People who don't ever consider or speak of morals or ethics are beside the point.
However its the statement that "Google lost its moral compass" has never really been true.
Its pretty clear at this point that companies solely respond to economic tides, which are governed by what people truly want. And Id argue that people in general have lost their moral compass (in the sense of how they vote, in politics and with their wallet, not what they say)
It at least gets circulated and discussed. Even at Google I'd assume people who have the privilege, seriously thought of leaving or way better if someone knows something really shady is going on, whistleblowing.
The thing is sure you are right, but if I started living my life "I cant ever say or have principles and act based on them, because about 25 years ago I broke one so now its not allowed" then, that surely, would ruin my life and if everybody did society and wouldn't these companies love that? When we all give up so easy? Aren't the companies the first that go on sexual harassment allegations with "if this was going on for years, why you coming out now, huh? Ncncnc".
So my point is, its still appreciated. Lets work with reality and not that idealistic version of society where only the perfect people can decide our ethical directions because they dont exist and we will fall into the dark.
I quit my job working for oil and gas companies, and taught myself how to code and then worked at a company that actually made non-asshole software that went on to IPO so things worked out.
I didn't choose to help oil and gas companies, the company I worked for had them as customers so the work I did helped oil and gas. I chose to give up the money and do something else.
So I don't give a fuck about downvotes. I actually lived it, and I don't give a fuck anymore either to call people out.
This is not about "believing in anything" other than a stable job and money. I respect the author that he felt this moral tradeoff was enough.
I'm afraid, we cannot expect anything else from every publicly owned company, because sadly, it's in human nature to be selfish if you are not the one who suffers from your actions.
Instead of monetising software sales, they monetised access to Free software performing an end run around the GPL by distributing access to it over the internet allowing them to make the public good proprietary google property. They threw out some crumbs at best.
Remember the un-publicised puzzles to paradoxically get media attention, hiring highschool kids with a demo that made the news because it made the news and all the rest of the BS. I guess it worked. Now they're big and bad and the Free software optimism is largely dead so they don't have to bother and now make killbots for the Pentagon.
Where else you gonna work? Go test the market, nerd.
> 3. Technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms.
Really?
Algorithms for ads and mass surveillance were always at the core of Google model.
And there is not really such thing as "internationally accepted norms", Google, as a pioneer, literally defined them at the time.
You may not have been around back then, but we had half a decade of Google before that model, and it was quite nice, nice enough to get us to leave our other search providers--and to hand them the keys to our inboxes.
I’d just like to add, as always: this person should give back all the money Google paid them. Of course, that has not once happened in the history of these pious pieces, and so the meme endures.
So if our enemies had no qualms at all about doing this, wouldn't it make sense that we have weapons that can at least counter, and potentially fight back? Would it be facilitating injury if the AI is used to stop an ISIS linked attack in our homeland?
> "Don't be evil"
Can evil also be interpreted as letting your government be impotent in protecting you?
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
This entire article is already engaging in political and ideological battle - René Mayrhofer is explicitly saying that he's unwilling to work at Google because he has a political problem with some of the decisions Google is making, namely abandoning earlier stated carbon-neutrality goals and being willing to make deals with the US military.
My contention is that if he considers this to constitute Google losing its moral compass but not the James Damore incident, which happened the same year he started working at Google; then there's no particular reason to think that his notion of a "moral compass" is any different from object-level agreement or disagreement (or simply not caring), about any particular decision that Google makes. Someone similar to Mayrhofer might well be willing to work for Google because they make a different judgement than he does about the political importance of AI model energy usage; and throwing terms like "moral compass" around is exactly equivalent to having an object-level disagreement about a political issue.
But let's be honest, the guy was kind of unhinged. I would not have fired him, but neither would I have kept him in my team.
Let’s be honest, though. That’s firing from your team.
In response to a "let a thousand flowers bloom and speak your mind" request from Google management snakes. The problem is that some tech people take these requests seriously.
Google of course has identified itself as Trump sycophants and hypocrites by now. Maybe they should invite Jordan Peterson, Gad Saad and Elon Musk to give keynote speeches.
Alas.
We had a mental health slack channel, and a racial politics one that rehashed Israel/Palestine daily.
One rarely stated thing I learned over time working there is that managers read eng-misc and will prevent you from transferring to their team if they didn't like what you said, or how you said it, or who you said it to.
