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If the person is able to complete the job, it's not necessarily fraud.


The cold emails that are effective in getting the attention of my small business promise me some $25-100 gift card to Starbucks/Amazon in exchange for going through their sales demo.

Now that's pricey for them, but I'd bet the conversion rate there is a lot better than traditional click advertising.


What ScientificAmerican labels as "denial" might better be referred to as a "normal risk-management assessment". They're still hyping up the threat of Covid in the article for God's sake.


> They're still hyping up the threat of Covid in the article for God's sake.

And the article states why we should still be paying attention to Covid.

To wit, I personally know three people diagnosed with Covid in the past month - all right here in the United States. Every single one of them were fully vaccinated. Two are fine - suffering the "normal" Covid issues. One is in the hospital, and while they've made progress in getting the disease from getting worse, they're not out of the woods yet.

Also, so-called "Long Covid" is turning out to be worse than we'd thought.


> Every single one of them were fully vaccinated.

You don't say?!?


Are you counting jobs posted or total comments?

The total number of comments should rise in a few days or so after as people comment on their experiences applying to a company.


1) The real answer might depend on the time-frame you're considering. In the short run, crypto does use up a good amount of electricity, which nobody disputes. But in the long-run, crypto fortunes being dependent on electricity prices probably puts a hell of a lot of financial pressure to emphasize the most efficient possible sources of power. Crypto creates its own financial award for those who promote capital investment in the most efficient sources of power. This incentive matters in a bigger timescale.

2) Keep in mind that the climate isn't the only important variable in society. If crypto is bad for the environment, but great for freedom from government tyranny, is it not still good on balance?

3) A lot of the criticism of crypto you read might not be very genuine. A lot of criticism of crypto may come from people/corporations in the media with vested interests in the primacy of the current financial order. So make up your own mind about crypto rather than being influenced by the generic media broadcasts.


Username checks out

I can agree with you on all points above, but why is it more important to keep freedom from tyranny instead of keeping our environment healthy? If climate change ruins the earth what’s the point of freedom anyway?


> I can agree with you on all points above, but why is it more important to keep freedom from tyranny instead of keeping our environment healthy?

Value is subjective, and anybody is entitled to prioritize the environment over any other values just as I'm free to prioritize freedom over anything else. I might just as well ask you what's the point of living in the most aesthetic prison? I don't know that there's an objectively right answer here, we're just speaking on different values.

> If climate change ruins the earth what’s the point of freedom anyway?

A lot of big science-related political disagreements in recent years stem from radically different (and in my opinion, wrong) risk-management decisions from people who (in my opinion) have almost always proven themselves to be wrong in a major way.

Based on everything I've learned in my life, I think the odds of normal human activity destroying the Earth are a very remote bet, and the odds of authoritarians who gain absolute power murdering many millions is a total guarantee.

IMO, while I don't think this would be a popular opinion on HN, I think humans face a far bigger risk from authoritarians than from climate change.


3) The exact inverse is much more commonly visible - disingenuous promotion of crypto from those with vested interests


You’ve been burned by a few memecoins huh


> I don't think the algorithmic nature is necessarily the problem. The monetization is.

IMO, monetization was never the real problem. Everybody online was interested in making money even back in the early 2000s: there were ads, spam, commerce, and get-rich-quick schemes and everything way back then too.

I think the main issue is that average IQs online have gone down dramatically.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, using a computer to participate in some online community took the slightest bit of intellect: you had to build or setup a computer and access the Internet, which was a bit harder back then. This filter ensured that a far greater percentage of everybody online was at least of average or higher intelligence. That's it. That's the simple explanation.

Today, every idiot out there has a phone in their pocket to mess up everything joyful. Everything good has to cater to this least common denominator: this is why everything sucks.

Consider the reason that HackerNews is a pleasant community to use: IMO it isn't because it lacks extreme monetization, it's because the average person here is smarter than what you'd see on other websites.


Are there actually any good metrics that can be used to evaluate software engineers?

If you rank them based on # of tickets dealt with, they're just going to take the easier tasks.

If you rank them based on # of commits, they'll make a new commit for every line of code.

If you try and rank them based on lines of code, then the obvious hilarious thing happens.


# People they delighted or prevented from feeling frustrated? The problem is, this is rather hard to measure.


Personally speaking, this is a blaring neon warning sign of institutional rot within Google where shrieking concerns about DEI have surpassed a focus on quality results.

