alt Hacker NewsThe company he's worked for nearly a quarter century has enabled & driven more consumerist spend in all areas of the economy via behaviorally targeted optimized ad delivery, driving far more resources and power consumption by orders of magnitude compared to the projected increases of data centers over the coming years. This level of vitriol seems both misdirected and practically obtuse in lacking awareness of the part his work has played in far, far, far more expansive resource expenditure in service to work far less promising for overall advancement, in ad tech and algorithmic exploitation of human psychology for prolonged media engagement.
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Don't be ridiculous. Google has been doing many things, some of those even nearly good. The super talented/prolific/capable have always gravitated to powerful maecenases. (This applies to Haydn and Händel, too.) If you uncompromisingly filter potential employers by "purely a blessing for society", you'll never find an employment that is both gainful and a match for your exceptional talents. Pike didn't make a deal with the devil any more than Leslie Lamport or Simon Peyton Jones did (each of whom had worked for 20+ years at Microsoft, and has advanced the field immensely).
As IT workers, we all have to prostitute ourselves to some extent. But there is a difference between Google, which is arguably a mixed bag, and the AI companies, which are unquestionably cancer.
You're not wrong about the effects and magnitude of targeted ads but that doesn't preclude Pike from criticizing what he believes to be a different type of evil.
He worked on: Go, the Sawzall language for processing logs, and distributed systems. Go and Sawzall are usable and used outside Google.
Are those distributed systems valuable primarily to Google, or are they related to Kubernetes et cetera ?
He got his bag. He doesn't care anymore.
Google is huge. Some of the things it does are great. Some of the things it does are terrible. I don't think working for them has to mean that you 100% agree with everything they do.
I agree completely. Ads have driven the surveillance state and enshitification. It's allowed for optimized propaganda delivery which in turn has led to true horrors and has helped undo a century of societal progress.
What are you implying ? That he’s a hypocrite ? So he’s not allowed to have opinions ? If anything he’s in a better position than a random person . And Google is a massive enterprise, with hundreds of divisions. I imagine Pike and his peers share your reluctance
I disagree completely.
To expand on my comment wrt "promising for overall advancement": My daughter, in her math class: Her teacher- I'll reserve overall judgement on their teaching: she may be perfectly adequate as a teach for other students, which is part of my point- simply doesn't teach in the same sense other teachers do: present topic, leave details of "figuring out how to apply methods" to the students. Doesn't work for my daughter, who has never done less than excellent in math previously. She realized she ChatGPT (we monitor usage) for any way of explaining things that "simply worked" for how she can engage with explanations. Math has never been as easy for her, even more so than before, and her internalization of the material is achieving a near-intuitive understanding.
Now consider: the above process is available and cheap to every person in the world with a web browser (we don't need to pay for her to have a plus account). If/when ChatGPT starts doing ridiculous intrusive ads, a simple Gemma 3 1b model will do nearly as good a job) This is faster and easier and available in more languages than anything else, ever, with respect to individual-user tailored customization simply by talking to the model.
I don't care how many pointless messages get sent. This is more valuable than any single thing Google has done before, and I am grateful to Rob Pike for the part his work has played in bring it about.