Creating a distaste in people without like minds has been an intentional goal to cause exodus after exodus on various platforms, in companies and so on. If you let that get out of control, you can poison a culture almost unrecoverably. We can't let that happen to our critical tech companies for national security reasons.
The previous policies simply reflected the culture of employees and HR managers that had graduated from universities that openly practiced race-conscious admissions after Grutter v. Bollinger. The change in policy likely came not from the new administration, but the Supreme Court's SFFA decision in 2023 that reminded everyone the civil rights laws require race blindness.
The actual reason for the "corporate DEI" in tech was that since Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), EEOC could sue companies that had lower minority proportion than population norm for discrimination, and could could prove the discrimination in court using nothing but the racial makeup of the employees, and some policy at the company that could in theory have disparate impact. And under their standards, literally any policy has disparate impact.
This hit other sectors first, to which they responded by hiring more minorities. But tech had the problem that schools were consistently producing fewer minority engineering grads than the population proportion, and in a world where approximately every engineer got employed, some US tech companies would have to have lower minority representation than the population no matter what they did. And because the disparity between engineering grads and racial population proportion was so high, in fact most large companies would fail to meet the necessary minority proportions.
But EEOC would not instantly file suit against every offender, instead they would file ~40 such suits per year, targeting large companies that they considered particularly bad. And so companies that felt they might get hit soon started doing DEI programs, at first to attract more minority engineers (from other companies in the same sector, which would then fall under the limit, making it zero-sum), but then they realized that the EEOC didn't really sue the companies that were the loudest at touting their DEI credentials, and it all became extremely performative, no longer trying to attract minority talent but to be the loudest company talking about the subject. Iterate over that for a few decades and it got really weird.
It ended because Trump named 3 SC justices on his first term, and in a few important cases between 2023 and today, the new SC tore the whole thing down, and suing a company for disparate impact is now considered unconstitutional.
The support of war efforts is clearly a change in moral compass that is much more fascinating though.
I find it is a deeply cynical move, to be asked to place the James Damore "was it employer overreach-or-not?" episode in similar proportion to critiquing a company's actions regarding issues such as mass surveillance and/or assisting war efforts, especially when the accusations about those broader issues are tied to complicity in the 2020s resurgence in fascist politics. It is so cynical that I can't believe it isn't intentional.
They lost their moral compass a while ago, but it had nothing to do with Damore.
But that “critique” of gender diversity efforts said that the lack of women in CS was due to some innate difference in women (rather than a social division that is neither innate nor universal across time or cultures) While also decrying the lack of affirmative action for conservatives.
It’s neither the tipping point for Google, nor is it a hill worth dying on
https://web.archive.org/web/20170813080340/https://www.theat...
What statistical argument did Damore make?
He has, and has had, a specific moral philosophy he follows. When he took the job the public (and once he started, internal) words and actions of the company fit within that philosophy (or closely enough). Now the company has changed and they don’t fit. Further, the obvious changes happened without any real notice or explanation.
It seems reasonable in that situation to leave. FWIW; I was in the same situation, and left.
Do you fault him for his personal moral code? He is not telling you how you should act.
Describe that scenario to me. What precisely is the language model going to do? To defeat a _terrorist_ organization? I feel like this is way to asymmetric of a philosophy to actually work, but, I'm curious to know what your imagination holds on this one.
> Can evil also be interpreted as letting your government be impotent in protecting you?
The government _is_ impotent in protecting you. If they weren't we wouldn't need courts. Or a constitution. Or the revolution which started it.
Finally, there is an argument to be made, that our government, and it's imperious ways, were the primary force which led to the creation of ISIS in the first place. Perhaps if we weren't telling lies about yellow cake and mobile chemical labs while indiscriminately bombing innocent civilians we wouldn't be facing such a ridiculous world security posture.
Some things are just simple. ISIS is a terrorist organization you're carrying water for. Most of the mission of ISIS is simply spread Islam and kill infidels. Islam had that charter prior to the creation of America by the way.
Regarding this specifically:
> Would it be facilitating injury if the AI is used to stop an ISIS linked attack in our homeland?
it again depends on what exactly said AI does. If it's used to surveil most people most of the time, for example, then that probably does reduce the odds of an ISIS-linked attack on US, but the surveillance itself would be a greater injury at that scale.
*or this is an inter-capitalist war
When they rename "Department of Defense" to "Department of War", there can be no mistake about the intention of the government. They aren't "protecting" us, they are actively starting unnecessary wars, because cruelty has always been the point for them.