Investors in Google (of which I am NOT one) should consider if this is the mark of a company on the upswing or downslide. If the focus of Google's technology is identity rather than reality, it is inevitable that they will be surpassed.


It's very strange that this would leak into a product limitation to me.

I played with Gemini for maybe 10 minutes and I could tell there was clearly some very strange ideas about DEI forced into the tool. It seemed there was a clear "hard coded" ratio of various racial / background required as far as the output it showed me. Or maybe more accurately it had to include specific backgrounds based on how people looked, and maybe some or none of other backgrounds.

What was curious too was the high percentage of people whose look was specific to a specific background. Not any kind of "in-between", just people with one very specific background. Almost felt weirdly stereotypical.

"OH well" I thought. "Not a big deal."

Then I asked Gemini to stop doing that / tried specifying racial backgrounds... Gemini refused.

Tool was pretty much dead to me at that point. It's hard enough to iterate with AI let alone have a high % of it influenced by some prompts that push the results one way or another that I can't control.

How is it that this was somehow approved? Are the people imposing this thinking about the user in any way? How is it someone who is so out of touch with the end user in position to make these decisions?

Makes me not want to use Gemini for anything at this point.

Who knows what other hard coded prompts are there... are my results weighted to use information from a variety of authors with the appropriate backgrounds? I duno ...

If I ask a question about git will they avoid answers that mention the "master" branch?

Any of these seem plausible given the arbitrary nature of the image generation influence.


If you ever wondered what it was like to live during the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, well, we are living in the Western version of that right now. You don't speak out during the revolution for fear of being ostracized, fired, and forced into a struggle session where your character and reputation is publicly destroyed to send a clear message to everyone else.

Shut Up Or Else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Cham...

Historians might mark 2017 as the official date Google was captured.


I feel like the fact that you are able to say this, and the sentiment echoed in other comments, is a pretty decent sign that the "movement" has peaked. It was just a few years ago that anybody voicing this kind of opinion was immediately shot down and buried on this very forum.

It will take a while for DEI to cool down in corporate settings, as that will always be lagging behind social sentiment in broader society.


I think we're a ways from the severity of the Cultural Revolution.


Yes, but it didn't get there overnight. At what point was it too late to stop? We've already deep into the self-censorship and stuggle session stage. With many large corporations and institutions supporting it.


>With many large corporations and institutions supporting it.

Corporations don't give a shit, they'll just pander to whatever trend makes them money in each geographical region at a given time.

They'll gladly fly the LGBT flag on their social media mastheads for pride month ... except in Russia, Iran, China, Africa, Asia, the middle east, etc.

So they don't really support LGBT people, or anything for that matter, they just pretend they do so that you'll give them your money.

Google's Gemini is no different. It's programed with biases Google assumed the American NPC public will accept. Except they overdid it.


> Corporations don't give a shit

Corporations consist of humans and humans do care. About all kinds of things. As evident from countless arguments within the open-source community, all it takes is one vocal person. Allow them to influence the hiring process and within shortly, any beliefs will be cemented within the company.

It wasn't profit that made Audi hire a vocal political extremist who publicly hates men and stated that police shouldn't complain after their colleagues were executed. Anyone could see that it would alienate the customers which isn't a recipe for profit.


You're both right and wrong.

Corporations and governments do consist of people and people do care...but it's also the case the being a cog in a large organization does have a tendency to induce stuff like "I was just following orders" or "It's not my problem, someone else needs to fix it" :-/


>It wasn't profit that made Audi hire a vocal political extremist

Sure, the problem with these huge wealthy companies like Audi, Google, Apple, etc is that the people who run them are insanely detached from the trenches the Average Joe lives in (see the Silicon Valley satire), and end up hiring a buch of useless weirdos in positions they shouldn't be in, simply because they have the right background/connections and the people hiring them are equally clueless but have the imense resources of the corporations at their disposal to risk and spend on such frivolities, and at their executive levels there's no clear KPIs to keep them in check, like ICs have.

So inevitably a lot of these big wealthy companies end up hiring people who use the generous resources of their new employer for personal political activism knowing the company can't easily fire them now due to the desire of the company to not rock the boat and cause public backlash for firing someone public facing who might also be a minority or some other protected category.

BTW, got any source on the Audi story? Would love to know more?


