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> But for years, the company has also furnished fossil fuel giants with cloud computing services and specialized software tools powered by machine learning and

> But for years, the company has also furnished fossil fuel giants with cloud computing services and specialized software tools powered by machine learning and AI in order to streamline and automate their operations. In other words, some low-level engineer at BP signed up for Azure and provisioned a few VMs with GPUs. Let's say MS did ban an entire industry from using their products... wouldn't that engineer just switch to AWS and use EC2 instances instead? Or is the argument that every cloud company should independently decide not to serve this particular industry? If that's true, why are we pressuring private companies at all? Wouldn't it be more effective for the government to sanction these forbidden companies, instead of relying on so many independent profit-motivated companies to voluntarily lower their profits?

voisin 2y ago
> Or is the argument that every cloud company should independently decide not to serve this particular industry? If that's true, why are we pressuring private companies at all? Wouldn't it be more effective for the government to sanction these forbidden companies, instead of relying on so many independent profit-motivated companies to voluntarily lower their profits? Yes, it would be more effective but in the absence of any adults in the rooms of government, I don’t blame regular folk from using whatever little power they might have to try to effect change, albeit however futilely. Our world is a dumpster fire and the ruling class seems fine with fanning the flames, so it is incumbent upon everyone else to fight in whatever ways available to them.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Americans have a very weird individualistic idea of what's acceptable when it comes to reining in Companies Behaving Badly: - Individual action is acceptable (vote with your wallet) - Government action is totally unacceptable (interference with the holy free market!) - But, coordinated, collective individual action is also unacceptable (unions bad! organized boycotts bad!) Consequently, the only way to punish companies that's acceptable to Americans is totally spontaneous, unorganized, grassroots actions by individuals. You can imagine how often that's successful. The only time it actually has a chance of working is when it's secretly organized (astroturfing). So, we Americans continue to run around individually complaining about bad corporate behavior, but are powerless to do anything about it because we've made all the effective mitigations taboo!
  - exe34 2y ago
    Do you think it's the same people making the rules and feeling powerless because of the rules? Your writing gives that impression, but maybe I'm reading it incorrectly.
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      I honestly don’t know where it comes from. The Cold War with the Soviet Union didn’t help. We had decades of being told anything collective = bad, worker power/ownership = bad, government planning = bad. Society needs to be limited to “individuals acting independently.” The Soviet Union is gone, but our fear is still strong of everything that even remotely looks like communism. The Red Scare was a huge beneficial windfall for corporate power.
      - exe34 2y ago
        I saw a "conspiracy theory" that the only reason we saw quality of life improve in the west after ww2 and until a bit after the fall of the iron curtain is that western oligarchs feared the population would turn east and there would be red revolutions everywhere otherwise. The only way to beat the USSR was to improve quality of life in the west. Now that this threat is gone, there's no reason to keep a foot on the brake of welfare-capitalism. The population pays for the cockups (quantitative easing), while the shareholders take all the profits. This is the source of the growing economic inequality.
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    > Consequently, the only way to punish companies that's acceptable to Americans is totally spontaneous, unorganized, grassroots actions by individuals. And don't forget the caveat that if it's the wrong grassroots unorganized action, it's clearly a product of George Soro's money paying people to do things, and not their actual action.
jajko 2y ago
Dont know BP specifically, but in no normal big corporation can 'some low level engineer' just go and create accounts at will unless said provider is already used quite a bit. There are approved providers, getting stuff from them goes through responsible team which should ask many relevant questions.
gwbas1c 2y ago
Microsoft provides consultants that happily show you how to use their tools. I doubt this is a case of some random engineer at an oil company buying a few VMs on a website.
kthejoker2 2y ago
I mean ... Chevron literally sold Microsoft their data center to become Azure southcentral. These are not "low level engineers", these companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars with Azure. And all the other clouds. And Wal-Mart and AT&T and ... big companies spend big bucks.
tdsanchez 2y ago
The thing people have a problem with is that Microsoft is claiming that it will be carbon neutral by 2030 but it can't be true so they're just bullshitting. I was at Microsoft as a blue badge when they intro'd the carbon neutral by 2030 initiative and the first employee to ask about how this was possible was politely swatted down by Nadella in a live company meeting. "why are we pressuring private companies at all?" Because what Microsoft is doing is unsustainable but Nadella and the c-suite are too busy buying back stock to care. Microsoft doesn't actually make anything anymore - they just acquire technologies and extract the value and move on. The OpenAI acquisition will take down Microsoft because to stay on the trajectory Nadella has bet the farm on would require Moore's Law to still be increasing compute mips/watt but that ended a while ago. By the time these companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta) realize that AI will require geometrically more compute when only a linear increase in MIPS/watt is all we are going to get out of silicon. That none of these firms are building silicon photonics labs to be the first to make this incremental leap away from CMOS shows that they're only vaguely aware that AGI isn't anywhere close to being a reality with any silicon based technologies. Using bullshit technology, aka AI, to look for unknown amounts of oil while telling the press the date you will be carbon neutral is just unethical garbage like so much else Microsoft does.