Over a 10+ year period it dropped the do no evil part, it implemented code siloes claiming it was because of Waymo's code being stolen, it prevented a union from being formed, it got into military and genocidal contracts.
I don't think it's the nice place to work at it was in the 2000s and early 2010s where the worst moral offence was advertising though a monopoly
Hence we don't really want articles like this on HN, and checking the stats now, I see it only spent about two hours on the front page, which was more than enough.
Articles like this are bad for HN as they are mostly about the writer's own political grievances, and the discussion thread then becomes a vehicle for others to express their own alternative political grievances, many of which have nothing to do with the topic of the original post. So the whole thread just becomes a battle between people expressing their own conflicting political grievances, which is precisely what we don't want on a site whose primary reason for existing is to cultivate curious conversation.
As I wrote in my first comment above, the guidelines specifically ask us to avoid using HN this way. Your comment counts as a generic tangent, because it introduces an issue that's only very tenuously linked to the central topic of the article, then sets off a whole new subthread debating that topic, taking the thread further and further away from the original topic.
I understand this topic is important to you and I'm not telling you it shouldn't be. I'm upholding the HN guidelines and asking you to make the effort to observe them, because it's only by upholding the guidelines that we can have any hope of keeping this place from going up in flames.
Our experiences with a few instances of something is rarely sufficient for us to suggest or imply some kind of universality.
I'm sure either of us could quickly find a bunch of people who would like to one or several of those acceptable again, yet us finding that such people exist would not tell us a damned thing about whether dismantling those protections is a good idea. Or supposing it does, then one might even make the case that those people existing is an excellent reason for having such a law in the first place.
I assume if he actually felt threatened personally he wouldn't have any issues with developing weapons (through full-disk encryption or unbreakable DRM or locking people out of their devices or whatever).
We had one of those. Not slack, self hosted internal stuff. Some "senior by tenure but not title" people decided the only thing that could come of it was people running their mouths to everyone's detriment and start trolling it until nobody took it seriously and then it was quietly "collateral damage" in a migration that was also arranged.
I think they were afraid of touching what had started as an anti racism channel until the vibes had shifted a bit.
There were both Palestinian employees and an IDF veteran Israeli employee who were seemingly spending half the workday discussing October 7th and the Intifada.
"And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!"
Sorry this is one of those things that bugs me - but "don't be evil" was never removed from their code of conduct. It's placement was moved though from the start to the end, and you could argue whether it's less important because of that if you want.. but it is still there.
I mean, I think you meant it somewhat derisively (if not, apologies), but it's absolutely true. I work for two reasons: it gives me a higher quality of living and it anchors my life by creating structure.
I could choose to not work and be very frugal and probably be ok. But I might have to re-enter the job market later in life due to rising costs after my skills have atrophied (been there, it's horrible; no one will consider you). Or I can make certain that when the day comes that I'm ready to be done, it's at a time when making it to death without financial hardship has a much higher probability. I can also afford to enjoy nice things rather than pinching pennies.
I also know that I have a tendency to spin out if I have too much free time and not enough going with routine and a sense of contributing. Combined with the above, this means I am free to work where I want to work, doing the absolute easiest thing I can find that I still consider rewarding. I don't have to chase money or promotions (I want as little responsibility as possible).
I can walk away tomorrow if my org does something I consider unethical. I can hold out for a position that meets the above criteria rather than taking the first job I see because of desperation. When my previous employer had layoffs, I was able to remain comfortable for six months while only applying to jobs I genuinely wanted.
There's no amount of money that a Meta, Google, OpenAI, etc could offer me because even though it'd be nice to own a house in the Bay Area, I'm satisfied renting until death and don't need more than the very nice spacious home I've already got. I hit the jackpot and I'm grateful every day.
Ive had them demand my pronouns. I really dont care, but saying that is absolutely not acceptable. Ill use your pronouns. I really do not care.
Ive been in meetings with 'land acknowledgements' with whatever former indians/native americans who were there. Its not like we're giving them the land back.
DEI and what it turned into was a big for-public-show that you knew the buzzwords and the antiwords. And if you didnt, or woukdnt play along, theyd ruin you.
The current MAGA MAHA meritocracy crap is also just the opposite, but the same games as DEI folks. They have their buzzwords and antiwords. Although, theyre a whole lot stupider and easier to manipulate and deal with.
