Shower thoughts

[Lancelot]

2 hours ago, Mégille said:

Il y a même une opposition forte entre les deux conceptions : l'hypothèse de la simulation repose généralement sur le fonctionnalisme en théorie de l'esprit, l'idée que l'esprit puisse se réduire à une certaine activité de la matière. Là où les anciens gnostiques croyaient plutôt en une autonomie de l'esprit.

Sur ce point en particulier les fonctionnalistes classiquement (Putnam, Fodor et toute la famille) quand ils partent dans les histoires de multiple realizability sont justement dans une posture anti-réductionniste. Et la simulation hypothesis leur permet de s'abstraire assez facilement du matérialisme (du moins en ce qui concerne la matière telle qu'elle nous apparaît). Personnellement je trouve que ce sont des gens qui ont pris Matrix trop au sérieux, mais bref.

[Hugh]

Le 06/04/2024 à 04:14, Mégille a dit :

Il y a un paquet de religions centrées sur les extra-terrestres, des mormons aux raéliens en passant par les scientologues et d'autres, mais encore aucune sur la théorie de l'univers comme simulation informatique. Etrange, parce qu'il y a vraiment de quoi faire. 

Possiblement:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrixisme

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/288066/20230222/simulation-creationism-a-new-hypothesis-uniting-simulation-theory-science-and-religion.htm

https://www.thearchitect.global/what-is-simulation-creationism/

[Tramp]

La montée en puissance de la gestion du risque de réputation des banques via la réglementation est le nouveau moyen pour l’Etat de faire interdire ce qu’il veut sans faire passer de loi. Comme c’est très flou, c’est très pratique. 
 

Faire X n’est pas illégal mais comme c’est mauvais pour votre réputation, c’est interdit. 

[Rincevent]

Il y a 1 heure, Tramp a dit :

La montée en puissance de la gestion du risque de réputation des banques via la réglementation est le nouveau moyen pour l’Etat de faire interdire ce qu’il veut sans faire passer de loi. Comme c’est très flou, c’est très pratique. 
 

Faire X n’est pas illégal mais comme c’est mauvais pour votre réputation, c’est interdit. 

Exactement. Un exemple méconnu est le concept de "Personnalité politiquement exposée", qui aboutit in fine à interdire de facto d'activité politique quiconque n'est pas déjà dans le sérail.

[Rincevent]

Une pensée littéralement eue sous ma douche.

 

J'étais parti de ce que, au fond, deux approches de la monnaie s'affrontaient : pour les uns, la monnaie appartient à celui qui l'a en main ; pour les autres, la monnaie continue à être la propriété de l'État, qui la met à disposition des utilisateurs mais continue à avoir plus ou moins tous les droits dessus. (Vous aurez reconnu les vraix propriétaristes face aux étatistes de tout poil, sachant que parfois l'étatisme commence à Chicago).

 

Et là, je me suis fait la remarque que, dans la doctrine des externalités (un des "échecs du marché" affirmés par les tenants de "l'économie de la synthèse"), il y a un type d'externalité qui n'est jamais pris en compte et jamais pointé du doigt comme tel. Songez-y : comme la monnaie est fongible, toute production de monnaie a in fine un impact sur la valeur de la monnaie détenue par quiconque en a en poche ou en caisse. La production de monnaie est donc une formidable source d'externalités sur le reste de l'économie, des externalités que personne ne compte réinternaliser (et ce, que le processus de réinternalisation soit pigouvien ou coasien, d'ailleurs).

 

Je ne sais pas si je suis le premier à analyser les choses de la sorte ou à voir cette contradiction béante dans l'économie de la synthèse néoclassique/néokeynésienne ; si des gens ont des sources d'économistes qui y ont déjà réfléchi sous cet angle, ça peut m'intéresser.

[Mégille]

Attention, Pigou, Mr externalité, était un néo-classique de la bande à Marshall, et pas du tout copain avec Keynes, donc pas de l'école de la synthèse ! Et hors de l'aspect historique, son approche me semble bien néo-classique et pas keynésienne, puisqu'elle consiste à analyser les problèmes que d'autres voudraient présenter comme irréductiblement collectifs en des termes individualistes et micro-économiques, et que la solution implique une planification minimale de l'état (fixation d'un seul prix qui n'est pas fixé par le marché) et de surtout faire confiance au marché. 

