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I wonder where that anti-military sentiment in U.S. tech stems from? At least in former Soviet bloc, we view your military in quite a positive light. Well, for sure in a more positive light than armies of competing 'superpowers'.
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Is it the Russians or IS you think are our allies.
Or am I missing out on something here?
What is the point? Getting some goodwill of non-paying users (aka. freeloaders), while (maybe) alienating paying users? I get that it is a project that uses lots of volunteer work, but you won't pay your hosting fees and buildfarms from latest rust helloworld-webservice flake contributions from the programmers-socks wearing community. Sidenote: the foundation of current computing is built on DoD money.
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Right. So why haven't they gotten rid of Google as a sponsor then given that they also hold contracts with multiple governments, militaries and especially one contract with the Pentagon in the US on top of aiding their surveillance programmes?
(Biased, I work at Google), but I think there's a material difference between what Google does (as I understand it, from public info) – providing infrastructure services on Google Cloud, as all the major cloud providers do, or providing customer support for cloud workloads – and building defence related technology. To my knowledge Google and the other big tech companies aren't building application directly for offenc…
Actually there was a big uproar about exactly this several years ago https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/07/google-ai...
I wonder where that anti-military sentiment in U.S. tech stems from? At least in former Soviet bloc, we view your military in quite a positive light. Well, for sure in a more positive light than armies of competing 'superpowers'.
It's been a while since the US was in a war that we looked at afterward (or during, frankly) and said "yeah it was a good and smart thing we did that, worth the costs."
Is there some specific controversy with Anduril that the community is reacting to, or is NixCon simply avoiding sponsorship from defense firms?
Palmer Luckey and Peter Thiel themselves are also quite controversial political actors.
I wonder where that anti-military sentiment in U.S. tech stems from? At least in former Soviet bloc, we view your military in quite a positive light. Well, for sure in a more positive light than armies of competing 'superpowers'.
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Also because people there remember the horror of Soviet domination. I am ashamed of my country's (US) crimes too, but they don't make the alternatives on offer any better.
Is there some specific controversy with Anduril that the community is reacting to, or is NixCon simply avoiding sponsorship from defense firms?
Anduril is infamous for its AI sentry towers along the US-Mexico border.
I wonder where that anti-military sentiment in U.S. tech stems from? At least in former Soviet bloc, we view your military in quite a positive light. Well, for sure in a more positive light than armies of competing 'superpowers'.
US Tech in the past: "we dislike the military, the government, the military-industrial complex (and generally all authority) because we skew hippy and/or libertarian. Let us be creative and free!"
US Tech today: "we dislike the military, the government, and the military-industrial complex because our particular flavour of cultural identity politics doesn't like it. Let us conform to the moral outrage of the day."
Meanwhile, the best reason IMO -- "we dislike the military, the government, the military-industrial complex because it serves the interests of the wealthy first and foremost (at the expense of the poor)" -- seems to get less discussion.
But all of these are reasons why tech can dislike the military or at least be uncomfortable with it, even while DARPA funding has helped progress tech and many innovations have come out of military-first applications.
Right. So why haven't they gotten rid of Google as a sponsor then given that they also hold contracts with multiple governments, militaries and especially one contract with the Pentagon in the US on top of aiding their surveillance programmes?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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While I think you're being genuine, remember that si vis pacem para bellum : "if you want peace, prepare for war". A blanket antimilitary view is very dangerous. A company should only be ostracised if it's helping carry out war crimes.