More commonly, this happens the other way around. For example, in Monica Helms' autobiography, he writes:
> Shortly after one of the training sessions had finished, I held back from leaving the training room and watched all the women make their way to the third-floor restroom. I had to pee too, so I went into the restroom I had become accustomed to using. The other women made it immediately clear they didn't want me there. Some gave me the evil eye while others rushed out when they saw me. I did my best to ignore them, stepped into a stall and did my thing. Then I went back to my desk to carry on with my work. Twenty minutes later, HR called me into their office.
> The new head of HR told me, "Some of the women have complained that you went into the third-floor restroom after today's training session."
Showing no empathy whatsoever for the women he imposed his presence on, he then goes on to explain how the company caved to his demands to use the female restroom, and that women who complained were given short shrift.
Clearly, this approach creates a hostile workplace environment for female employees.
and the other is "gender essentialism"[3] which has also been rejected by mainstream scholars across fields from biology to medicine to sociology to gender studies, and which acts in culture as a similarly pseudoscientific popular rationale for organizing society in ways that harm women and gender minorities.
The study of the field of racism is absolutely fascinating in that very quickly, the simple, obvious "commonsense" theories like "race exists as a meaningful biological category" turn out to be quite false.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism#Racial,_cultural_...
Python core people like Thomas Wouters and Gregory P. Smith, since fired from Google, canceled and libeled people like Tim Peters. All that matters is having a mob on your side and preventing the other side from responding.
We must also look at the effect of his memo, which was to alienate many, and which caused a backlash that led to his firing. The company did not make a big deal of it just to fire him, it was individuals who were personally impacted and offended by it who made it what it was.
Damore's thesis amounted to "maybe women are 20% of software developers not because they're being discriminated against, but because they're exercising their own agency and choosing other fields."
Given that about 20% of CS grads are women, it seems like a pretty reasonable stance.
Taken alongside the rest of the content, it's a rejection of the idea that there is systemic bias, and much of his memo is dedicated to ways in which that bias can be propagated and solidified.
At best, the memo paints Damore as someone who is radically uninformed and parroting old and invalid talking points that others have given to him. At worst it implies that he knows what he's doing and is trying to dismantle processes and culture that are improving women's access to the workplace.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4380791-NLRB-Advice-...
> statements about immutable traits linked to sex—such as women’s heightened neuroticism and men’s prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution—were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding effort to cloak comments with “scientific” references and analysis, and notwithstanding “not all women” disclaimers.
Soh will of course try to dress that horrific construction from her article up in professional-sounding language, but our duty is in fact to address the thrust of her argument, not whether she attempts to frame it in polite language. You might also recognize Soh from her work in the atrocious Matt Walsh "documentary" that pretends to be about women but is entirely about invalidating trans people.
To make this more clear: Soh's need to provide an explanation for femininity in a person who is assigned male at birth while denying the validity of trans people is only necessary for a person operating from a bioessentialist lens. The need in Soh is so strong that it leads her to make totally unfounded and ridiculous claims in that article, and it also drove her promotion of the discredited (and retracted!) pseudoscientific 'Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria)' invented by Lisa Littman.
Surely you'd agree that if a natal male says he is a boy and when asked why he replies "because I'm attracted to boys", then the responsible reply is "it's okay to be a gay boy", and not "yes, because you're attracted to boys you are a girl." It's certainly possible that a child will persist in expressing and opposite-sex gender even after exploring identity as a gay boy and will follow through with transition. But surely the responsible thing to do is to make sure that the child first understands that there's nothing wrong with being a boy attracted to other boys. First, eliminate the possibility that the boy is identifying as a girl out of a gender-essentialist belief that boys are only attracted to girls and he has to be a girl to attract boys. If after that, if the child still expresses a cross-sex gender identity then explore transitioning.
I don't think Singal has ever said that all - or even a majority - of children expressing a cross-sex gender identity are actually just same-sex attracted cis people. He only takes issue with legislation in some jurisdictions effectively prohibit medical professionals from exploring a gay male identity in this scenario, and effectively mandate social affirmation the moment a patients expressed a cross sex gender identity.
Even if you disagree with the above, surely at least you understand why I'm confused about the allegation that Singal is promoting gender essentialism. His concern is that gender essentialism is being misdiagnosed as gender dysphoria, and people aren't doing enough to accept boys wearing dresses, being attracted to other boys, and behaving in "feminine" ways, and being too quick to say "well, you're a girl". Even if you don't agree with his claims about misdiagnoses, it's abundantly clear he is against gender essentialism.