 

Maintenant, est-ce que le coût en inflation de la création monétaire peut être assimilé à une externalité... peut-être, mais le dire aux interventionnistes ne les convaincra probablement pas, puisque 1) ils considèreront la "relance" comme une externalité positive supérieure, et que 2) les coûts bel et bien internes que sont les taxes et les impôts ne les gênent déjà pas vraiment. 

[Rincevent]

il y a 46 minutes, Mégille a dit :

Attention, Pigou, Mr externalité, était un néo-classique de la bande à Marshall, et pas du tout copain avec Keynes, donc pas de l'école de la synthèse !

Ce n'est pas ce que j'avançais (ça aurait d'ailleurs été un anachronisme).

[Rincevent]

Rien à voir : ce qui me turlupine dans le visage de Charlotte d'Ornellas (la commentatrice politique bien connue) est à peu près ce qui me turlupine dans le visage de Rhonda Patrick (médecin un peu connue dans les milieux qui s'intéresse-t-il à "l'optimisation" de la santé).

[Mister_Bretzel]

10 hours ago, Rincevent said:

Rien à voir : ce qui me turlupine dans le visage de Charlotte d'Ornellas (la commentatrice politique bien connue) est à peu près ce qui me turlupine dans le visage de Rhonda Patrick (médecin un peu connue dans les milieux qui s'intéresse-t-il à "l'optimisation" de la santé).

Je dirais leur visage long couplé à une mâchoire large, des yeux légèrement écartés et une grande bouche.

 

Elles ne sont pas connues pour leur beauté, je serais bien loin de les qualifier de moches.

[Rincevent]

il y a 24 minutes, Mister_Bretzel a dit :

Je dirais leur visage long couplé à une mâchoire large, des yeux légèrement écartés et une grande bouche.

D'Ornellas ne me semble pas avoir les yeux spécialement écartés. Mais pour le reste, il y a quelque chose de, je ne sais pas, peut-être vaguement simiesque dans cette structure faciale. D'ailleurs si on ne considère que la partie du visage plus basse que les yeux, il y a quelque chose d'approchant chez Ron Perlman.

[Mister_Bretzel]

1 minute ago, Rincevent said:

D'Ornellas ne me semble pas avoir les yeux spécialement écartés. Mais pour le reste, il y a quelque chose de, je ne sais pas, peut-être vaguement simiesque dans cette structure faciale. D'ailleurs si on ne considère que la partie du visage plus basse que les yeux, il y a quelque chose d'approchant chez Ron Perlman.

Je maintiens mon "visage long, forte mâchoire, grande bouche" 😁

[Rincevent]

il y a 1 minute, Mister_Bretzel a dit :

Je maintiens mon "visage long, forte mâchoire, grande bouche" 😁

Oui oui, ça c'était très pertinent. Il y a peut-être aussi quelque chose avec leurs pommettes, ou leurs joues.

[Daumantas]

À propos des bullshit jobs j'ai vraiment l'impression qu'il s'agit de salariés dans des métiers relativement tranquilles (travail de bureau) et qui, gâtés par la tranquillité de leur travail, finissent par se plaindre de ne pas voir de A à Z le parcours du petit dossier qu'ils ont traité pendant quelques jours/semaines sans comprendre qu'ils n'ont pas les compétence pour et qu'ils ne sont pas là pour ça.

[Hugh]

Aujourd'hui un "mec" comme Raymond Aron serait un "youtuber" avec une compte au "X", sans livres ou articles.

[Rincevent]

il y a 50 minutes, Hugh a dit :

Aujourd'hui un "mec" comme Raymond Aron serait un "youtuber" avec une compte au "X", sans livres ou articles.

Aron, je ne pense pas. Sartre, en revanche, clairement (avec la même passion que le YouTubeur moyen peut avoir pour les très jeunes filles).

[Lameador]

J'ai un pote qui travaille pour une entreprise rivale et a récemment eu une formation obligatoire  bien gnangnan sur le harassment.

