My reading of the article is that it has nothing to do with the author's trust or lack thereof for their lawyer. I think the author would agree that you have to find a lawyer you trust, just as you need a doctor you can trust.
I trust my doctor, and if it's a minor issue like needing antibiotics for something I just accept whatever they prescribe. But if it was a life or death situation I am not going to blindly follow their advice without any questions. I ask my doctor for their recommendations but I make the final decision. They may disagree with that decision but ultimately it's my life at risk and I'm the one who suffers the consequences. As long as you are reasonable and not trying to cure cancer with fruit I hope that the majority of doctors are going to support this.
When it comes to drafting contracts or other minor issues you should just trust your lawyer. But if the lawsuit has the ability to completely end your company I think it would be a mistake to do the same. But I'm not a founder so maybe my opinion isn't worth anything here. I've only hired a lawyer once for a landlord-tenant dispute, my lawyer gave their recommendations, I disagreed with it, and they said alright it's your money, but it ultimately worked out so we were both happy. I find it interesting that the author had trouble at first finding a lawyer who would agree to this arrangement because that wasn't my experience.
If you're going to do this, you need to do your own research beforehand. In my case I read all the relevant tenant laws before I even met with the lawyer. Today I might use AI to help with that, but I would be wary of hallucinations. I think the majority of the article is about this: just using AI to help with research before meetings with your lawyer.
At the end of the article the author says they are now using AI to draft legal documents and I don't agree with that but that's just me.
It's not a problem that you try multiple sources at all. That's a smart move as long as you do realize what you are doing and give these extra sources appropriate weight.
But that's very difficult to do with LLMs due to a) pointy-haired bosses and the capital very much wanting to believe they can do away without third-party expertise and the unpleasent dependency on humans in general, and b) the market hype around technical tools that technical people are much more prone to (excellent, it works well in my field, it should also work in other fields, we're smarter then the others etc.).
The difficult part is that if many people go with bad contracts and bad legal advice, that will be visible only after many years of litigation, and in general, by rising legal costs in courts.
And that also means a lot more people will have to swallow agressive counterparty propositions from the better financed side, bad default judgements, and in general, a lot more third-party financed litigation (which will not benefit lawyers in the end, but most lawyers do not care).
That will also be seen just as a further rise in legal costs... Which will probably be promised to be solved by less human judges and more LLMs, run by people interested courts spending more on LLMs.
LLMs do not work in the way that humans do, benchmarks are very primitive and unreliable, even the best tools marketed for lawyers are unreliable on real life scenarios, while evaluations costs a lot, so very few people do them.
"Minor" was a poor word choice, I'm not sure what word would have been better. My intention was to say that I don't see how a non-lawyer could have any reasonable opinion on how a legal document is drafted. That is also why I don't agree with the author about replacing that with AI. They absolutely should weigh in on overall strategy because you need to consider factors such as your company's finances, risk tolerance, etc. In the same way that you might decide with your doctor that you want a surgery done but you have to trust them to do the surgery properly.
It is legal for a bicyclist to run a red light in a specific circumstance (when the light is red but the pedestrian walk signal is lit). This has been a NYC law since 2019, but NYPD is still routinely giving tickets for this, and judges are routinely refusing to vacate them. I can understand a lone NYPD officer not being aware of the law (although I think 6 years is getting ridiculous). But the issue is also the DMV judges that, in some cases, have acknowledged the law but have claimed they have the power to ignore it as it is a NYC law and not NYS law. This argument is bewildering to me - if it was true then what is the reason for NYC laws to exist at all?
I feel very strongly about bicyclists running red lights, and I'm always the one looking like a nerd who stops at the light. But I am very concerned about bicyclists getting criminal summonses for them when our system of checks and balances is consistently not working even in the unambiguously legal cases.
There are a lot of people who get confused using the SMS code they received, let alone setting up passkeys, or TOTP and backing up their codes, and so on. The systems are designed for those people, not you. Even offering passkeys or TOTP as an option is a customer support liability, that's another thing agents need to support when someone nontechnical inevitably enabled this on accident or has a family member set it up for them.
> Think of the person from your grade school classes who had the most difficulty at everything. The U.S. expects banks to service people much, much less intelligent than them. Some customers do not understand why a $45 charge and a $32 charge would overdraw an account with $70 in it. [...] This customer calls the bank much more frequently than you do.
From what I understand, the judge ruled that it wasn't defamation for Jobst to call Mitchell a cheater but saying he drove Apollo Legend to suicide was too far considering he didn't have a lot of reason to believe this: it was mostly based on online rumors about an apparent out of court financial settlement between Apollo and Mitchell which never existed. What probably drove the nail in the coffin is that Jobst did edit the video later to remove the claim, but after Mitchell sent legal action, he republished the original video. This might have felt vindictive to the judge. Now, Jobst did eventually ask Apollo's family for the facts, remove the claim and publish a retraction about a month later, but perhaps the judge thought this was too little too late.
