Comment by jjani
21 days ago
Thank you, all HNers at Google, for continuing to work there.
And yes, before you ask, I have personally quit a job that paid 3x what I was able to get elsewhere over ethics. And no, I'm not rich, probably bottom 5% in terms of assets among my colleagues, coming from a lower-class background.
Yep, at this point aiding google is simply inexcusable. Taking into account the scale of the harm to humanity, what is being done by these google developers is truly evil. These developers cannot feign ignorance. Not with this level of harm.
I wonder if the individuals implementing this will ever be held accountable for their crimes. I would certainly be in support for it.
It's always so rich to see comment sections on here when there's an article about a place like Palantir when the likes of Google and Meta play an even so much bigger role in enabling mass surveillance. I'm sure they'll tell themselves "well but I for one am working on something good like Waymo, or as innocuous as Google Sheets! And we don't kill people!! (please don't look at who provides the underlying services that defense runs on)". While the exact same is said by most employees at those companies they criticize so hard.
Sure, no one's perfect, and you have to draw a line somewhere. But if you're at somewhere like Google or Meta, or have been in the last decade and left for other reasons than these, you really don't have a leg to stand on in these discussions.
The way that it works is that most of the people there are not concerned with the topic, and if they are, they will be willingly gaslit into the official excuse which is provided to us, too. It being that it will greatly improve the security for the common folk.
The mechanisms are just the same as political discourse on other topics currently in UK, just much worse, because people's livelihoods actually depend on that.
What the hell do the antitrust people in the US do? Google should have been chopped to bits a decade ago and Microsoft buying Github is just nonsense. Way too much potential for abuse all around.
Nothing apparently. We've stopped caring. If it's not about getting rich right now in this lifetime then it's not worth doing. I'm also convinced governments have realised monopolies are good for them. You don't need a big government if you control the few massive corporations everyone has to use.
You're giving the government too much credit. They're not even that competent at malice. It's the large companies that control it by lobbying, not the other way around.
> Thank you, all HNers at Google, for continuing to work there.
There are people here that most likely don't work at Google but defended Manifest V3 nonetheless. "Hacker" in HN has lost its meaning.
But my Grandma might install the wrong extensions. Please think of her.