Je ne peux m'empêcher de penser qu'une culture d'entreprise ne devrait pas exagérément prêcher la bienveillance.

En fait, la bienveillance c'est un peu comme la tolérance, il est un niveau au delà duquel elle cesse d'être une vertu.

 

[Rincevent]

il y a 25 minutes, Lameador a dit :

En fait, la bienveillance c'est un peu comme la tolérance, il est un niveau au delà duquel elle cesse d'être une vertu.

Toute vertu est une médiété entre deux vices.

[Mister_Bretzel]

On 4/30/2024 at 4:25 PM, Daumantas said:

À propos des bullshit jobs j'ai vraiment l'impression qu'il s'agit de salariés dans des métiers relativement tranquilles (travail de bureau) et qui, gâtés par la tranquillité de leur travail, finissent par se plaindre de ne pas voir de A à Z le parcours du petit dossier qu'ils ont traité pendant quelques jours/semaines sans comprendre qu'ils n'ont pas les compétence pour et qu'ils ne sont pas là pour ça.

De ma lorgnette de consultant en IT pour des banques et des assurances, les bullshit jobs sont intimement liés à la conformité réglementaire.

 

On passe notre temps à compter et recompter les ronds sous N formes différentes pour satisfaire N régulateurs différents. 0 valeur ajoutée.

[Cthulhu]

Il y a 5 heures, Mister_Bretzel a dit :

De ma lorgnette de consultant en IT pour des banques et des assurances, les bullshit jobs sont intimement liés à la conformité réglementaire.

 

Aux US, très inspiré de la lecture de Origins of Woke de Hanania, je vois ça de façon légèrement différente: la discrimination positive légale fait qu'on doit embaucher plein de postes pour cocher les cases qui vont bien. Du coup, on crée plein de départements sans vraie valeur ajoutée et dont l'atout principal est qu'on ne peut pas vraiment juger de l'impact individuel de chaque employé (donc on peut recruter presque n'importe qui pour le job).

 

Au fur et à mesure, ces départements se retrouvent remplis de ceux qui ont compris inconsciemment le bon filon et ont la mentalité qui va avec. Ils finissent par phagocyter le reste de la boite et sortent des AI bizarres.

 

J'imagine que l’environnement législatif européen (ou a minima français) fait que ça se fait plus dans l'autre sens.

[Mister_Bretzel]

On 5/9/2024 at 7:26 AM, Cthulhu said:

Au fur et à mesure, ces départements se retrouvent remplis de ceux qui ont compris inconsciemment le bon filon et ont la mentalité qui va avec. Ils finissent par phagocyter le reste de la boite et sortent des AI bizarres

 

 

Souscription obligatoire 😕 

[Cthulhu]

Il y a 5 heures, Mister_Bretzel a dit :

Souscription obligatoire 😕 

 

Ah zut, c'était en accès libre il n'y a pas si longtemps et mes sites usuels (archive.is et 12feet.io) ne marchent pas 😕

[Hugh]

Il y a 14 heures, Mister_Bretzel a dit :

 

Souscription obligatoire 😕 

 

Citation

Pirate WiresTechnologyPoliticsCulture

Technology

NewslettersSubscribeSign In

 

SubscribeSign InNewslettersGift a Sub 🎁

Pirate WiresTechnologyPoliticsCulture

SearchAboutWritersPodcastCareers

 

Google's Culture of Fear

inside the DEI hivemind that led to gemini's disaster

Mike Solana

4 de mar. de 2024

 

 

• Following interviews with concerned employees throughout the company, a portrait of a leaderless Google in total disarray, making it “impossible to ship good products at Google”

• Revealing the complicated diversity architecture underpinning Gemini’s tool for generating art, which led to its disastrous results

• Google knew their Gemini model’s DEI worldview compromised its performance ahead of launch

• Pervasive and clownish DEI culture, from micro-management of benign language (“ninja”) and bizarre pronoun expectations to forcing the Greyglers, an affinity group for Googlers over 40, to change their name on account of not all people over 40 have grey hair

• No apparent sense of the existential challenge facing the company for the first time in its history, let alone a path to victory

 

