Awareness is not change. What we've really seen is the incredibly high cost of true patriotism and the absence of action from government and citizens alike. And not just absence of action, but also rhetorical responses ranging anywhere from deflection to character assassination.
Why would I display a modicum of good faith and grace when google has actively, at every chance, shown that they don't act in good faith. Hell today they announced if school districts turn off Google's ai for students they won't let them use google search either.
What if we displayed a modicum of truth and stopped pretending that Google employees don’t work there for the money? That is faithful and gracious to reality.
For who and for what? When did Google engineers demonstrate faith and grace? When they deprecated Manifest v2 so they could strengthen their advertising monopoly? Or when they ensured the death of XSLT to ensure everyone was forced to use JS for simple templating features? These are just the tip of the iceberg, should I keep trying to find other good faith and grace examples?
May I ask? Why should I show faith and grace to the people actively involved in turning our society into a Big Brother program? People who work with the DoD to build war machines? Directly or indirectly involved, they either know what they’re doing or choose to look the other way, for money.
Please enlighten me, what is the faith and grace approach I should be stating?
One example of acting in good faith would be not to attribute the actions of a group of people to the characteristics of a small number of individuals who were not involved in the aforementioned actions. Are you responsible for every evil thing your country has done while you've chosen to remain a citizen? Another example of good faith is keeping the discussion narrowed down to relevant facts rather than including anything negative you can think of. V2 to V3 is so out of left field it's mind boggling to me that you'd consider it relevant to this conversation.
My country doesn’t pay me to be a citizen. It costs money, a lot, for me to even try leaving. My country can be changed through elections. Google pays these people and when they find out they’re destroying society they take the paycheck. A better metaphor would have been if I was in the armed services and decided to quit after bombing Iran. Nice try.
If v2 to v3 is out of the wild for you then you really do not have any idea what you’re talking about. I cherry picked a few examples to demonstrate how evil the core of Google really is, regardless of the people who work on less evil teams there. It doesn’t matter how nice most of the employees there are, they’re still helping the money machine ad engine core of Google plow ahead and knowingly so. They protect and enable the bad actors by working on the lesser parts of Google.
Another example of how evil Google and it’s workers are, they recently announced that they’ll start scanning people’s emails again to serve ads. I didn’t hear of the Gmail team being upset and leaving. That’s because their fat paycheck makes them smile while thinking about how they helped build the service that tokenizes email makes them frown. So they don’t think about it and turn away.
I have worked at plenty of giant corps to know how this works, you’re not going to fool me with this “have faith and grace in the Google employees, they’re not all evil, just a few. The rest just hang out there nicely.”
Just, Devil's Advocate, but what would be the benefit of your career if all humans (or even just a few billions of humans) are going to die?
I think it's reasonable to assume that if it's not worth breaking the NDA, it's likely not an existential threat for the vast majority of humanity.
Now, does that mean that people who currently work upper-middle class knowledge work jobs aren't in for an exceedingly harsh economic reality check? Absolutely not.
But that's not really as serious as an existential threat to humanity.
I doubt you are asking in good faith, because I suspect a good faith interlocutor would have worked this out on their own, but I'll proceed anyway.
On the one hand, you've potentially got an indeterminate number of future comfortable years based on a subjective assessment of how long you think it takes catastrophe to materialize, with the downside that you can't warn anyone and so no one will stop the coming catastrophe.
On the other hand you've got the immediate assurance of your current career being gone and high likelihood that you'll struggle financially as a result, with the upside that you can provide a warning to the public that they will almost certainly ignore and catastrophe comes anyway.
Given the risk/reward assessment of those two options, what do you pick?
Then share the stories where you faced such a situation and acted on it in a way that had a negative impact on you personally but brought a greater good
I'm having a challenging time communicating what I'm saying.
Please understand, it's a job. I spot a threat to my unit, I report it up the chain of command.
It's not about whether or not there is a negative impact on me. It's not even about whether or not it serves a greater good; nor whether there is an ultimate benefit to my unit; nor whether I get brownie points when whatever you deem divine evaluates my soul in the hereafter.
It's my job to report. So I report.
I've never once considered the things you're talking about now when I was in any such situation. It was just a job.
Here's the thing, it kind of made me just automatically think a certain way. I know that if I see an existential threat, I'm reporting it. I believe anyone would. Not for benefit. Just because that's what you do. If you see a mass shooting in progress, you call the cops. I don't think there is a single person who thinks about negative impact or greater good. It's just automatic.
I was only saying that if the NDA would prevent them from reporting, then, to my mind, the threat is likely not existential. But, again, I do make room for the possibility that not everyone thinks like me. I just think it's very likely that people think exactly as I do when faced with that level of threat.