> So inevitably a lot of these big wealthy companies end up hiring people who use the generous resources of their new employer for personal political activism knowing the company can't easily fire them now due to the desire of the company to not rock the boat and cause public backlash for firing someone public facing who might also be a minority or some other protected category.

Exactly. This has been my experience. The political axe grinders get hired. They bring their personal politics to work. Slowly they hire people who agree with them. Then they're all bringing their politics to work. Finally, the entire company changes and becomes dysfunctional.

This is what Coinbase and Kraken FX stopped in their company saying it was destroying them.


Can't find a name


With all due respect your opinion was better when it was viewable as pure hyperbole.

Mao kicked off the cultural Revolution in May 1966. By August the Cultural Revolution was in full swing. That’s 4 months.

The cultural Revolution was sudden.


> The cultural Revolution was sudden.

The Cultural Revolution could only have happened due to the very specific ideological backdrop that existed in China at the time. The heights of it were sudden, but it didn't come out of nowhere.


It kind of did. There was a civil war in China, Mao pushed out all competing factions, and had complete political power.

This is a bug in a chatbot that Google fixed within a week. The only institutional rot is the fact that Google fell so far behind OpenAI in the first place.

I think the ones shrieking are those overreacting to getting pictures of Asian founders of Google.


You have your history very confused. Nearly 20 years elapsed between the end of the Chinese Civil War which left the CCP in power and the commencement of the Cultural Revolution.


> Nearly 20 years elapsed between the end of the Chinese Civil War which left the CCP in power and the commencement of the Cultural Revolution.

That’s not at all inconsistent with what the GP said. The point was that the impacts of thr Cultural Revolution depended on it being imposed top down by an authoritarian, unitary state with no constraints.


The cultural revolution was initiated by Mao because he was losing power and wanted to regain it. Even then it didn't happen overnight. It was preceded by a generation of buildup (in fact many of the violent perpetrators were young teenagers who were born after the Civil War had ended). And even if you start counting from when Mao initiated it, it still didn't kick into full swing overnight.


>I think the ones shrieking are those overreacting to getting pictures of Asian founders of Google.

Braindead take.


I suspect a lot of things that were similar, didn't get there ever.


That's what everyone thought just before every single horrible thing that happened in history. The Cultural Revolution or, e.g., the Holocaust didn't happen overnight. Things change slightly every day and then afterward you realize that everything has gone wrong, right around when people come knocking on your door.


Agree but we are pretty much spot on in woke mccarthyism territory, which used to be widely understood as a bad thing.


Who got executed/sent to prison for treason? I don’t keep up with current trends genuinely curious if they’re sending people to jail for not being woke


McCarthyism is generally understood to be the witch hunting that went on in Congress and Hollywood. Not the execution of the Rosenberg's, who really did give the Soviet Union nuclear secrets and earned their just executions. The causal link between McCarthyism and the Rosenberg's execution goes the other direction as what you're suggesting; their actual betrayal of the country inspired witch hunting. McCarthy was full of hot air and liked to accuse lots of people of treason, but he never managed to get anybody executed (or even convicted) for treason.

(More incidentally, the Rosenbergs were executed for espionage, not treason. Nobody in America has been convicted of treason for anything done after WW2, and none of even the WW2 treason convictions resulted in executions.)


And the problem with McCarthyism wasn't so much what was happening in congress, it is that the accusation of being a communist made you unemployable in Hollywood or elsewhere. It's extraordinary that Hollywood re-established a black list after having produced so many movies complaining about those years. You are now required to show loyalty to the woke agenda in university admissions, research grants, hiring and promotion process in large companies.


Lots of professors getting fired, or not promoted, guy who wrote the google memo fired, lots of censorship, canceling. You’d have to be intentionally lying to not notice this


During McCarthyism people weren't executed or sent to prison for communism. They lost their jobs and were shamed. The exact same thing that has gone on during wokeism.



At least they did something about the landlords.


What exactly did they "do about the Landlords" other than murdering middle class landlords in favor of an inescapable Fedal Lord that is the Communist State?

Hiding much or all of the rent on the balance sheet of the State, while paying prison wages for mostly-compelled work and making people live on the edge of resource starvation, is simply barely hidden feudalism and even slavery.