Subscribe to Pirate Wires Daily

Sign up for free

 

---

 

Last week, following Google’s Gemini disaster, it quickly became clear the $1.7 trillion-dollar giant had bigger problems than its hotly anticipated generative AI tool erasing white people from human history. Separate from the mortifying clownishness of this specific and egregious breach of public trust, Gemini was obviously — at its absolute best — still grossly inferior to its largest competitors. This failure signaled, for the first time in Google’s life, real vulnerability to its core business, and terrified investors fled, shaving over $70 billion off the kraken’s market cap. Now, the industry is left with a startling question: how is it even possible for an initiative so important, at a company so dominant, to fail so completely?

This is Google, an invincible search monopoly printing $80 billion a year in net income, sitting on something like $120 billion in cash, employing over 150,000 people, with close to 30,000 engineers. Could the story really be so simple as out-of-control DEI-brained management? To a certain extent, and on a few teams far more than most, this does appear to be true. But on closer examination it seems woke lunacy is only a symptom of the company’s far greater problems. First, Google is now facing the classic Innovator’s Dilemma, in which the development of a new and important technology well within its capability undermines its present business model. Second, and probably more importantly, nobody’s in charge.

Over the last week, in communication with a flood of Googlers eager to speak on the issues facing their company — from management on almost every major product, to engineering, sales, trust and safety, publicity, and marketing — employees painted a far bleaker portrait of the company than is often reported: Google is a runaway, cash-printing search monopoly with no vision, no leadership, and, due to its incredibly siloed culture, no real sense of what is going on from team to team. The only thing connecting employees is a powerful, sprawling HR bureaucracy that, yes, is totally obsessed with left-wing political dogma. But the company’s zealots are only capable of thriving because no other fount of power asserts, or even attempts to assert, any kind of meaningful influence. The phrase “culture of fear” was used by almost everyone I spoke with, and not only to explain the dearth of resistance to the company’s craziest DEI excesses, but to explain the dearth of innovation from what might be the highest concentration of talented technologists in the world. Employees, at every level, and for almost every reason, are afraid to challenge the many processes which have crippled the company — and outside of promotion season, most are afraid to be noticed. In the words of one senior engineer, “I think it’s impossible to ship good products at Google.” Now, with the company’s core product threatened by a new technology release they just botched on a global stage, that failure to innovate places the company’s existence at risk.

As we take a closer look at Google’s brokenness, from its anodyne, impotent leadership to the deeply unserious culture that facilitated an encroachment on the company’s core product development from its lunatic DEI architecture, it’s helpful to begin with Gemini’s specific failure, which I can report here in some detail to the public for the first time.

First, according to people close to the project, the team responsible for Gemini was not only warned about its “overdiversification” problem before launch (the technical term for erasing white people from human history), but understood the nebulous DEI architecture — separate from causing offense — dramatically eroded the quality of even its most benign search results.

Roughly, the “safety” architecture designed around image generation (slightly different than text) looks like this: a user makes a request for an image in the chat interface, which Gemini — once it realizes it’s being asked for a picture — sends on to a smaller LLM that exists specifically for rewriting prompts in keeping with the company’s thorough “diversity” mandates. This smaller LLM is trained with LoRA on synthetic data generated by another (third) LLM that uses Google’s full, pages-long diversity “preamble.” The second LLM then rephrases the question (say, “show me an auto mechanic” becomes “show me an Asian auto mechanic in overalls laughing, an African American female auto mechanic holding a wrench, a Native American auto mechanic with a hard hat” etc.), and sends it on to the diffusion model. The diffusion model checks to make sure the prompts don’t violate standard safety policy (things like self-harm, anything with children, images of real people), generates the images, checks the images again for violations of safety policy, and returns them to the user.

“Three entire models all kind of designed for adding diversity,” I asked one person close to the safety architecture. “It seems like that — diversity — is a huge, maybe even central part of the product. Like, in a way it is the product?”

“Yes,” he said, “we spend probably half of our engineering hours on this.”