1. https://resources.healthgrades.com/right-care/childrens-heal...
Hn discussion of the paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25069644
That's not what the memo was. It ignored the evidence we have that there is systemic bias, it relied on tired and debunked tropes, and has explicit goals about preserving and elevating the privilege that perpetuates that systemic bias. That done in front of a large company filled with people personally affected by it is just a terrible idea. I'm open to discussion about this, but from the right people (those affected, with the experience) in the right context. James Damore was neither.
But honestly, if you read the memo and think it sounds reasonable, I'm not going to be able to change your mind. These biases are deeply rooted and take decades of introspection to overcome. I've been on that journey for probably 15 years and I've still got blind spots.
The experiment I linked above sent monitored the callback rates of applicants sent out to Bay Area tech companies for technical roles, and saw higher callback rates for women. This is the sort of prototypical evidence we use as an example of systemic anti-Black bias where Black applicants are called back less frequently than white applicants.
Is Google, specifically, systemically biased against women? Cross-referencing the diversity reports they publish [1], with employment statistics [2] does not show an underrepresentation of women. Google has also taken controversial steps, such as tying executive performance reviews to the representation of "underrepresented groups" - that term has included women at every company I've worked at, but if that's not the case at Google please correct me. When Google conducted an investigation into whether women were underpaid, they discovered that the disparity leaned the other way [3].
Perhaps maybe some introspection is warranted on your part, and revisit the assumptions you have about gender bias at Google and in the tech industry in general.
1. https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/819bcce604bf5ff7...
2. https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
3. https://www.npr.org/2019/03/05/700288695/google-pay-study-fi...
The gender bias is clear in individual experience and data, all it takes is talking to women (or people of colour, or whatever under represented group you want) to see it.
I think Google does pretty well on this, largely due to the diversity programs that Damore was calling to have abolished.
Nonwhites are not actually underrepresented at tech companies like Google, and the fact that you casually claim they are in an aside should cast serious doubts on other arguments you make as well.
Data could definitely change my mind: what percentage of applicants to software developer roles at Google are women, and what percentage of offers extended for those roles go to women? If the former is substantially smaller than the latter, that would definitely sway me.
Don't get me wrong. I hate war. And never-ending wars like the Iraq War anger me to no end (and for that matter, I think G.W. Bush and his cabinet were truly evil). Of course, the danger is real; a military built for defense can easily become an instrument of tyranny or empire if left unchecked. That is why we must maintain rigorous civilian oversight and strict checks and balances over its power. But that does not mean the military, by default, is always evil, right?
[1] As I get older, I'm more sympathetic to Colonel Jessup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FnO3igOkOk.
There hasn't been an existential threat to the United States since the Civil War, and that one was self-inflicted. Obviously we need to maintain a military but 99% of what the current military does is either for economic goals or hollow national pride.
The military preparations this fear leads to take a very special form though: investment in actual defence, commitment to stay behind and fight in case on an invasion, that sort of thing.
Obviously working on defence technology is part of this, but it also shapes the direction of the defence technology you work on. Sweden's forces have looked rather different from forces that intend to conduct offensive wars, especially historically. Tanks specifically designed for conducting ambushes are one example. Artillery emplacements designed to sink invasion fleets and to resist direct nuclear attack are another.
Each military operation has a cool story in advance and a different cool story afterwards. Neither is ever true and if someone finds out the "truth" it usually isn't even half the story.
Usually if you go back far enough there is some guy with an obviously stupid idea. It then takes effort to keep the stupid idea alive and side shows become the main act.
But with the US military, at least the years I was alive, it seemed to be never a real national security threat at the borders but very far away and for so not obvious reasons.
In the end however I agree with your "defense is necessary" and that's why NATO exists and should be developed further so its more strict and almost all nations worldwide join.
Incidentally, I'd feel the same way about killing someone in self-defense.
John 6:40 (KJV) 40 And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day.
This quote sums up the current situation:
Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
"Hard times eradicate most of the population and some survive with heavy PTSD and regrets, then after the destruction some peace agreement is reached and so after many years of rebuilding the good times do come."
> strictly defensive action is somewhat different
If you don't understand don't call it blindly.
If the country doesn't align with your world view at all there is no reason to fight for its military. Let those who like it the way it is do the fighting. If it is the complete opposite of what you would like you should fight against it. Aggression should scale with how offended you are.
