You can never tell the breaking point of fascism but this certainly looks like it. I'm happy I don't work for a US company because I no longer think it's ethical to do so.
Most people I know, including some on the right disagree with these tactics which seem designed more to intimidate and silence opposition. Of course you’re free to work with whomever you choose but it seems like a pretty empty virtue signal to avoid all companies in a huge, diverse country
It might be empty but if enough people do this and put pressure on the US economy it might make a difference. It's unfortunate but many people won't care until it starts effecting them personally.
The leader of that huge, diverse country controls the most powerful military in the world and is threatening to invade my country and is showing maps where it’s part of the US.
I have a 2 year old daughter.
With every fibre of my being I’m not spending a cent on any US business, person, company.
You can never tell the breaking point of fascism but this certainly looks like it. I'm happy I don't work for a US company because I no longer think it's ethical to do so.
quick reminder that out of the 8 author of the seminal paper that arguably started the whole LLM thing (attention is all you need) only one is American.
all the other are foreign born, studied and worked abroad and only then were recruited by US FAANGs.
If your business model needs the impossible then it's a bad business model. If your margins are too thin to absorb the schedule uncertainty then don't produce software.
Alternatively treat it like a bet and accept it may not pay off, just like any other business where uncertainty is the norm (movies, books, music).
To be exact: the problem here is fossil fuel and wood being burned in inefficient furnaces/stoves/fireplaces where the fuel doesn't fully burn. There are efforts by the government to replace them but they aren't super effective yet (random example: https://um.warszawa.pl/kopciuchy).
For the industrial scale fossil fuel furnaces this problem is solved already (they are obviously still bad because of their huge CO2 emissions but that's a different problem).
There's an interesting coping mechanism (verging on the conspiracy theory) popular on some Polish forums, namely that the abysmal data comes from abundance of sensors combined with them being placed (by whom and why? here's where the conspiracy part kicks in) in the most polluted spots.
Until recently, I've been a smog-skeptic; I figured it must be an overblown issue, as regardless of what the digital sensors and pretty graphs say, having spent almost my entire life in Kraków, I never saw it, never felt it. Still don't. Air in Kraków feels perfectly fine to me. And every time I saw someone complain, it was because of "see the PM2.5 PM10 thru the roof omg zomg!", not any actual health-related issues or discomfort.
What changed my mind about the whole thing was my kids. I may not feel the particulates in the air, but my kids do, especially my eldest daughter (who has early childhood asthma, in remission) - winter comes, particulates go up, they start coughing uncontrollably all day. Particulates go down, suddenly they're healthy again (+/- running nose).
I have limited sympathy for conspiracy theories, and very little for those burning trash in their homes, but I do understand where the smog-skepticism comes from. I still remember when Krakowski Alarm Smogowy became a thing, winter 2012; back then, this felt like a huge fad pushed by young activists on the Internet.
I got the same condition for diesel fumes since my military service. Thankfully
I remember how dizzy I used to get around fumes but I really have to force myself to avoid fumes now even at the faintest smell since I can endure it ... when people around me start complaining I can't even smell it.
I assume you lived there since childhood and got used to it from that time?
I don't mean this in a bad way but, have you visited other countries? I'm Spanish but lived for about half a year in Krakow, and the difference is just so stark I can't imagine skepticism. In winter the air smells burned. Fog is a phenomenon, sure, but what takes place most of winter in Krakow is not fog. It's just smoke.
I didn't know about any of this when I first travelled there, in fact when my boss at the time recommended I got a mask I thought he was paranoid or something. Absolutely not.
I hear you but let me add that what you feel is not necessarily the good indicator.
PM 2.5 does have the potential to trigger asthma & similar stuff but it also causes cancer and heart disease, neither of which can be felt (until it's too late anyway).
My parents were the same until I forced them to install an air purifier, and showed them the filter after running it for one winter (with windows always closed). It was snow white when new, and turned black after four cold months (not grey or dark grey, but literally black).
Actually, if the PM2.5 and PM10 are high, you can see it very easily.
If you can't see it, that means the air isn't polluted. Obviously some people confuse fog with smog, or can't see haze in some situations (failure to see).
But it's always there and always visible. You can't have pollutions at that scale and not see them.
To be frank, having a poorly functioning sense of smell is not exactly a great excuse for ignorance. Are you rejecting everything that you can't verify with your (or your relatives') senses?
Well, the map obviously does a lot of extrapolation. Look at Norway, for example. The bigger cities pollute the air in a 50km radius? In a country where heating is primarily electric? When Berlin and Paris don't seem to affect the air quality 20km away, despite having ten times the population?
Isn't it another way of saying what the author says in the previous paragraph, namely that "ideal SIMD speedup can only come from problems that are compute bound"?
If the cost of getting the input data into the cache is already large compared to processing it with the non-vectorized code, then SIMD cannot achieve meaningful speedup. The opposite of this condition (processing is expensive compared to the cost of data into the cache) is basically the definition "compute bound".
So you're trying to say that taking a flight is some sort sacrifice?
Most of the people I know have lived in at least one other country for several months, while most of US citizens not once in their life have left the USA and don't even own a passport.
That's not my experience from the time I worked for Google. The popular sentiment was actually "We now work for a company that dropped 'don't be evil' and that sucks". See Manu Cornet comics - they are a pretty good reflection of the sentiment I'm talking about, a random example https://goomics.net/387
And it's not like everyone just complained for moral posturing and then continued to wipe the tears of disgust with wads of cash. Many people who left also mentioned the ethics part as why they left.
Due to background, I know a lot of people who work at google, and while many of them will give lipservice to ethical concerns, none of them have made any changes at all because, and this is an exact quote, "the money is too good."
Yes, this is how market economy works. For every organization doing horrible things, literally everyone is a small number of payment-handshakes from it.
No, it doesn't mean that "mr gotcha"[1] argument is valid. You don't have to isolate yourself from society Kaczynski-style to either criticize society or to do something smaller (like choosing who you work for).
The rage should be dependent on the contribution. You mention a third party software vendor who produces tools that aren't even "dual-use" with respect to the abuse by ICE, they are specifically tailored. That's not the same as, say, providing electricity to them.
They are dual use. Palantir creates platforms (Foundry, Gotham) which are used by ICE but also thousands of other companies. Are you saying that just because ICE tailors these platforms to their workflows they’re not dual use? That feels akin to saying some super complicated excel workflow used by a company means excel is not dual use.
Palantir does a ton of customization and consulting for specific use cases. This isn't like Microsoft Excel being used to track uranium enrichment in Iran, it is a direct, explicit part of their business.
Even if you do nothing else of impact in your life, you can stop defending the bad guys.
I’m not defending the “bad guys”. The original argument was about moral culpability based on distance from the bad deed. Microsoft could have just as easily refused Azure for the ICE contract, but they didn’t, yet somehow they are just far enough away to not be culpable.
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