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It’s not really whataboutism. Would you take an environmentalist seriously if you found out that they drive a Hummer? When people have choices and they choose

It’s not really whataboutism. Would you take an environmentalist seriously if you found out that they drive a Hummer? When people have choices and they choose the more harmful action, it hurts their credibility. If Rob cares so much about society and the environment, why did he work at a company that has horrendous track record on both? Someone of his level of talent certainly had choices, and he chose to contribute to the company that abandoned “don’t be evil” a long time ago.

cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
Honestly, it seems like Rob Pike may have left Google around the same I did. (2021, 2022). Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back.
- pstuart 10mo ago
  My take was that he had done enough work and had handed the reins of Go to a capable leader (rsc), and that it was time to step away. Ian Lance Taylor on the other hand appeared to have quit specifically because of the "AI everything" mandate. Just an armchair observation here.
- christophilus 10mo ago
  It was still a wildly wasteful company doing morally ambiguous things prior to that timeframe. I mean, its entire business model is tracking and ads— and it runs massive, high energy datacenters to make that happen.
  - cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
    I wouldn't argue with this necessarily except that again the scale is completely different. "AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving. And so it's again, a kind of whataboutism that pushes the scale of the issue out of the way in order to make some sort of moral argument which misses the whole point. BTW in my first year at Google I worked on a change where we made some optimizations that cut the # of CPUs used for RTB ad serving by half. There were bonuses and/or recognition for doing that kind of thing. Wasteful is a matter of degrees.
    - luckylion 10mo ago
      > "AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving. It wasn't only about serving those ads though, traditional machine-learning (just not LLMs) has always been computationally expensive and was and is used extensively to optimize ads for higher margins, not for some greater good. Obviously, back then and still today, nobody is being wasteful because they want to. If you go to OpenAI today and offer them a way to cut their compute usage in half, they'll praise you and give you a very large bonus for the same reason it was recognized & incentivized at Google: it also cuts the costs.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- trimbo 10mo ago
  > Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back. Did you sell all of your stock?
  - cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
    Unfortunately, yes. If I hadn't, I might be retired.
    - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
      But you left because you were feeling like google was going in gutter and wanted to make an ethical choice perhaps on what you felt was right. Honestly I believe that google might be one of the few winners from the AI industry perhaps because they own the whole stack top to bottom with their TPU's but I would still stray away from their stock because their P/E ratio might be insanely high or something Their p/e ratio has almost doubled in just a year which isn't a good sign https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/googl/alphabet/pe-ratio https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/googl/alphabet/pe-... So like, we might be viewing the peaks of the bubble and you might still hold the stocks and might continue holding it but who knows what happens after the stock depreciates value due to AI Bubble-like properties and then you might regret as why you didn't sell it but if you do and google's stock rises, you might still regret. I feel as if grass is always greener but not sure about your situation but if you ask me, you made the best out of the situation with the parameters you had and logically as such I wouldn't consider it "unfortunately" but I get what you mean.
      - cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
        That's one of the reasons I left. It also became intolerable to work there because it had gotten so massive. When I started there was an engineering staff of about 18,000 and when I left it was well over 100,000 and climbing constantly. It was a weird place to work. But with remote work it also became possible to get paid decently around here without working there. Prior I was bound to local area employers of which Google was the only really good one. I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities. After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though. People who worked there in the decade prior to me had a much better place to work.
- fidotron 10mo ago
  That has been clear since the Google Plus debacle, at the very least.
cycomanic 10mo ago
I would argue that Google actually has had a comparitively good track record on the environment, I mean if you say (pre AI) Google does have a bad track record on the environment, then I wonder which ones do in your opinion. And while we can argue about the societal cost/benefit of other Google services and their use of ads to finance them, I would say there were very different to e.g Facebook with a documented effort to make their feed more addictive

cmrdporcupine 10mo ago

Honestly, it seems like Rob Pike may have left Google around the same I did. (2021, 2022). Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back.

pstuart 10mo ago
My take was that he had done enough work and had handed the reins of Go to a capable leader (rsc), and that it was time to step away. Ian Lance Taylor on the other hand appeared to have quit specifically because of the "AI everything" mandate. Just an armchair observation here.
christophilus 10mo ago
It was still a wildly wasteful company doing morally ambiguous things prior to that timeframe. I mean, its entire business model is tracking and ads— and it runs massive, high energy datacenters to make that happen.
- cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
  I wouldn't argue with this necessarily except that again the scale is completely different. "AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving. And so it's again, a kind of whataboutism that pushes the scale of the issue out of the way in order to make some sort of moral argument which misses the whole point. BTW in my first year at Google I worked on a change where we made some optimizations that cut the # of CPUs used for RTB ad serving by half. There were bonuses and/or recognition for doing that kind of thing. Wasteful is a matter of degrees.
  - luckylion 10mo ago
    > "AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving. It wasn't only about serving those ads though, traditional machine-learning (just not LLMs) has always been computationally expensive and was and is used extensively to optimize ads for higher margins, not for some greater good. Obviously, back then and still today, nobody is being wasteful because they want to. If you go to OpenAI today and offer them a way to cut their compute usage in half, they'll praise you and give you a very large bonus for the same reason it was recognized & incentivized at Google: it also cuts the costs.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
trimbo 10mo ago
> Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back. Did you sell all of your stock?
- cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
  Unfortunately, yes. If I hadn't, I might be retired.
  - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
    But you left because you were feeling like google was going in gutter and wanted to make an ethical choice perhaps on what you felt was right. Honestly I believe that google might be one of the few winners from the AI industry perhaps because they own the whole stack top to bottom with their TPU's but I would still stray away from their stock because their P/E ratio might be insanely high or something Their p/e ratio has almost doubled in just a year which isn't a good sign https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/googl/alphabet/pe-ratio https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/googl/alphabet/pe-... So like, we might be viewing the peaks of the bubble and you might still hold the stocks and might continue holding it but who knows what happens after the stock depreciates value due to AI Bubble-like properties and then you might regret as why you didn't sell it but if you do and google's stock rises, you might still regret. I feel as if grass is always greener but not sure about your situation but if you ask me, you made the best out of the situation with the parameters you had and logically as such I wouldn't consider it "unfortunately" but I get what you mean.
    - cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
      That's one of the reasons I left. It also became intolerable to work there because it had gotten so massive. When I started there was an engineering staff of about 18,000 and when I left it was well over 100,000 and climbing constantly. It was a weird place to work. But with remote work it also became possible to get paid decently around here without working there. Prior I was bound to local area employers of which Google was the only really good one. I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities. After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though. People who worked there in the decade prior to me had a much better place to work.
fidotron 10mo ago
That has been clear since the Google Plus debacle, at the very least.

cycomanic 10mo ago

I would argue that Google actually has had a comparitively good track record on the environment, I mean if you say (pre AI) Google does have a bad track record on the environment, then I wonder which ones do in your opinion. And while we can argue about the societal cost/benefit of other Google services and their use of ads to finance them, I would say there were very different to e.g Facebook with a documented effort to make their feed more addictive