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Stanford grads walk out on Google CEO Sundar Pichai speech
- Venn1 4mo agoTech leaders from this era will not be remembered well.
- dragonelite 4mo agoThere's not much good to remember them by for the past decade they have been implementing a global panopticon system etc. At least in the 1990s and 2000s it felt they were doing some good stuff for humanity. But the 2010s and 2020s the masked pretty much slipped.
- krunck 4mo agoThey knew all along how their companies could profit from surveillance and propaganda.
- LeFantome 4mo agoThat is a bold prediction
- Larrikin 4mo agoNo it is not.
- happytoexplain 4mo agoIt doesn't seem like a stretch. I don't know what you mean. (You may disagree with the opinion of course, but "bold" is a counterintuitive adjective here)
- mulr00ney 4mo agoHow so?
- ares623 4mo agoThere's two opposing forces at work. Everyone wants to be Steve Jobs, and no one wants to be Steve Ballmer. So the only choice is to go to the extreme to stay as far away from the other end as possible.
- layer8 4mo agoI'd take Steve Ballmer over most of the current big-tech CEOs, to be honest.
- jameson 4mo agoI wonder which spectrum Steve Jobs would be on if he was still alive to this day.
- happytoexplain 4mo agoHate him or not, Steve Jobs understood humans. He spoke and behaved as a human. He was flawed and may be considered "cringey" now, but I think he'd be liked better than the rest.
- pmdr 4mo agoHis Apple keynotes conveyed a sense of magic, for example demonstrating pinch to zoom on the iPhone and pulling a MacBook Air out of a manila envelope. And something he'd be angry because things didn't go as planned. These pre-recorded keynotes we get nowadays are just bland and AI-generated.
- dgrin91 4mo ago"You're holding it wrong" would beg to differ, not to mention the many flops he had (remember the magic mouse?). He was smart & very successful. I wouldn't call him relatable to most humans.
- basisword 4mo agoSteve Jobs? The guy who was adopted by working class parents, a hippy, with a Syrian immigrant father? I think he might view the world slightly differently than the guys born into wealth, who went to Ivy League schools, and who all seemingly share the same total inability to understand ordinary human beings.
- iAMkenough 4mo agoAs opposed to the current guy who gifted a custom 24K gold plaque to the current administration, after being raised by a shipyard worker and pharmacist and attending a public land-grant research university in Alabama. When it comes to business, I think Jobs would grovel at the feet of Trump just as much as Cook has.
- penguin_booze 4mo agoI think you underestimate what the human attention span has become.
- xnx 4mo agoBig difference between owners like Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Musk vs. Sundar Pichai.
- wxw 4mo agoWhat was the speech on?
- downrightmike 4mo ago[flagged]
- throw1234567891 4mo agoIf you'd click on the link and listen to the 17 second video (don't even have to watch it!), you'd know how wrong you are.
- pkaye 4mo agoWhat is it about? The audio is too noisy (my hearing is bad...)
- throw1234567891 4mo agoThey are all chanting "free Palestine".
- dh2022 4mo agoThanks for the link. Sundar couldn’t be more tone deaf. Pretending this is not a time of great anxiety shows how much stock you can put in his words.
- hoppyhoppy2 4mo agoIt was a commencement speech. Here's a transcript: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/stanford-commencement-speech-2026/ https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/s...
- inatreecrown2 4mo agoNo mention of AI at all.
- gritspants 4mo agoSeems this has more to do with Palestine and Google's involvement with Israel to provide cloud computing.
- smallerize 4mo agoIf only there weren't so many reasons.
- themafia 4mo agoIf only Google kept "don't be evil."
- ergocoder 4mo ago[flagged]
- nujabe 4mo agolol you clearly think the Palestine side are worse, stop being disingenuous and just say it with your chest. Only one side is being armed and funded by our tax dollars, and that’s good enough reason to protest.
- ergocoder 4mo ago> you clearly think the Palestine side are worse You only think that in order to fit your narrative... even I already stated the contrary. > that’s good enough reason to protest. Clearly, this protest isn't about that. The protest is about criticizing Israel's actions. It's you who should stop being disingenuous
- filoleg 4mo ago> Only one side is being armed and funded by our tax dollars I mean, yeah, I would heavily prefer for one of the sides in this conflict to be much better funded and armed than the other. Specifically, the side that I consider to be fundamentally in the right in the conflict. Whichever side I am talking about is not relevant to the point. What's relevant to the actual point I am trying to make, is that I don't think that one side being better armed and funded serves as a reasonable indicator of which side is right/wrong in a given conflict.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- smashah 4mo agoGood kids - proud of them.
- kunai 4mo agoSo funny how a site called "Hacker News," once vibrant with the ethos of lighthearted disobedience and an inquisitive spirit, finds itself almost religiously in opposition to those who decry a (horrendously incompetent) dystopia and panopticon forced upon the population by the very forces this website's (former, I'm assuming) users claimed to hate so much.
- a4isms 4mo agoThe easiest metaphor for HN's evolution is that of gentrification: An outsider community forms in a down-market neighbourhood. Lacking money and power, it makes its own culture. That becomes "hip," and those with money start buying property in that neighbourhood, displacing the very people who made it hip to begin with. As with "hackers," so also with artists, musicians, bicycle messengers, dirtbag rock climbers, frisbee players, &c. &c.
- sva_ 4mo agoI wonder what percentage of total graduates walked out? The video shows maybe around 50 people at all. The title makes it seem like everyone graduating walked out.
- happytoexplain 4mo agoIt does not.
- Freedom2 4mo agoWhich part of the title indicates that everyone walked out? I assumed it was merely some of the cohort.
