You know, if enough tech workers at Microsoft felt strongly about these ethical issues, they could influence Microsoft's decisions internally which is probably the most effective position to be in to do so.
But all well, glad you can feel good about yourself by leaving so that someone with less concern about these ethical issues can fill the void and assert their own influence on the company instead.
Have you ever worked at a large company? This is simply not how things are done. Speaking up about something like this is almost a guaranteed fast track to getting laid off in the next round of reduction in force, and if you do somehow have the pull individually or collectively to make a meaningful difference here, coordinating all those levers in a way that satisfies the board/shareholders and effects meaningful change is pretty much an impossibility. And we're dealing with nation states who are going to have their own levers to push (and internally too). For an individual contributor or hell, someone who's not on the board/C suite, quitting and letting management know they're losing talent because of their stance on certain issues is probably the most effective thing someone can do in that spot.
Following your line of thinking, why don't you join microsoft and effect such change? I guess it's easier to leave a moralizing snarky comment and feel good about yourself.
> if enough tech workers at Microsoft felt strongly about these ethical issues, they could influence Microsoft's decisions internally
This isn't how companies work or are structured. If you have the CEO's ear, potentially. If you don't, the only ethical thing to do is to quit. (I don't personally have an issue with the military per se. I have other issues with several tech companies which would make taking a job there something I couldn't do.)
If something bad is going on and you don't agree and you quit, that is just absolving you of your guilt. I mean think two steps ahead. Is M$ going to go "gee, Jimbo quit, maybe the project is just no good and we ought to stop." Hell no. They will fill your position with someone who will be thankful for the opportunity. And I think ultimately you know it, but a bit of cognitive dissonance makes you think you did something.
Why are so many people supposedly principled but not militant about it? A principled militant would use their role in m$ as an opportunity to be an anchor to the efficiency of the operation that they do not agree with. They will fight to keep their position such that a more effective less moral person might not take it over and get the project moving.
One has to wonder how many projects in the world are in such a holding pattern, protected by people who had the foresight to think two steps ahead, attempting to keep their body holding that door shut as they possibly can.
> They will fill your position with someone who will be thankful for the opportunity
But you won't be doing it. Companies are run top-down. If you're within the organisation you're advancing the goals of those at the top. You aren't going to change that by complaining internally (unless you have a direct line to the CEO).
It's fine to disagree with something and just not contribute to it. If you want to be principled and militant, staying is hypocritical. In that case, you should whistleblow.
> attempting to keep their body holding that door shut as they possibly can
Unless you're conducting sabotage, which within this context seems like a gross overreaction, you aren't holding any door shut. (Again, assuming you don't have a line to the CEO.)
I am saying you should conduct sabotage if you feel the work is immoral and against your principles to such an extent. It would be immoral not to in a lot of ways, saying you'd rather wash your hands of it and pretend it weren't happening than to try and think of what you might do about it.
I think you do have a point but, at least for me, I found it wasn't so cut and dry. Nothing I was working on related to the ethical issues I had. I did find other like-minded people in Microsoft and that felt like we were at least creating a pocket of people who cared, yet none of us had direct power to change anything. There were people who protested directly and got fired for it. I had to balance my IRL responsibilities outside of work with my ability to change things and my need for employment in the future. I made compromises across the board and like I mention up thread, I don't think I was brave at all. In fact I think I did the bare minimum I could, but at least I'm no longer complicit.
There are people far braver than me, but they were indeed fired. There are probably people covertly fighting the system from within but I didn't work close enough to any of these projects to know them.
So ideally people would do what you say and/or just be very open about their objections, but it's also worth recognizing the risk of industry blacklisting and how things like employer provided health insurance raise the stakes.
"You know, if enough tech workers at Microsoft felt strongly about these ethical issues, they could influence Microsoft's decisions internally which is probably the most effective position to be in to do so."
The workers can't even influence things like office setup and floor plans. They certainly can't influence business decision to any meaningful degree.
Sure, I know that on an intellectual level. But I will say, I find these reports quite unsettling to read due to the extreme specificity. Especially since some of the examples they chose to include clearly aren't terrorists and just sound like... regular scientists doing their 9-5 job.
Like I know Google can read any of my emails, but I also don't see them do monthly blog posts describing intimate details from each email they found in one guy's Gmail inbox who their algorithm flagged as "maybe possibly kinda sketchy: 70% confidence"
Nah, this is working backwards. I've seen this dynamic plenty of times before: someone gets comfortable with some workflow in a limited context, and try to force into larger, more sophisticated context where it doesn't work as well rather than accepting that there are better tools for the job.
Nothing wrong with putting this stuff out there I guess, but if anybody I was working with was doing anything like this, we'd be scheduling a few sit-downs where I explain the proper way of handling this stuff and spare them the headaches of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
This is where this discrepancy occurs. AWS (etc.) aren't targeting "consumers," they're targeting enterprises. Enterprises want to use these services with minimal interference and overhead. They'll build out whatever features they need as they need them. It's the same thing with any other utility service: a factory isn't interested in having the electric company or water company shut off their services if their usage spikes. They'll manage their usage (and potential overages) in whatever way is specifically suitable for them.