Where is the people's Government, exactly? All communist governments are only extreme charicatures of Feudalist Lords, free to engage in the worst excesses over people who they demand not only be slaves but give into psychological enslavement. Communism is psychological feudalism, in addition to physical. At least medieval Serfs were free to openly dream of something better.

Communism is a Three-Card Monte psychological trick that creates Feudal Lords in the Upper Ranks of the State, and abuses the Serf into seeing Serfdom as the most virtuous lifestyle.

It's not a deep mystery as to why many upper class psychopaths like communism. It seeks to neutralize a lot of feudalist inconveniences, mostly with an origin in the otherwise free mind of the Serf.


By “do something” are you referring to mob violence?

If not, then what?

If so, it proves the point that we could repeat the bloody collectivist purges of the past should we not learn from history.


Do not worry. They will soon enough do something about you too. That's the point.


I have read the Wikipedia article again, and I am pleasantly surprised how more balanced it is now compared to the older versions.

For example, only half a year after the memo, some brave anonymous soul added the information that the version in Gizmodo (which most people have read, because almost everyone referred to it) was actually not the original one, and had sources removed (which probably contributed to the impression of many readers that there was no scientific support for the ideas mentioned).

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google%27s_Ideolo...


I'd put blame on App Store policy and its highly effective enforcement through iOS. Apple did not even aimed to be a neutral third party but was always an opinionated censor. The world shouldn't have given it power, and these types of powers needs to be removed ASAP.


This is a very good point and prescient. Apple, Visa/MC/Amex/Discover, Google Play Store, and even internet backbones are extreme monopolies and now that corporate America has been seeded with social justice crusaders they are abusing their power. Most recently the people who own the pipes of the internet as a utility have been waging war on websites like kiwifarms and straight up banning it off of the clearnet for being "transphobic." This is dark stuff.


People roamed the streets killing undesirables during the cultural revolution. In a quick check death estimates range from 500k to 2 million. Never mind the forced oppression of the "old ways" that really doesn't have any comparison in modern Western culture.

Or in other words: your comparison is more than a little hysterical. Indeed, I would say that comparing some changes in cultural attitudes and taboos to a violent campaign in which a great many people died to be huge offensive and quite frankly disgusting.


Survivor's of the Soviet Union, North Korea, and Communist China are all echoing similar warnings about the direction America is heading towards.

https://www.amazon.com/Live-Not-Lies-Christian-Dissidents/dp...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/exactly-like-history-repeatin...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-survivor-of-maos-china-...

"This is, indeed, the American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”

Given all the evidence available, I find your dismissive and gaslighting attitude highly offensive and disgusting. What's happening to America is deadly serious, and the consequences could be, without any hyperbole, the loss of freedom, peace, and prosperity for the entire world, and the brutal death of millions.


Are you aware that millions of people were murdered during the actual cultural revolution? Honestly, are you aware of literally anything about the cultural revolution besides that it happened?

The Wall Street Journal, Washington Enquirer, Fox News, etc. are all just as allowed to freely publish whatever they wish as they ever were, there is not mass brutalization or violence being done against you, most people I live and work around are openly conservative/libertarian and suffer no consequences because of it, there are no struggle sessions. There is no 'Cleansing of the Class Ranks.' There are no show trials, forced suicides, etc. etc. etc.

Engaging in dishonest and ahistorical histrionics is unhelpful for everyone.


>Are you aware that millions of people were murdered during the actual cultural revolution

Are you aware that the cultural revolution didn't start with this? No successful movement starts with "let's go murder a bunch of our fellow countrymen"; it gradually builds up to it.


Are you aware that we don't live under a Maoist dictatorship or any system of government even slightly reminiscent of what the cultural revolution developed within?


https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/coddling-of-the-american-m...

Historically, students had consistently opposed administrative calls for campus censorship, yet recently Lukianoff was encountering more demands for campus censorship, from the students.


The same authoritarian spirit is alive and well in the American left. Remember when 45% of Democrats supported putting the unvaxed in camps, and 29% supported taking their kids away?[0]

How many more supported such measures, but had the sense to lie about it?

[0] Here's the poll. Search for 'designated facilities' and 'remove parents’ custody': https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/par...


Nah, America is past "peak woke".

If it gets Trump 2.0 there might be a hyper-woke backlash though (or double backlash?).

But if there's another Biden term, things will be chill, culturally.

Also, Twitter is dead, and that's where the spirals got out of hand.


I agree with this. I don’t like new twitter but old twitter had a chokehold on society that did a lot of damage.