I don't agree that Mitchell's reputation was harmed as he brought attention to the video multiple times, but it's hard to argue against the facts: Jobst said something he wasn't sure was true, and when he learned it was false he kept it up anyway.
AFAIK the entire lawsuit was about Jobst falsely accusing Mitchell of driving Apollo Legend to suicide and then not properly retracting it (Jobst buried the retraction at the end of an unrelated 30 minute video). The reason why Mitchell's cheating was brought up in the trial was that Jobst's side were attempting to say that all reputational harm Mitchell suffered during that period was caused by cheating accusations, not Jobst's suicide accusations (as if being accused of cheating at Donkey Kong is equivalent to being accused of driving someone to suicide). Mitchell was able to prove this was false by producing emails from events that specifically said that they weren't hiring him due to Jobst's suicide accusations.
Additionally, Jobst kept making videos berating Mitchell during the course of the trial, which seems to have pissed off the judge. From the decision: "Mr Jobst’s attitude seems to me to have been one of, “Well, if I’m going to be sued,
I may as well go for broke and damn the consequences.” Far from being evidence of his bona fides, I consider his conduct to be reckless and to show no regard for the truth or for the effect of his video on Mr Mitchell and his reputation."
> Jobst's side were attempting to say that all reputational harm Mitchell suffered during that period was caused by cheating accusations
The cheating and the other lies and the rampant lawsuits. I agree with that causing almost all the damage. I hadn't even heard of the particular badly substantiated piece among the real stuff.
> (as if being accused of cheating at Donkey Kong is equivalent to being accused of driving someone to suicide)
...no, not as if that. That is not part of the argument.
> Mr Mitchell said that John Weeks was the organiser of an auction of the world’s
largest collection of pinball and arcade gaming machines. Mr Mitchell had an
agreement with him to host the auction for a fee of $50,000. After the publication of
the video, Mr Weeks cancelled the agreement, apparently because of the negativity
surrounding Mr Mitchell as a result of the video. Mr Mitchell later received an
email from Mr Weeks confirming that cancellation, in which he said:
> "As per our previous conversation, I apologize for our decision to withdraw our
agreement with you to host you at our auction due to the allegations from
Karl Jobst that you played a significant role in Apollo Legend’s decision to
take his own life. We made the decision strictly for business reasons and I do
not feel personal discontent with you, but the negativity brought by the claims
presented too large a risk to us strictly from a business perspective."
> Mr Mitchell recalled that another person, Ryan Burger, who had booked him for
three separate events, cancelled all three and has not since booked him to appear at
any events. Mr Burger also sent him an email cancelling the third event, saying:
> "Due to the toxicity and negativity brought by Karl Jobst’s claim that you
played a role in Apollo Legend’s decision to take his own life, Old School Gamer Magazine feels compelled to withdraw its $5,000 per weekend paid
appearance offer also for the Midwest Gaming Classic.
I had hoped that this would have faded by now so we didn’t have to cancel
this event similar to Des Moines Gaming Classic and Planet Comicon
appearances that we had withdrawn earlier this summer, but I think it’s best
that we allow some time to pass given the current climate."
> Whether or not the reasons given in those emails were true, the withdrawal of the
offers demonstrated a harmful effect of the video on Mr Mitchell’s reputation and
the receipt of the emails affected Mr Mitchell’s personal reactions to the video.
Jobst's team argued that the suicide accusation didn't cause any damage because Mitchell's already poor reputation and the other claims he made in the video meant that it couldn't be harmed further. The judge pointed out in his decision that the cheating allegations and the suicide allegations impacted different "sectors" of Mitchell's reputation and that "In seeking to prove that the plaintiff already had a bad reputation (whether as a defence to an allegation of harm to reputation or because of substantially true contextual imputations), the allegedly bad reputation must be relevant to that “sector” of the plaintiff’s reputation that is, or may be, harmed by the imputations proved by the plaintiff." You're right that Jobst's team didn't literally argue that cheating at Donkey Kong is equivalent to being accused of driving someone to suicide.
My main concern would be these seem to be fabricated claims.
Mr Mitchell still was invited to the auction and attended it [1].
Ryan Burger seems to have never invited Mitchel to any events at all [2] prior to the video and yet shortly before the video was posted he invited him 3 times and canceled all of them?
These guys seem to be people that Mitchell has been friends with for very long times so it seems more reasonable to me they'd help him out with an email or two when it's literally at no cost to them. Where's an email from some Stock Brokers convention reneging on an appearance deal or a merchandise supplier asking him to find a new supplier?