Reporting up the chain of command in a structure that supports and encourages such reports is one thing. We are talking about an unsanctioned action that you take against the express or implied desires of those above you. And a legal system that will back them up, despite you having definitely done the right thing.
The downside risk to yourself doesn't have to be existential for the upside to not be worth it.
Coming at this from a completely different angle, other people may see their duty to the law and the agreements they've signed as being more morally binding over their behaviors than their social obligation to raise the alarm. Not everyone uses the same formula to calculate which duty is most important.
The people who "lost everything" were people who bought houses they couldn't afford by lying about their incomes. Counting on the bubble growing forever.
You are ignoring the many documented cases of predatory mortgage lenders encouraging elderly and otherwise infirm people to switch to the “lower rate mortgages”.
Acting like the only people who had these loan obligations were actively doing something wrong is a total myth.
Meanwhile Wells Fargo, who gave loans to dead people to meet quotas, was made whole and then fined a few token dollars.
The people who "didn't lose everything" were people who were lying about securities being AAA worthy while in reality being filled with subprime junk. Counting on getting bailed out and facing no consequences.
Subprime mortgages were subprime because there was no documentation given to prove incomes/debt of the people they were given to.
The people who defaulted on their mortgages did so because they couldn't afford them. The reason they got a loan that they couldn't afford was because they lied about either their income or their debts while getting the no-doc loans.
The failures in process that led yo the industry allowing people to lie to them without verification is another part of the story but it's completely dishonest to act like the people getting the loans they defaulted on had no agency.
"The reason they got a loan that they couldn't afford was because they lied about either their income or their debts while getting the no-doc loans."
No, they were offered loans at incredibly low rates that would be unaffordable if they rose at all. A large part of the scandal was about how the banks were offering loans to people that couldn't really afford them not that people were lying to get those loans.
First, if your company could double its workforce for free right now with 0 plans for how to convert the extra bodies into revenue, how long would it take them to see a return? Because from what I understand companies aren't leaving money on the table, if hiring someone would make them more money they just would. AI could help those that weren't maximizing revenue despite having high demand and a market because they were resource constrained. That doesn't describe very many large companies.
Second, I'm getting huge value from it, but I'm not making any money and none of it is being redirected. It's simply value that wouldn't have existed otherwise because I would have just gone without the thing because it was prohibitively expensive or too much work. I'm quite sure many companies and people have been unlocked in this way. Plenty of value locked up in an overly expensive economy dedicated to maximum value extraction instead of value creation.
It's not how much energy is used, it's how much wasted heat energy is dumped into the surrounding environment. Seems like a much more apt comparison in that light. Second paragraph of TFA:
> An analysis of the mammoth data centre proposed by celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary suggests it would release the equivalent of 23 atom bombs of heat waste into the boreal forest of northwestern Alberta every day.
it would be apt if it was "fun fact, despite being incredibly destructive, a nuclear bomb doesnt leave much waste heat" but also a non-sequitur.
a really obvious electricity in, waste heat out is aluminum smelting in quebec. at ~12GWh a day for the biggest ones, this would come out at a similar scale, but make clear that the data center industry in alberta produces far less waste heat than the aluminum industry in quebec, and we should start looking to shutter all those smelters for wasting too much power
bringing up nuclear bombs when the heat output of a nuclear bomb isnt what people are familiar with is intentionally misleading. it also elicits a "cool, this thing can survive 20 nuclear blasts a day?" response which is pretty obviously not intended and isnt true
Still makes no sense. People do not have an intuition about how much heat a nuclear bomb gives off, and comparing an instantaneous explosion versus a energy in a day is really dumb.
It's not dumb at all, it's intentionally misleading; as modern "journalists" are shams that rely on misinforming the public over any sort of integrity to make a cheap buck.
Arguably one of the only professions I'd say are a good thing to be entirely replaced. Can't wait.
To be fair it's a non-political post with a political title which invited a conversation/argument completely unrelated to the contents. I'm not against politics here but this is exactly the low quality flame bait that this site would be better without.
They refused to reschedule to a larger venue (and more hours?) but since they can count how many people showed up and watched and emailed my guess is that wouldn't have given them a much more accurate picture. In some ways I feel like they should have done it anyway, in other ways I don't know if it would have made any difference. It's certainly a lot less illuminating than a community vote...
When the article says "most" people spoke against the proposal, that's an unfortunate gap in the reporting. Was it 60% or was it 95% or where in between?
You'd have to take a public poll. The public comment period could be overwhelmingly negative even with the community in broad support because the "pro data-center" posture only requires silence.
reply