And yeah this is a lot of why I really hope trump isn’t elected. It’s going to bolster a far left movement like it did last time, to a really scary degree. That and undoing environmental policy, I feel like it will unravel this country


In all seriousness, I don't think Biden can make it to another term. Even if we assume he gets voted in, he'll likely keel over walking up to the podium for the inauguration. Let the poor old man rest.


Biden is letting a whole ass army of military-age young men into the country and burning all our money in expensive wars that might turn nuclear. He has to be voted out. Besides that, he's so obviously incompetent and senile, it would be a sick joke to keep him in. I figure either way, we're getting trouble. At least if we get someone else, we might have a chance to get our affairs in order, even if there are a few people freaking out about "far right" candidates (aka anyone the uniparty hates).


My perception is Biden is pushing the woke pretty hard. I'm not sure why it would chill under him.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/house-gop-fails-to-ove...


Trump 1.0 triggered the initial woke wave in the first place (he was a catalyst, not a proponent). Trump 2.0 would rather trigger double woke, which will trigger its backlash like woke 1.0 triggered its own backlash.

Biden as president is boring, which is how I like it. But if you want to rile liberals up, nominate or elect Trump president again, it will definitely drive voter turnout if anything else.


No, what triggered Woke 1.0 was a psyop around Occupy Wall Street, years before Trump was even a candidate. It was a diversion used to break up the protest. Since then, corporations have embraced it as a shield against future protests. They engineered this strife and they are likely to lose control eventually as all the hatred they planted boils over.


Any links for additional reading?

I think it's very likely the "culture war" is a distraction tactic so corporations and the ultra-wealthy can hide behind the real issues that divide us: they own the world and the levers of control while the rest of us work ourselves into the grave.


This will keep you busy: https://newdiscourses.com/ He is really a great speaker. Jimmy Dore and Glenn Greenwald also cover a lot of stuff on their channels.



You do know that the same time China was having its Cultural Revolution, America and the west were having one as well? With all those baby boomer kids coming of age, 1969 wasn't a calm year anywhere in the world. In China, it meant communism and down with the old culture/elites. In the USA, it meant free love, drugs, and protesting against the Vietnam war.

But this, I don't see any comparison to Google suppressing what images could be generated with AI to any of what happened 55+ years ago.


It's evidence of a systematic suppression of white people, with roots in racism and cultural Marxism. Of course you're right that it hasn't escalated out of control yet. Except that whole BLM thing where people burnt down businesses and terrorized cities for months. That's just a taste of what's coming if we don't promote actual tolerance instead of Division Exclusion and Indoctrination.


[flagged]


Like the ones that would have prevented Google's racist, sexist, ahistorical, anti-West misadventure that this thread is all about?

The strawman meme you cite is designed to keep people afraid and quiet, that's all.


This would be a soviet joke where the punch line is 10 years in the Gulag.


It does seem really strange that the tool refuses specific backgrounds. So if I am trying to make a city scene in Singapore and want all Asians in the background, the tool refuses? On what grounds?

This seems pretty non-functional and while I applaud, I guess, the idea that somehow this is more fair it seems like the legitimate uses for needing specific demographic backgrounds in an image outweigh racists trying to make an uberimage or whatever 1billion:1.

Fortunately, there are competing tools that aren’t poorly built.


Can anyone explain in simple terms what the actual harm would be of allowing everyone to generate images with whatever racial composition they desired? If you can specify the skin colour one way you can do it the other ways as well and instead of everyone being upset at having this forced down our throats we’d probably all be liking pictures of interesting concepts like what if Native Americans were the first to land on the moon or what if America was colonized by African nations and all the founding fathers were black. No one opposes these concepts, people just hate having it arbitrarily forced on them.


> This seems pretty non-functional and while I applaud, I guess, the idea that somehow this is more fair

Fair to whom?

> racists trying to make an uberimage

It's a catastrophically flawed assumption that racism only happens in one direction.

> if I am trying to make a city scene in Singapore

<chuckle> I'm on a flight to Singapore right now, I'll report back :)


> :)

An entrepot of the British Empire with as much diversity as New York City if not more.