- paulddraper 4mo ago"Pentagon leaders disagree with DoD budget cuts." Technically, that just means at least two people at the Pentagon who qualify as leaders disagreed. But it seems like broad opinion.
- iAMkenough 4mo agoIt might seem like a broad opinion, but that’s the reader’s own opinion either being reinforced or rejected by a single line of text. The reader may wish the disagreement wasn’t documented at all, because it doesn’t meet their own personal editorial standards, and they like telling someone they don’t pay how to do their jobs. But factually, there’s nothing incorrect about what was observed and reported.
- paulddraper 4mo agoYou are technically correct.
- stevenwoo 4mo agoI went to the Electrical Engineering ceremony, the only speakers were from the faculty and one newly minted B.S.E.E. I biked there and saw there were a lot of smaller ceremonies across the campus outside of the stadium the photo captures.
- arjie 4mo agoSpeech itself was kind of fun: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/stanford-commencement-speech-2026/ https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/s... Pretty light hearted, and honestly considering that he's given a speech to an empty stadium before (as referenced in the first few sentences, I think he'll have handled it just fine. > But people have also been giving me a lot of advice on what to say. Actually, it’s been the same advice, and it’s about what not to say. People thought it would be really difficult for me; it is the last two letters of my last name, after all. Ha, chuckle-worthy. Of course he'd find it hard to not pitch AI. The only thing I find surprising is no-one points out that Stanford is a truly elite education system: Some 2 in 5 of students enter disabled, but almost all of them end up successful over time.
- dumbmrblah 4mo agoDisabled in the sense they get more time to take tests.
- watwut 4mo agoNot even that. Disabled as in "theoretically maybe could ask for some accomodation and maybe could get it". They dont get more time on tests, the moral panic is about them potentially being able to ask for more time if they cared.
- Gagarin1917 4mo agoI wish I’d skipped my graduation ceremony as well. What a complete waste of time.
- SpaceNoodled 4mo agoNot me. I always enjoy a nice opportunity to nap in front of a large crowd.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- karmakurtisaani 4mo agoPresident material right here!
- Groxx 4mo agoI skipped mine. Definitely worth skipping - I don't really need the super expensive pep talk by someone who I almost always really don't want to hear from, inspiration porn is free (and largely unavoidable) by the gigaton nowadays. Save the money, fund the humanities with it. Maybe then the people planning these speakers would realize why people are booing and walking out.
- squibonpig 4mo agoYeah skipped mine too. Couldn't see the point and still did a grad party with the family so we could do something together.
- Groxx 4mo agoYea. Want to meet with all your graduating friends at once? Just go after! All you can really do at the thing is whisper to your neighbor and grow increasingly bored for X hours. And remember how much going to it cost. Mine wanted a couple hundred for the outfit and paper and folder thing, which certainly didn't go to the materials! that can't have cost more than about $5 cumulative, almost all of that going toward the extremely cheap leather on the certificate-folder-thing. The only people who weren't complaining about that afterward were the ones who made their own (which were universally much nicer or more fun) and refused to pay.
- Rekindle8090 4mo ago[dead]
- jfkeinfmsn38 4mo agoEveryone loves the "free Palestine" slogan, but I've never actually seen the people who call it offer a concrete realistic solution that could achieve that - is it a two state solution? Is it a one state solution that will burst into a civil war? What's the plan? What does it actually look like? I still think a two state solution is the only realistic plan.
- triyambakam 4mo agoI'm very uninformed but could "free Palestine" not mean a two state solution?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- 762236 4mo agoIt's performance for social standing. They don't actually care.
- blackqueeriroh 4mo agoUnless the people who shout “Free Palestine” are part of the Knesset or Hamas, I don’t think their offering of a “concrete realistic solution” matters one bit.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- khaledh 4mo agoFree Palestine simply means a sovereign Palestinian state separate from Israel, which Israel has rejected many times over the years, most recently in the Knesset vote in February and July 2024, opposing the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. Any time there was outside attempts to recognize Palestine as a state (e.g. through UN efforts) Israel responded with building more settlements in the West Bank.
- happytoexplain 4mo agoRegardless of the details of this speech, I believe Sundar Pichai is uncommonly out of touch with reality and with the nation of the United States of America, even among tech CEOs. He should step down.
- iwontberude 4mo agoHe ruined Google, started by shattering the culture into a million pieces. He has negative charisma and no imagination. He was best as a mid level manager.
- gaws 4mo agoTop shareholders aren't concerned with "the culture."
- iwontberude 4mo agoNot to be crass buts it’s basically slave labor with free lunch
- xnx 4mo agofree lunch and hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in total compenasation.
- iwontberude 4mo agoThey are notoriously stingy and underpay.
- gaws 4mo agoThere's no such thing as "free lunch."
- criddell 4mo agoNo chance. Have you seen the stock price lately?
- ChrisArchitect 4mo agoAssociated story released after: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/sundar-pichai-stanford-commencement-22304888.php https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/sundar-pichai-stanford-c...
- Gud 4mo agoGOOD! I wish more people had the guts to reject Google and the panopticon they’ve built.
- t0bia_s 4mo agoWould be interesting to see how many of them actually use services of company that this CEO represents.
- happytoexplain 4mo agoIt would be a petty gotcha with little meaning, more than interesting.
- t0bia_s 4mo agoEffectiveness is on of topics that they studied or should learn on uni. Not hypocrisy.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- MAustriaGA 4mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- vonneumannstan 4mo ago90% of them would take an APM position at Google in a heartbeat. This is totally performative.
- porridgeraisin 4mo agoWill they reject google / meta / etc internships and job offers? If not and I suspect not, it's the classic performative stuff activists around the world are used to.