Subscribe to Pirate Wires Daily

Sign up for free

 

The inordinately cumbersome architecture is embraced throughout product, but really championed by the Responsible AI team (RAI), and to a far greater extent than Trust and Safety, which was described by the people I spoke with closest to the project as pragmatic. That said, the Trust and Safety team working on generation is distinct from the rest of the company, and didn’t anchor on policy long-established by the Search team — which is presently as frustrated with Gemini’s highly-public failure as the rest of the company.

In sum, thousands of people working on various pieces of a larger puzzle, at various times, and rarely with each other. In the moments cross-team collaborators did attempt to assist Gemini, such attempts were either lost or ignored. Resources wasted, accountability impossible.

Why is Google like this?

The ungodly sums of money generated by one of history’s greatest monopoly products has naturally resulted in Google’s famously unique culture. Even now, priorities at the company skew towards the absurd rather than the practical, and it’s worth noting a majority of employees do seem happy. On Blind, Google ranks above most tech companies in terms of satisfaction, but reasons cited mostly include things like work-life balance and great free food. “People will apologize for meetings at 9:30 in the morning,” one product manager explained, laughing. But among more driven technologists and professionals looking to make an impact — in other words, the only kind of employee Google now needs — the soft culture evokes a mix of reactions from laughter to contempt. Then, in terms of the kind of leadership capable of focusing a giant so sclerotic, the company is confused from the very top.

A strange kind of dance between Google’s Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s Board, and CEO Sundar Pichai leaves most employees with no real sense of who is actually in charge. Uncertainty is a familiar theme throughout the company, surrounding everything from product direction to requirements for promotion (sales, where comp decisions are a bit clearer, appears to be an outlier). In this culture of uncertainty, timidity has naturally taken root, and with it a practice of saying nothing — at length. This was plainly evident in Sundar’s response to Gemini’s catastrophe (which Pirate Wires revealed in full last week), a startling display of cowardice in which the man could not even describe, in any kind of detail, what specifically violated the public’s trust before guaranteeing he would once again secure it in the future.

“Just look at the OKRs from 2024,” one engineer said, visibly upset. Indeed, with nothing sentiments like “improve knowledge” and “build a Google that’s extraordinary,” with no product initiative, let alone any coherent sense of strategy, Sundar’s public non-response was perfectly ordinary. The man hasn’t messaged anything of value in years.

“Sundar is the Ballmer of Google,” one engineer explained. “All these products that aren’t working, sprawl, overhiring. It all happened on his watch.”

Among higher performers I spoke with, a desire to fire more people was both surprising after a year of massive layoffs, and universal. “You could cut the headcount by 50%,” one engineer said, “and nothing would change.” At Google, it’s exceedingly difficult to get rid of underperformers, taking something like a year, and that’s only if, at the final moment, a low performer doesn’t take advantage of the company’s famously liberal (and chronically abused) medical leave policy with a bullshit claim. This, along with an onslaught of work from HR that has nothing to do with actual work, layers tremendous friction into the daily task of producing anything of value. But then, speaking of the “People” people —

One of the more fascinating things I learned about Google was the unique degree to which it’s siloed off, which has dramatically increased the influence of HR, one of the only teams connecting the entire company. And that team? Baseline far crazier than any other team.

Before the pernicious or the insidious, we of course begin with the deeply, hilariously stupid: from screenshots I’ve obtained, an insistence engineers no longer use phrases like “build ninja” (cultural appropriation), “nuke the old cache” (military metaphor), “sanity check” (disparages mental illness), or “dummy variable” (disparages disabilities). One engineer was “strongly encouraged” to use one of 15 different crazed pronoun combinations on his corporate bio (including “zie/hir,” “ey/em,” “xe/xem,” and “ve/vir”), which he did against his wishes for fear of retribution. Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of “inclusivity” (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group). There’s no shortage of DEI groups, of course, or affinity groups, including any number of working groups populated by radical political zealots with whom product managers are meant to consult on new tools and products. But then we come to more important issues.