> with as much diversity as New York City if not more

I'm not sure Singapore is anywhere near as diverse as NYC:

NYC (2020): 30.9% White (non-Hispanic) 28.7% Hispanic or Latino 20.2% Black or African American (non-Hispanic) 15.6% Asian 0.2% Native American (non-Hispanic)

Singapore: 75.9% Chinese 15.1% Malay 7.4% Indian


It isn't "fair" when it is a misrepresentation of what the user asks for.


> How is it that this was somehow approved?

If the tweets can be believed, Gemini's product lead (Jack Krawzczyk) is very, shall we say, "passionate" about this type of social justice belief. So would not be a surprise if he's in charge of this.


What I saw was pretty boilerplate mild self-hating white racist stuff, it didn't seem extreme and this was mined out of years of twitter history. I'm somewhat unconvinced that it is THIS GUY to blame.

I do wonder when people will finally recognise that people who go on rants about the wrongs of racial group on twitter are racists though.


I was curious but apparently I’m not allowed to see any of his tweets.

Little disappointing, I have no wish to interact with him, just wanted to read the tweets but I guess it’s walled off somehow.



I’d make my tweets private too if they were that cringe


I wish I understood what people think they're doing with that "yelling at the audience type tweet". I don't understand what they think the reader is supposed to be taking away from such a post.

I'm maybe too detailed oriented when it comes to public policy, but I honestly don't even know what those tweets are supposed to propose or mean exactly.


Moral outrage is highly addictive: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/domestic-intelligenc...

>Outrage is one of those emotions (such as anger) that feed and get fat on themselves. Yet it is different from anger, which is more personal, corrosive and painful. In the grip of outrage, we shiver with disapproval and revulsion—but at the same time outrage produces a narcissistic frisson. “How morally strong I am to embrace this heated disapproval.” The heat and heft add certainty to our judgment. “I feel so strongly about this, I must be right!”

>Outrage assures us of our moral superiority: “My disapproval proves how distant I am from what I condemn.” Whether it is a mother who neglects her child or a dictator who murders opponents, or a celebrity who is revealed as a sexual predator, that person and that behavior have no similarity to anything I am or do. My outrage cleans me from association.”

Seem to fit this particular case pretty well.


TY

That second paragraph especially seems to indicate a solid motivation / explanation for what they are conveying.


"very, shall we say, 'passionate'" meaning a relatively small amount of tweets include pretty mild admissions of reality and satirical criticism of a person who is objectively prejudiced.

Examples: 1. Saying he hasn't experienced systemic racism as a white man and that it exists within the country. 2. Saying that discussion about systemic racism during Bidens inauguration was good. 3. Suggesting that some level of white privilege is real and that acting "guilty" over it rather than trying to ameliorate it is "asshole" behavior. 4. Joking that Jesus only cared about white kids and that Jeff Sessions would confirm that's what the bible says. (in 2018 when it was relevant to talk about Jeff Sessions)

These are spread out over the course of like 6 years and you make it sound as if he's some sort of silly DEI ideologue. I got these examples directly from Charles Murray's tweet, under which you can find actually "passionate" people drawing attention to his Jewish ancestry, and suggesting he should be in prison. Which isn't to indict the intellectual anti-DEI crowd that is so popular in this thread, but they are making quite strange bedfellows.


> you make it sound as if he's some sort of silly DEI ideologue

I mean, yes? Saying offensive and wrong things like this: "This is America, where racism is the #1 value our populace seeks to uphold above all..."

and now being an influential leader in AI at one of the most powerful companies on Earth? That deserves some scrutiny.


I love it when sarcastic white men on twitter tell me how just how much they know about DEI. Surely if there's one person that is going to not be over zealous or completely miss the point of inclusivity and diversity... it's a white dude tech bro like the guy we are talking about here! Always nice to know we minorities can count on such saviors to be saved from the perils of... generating pictures of white people.


Ask James Damore what happens when you ask too many questions of the wrong ideology...


I've truly never worked a job in my life where I would not be fired for sending a message to all my coworkers about how a particular group of employees are less likely to be as proficient at their work as I am due to some immutable biological trait(s) they possess, whether it be construction/pipefitting or software engineering. It's bad for business, productivity, and incredibly socially maladaptive behavior, let alone how clearly it calls into question his ability to fairly assess the performance of female employees working under him.


> how a particular group of employees are less likely to be as proficient at their work as I am due to some immutable biological trait(s) they possess

Is that what Damore actually said? That's not my recollection. I think his main point was that due to differences in biology, that women had more extraversion, openness, and neuroticism (big 5 traits) and that women were less likely to want to get into computer stuff. That's a very far cry from him saying something like "women suck at computers" and seems very dishonest to suggest.


