Interim: ASML, request to redact licensing specifics

Harassment: ASML, licensing (complete) originally contained elaborate details of the licensing mechanism, as I was able to remember them, for the specific application I was involved with.

Clarification

There were several purposes, originally, to posting the licensing:

1. A point needed to be made that this continuous persistent harassment had to stop. The attacks were, and to a somewhat lesser extent are, on many different areas, but included abusive practices by other people and also my own investigation and fixes for licensing.
2. The licensing mechanism specifics illustrated the deficiencies I took the time investigating, so it demonstrated the verification effort was with genuine purpose and clear findings.
3. The post was scheduled to appear on a certain date and I warned about that some two days in advance, at or around the same time as I posted the prior post. This gave them prior warning and time to act in whichever way they deemed appropriate.
4. Numerous prior, much weaker counters had not deterred the constant persistent harassment.

There was no “revenge”-factor to the post on licensing. If I had acted primarily with malicious motivation, I would have had possibilities to copy the symmetric key and other specifics and documents. It also was not about “prestige”, so nitpicking about exactly which words to redact is in the interest of neither. At this point, I can remove the specifics and leave the rest of the post as-is. One may now assume the rest of the post truthful despite specifics no longer being available for verification. Besides, the general description remains available and almost completely unchanged.

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Questioning Grok on definition of simplicity

Having remained quite unsatisfied about what seems like a relatively clean “undisputed” definition of simplicity, I decided to question Grok on this. Goals:

1. See if I can get more insight into the stated definition, possibly from counter-examples, missed aspects or perspectives, or possibly to larger insights into successful applicability.
2. Insight into ability to question AI, in this instance Grok, on a (relatively ad-hoc) subject to discover how it will adjust and respond, and how much insight I can get out of it.

I have not vetted every sentence and claim of Grok exactly and rigorously. It started as a casual interaction with A.I. I picked up on claims I did not agree with, by countering in a follow-up question. I am, for example, not familiar with the logistics map and, as such, have not vetted if all its claims w.r.t. that example are correct.

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Harassment: ASML, false phishing claims

There were these posts being thrown in my face for the past few years, but given the suspicious timing at this moment, it seemed prudent to respond with what seemed like the most likely scenario being referenced.

Premeditated attacks

There are very strong indications that at the moment of starting at ASML, there were several activities set in motion already for this kind of premeditated harassment and abuse.

One involved supposed “bad decision and its consequences” where someone already told me before I started at ASML, that they had – either accidentally or deliberately – smuggled in MongoDB despite opposition of some ASML engineers through their use of GridFS, which is built upon MongoDB. I was told this, and given that I had at least some theoretical knowledge from experiences I read about in blogs, I knew there were some caveats and need-to-knows concerning configuration but in general MongoDB is (at least at the time) known to be a solid solution. For example, MongoDB version 1 was known to only be properly fault-tolerant in multi-instance set-up in its default configuration. A single instance could work too, but required a change in configuration to ensure proper persistence to disk.

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Harassment: questioning validity

There were early references, with remarks like “that’s his story”, and later references, with what I think were hints by one Lisa, likely done with good intentions, on the nature of lies and lying. I am happy to respond and can be relatively brief, and will illustrate with an example. There have been plenty of “hints” and after a while and the stress of the constant false, directed attacks and false accusations, it is sometimes difficult to properly distinguish between well-intentioned comments and malicious engagement. This is also a comment I made a few years ago, as there were other well-intentioned posts, that I have undoubtedly misunderstood because of the sheer ridiculousness of the situation.

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Harassment: ASML, near-shoring "productivity" hacks

This post describes the organizational and abusive shitshow at ASML concerning the near-shoring hires that were originally loaded up in droves, initially to work at a Dutch ASML location, and later also for 50%-50% remote work.

Way of working

Let’s first go through some considerations with regard to the way-of-working when remote teams or remotely located people are involved. This was roughly the way-of-working in our case. Most of it should be obvious. Essentially, we’re working with and around the restrictions that are imposed by circumstances of having team-members in remote locations. In this case, specifically the near-shoring country of origin.

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On Design vs Architecture

As mentioned in interim: impersonal feedback, I originally started writing this post on 2019-07-09.

An outline of the fundamental differences between architecture and design. How to distinguish between the two? What is the impact when one - unintentionally, or at least it should be - influences the other?

Defining the boundary

First, we need to be clear on what the boundary is between architecture and design. All too often, this is not clear and instead is being argued by “reasonable influence” or “undesirable situation” whether or not something is or is not part of architecture. Way too often, does architecture unnecessarily influence (e.g. restrict) design and as a consequence quality of an application.

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Interim: impersonal feedback

Not not taking things personal

Let’s start with the obvious. The comment of “not taking things personal” is never, or should never be, about personal attacks that “supposedly” are freely allowed to be launched upon the “receiver” because the “receiver” should “just” accept all the crap thrown at them as-is. There are many varieties. One can often not argue that these comments are illegal, which is a different matter entirely. However, there is a very clear distinction between taking a personal, targeted comment personally, or taking any arbitrary comment as-if it is personal, or looking for a personal reason in an argument that refers merely to objective concerns.

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Analysis: are HOTP-based one-time passwords zero-knowledge proofs?

I found surprisingly little information on this topic. Even just searching for the terms “HOTP” and “zero-knowledge proof” resulted in very few entries. So I decided to evaluate this for myself. If it turns out bad or redundant, at least I spent some time investigating an interesting topic and learning why I was wrong. If it turns out to have some truth to it, it would be an interesting find. The post itself is likely more elaborate than strictly necessary due to also investigating Zero-Knowledge and related properties.

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Harassment: (re)normalizing expectations

When in a prolonged period of continuous attacks, it might be important to (re)normalize expectations of reasonable, normal, acceptable behavior and interaction. These memes and quotes helped me along the way, as concise nuggets of truth, wisdom or clarity of thought. Note that I do not claiming that all of them apply all the time, but they do help to set a reasonable base-line to compare one’s current situation against.

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Harassment: ASML, miscellaneous events

This post will be updated with additional stories as need arises. I will update the publication date and changelog (at the bottom) accordingly.

Following are a series of miscellaneous remarks and scenarios that didn’t quite fit in with the larger stories, or risked side-tracking the main story too much with all the tangents.

Clarification: documenting my experience

There have been several attacks on the validity of these harassment stories. I have no intention of making up stories. Furthermore, given the relentless, repeated attacks, certain people should find many recognizable elements in all of these stories. These are events as they occurred.

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