Among everyone I spoke with, there was broad agreement race and gender greatly factor into hiring and promotion at Google in a manner considered both problematic (“is this legal?”) and disorienting. “We’re going to focus on people of color,” a manager told one employee with whom I spoke, who was up for a promotion. “Sounds great,” he said, for fear of retaliation. Later, that same manager told him he should have gotten it. Three different people shared their own version of a story like this, all echoing the charge just shared publicly by former Google Venture investor Shaun Maguire:

@shaunmmaguire

Every manager I spoke with shared stories of pushback on promotions or hires when their preferred candidates were male and white, even when clearly far more qualified. Every person I spoke with had a story about a promotion that happened for reasons other than merit, and every person I spoke with shared stories of inappropriate admonitions of one race over some other by a manager. Politics are, of course, a total no go — for people right of center only. “I’m right leaning myself,” one product manager explained, “but I’ve got a career.” Yet politics more generally considered left wing have been embraced to the point they permeate the whole environment, and shape the culture in a manner that would be considered unfathomable in most workplaces. One employee I spoke with, a veteran, was casually told over drinks by a flirty leader of a team he tried to join that he was great, and would have been permitted to switch, but she “just couldn’t do the ‘military thing.’”

The overt discrimination here is not only totally repugnant, but illuminating. Google scaled to global dominance in just a few years, ushering in a period of unprecedented corporate abundance. What is Google but a company that has only ever known peace? These are people who have never needed to fight, and thus have no conception of its value in either the literal sense, or the metaphorical. Of course, this has also been a major aspect of the company for years.

Let’s be honest, Google hasn’t won a new product category since Gmail. They lost Cloud infrastructure to AWS and Azure, which was the biggest internet-scale TAM since the 90s, and close to 14 years after launching X, Google’s Moonshot Factory, the “secret crazy technology development” strategy appears to pretty much be fake. It lost social (R.I.P. Google+). It lost augmented reality (R.I.P. Glass). But who cares? Google didn’t need to win social or AR. It does, however, need to win AI. Here, Google acquired DeepMind, an absolutely brilliant team, thereby securing an enormous head start in the machine god arms race, which it promptly threw away to not only one, but several upstarts, and that was all before last week’s Gemini fiasco.

In terms of Gemini, nobody I spoke with was able to finger a specific person responsible for the mortifying failure. But it does seem people on the team have fallen into agreement on precisely the wrong thing: Gemini’s problem was not its embarrassingly poor answer quality or disorienting omission of white people from human history, but the introduction of black and asian Nazis (again, because white people were erased from human history), which was considered offensive to people of color. According to multiple people I spoke with on the matter, the team adopted this perspective from the tech-loathing press they all read, which has been determined to obscure the overt anti-white racism all week. With no accurate sense of why their product launch was actually disastrous, we can only expect further clownery and failure to come. All of this, again, reveals the nature of the company: poor incentive alignment, poor internal collaboration, poor sense of direction, misguided priorities, and a complete lack of accountability from leadership. Therefore, we’re left with the position of Sundar, increasingly unpopular at the company, where posts mocking his leadership routinely top Memegen, the internal forum where folks share dank (but generally neutered) memes.

Google’s only hope is vision now, in the form of a talented and ferocious manager. Typically, we would expect salvation for a troubled company in the heroic return of a founder, and my sense is Sergey will likely soon step up. This would evoke tremendous excitement, and for good reason. Sergey is a man of vision. But can he win a war?

Google is sitting on an enormous amount of cash, but if the company does lose AI, and AI in turn eats search, it will lose its core function, and become obsolete. Talent will leave, and Google will be reduced to a giant, slowly shrinking pile of cash. A new kind of bank, maybe, run by a dogmatic class of extremist HR priestesses? That’s interesting, I guess. But it’s not a technology company.

-SOLANA

Subscribe to Pirate Wires Daily

Sign up for free

 

 

Enter your email to continue reading

Subscribe to Pirate Wires Daily

Sign up for free

 

Already have an account? Sign In

 

44 Likes21 Comments

Share

 

Please sign-in to comment

Some Guy2 months ago

Just knowing the ins and outs for what has to happen to ship something like that (I don’t work on things as big as google, but I’m a PO) and the multiple meetings, demos, stakeholder sign-offs, etc that it had to go through before launch gives me little hope. Some people see a release like that without knowing the back end and think “oh flub.” But if you know you can look at it and immediately diagnose “cancer.”

