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> Unfortunately, times have changed. Google management has quietly abandoned its goals to become carbon-neutral because of the AI model energy usage. Worse, Goo

> Unfortunately, times have changed. Google management has quietly abandoned its goals to become carbon-neutral because of the AI model energy usage. Worse, Google management is now signing deals with the US Ministry of War—where “any lawful purpose” by the current US government has already been repeatedly demonstrated to be in violation of international laws. None of this is being debated or communicated within the company. It is just decided by top-level management (I was part of the management chain before, and I hadn’t heard of any of these changes through internal channels). With my moral and ethical principles, I cannot—explicitly or implicitly, directly or transitively—support the current and ongoing actions of the “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality” US Ministry of War. 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.

tomhow 4mo ago
> This entire article is already engaging in political and ideological battle 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.

tomhow 4mo ago

> This entire article is already engaging in political and ideological battle 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.