voisin 2y ago

> Or is the argument that every cloud company should independently decide not to serve this particular industry? If that's true, why are we pressuring private companies at all? Wouldn't it be more effective for the government to sanction these forbidden companies, instead of relying on so many independent profit-motivated companies to voluntarily lower their profits? Yes, it would be more effective but in the absence of any adults in the rooms of government, I don’t blame regular folk from using whatever little power they might have to try to effect change, albeit however futilely. Our world is a dumpster fire and the ruling class seems fine with fanning the flames, so it is incumbent upon everyone else to fight in whatever ways available to them.

ryandrake 2y ago
Americans have a very weird individualistic idea of what's acceptable when it comes to reining in Companies Behaving Badly: - Individual action is acceptable (vote with your wallet) - Government action is totally unacceptable (interference with the holy free market!) - But, coordinated, collective individual action is also unacceptable (unions bad! organized boycotts bad!) Consequently, the only way to punish companies that's acceptable to Americans is totally spontaneous, unorganized, grassroots actions by individuals. You can imagine how often that's successful. The only time it actually has a chance of working is when it's secretly organized (astroturfing). So, we Americans continue to run around individually complaining about bad corporate behavior, but are powerless to do anything about it because we've made all the effective mitigations taboo!
- exe34 2y ago
  Do you think it's the same people making the rules and feeling powerless because of the rules? Your writing gives that impression, but maybe I'm reading it incorrectly.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    I honestly don’t know where it comes from. The Cold War with the Soviet Union didn’t help. We had decades of being told anything collective = bad, worker power/ownership = bad, government planning = bad. Society needs to be limited to “individuals acting independently.” The Soviet Union is gone, but our fear is still strong of everything that even remotely looks like communism. The Red Scare was a huge beneficial windfall for corporate power.
    - exe34 2y ago
      I saw a "conspiracy theory" that the only reason we saw quality of life improve in the west after ww2 and until a bit after the fall of the iron curtain is that western oligarchs feared the population would turn east and there would be red revolutions everywhere otherwise. The only way to beat the USSR was to improve quality of life in the west. Now that this threat is gone, there's no reason to keep a foot on the brake of welfare-capitalism. The population pays for the cockups (quantitative easing), while the shareholders take all the profits. This is the source of the growing economic inequality.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  > Consequently, the only way to punish companies that's acceptable to Americans is totally spontaneous, unorganized, grassroots actions by individuals. And don't forget the caveat that if it's the wrong grassroots unorganized action, it's clearly a product of George Soro's money paying people to do things, and not their actual action.

jajko 2y ago

Dont know BP specifically, but in no normal big corporation can 'some low level engineer' just go and create accounts at will unless said provider is already used quite a bit. There are approved providers, getting stuff from them goes through responsible team which should ask many relevant questions.

gwbas1c 2y ago

Microsoft provides consultants that happily show you how to use their tools. I doubt this is a case of some random engineer at an oil company buying a few VMs on a website.

kthejoker2 2y ago

I mean ... Chevron literally sold Microsoft their data center to become Azure southcentral. These are not "low level engineers", these companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars with Azure. And all the other clouds. And Wal-Mart and AT&T and ... big companies spend big bucks.

tdsanchez 2y ago

The thing people have a problem with is that Microsoft is claiming that it will be carbon neutral by 2030 but it can't be true so they're just bullshitting. I was at Microsoft as a blue badge when they intro'd the carbon neutral by 2030 initiative and the first employee to ask about how this was possible was politely swatted down by Nadella in a live company meeting. "why are we pressuring private companies at all?" Because what Microsoft is doing is unsustainable but Nadella and the c-suite are too busy buying back stock to care. Microsoft doesn't actually make anything anymore - they just acquire technologies and extract the value and move on. The OpenAI acquisition will take down Microsoft because to stay on the trajectory Nadella has bet the farm on would require Moore's Law to still be increasing compute mips/watt but that ended a while ago. By the time these companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta) realize that AI will require geometrically more compute when only a linear increase in MIPS/watt is all we are going to get out of silicon. That none of these firms are building silicon photonics labs to be the first to make this incremental leap away from CMOS shows that they're only vaguely aware that AGI isn't anywhere close to being a reality with any silicon based technologies. Using bullshit technology, aka AI, to look for unknown amounts of oil while telling the press the date you will be carbon neutral is just unethical garbage like so much else Microsoft does.