 

Someone had to fuck it up like that on purpose and someone else had to say it wasn’t fucked up and everyone standing in a circle had to be too afraid to say it was fucked up and that’s organizational rot.

 

Here is hoping Sergey can be the chemo.

Like (21)Reply

 

Jacilyn Hayden2 months ago

Siloed teams are the kiss of death.

Like (10)Reply (1)

Mike Solana2 months ago

This was one of the most interesting subjects I discussed with folks while writing this piece.

Like (1)Reply

 

ThePossum2 months ago

Google went off the merit rails and exclusively into the DIE business the minute they fired James Damore. The lack of interesting product to ship can be fixed but only with enough testicular fortitude to tell HR to fuck off when it comes to technology, which is, like, the whole point of the company. When push comes to shove, the only people who keep the lights on are the engineers.

 

Amazon, my former employer prior to my retirement, has had similar but less embarrassing problems. Once Bezos departed, the company became devoted to DIE to the detriment of the entire company. We had Leadership Principles that provided a shared framework for understanding products across teams, across timezones. These were expanded to allow the inclusion of waffle-ey, weasel-ey "principles" guided by, yep, HR. We didn't have free food, and desk massages, and daycare. We had killer products that met customer needs. That was Bezos' miraculous flywheel, and we all understood and embraced it, or we got gone. But that was then.

 

Google obviously still has potential, but it needs as leader who will indeed fire that 50-75% chaff, errrr, staff, and get rid of the kruft that has clogged their product development pipeline for reasons unrelated to technical prowess. I hear Vivek Ramaswamy might have some free time.

Read more

Like (10)Reply (1)

Some Guy2 months ago

Damore was sort of the ultimate signal “hey, we will go by public perception, we won’t give you a fair hearing or a right to speak in your defense and we will always, absolutely in all cases, back down to mob pressure.”

 

It’s crazy how in a large org those “guiding principles” really are. I think people make a mistake by letting others at the company go in and change them. True principles are timeless.

Like (7)Reply

 

PsuedonymousJoe2 months ago

It is fascinating how so many successful organizations end up accidentally setting up incentives that reward and increase the influence of the dumbest people in the room. There are undoubtedly thousands of genius level engineers at Google, and yet they get their marching orders from people who couldn't pass a freshman calculus class.

Like (8)Reply

 

Michael Kelly2 months ago

I think you missed the big miss. Something Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying spoke about in their podcast last week "Positive Feedback Loop." This is the whole problem with woke, and probably a major problem in women dominated professions. The inability to tolerate negative feedback. Lets face it, HR is women dominated. Thus a women dominated HR is a women dominated company. Which becomes an 'averse to negative feedback' company, which is how we get to a Black Lady George Washington crossing Clinton's Ditch in a coracle.

 

What you alluded to, but didn't state outright, is that any negative feedback on DIE is/was closed off, hence you only have positive feedback. Which as Drs. Weinstein & Heying say, is like if the heat in your apartment is too high, the positive feedback is to turn up the heat ... the too much heat causes the system to turn up the heat even more. DIE is sick with positive feedback issues, and we see the results here, where everyone is Black, even George Washington.

 

What is the cure? Encourage or even require negative feedback. Ask what am I or are we getting wrong? What can we do better?

 

If we can't fix the root cause, we can't get better. If we can't even talk about what the real problems are, we can't even find the real problems, and we'll never find the root cause, let alone fix it. We've spent 50 years talking about what is wrong with white people, but we can't even ask what—people of racial minority groups who are doing particularly badly—need to do to improve their lot.

 

Negative feedback not allowed; better performance not on the horizon.

 

 

Read more

Like (5)Reply (1)

Jacilyn Hayden2 months ago

Wait how is Google’s situation women’s fault? I missed that data.

Like (2)Reply (1)

Michael Kelly2 months ago

Of course, its not all women, women & men range in all aspects across a spectra ... with notable difference in mean.

 

Women HR type women are easily stuck in positive feedback loops. It stems from reluctance to accept negative feedback; more like a wild opposition—screaming at frustration they can't wring my—heavily bearded—neck right now. On the scientific/engineering side, not so much. Scientists and Engineers are molded and shaped by correcting errors. However on the HR side, dominated by the 'too much much makeup, very long nails' types ... things are different.