Why would you blindly cooperate with some military?
Well, what if people had refused to lend their talents to Hitler or Genghis Khan?
Agree or disagree with particular foreign policy or military action, why do people forget that the bulk of military is staffed with their fellow citizens? Many of whom aren't terribly privileged to enjoy ample alternative choices to elevate themselves socially or financially. It is exactly this lot who benefits the most from DEI policies, cherished by "pacifists", is it not? It is them who are the first and most massive direct casualties, caused by not having access to the best, superior materiel, doctrine and training on and beyond the battlefield.
I'll be the first to point that military and paramilitary forces attract many with unchecked lust for violence. That "pride", "honor" and "patriotism" are often terribly misused, to uphold goals of those with impure, malicious ambitions. Who, I grant it, also disproportionately represented in the command echelons of military and beyond. But if we are honest, that scum won't be shaken or taught a lesson by SotA technology being withheld from their use or corporation refusing cooperation. It is their subordinates, who, maybe naively, subscribe to "ideal", unquoted interpretation of Pride, Honor and Patriotism, will bear the brunt of being crippled (by the consequences of the withholding and refusal) on the battlefield, and pay with their lives. Don't their lives matter?
I've developed an involuntary, muscle-level reflex that forces me to close the tab immediately when I read these "not just X -- it was Y" LLMisms.
I realize the author might be human and am sorry if that's the case, but I can't help it.
Complete joke, do some introspection.
He is a top expert on a security topic. Running Android platform security gives him an opportunity to have incredible positive impact for many people---which he did for a decade.
People weigh trade-offs.
At the beginning, he may have had high ambitions to deploy interesting, research-forward ideas to Android; at this point, he has accomplished a lot of that. Maybe now, he is considering other factors.
Guessing that people are only money-driven or have made some decision because of threshold personal wealth is awful, especially if you do not know them.
Almost all academics I know (I am one also) are driven by personal curiosity, intellectual ambitions, a need to identify and solve problems, and a strong desire for positive contribution. I know Rene and believe this to be true of him.
Most of the commenters are experienced programmers, and like many experienced programmers have largely lost the ability to think about things in non-binary terms.
You see this on most threads that aren't about a mostly technical subject.
I think I can still think in a non-binary way despite decades of programming but I attribute that to to getting burned out about 10 years into my career and taking a break to go to law school. Looking back at my writing before taking that break I can see that I was thinking in a very binary way.
First year law school does a really good job of breaking that.
I seriously think that some of the things from first year law school should be moved into the standard bachelor's degree program for CS, and maybe for several other STEM degrees, taught exactly the same way they are taught in law school. Maybe contracts and torts. Those are both good at building up your non-binary thinking. Heck, maybe do nearly the whole first year of law school, spread out over the 4 years of your bachelor's degree.
If the guy made some money for his work, good on him.
So if you decided to go in 2017 with all that happened since, your moral compass was already broken with google's. Snowden already revealed what all that data was used for with program like PRISM. You already seen the total lack of interest in preventing scams in their ads as long as it brings money. You've seen the antitrust fines. The tax avoidance schemes. The election influence concerns over youtube content.
What I read is "I know have made enough money from Google immorality, I can virtue signal by taking an early retirement and pretend I'm a great person".
These people who act like it's all suddenly gone down hill weren't there or weren't paying attention. If someone believes Goog's only turned to shit since about 2017, they were mislead, probably by the paychecks that kept them from looking too closely.
The military work came out in 2018
Pretty nice life if you ask me.
Much harder than taking the money and blindly following management decisions.
Is this the person I have to complain about for the removal of fulldisk encryption in Android 13?
They are probably more moral than the average large US corporation.
Any statement to the idea of a moral compass is just a form of marketing when the politics of the day align with it.
The best we can to is have independent moralities, while balancing that with the need to eat.
They are now openly partnering with war industries and the government to assist them in doing things like bombing a school full of girls, killing hundreds in an entirely indefensible war of aggression.* This is a very dark red line to cross and despite Googlers being wealthy and privilaged, it is nonetheless a significant protest that deserves to be heard on its own terms. Ideally, a protest would change policy at the company.
Google management: Stop cooperating with the immoral and illegally operating War Department!
* I don't have evidence Google directly participated in the Minab school bombing, but this is the side they are supporting.
