221–230 of 464 posts
Interesting that the person moved to San Diego (not a cheap place by any means), and Google cuts the salary. There is some strange fixation Google currently has, especially towards getting people into their New York offices - must be some tax incentives or other deals with the city.... A friend just recently wanted to work from google office in another tech hub city (not remote/from home by any means) and during offe…
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I have read the paper. There were several things wrong with it. The most glaring example was comparing the power consumption of training a machine learning NLP model with a gas guzzling jet. Not once in the paper does she mention that Google has been carbon neutral since 2008, because that would trash half her paper. The paper seemed of desperation to make non existent arguments.
You mean Google bought pieces of paper and pretends that they represent removing co2 from the atmosphere, when in reality they don't. https://www.dezeen.com/2021/07/30/carbon-neutrality-google-s...
The point is that electricity can have a green source, liquid carbon fuel can't. You absolutely cannot compare the two. FWIW, Google's data centers are primarily powered by green energy.
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I have read the paper. There were several things wrong with it. The most glaring example was comparing the power consumption of training a machine learning NLP model with a gas guzzling jet. Not once in the paper does she mention that Google has been carbon neutral since 2008, because that would trash half her paper. The paper seemed of desperation to make non existent arguments.
Could you explain in detail why the power consumption calculations were mistaken? It sounds like you're saying that the calculations weren't mistaken, but that she didn't mention the carbon neutral status of Google as a whole.
Electricity from the grid can come from green sources, and in the particular case if Google, it actually does. Comparing electricity consumption for a one time training with jet fuel usage is absurd.
Moreover, the paper doesn't mention any possible benefit of building such nlp models. Increased accessibility of web content across languages and for disabled people.
Google, simply through its search, maps and navigation saves a lot of wasted carbon. Complaining about the power consumption of ML models is absolutely ridiculous.
Her paper reeked of desperation to find something, anything within the AI space that could be posted as an ethical dilemma.
Reading that paper convinced me that Timnit could bring absolutely no value to AI as a field, in terms of ethics or otherwise.
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No, Google would easily survive if they focused on maintaing existing services and making the headcount stable instead of increasing. Most businesses in the world survive with their piece of the pie and remaining having the same profits or slightly lower/higher than previous years. You don't disappear over night, and no market is really a "winner takes it all", it's just what management wants you to believe so you fi…
Sure, but the stock price would tank (note that the current multiple assumes growth), employees would leave due to poor compensation, and starts a downward spiral. I am not sure if that is called survival. And no, most businesses in the world do not survive that long. Lifetime of businesses are often much shorter than lifetime of humans. Even many of them that look like have survived may share the name only and are e…
With a gross profit of 100 billion dollars a year [1] they can easily outbid the market compensation if they want to and stay with current revenue. But again how many Jeff Deans can one company need before it calls itself The Man?
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gros...
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Product Management, in many orgs, is the old wine of Taylorism in a new bottle, where there is a "thinking class," and there is a separate "doing class." The stereotype of an engineer with poor social skills who can't grasp the "high-level cross functional relationships and strategies" (from nostrebored's sibling comment) is not very different from Taylor's idea of workers: One of the very first requirements for a ma…
This is exactly right. I studied both engineering and management, so I have experienced both schools. Actually understanding science and manipulating the world is hard. Try to explain to a non techie how a car moves, or how a web request happens. They can never understand it on the required level to fix things. Now try to explain to an engineer how a bond works, or how industrial strategy works. He can do both his ow…
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I have read the paper. There were several things wrong with it. The most glaring example was comparing the power consumption of training a machine learning NLP model with a gas guzzling jet. Not once in the paper does she mention that Google has been carbon neutral since 2008, because that would trash half her paper. The paper seemed of desperation to make non existent arguments.
"Carbon neutral" via buying offsets and renewables made electricity is better than nothing but also a half truth. Their energy demand is displacing other consumers of that electricity, and for example, who will then consume eg fossil made electricity instead.
Google buying green electricity makes green electricity cheaper, not more expensive. More producers are incentivized to produce green electricity as Google's demand increases continuously. Other companies like Microsoft and Facebook go green as well, and the economies of scale kick in. Prices start collapsing. This is actually happening right now.
If I go solar today with my home, it is not a negative action that displaces someone else. It actually expands the solar industry and enables cheaper solar in the future.
Without early customers, green energy would never have taken off.
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"Carbon neutral" via buying offsets and renewables made electricity is better than nothing but also a half truth. Their energy demand is displacing other consumers of that electricity, and for example, who will then consume eg fossil made electricity instead.
That's not how economics of scale work. This is zero sum thinking. Google buying green electricity makes green electricity cheaper, not more expensive. More producers are incentivized to produce green electricity as Google's demand increases continuously. Other companies like Microsoft and Facebook go green as well, and the economies of scale kick in. Prices start collapsing. This is actually happening right now. If…
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> Why are they still able to continuously pushed out great products and keep innovating? What’s your hypothesis? Big assumption that Apple is indeed innovating right now. Yeah, M1 was a great innovation, but before that, the iPhone was the previous innovation. Everything between has just been iterations basically, so I disagree with your assumption that Apple is in-fact highly innovative.
Any tech company would toss a limb for those "iterations". Aluminium unibody, stacked battery tech, MagSafe, ECG for watch, and much more.