Consumers have plenty of options to prevent such situations. Hell, AWS even offers Lightsail which is the consumer-friendly version of their services which is designed to be simple with a flat rate cost (including options of object storage).
If a consumer decides to tap into enterprise-grade services and ends up getting burned as a result, then I'm blaming the consumer rather than the provider of those services. These dynamics are all pretty clear and easy to understand (and even mitigate, with enough effort), so I don't see how you can claim they are "opaque" unless you're the kind of consumer who feels every company should dumb down their products to cater to the lowest common denominator.
I assume it has something to do with being on a website called "Hacker News" and said models are, for the most part, the only ones being published as open weights.
Open is better than closed, simple as. Nothing to do with China versus America, I'll always stan the open models and cast my aspersions on the closed ones.
And you don't think it is weird that the chinese models are the only ones embracing free markets, and open concepts, while the so called 'free' market on this side of the world tries to close everyone off from the technology that is so essential for the future?
>The circle jerking of Chinese models on this site never ceases to amuse me.
As opposed to "ask the model about Tiananmen" which seems to be the site's favorite pastime about Chinese models. ;)
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Sarcasm aside, I don't think people are happy about _Chinese_ models making advances. They are happy about _open_ models making advances. It's just coincidental that China is the one making them.
If some American lab were to develop a SOTA open model most people here will be equally excited. Although besides GPT-OSS-120B the American labs have been disappointing in this regard.
The title kind of buries important details about the distribution of these costs and their changes.
For example, Apple TV+ went from $4.99 per month to $14.99 per month, a +200% change, while YouTube Premium went from $11.99 to $15.99, a +33% change.
So services like Apple TV+ are skewing this increase a lot while services like YouTube Premium have remained relatively low. Similarly, Apple TV+ starting at $4.99 per month was clearly a very low price to start (which can probably be mostly attributed to the service's lack of content at that point). It's now at a "normal" price.
Just the same, saying something like something "costs $702/year more" without a point of reference is bad data presentation. The 2021 cost for all of these services was $1,150.92, for a +61% change. I'm not saying that's not substantial, but this kind of information is necessary for these figures to not just be rage bait.
And, of course, if you're simultaneously paying for Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Peacock, YouTube Premium, and Spotify every month, then you're either (a) really into consuming this kind of content and are a "premium subscriber" in the sense that these costs ought to be justified or (b) very bad with managing your time and finances. I suspect normal users subscribe to one or two of these at a time and are probably willing to switch around as prices change, content gets released/pulled, etc. A better analysis would try to do some investigation into this dynamic, since it will probably reveal that people are able to navigate dynamic service subscriptions well enough that they aren't actually experiencing a straight-up +61% increase in costs since 2021.
All of this is to say that this "analysis" barely even qualifies as a valid first-pass at understanding this kind of data. It's literally something that Claude probably churned out in 20 minutes. Everyone can be dissatisfied with the value they get from these streaming services, but this kind of post only helps to muddy the conversation.
The title means exactly what it says and the expanded details are nearly as close to the top of the article and as clearly presented as possible. Why does every article on HN need to find some excuse to make a complaint about the title?
But because it's just looking at the data in the most literal way possible it doesn't factor that in and instead says buying Disney+ and Hulu Premium would be $18.99 each.
There’s also c) you just aren’t price sensitive to the changes and find it overall rather immaterial d) can recall how expensive and crappy cable/satellite tv was, still see this as a good deal e) have many people in your household with different media preferences and cost per capita is pretty low
Also you should consider the base period timing is when many of the big movers were in a rollout of their application and thus the price was either artificially low and/or represented a severely limited offering compared to their current offering.
Or c) family bundled consumption. Mom likes netflix, dad needs live tv, kids are into youtube, and everyone likes hbo.
Its hard to cancel a subscription when you know it brings joy to an infirmed parent. Youre effectively locked into paying whatever, like $350/mo for xfinity tv simply because thats the only UI they can handle on an old remote.
> And, of course, if you're simultaneously paying for Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Peacock, YouTube Premium, and Spotify every month, then you're either (a) really into consuming this kind of content and are a "premium subscriber" in the sense that these costs ought to be justified or (b) very bad with managing your time and finances. I suspect normal users subscribe to one or two of these at a time and are probably willing to switch around as prices change, content gets released/pulled, etc.
Or you're the type of person that watches one or two shows on each of these services that in the days of yesteryear would have all been on Netflix, but since every company that owns a production studio decided to launch their own streaming service now means you need 25 subscriptions to keep up with the handful of decent shows with reasonable production budgets so you aren't stuck otherwise just consuming slop. Given the consolidation in industry, it's even more insult to injury as there's now only a handful of companies that collectively have /multiple/ streaming services per company each with a different fee because our current timeline is one of absolutely egregious extractive behavior and rent-seeking with no compensating controls.
You know computers have the ability to compress videos, right?
>Do I really need 4k HDR to enjoy Seinfeld?
No, but the difference between 480p and even 1080p is pretty significant and definitely makes the viewing experience just generally more enjoyable. But that's just Seinfeld, where you can basically close your eyes and guess what is being shown 90% of the time with great accuracy. Where this doesn't work is with movies/shows/etc. where the visual component is important. If you go to a LotR watch party and bring a 480p rip and expect people to watch that, then you might need to get your eyes checked.
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