That said, IIUC Australian is not as loose as the US is when making verbal claims about other people so claiming "Billy caused Apollo to kill himself" is a much weaker claim to make then "Billy is happy Apollo killed himself".
While I don't disagree, issue is that this is something that was Jobst's responsibility for presenting to dispute Mitchell's evidence of having been harmed due to the allegation to have driven someone to suicide.
It's disappointing to Jobst credibility, especially since I remember Jobst hyping up/bragging about the court case as an easy slam dunk for Jobst.
As I said in my post below, Jobst went a step too far and inferred that he was responsible for somebodies death. That is a lot worse reputation than a cheater at video games and a serial lier.
Yeah, I haven't been following the specifics so much, but you can't just call someone a murderer over and over and expect to not get sued. I am still sorta surprised that Billy won though considering that he's essentially a public figure and has an already negative reputation. I suppose calling someone a murderer is a step too far though. Australian laws are probably a little different than America's too.
Interesting that Mitchell won his case against Twin Galaxies. It sounded like the expert testimony supporting his claim that the video defects could occur from a "malfunctioning cabinet" was not believed by anyone knowledgeable in the Donkey Kong/and MAME community but seemingly was believed by the judge?
Billy paid a fraud expert, whose whole business is apparently providing fraud opinions, but that seemed to have tipped the scales (mentioned in TFA). Very unfortunate outcome.
Well, the silver lining for Jobst in all of this is that he did build his YouTube channel (partly) on ranting about Billy, and that might be worth more than what he paid here.
I can understand small businesses relying on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter because they may not have the resources to provide a perfect solution to everyone.
My country’s consulate in NYC posts important news only to Facebook. That is a problem.
I suppose I see the appeal, but for 99% of small businesses, I want your name, address, hours, and phone number, and a list of services you provide (e.g., if you're a restaurant, have a sample menu even if yours is variable; if you're a plumber, tell me how big of a job you can handle; if you're a store, show me the kind of things you sell). A simple static web page can handle that. I don't expect Janice's Flowers to have a site that rivals a multinational corporation.
For a while I've been searching for a note taking app that
* Allows more than one user editing the same page at once
* Is accessible on a mobile device (either app or mobile browser)
* Can be at the very least viewed in read only mode if disconnected from the internet
The last point is the most important to me and frustratingly has been the most elusive for me to find. For now I use Notion with the hopes they implement it eventually. I can't consider switching to a self hosted alternative without the last point.
The repository is back online, with this explanation from the developer:
> This attack appears to have been conducted from a PAT token linked to @tj-actions-bot account to which "GitHub is not able to determine how this PAT was compromised."
> Account Security Enhancements
> * The password for the tj-actions-bot account has been updated.
> * Authentication has been upgraded to use a passkey for enhanced security.
> * The tj-actions-bot account role has been updated to ensure it has only the minimum necessary permissions.
> * GitHub proactively revoked the compromised Personal Access Token (PAT) and flagged the organization to prevent further exploitation.
Editing to add: the developer has locked further discussion about this. Very concerning as I believe their explanations are raising more questions than they are answering.
First of all, clearly Github can't answer for the developer how their bot's token was compromised, that's something the developer needs to find out. Instead they are repeating this statement like it's out of their hands.
But more concerningly, I don't believe the explanation is supported by the Github history which says the compromised commit was "authored" by Renovate and "pushed" by @jackton1. It's obvious how the first part was spoofed, but the second part is concerning as it indicates the @jackton1 account was compromised not @tj-actions-bot. If I'm missing something please let me know.
Check the timestamp on that commit push. It was from today, an hour or two before the repo was restored, not yesterday when the attack happened. The push actor != the committor or even the actual commit author, and there can be multiple push actors if the commit is pushed multiple times by different actors.
He probably just re-pushed the bad commit while trying to figure out how to fix this.
I find it very plausible that the bot token was compromised, not his user account token, as the attack was simply to push over the tags (which is something the automation bot would have access to do, as tag management is one of its functions)
1. tj-actions-bot PAT spoofs renovatebot commit with malicious code - probably by creating a new unprotected branch, pushing to it spoofing the renovatebot user, then deleting the branch, but we really don't know.
2. Attacker uses PAT to also update release tags, pointing them to the malicious commit, again spoofing renovatebot
3. jackton1 tries to restore older branch, and therefore pushes the commit again. The original commit wouldn't be referenced as pushed in any pull requests
For #3: You don’t have to actually have a commit in a pull request for it to show up in the PR “conversation”. Simply putting the PR # in the commit message like #2460 would result in it showing up like that (“commit referenced this pull request”). The original malicious commit copied a real PR merge commit with #2460, so anyone who pushed it in this repo to any branch would have their push referenced in the PR conversation list. It’s just a misleading UI in my opinion.
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