> 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.
Hey, name-calling like this is not cool on HN. You've been here long enough to know this, and we've asked you repeatedly to observe the guidelines. If you keep this up we'll have to assume you have no intention of using the site as intended and ban the account.
> Your pet theories about how economies work should probably be grounded in more than 5 minutes of taking whatever bullshit you read on the internet as truth
Hey, commenting like this on HN is not cool, as the guidelines make very clear. Please remind yourself of the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to keep participating here. These ones in particular should be heeded:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
People linking LLM spam are not conversing curiously in any meaningful sense. When that LLM spam is used to blame all of a country's problems on a tiny minority of the population, I feel zero obligation to treat such a position with respect. Indeed, treating it with respect legitimises it. The person I was responding to might as well have said "Germany's economy is stagnating and fertility rate is declining because of the Jews" for how ridiculous their position is, and mine is the one that is violating guidelines for calling that out? Give me a break. I'll get off of your website.
The defiant flouncing isn't necessary, thanks. The guidelines are well established and apply no matter who or what you're replying to. If that weren't the case there would be no point having guidelines at all. It's fine to correct an incorrect fact or a bad source. You don't even have to treat a position with respect. You do have to treat other people with basic courtesy. Reaching for a Nazism analogy takes this interaction well beyond any bounds of decency, and also relevance; the parent commenter wasn't "blaming" anyone, at least not any minorities. This is only a site people think is a good place for discussing anything because enough people hold themselves to higher standards that this.
Please don't comment like this on HN. We've now asked you multiple times before to respect the guidelines. You may not owe controversial UK political figures better, but you owe the HN community better if you want to participate here.
Please don't ever comment like this on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. This is only a site where anyone wants to participate because others make the effort to do better than this. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and observe them in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That being said – and with no reduction in my apology – I'm very glad to see that the comment my anger was directed at (a wild political statement without anything backing it up or anything contributing to further discussion) was also reprimanded. This kind of "contribution" to the discourse is a major threat to free societies, and should be called out (calling the author a moron is, of course, not the best way of doing that).
We hadn't reprimanded that user as yet, not because we regard it as a good comment (we certainly don't), but because we hadn't gotten to it. That's almost always the reason why we may reprimand one comment but not another bad one in a subthread. We're often not reading through subthreads in order of the discussion; we have different views of comments we look at to help us find the worst ones. Often, we get to other comments later, or if not, users who comment like that repeatedly will be reprimanded at another time, and eventually banned if they keep it up.
> This kind of "contribution" to the discourse is a major threat to free societies
I'd appeal to you to be less alarmist about comments posted on a niche tech-focused text-only discussion board. People can have strongly opposing opinions and even unhealthy ways of expressing political positions without necesssarily being "a major threat to free societies".
Cool, can you reply to the person's original reply to me in which they made fun of the point I was making—how "disgusting" it is that Apple…allows photo editors in the App Store?
Please don’t act like a jerk. (And yes, deflecting from your own poor conduct counts as acting like a jerk on HN.)
It’s not clear that they were making fun of your point, and the guidelines ask us to assume good faith. If you’re serious about expecting others to observe the guidelines, that’s great. Start by observing the guidelines, to demonstrate that you hold yourself to a high standard. Then if others break the guidelines in their responses to you, you’ll be on solid ground in holding them to account, and doing so in a way that also keeps to the guidelines, avoiding personal abuse and escalation.
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