Comment by cmrdporcupine
2 months ago
That's frankly just pure whataboutism. The scale of the situation with the explosion of "AI" data centres is far far higher. And the immediate spike of it, too.
2 months ago
That's frankly just pure whataboutism. The scale of the situation with the explosion of "AI" data centres is far far higher. And the immediate spike of it, too.
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.
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
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.
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.
That has been clear since the Google Plus debacle, at the very least.
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.
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> Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back.
Did you sell all of your stock?
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