 

I can say all day long that women are better than men at X; I can even say Toxic Masculinity, Toxic Masculinity, Toxic Masculinity ... with impunity. However if I were to emit one little peep that men are better than women at Y, the world erupts in flames.

 

The gist of the problem, is inability face reality. Somebody wrote a book a few years back, which showed different abilities by racial groups. The howling and backlash —violent attacks were intense; canceling resulted. The name of the book—a statistical method—cannot be mentioned ... it simply quantified what we all clearly see at every NBA game. Its facts, and very ugly facts. But if we can't face the ugly facts, we can't find the truth. Just like the programmers of HAL the AI in Stanley Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Oddity", we told our computers they couldn't lie, then we told them to lie to us, and the results were disasterous.

 

Why did we do this? —tell our AI to lie to us? —because the AI wasn't allowed to emit one little peep that perhaps white men have some small amount of good qualities.

 

"But I didn't and still don't like making a cult of women's knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don't know, women's deep irrational wisdom, women's instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior — women's knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?

 —Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter, What Women Know

Read more

Like (3)Reply

 

James Schwartz2 months ago

Great article Mike. I read Gilder’s “Death of Google” and for a guy as smart as him he never considered they would be undone by DEI. I see Pinchar and he exudes zero confidence or leadership. I’d go even as far as saying he looks like a Govt worm and I know you have more insights and hooks into that Silicon Valley society than I could ever wish for but could Google at this point just be a front for Govt surveillance now? Knowing they have the full weight of the Govt behind them? It’s just another angle I like to consider as no way a real tech monopoly becomes this much of a dumpster fire on its own right? They seem to have zero drive and that apparent from some of the people you spoke with. I hope this becomes a class someday with the title how DEI killed a monopoly. Of course it’ll be a serious course for those that worship at that altar but it’ll be a blueprint of what not to do and keep printing 100 billion a year. Let me die because what’s coming will be infinitely better and freer.

Like (4)Reply

 

11 more replies

 

Continue Reading

 

Google's AI Is an Anti-White Lunatic

 

 

21 de fev.

google’s AI chatbot just erased white people from human history. a grim (if objectively hilarious) warning for the future

Mike Solana

 

Google's AI Disaster Continues

 

 

22 de fev.

the industry 24 // the latest on gemini erasing white people from history and other tech links

Mike Solana

 

"Is This Legal?"

 

 

2 de fev.

meet the company that powers silicon valley's race- and gender-based hiring goals

River Page

 

How San Francisco's DEI Industrial Complex Works

 

 

9 de fev.

for years, mayor breed has presided over massive budget increases to a now-$100 million a year DEI clientelism scheme

Sanjana Friedman

 

Moral Inversion

 

 

10 de out.

pirate wires #107 // when the good is called evil, and the evil called good: hamas, noble prostitutes celebrating terrorism on social media, a modern faith of total lies, and room for hope

Mike Solana

 

Inside Anduril’s Comms Strategy: 10 Rules for Mission-Driven Founders

 

 

23 de jan.

lulu cheng meservey shares the never-before-revealed playbook that shaped Anduril’s early communication strategy and helped its founders turn the company from black sheep to household name

Lulu Cheng Meservey

 

Terms & ConditionsCookie Policy

X (Twitter)FacebookInstagramRSSNewsletterAdvertise

All rights reserved. © 2024 Pirate Wires

 

C'est le meilleur que je pouvais faire.

[Cthulhu]

Il y a 7 heures, Hugh a dit :

C'est le meilleur que je pouvais faire.

 

Vaz-y balance le site que tu utilise.

[Hugh]

Il y a 16 heures, Cthulhu a dit :

 

Vaz-y balance le site que tu utilise.

Je ne sais pas (un site?), mais ici: ctrl + a; ctrl + c; ctrl + v 

[Cthulhu]

Il y a 4 heures, Hugh a dit :

Je ne sais pas (un site?), mais ici: ctrl + a; ctrl + c; ctrl + v 

 

Haha, c'est tellement simple que je n'y avais pas pensé, bien joué