> At the moment, my main focus is [...] fighting against (governmental or corporate) mass surveillance
While he always had "Ethics in Computer Science” as an interest, I wonder what blinds people into accepting offers at Google -- the advertising company. I want to take his words as sincere, but Google has been privacy violating for longer than his tenure with android. Money and prestige is a hell of a drug I suppose. He could very well work for grapheneos but no money or immediate persteige there (sadly).
If OP is only seeing the problems now, they must have been selectively blind.
Such a bizarre claim. EU academics seem under mass psychosis lately.
To be fair, US government was OK with Orban and tried to help him stay in power. It is OK with authoritarian far right movements and is trying to help them too. But, if you are pro-democracy European, US is a hostile country trying to destroy your democracy.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2025/12/17/trump-adminis...
Currently, the few "pro-democracy" (left-liberal, I presume?) European governments are cracking down hard on freedom of speech. Your worldview is lacking coherence.
At first I thought they were exaggerating; now I think it truly is.
The slogans are on the walls because they are not in our hearts.
Google has not changed its moral compass in 20 years. You just didn't want to admit it
But claiming that google lost it's "moral compass" just now is a claim only rich people can make because they retire, not quit.
Google is literally the largest, most organized, tracking and profiling company in the world. Which they tend to grow even larger with the rise of LLMs.
Turning a blind eye of that for the opportunity or whatever, and than claim that _just now_ they lost their moral compass, is being a hypocrite.
sorry not being a jerk but many of these kinds of posts just come off as performative and attention seeking. you could have just quit, literally everyone knows how FAANG operates.
These are the most successful companies in the history of the world. What do you expect? DO you need a PhD to figure this out?
My low-confidence theory is that it's an artifact of making the LLMs better at coding.
My two cents: think carefully if that pattern is a really great way to say what you want to say in your book. If it is, leave it, if you could say it better, change it.
How LLMs write and how people feel about them is evolving and the current dynamic will pass...
20 some odd years ago I read zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance, and it made the point that writing is hard when trying to decide what to say and how to say it at the same time. Just stuck with me. Brain dumping into an LLM is one way to get some momentum.
That said, the negation parallel pattern LLMs overuse drives me nuts and I'm always having to manually edit those out. I can't help but wonder if there is an advantage to thinking like that that helps with coding. E.g. defensive negation in coding probably improves code quality, but it dilutes good writing when over used.
But what happens when you no longer feel that you have a decent chance of being able to determine that something might have been created with LLM assistance? Do you not mind because you can't tell anyway, or do you refuse to read anything at all for fear of potentially consuming some LLM assisted work?
I'm fine with it as long as it's not full of the usual signals, because that's just bad writing that I don't enjoy.
It already is very hard to identify AI text, and we probably consume a lot of it unbeknownst to ourselves. Its like microplastics now -- you can find it everywhere (or so the propaganda goes).
I don't have a solution for when they fix that stupid idiom. I'm already reading less current things in general because of this, and might just do more of that. Even if its impossible to distinguish, I think people will pro-actively mark their stuff as LLM-free. There isn't a tech to support/prove that rn, but there might be in the future.
What changed was Google's motto, and it changed from "don't be evil" to "do the right thing". The given reason is that the prior motto also included inaction.
"Look what I did with Claude, LLMs are going to change our world!"
"Lame author, used an LLM to write a blog post."
The company is constantly changing, but also hasn't changed all that much. It always talked the talk and was eager to tell others how to behave, but was almost never willing to give up any real revenue to do the right thing. The usual justification was that if Google doesn't do it, someone else will (and that someone else is obviously not as moral as Googlers are).
If you're old enough, you might remember that they vocally opposed privacy-violating, disruptive display ads. That was their whole schtick. But that was before they realized there's a lot of money to be made by acquiring Doubleclick.
Its really hard to take such articles seriously. Its borderline gaslighting and says a lot more about the author than Google or US politics. In fact, even though I have no idea who this person is, I don't have a good opinion of them after reading this. And that ironically was the exact opposite of the intended effect of writing this for the author.
Google's moral compass was gone long before this man even joined. That doesn't make them particularly evil, but they have joined the ranks of ordinary, publicly traded corporations.
In a life-or-death situation, maybe a Christian could make the decision to take another life, then spend the rest of their life burdened by the guilt and sorrow of breaking the unambiguous 6th Commandment. There is room for repentance in this context.
That is *far* from the reality of the "defense" industry, however. Making widgets so that some dude at a computer terminal has an easier time drone-striking buildings full of kids halfway across the world is, essentially, evil.
