Comment by enraged_camel

2 months ago

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.

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enraged_camel

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cycomanic  2 months 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

cmrdporcupine  2 months ago

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.

  • pstuart  2 months ago

    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.

  • christophilus  2 months ago

    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.

    • cmrdporcupine  2 months ago

      I wouldn't argue with this necessarily except that again the scale is completely different.

      "AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving.

      And so it's again, a kind of whataboutism that pushes the scale of the issue out of the way in order to make some sort of moral argument which misses the whole point.

      BTW in my first year at Google I worked on a change where we made some optimizations that cut the # of CPUs used for RTB ad serving by half. There were bonuses and/or recognition for doing that kind of thing. Wasteful is a matter of degrees.

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