There were quite some that refused due to principles and beliefs, but I guess not enough, and when there are not enough the first sacrificed for nothing.
Some places for other evil ideas that didn't reach global size, it means enough people stood up and they won.
Whats the formula? I guess nobody knows.
Maybe this is the future of all (interesting/worthwhile) human writing. Perpetually stay one step ahead of the machines.
It is not hypocrisy at all to change opinion on the company as the company politics changes. That is actually "being consistent".
Being ok with some things and being against other things is perfectly fine and valid.
It has some truth to it, but it doesn't survive looking at European history. In 1913 Germany and Britain were each other's largest trading partners, but a year later they ended up fighting each other in WWI. They fought again in WWII. Nuclear deterrence is a better explanation of post-WWII peace.
* For us, maybe not for you.
yes....it was the "least evil" choice
Why I engage with this comment? I truly believe that trusting your own knowledge and skills is the way forward. If you don’t have the skill? Build it. Don’t outsource thinking and learning.
I'll give you that, it's really lame what HN has turned into and as a user for almost twenty years now, I'm bummed by it.
So it's far from clear. People who believe will have works, this is also something with scriptural support. So if you are doing harm, such as by killing people, you probably don't.
Aaron Sorkin unintentionally created some phenomenal performance art with the closing of that movie and various educated people seeing Jack Nicholson's character as some sort of hard defender of freedom.
Why do you think that’s relevant to the point?
The US has legitimate security interests in Cuba.
For Nukes thats just a given nowadays, humans have a remarkable ability to adapt to constant threats. Not in the sense of being able to do something against it but to know it exists and not be terrified every single day. So many things can threaten human life that exist around us and yet we do not get scared after some time anymore atleast not constantly. Look at people living in Australia the entire ecosystem is basically a giant threat to anyone living there. Look at people living in earth prone regions of the world. People adapt and keep on living their lives. This is a fundamental human skill.
True! This is precisely what really annoys me about humans, because it makes humans not care about many things, and it's a skill I struggle with, which causes constant anger and helplessness on my side of things. But I guess it's what allows people to have hope and being whimsical, happy and whatnot.
No, of course not. It's a threat to people within 15 miles of the explosion plus people who are outdoors and turn to look at the bright light in the sky.
And there's never been enough nukes to kill all human life. That statement is based on a despicable calculation in which it is assumed that people would assemble packed shoulder-to-shoulder in circles of just the right size and there are no structures or land masses to deflect the blast and no clouds or fog to absorb the intense light.
Regarding the larger relationship.. bro, it's not the 1960s. Nobody is even trying to put nukes in Cuba and we could have easily established normal relations at any point in the last 50 years. The only reason that they are "enemies" is because we can't let go of a grudge going on 75 years that is completely irrelevant in today's world.
The scene between Colonel Jessup, Lt Jg Kaffee, and Lance Corporal Dawson and PFC Downey is about the nature of contradictory duties.
Everyone in that scene has a sworn duty to the United States as active duty military.
However, their duties sometimes conflict with each other (Jessup and Kaffee), and are even sometimes self-conflicting (Dawson and Downey).
Bad doesn't always come with a sticker labeling itself, and there's trauma inflicted even in peacetime in the maintenance of military strength (in broken bodies, training deaths, and emotional trauma).
To hold ones nose and pretend there isn't constant violence, even absent declared war, being perpetrated to militarily protect the US and Europe is to be ignorant, willfully or otherwise, of the foundation peace is built on.
Jessup is a tale of the distinction between the reality of war and the higher ideals and laws of war.
Jessup is missing the forest for the trees far more than I ever could because it's not my job. He's getting kids killed for a bullshit assignment while being a Colonel.
How do you think an Afghanistan or Iraq veteran would regard the Cuba assignment?
> It's relevant to the macho point of Jack Nicholson's character talking a bunch of shit about how he defends us. The Guantanamo base is irrelevant
You think a naval base on Cuba is “irrelevant” because it’s on the south side of the island and not the north side?
And since Jessup seems to have been base commander for a while already, likely less than that.
The goal of the military (as a whole) is to make people substitutable per their rank and MOS.
Allowing good order and discipline to break down (as an officer, NCO, or enlisted) just because of current post is anathema to that.
Is Cuba a military threat today? No. But that’s because we have had a navel base there for more than a century, and the Soviet Union is long gone.