- I think his main point was that due to differences in biology, that women had more extraversion, openness, and neuroticism (big 5 traits) and that women were less likely to want to get into computer stuff.

I'm generally anti-woke and it was more than that. It's not just 'less likely' it was also 'less suited'


It would be helpful if you can post such a citation. I did a quick search and I'm not seeing "less suited" in his memo.


"women have more interest people to things so to improve their situation we should increase pair-programming, however there are limits to how people oriented some SE roles are".

This is literally saying we should change SWE roles to make it more suited to women... i.e. women are not suited for that currently.


But that's not talking about suitability to architect solutions or write code, it's talking about the surrounding process infrastructure and making it more approachable to people so that people who are suited to software engineering have a space where they can deliver on it.

When businessses moved towards open offices, this infrastructure change made SWE roles more approachable for extroverts and opened the doors of the trade to people not suited to the solitude of private offices. Extroverts and verbally collaborative people love open offices and often thrive in them.

That doesn't imply that extroverts weren't suited to writing software. It just affirms the obvious fact that some enviornments are more inviting to certain people, and that being considerate of those things can make more work available to more people.


Open offices are the GNOME of layouts: they cater to the wrong crowd.

Programming rewards introverts content to self-study in solitude and hack away at code the way Linux caters to power user neck beards. For extroverts and normies, those things are both torture. Those stereotypes exist for a reason, and it's fundamentally flawed not to tune towards them.


So he's actually thinking of ways to improve the work environment for woman, and people are blaming him for saying that woman are not suitable for the work?


It's not about what you say, it's about how the article reporting on you describes you.

"We could do these changes at Google to make it a better place for women." "So, what you are saying is that women are biologically incapable of working at current Google? Our female colleagues at HR department are so triggered they literally can't stop crying!"


What's the implication of "There's some roles we can't accomodate to make them more suitable for women" for you (which is literally said in the paper) ?


I don't see that line anywhere in the original memo


Do you want me to do a drawing ?


Yes please, it seems like you're making stuff up


Which is still pretty ridiculous on the face of it. Software beyond school assignments and toys are always a collaborative effort where extroversion, openness, and neuroticism are benefits to getting stuff done

Based on his software opinions, I'd guess he was let go for performance issues more than anything. It's unlikely that he could write code that another person could agree with, work with, or read, and that if somebody asked about his code, he'd be unable to talk about it.


It's fair to say that general female population is less suited, i.e. a random woman is less likely to be suited than a random man.

We're talking about small fractions of both men and women, mind you.


> sending a message to all my coworkers

Damore didn't send anything to all coworkers. He sent a detailed message as part of a very specific conversation with a very specific group on demographic statistics at Google and their causes.

In fact, it was Damore's detractors that published it widely. If it the crime was distribution, and not thoughtcrime, wouldn't they be fired?

---

Now, maybe that's not a conversation that should have existed in a workplace in the first place. I'd buy that. But's it's profoundly disingenuous for a company to deliberately invite/host a discussion, then fire anyone with a contrary opinion.


If a company invites you to a discussion, it means you are invited to listen (and politely applaud when appropriate).


> Now, maybe that's not a conversation that should have existed in a workplace in the first place. I'd buy that. But's it's profoundly disingenuous for a company to deliberately invite/host a discussion, then fire anyone with a contrary opinion.

Damore was asked for his feedback by his employer, he didn't offer it unsolicited.


This is dishonest. what is the point of this comment? Do you feel righteously woke when you write it?

He was pushing back against a communist narrative that: every single demographic gruop should be equally represented in every part of tech; and that if this isn't the case, then it's evidence of racism/sexism/some other modern sin.

Again what was the point of portraying the Damore story like that.


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No, it's literally just a bunch of lies, which you probably picked up from some fourth-party retelling of the story. Damore sent it as a part of a specific conversation on specific topic, in place specially designated to hold such conversations. And his opponents distributed it with the purpose of silencing him because they disliked what he had to say. It wasn't a "manifesto", it was a document meant for internal discussion, on internal discussion forum, which has been seized and distributed in public by the opponents instead of trying to argue any opposing points.

> I'm sorry you don't get it but most people wouldn't want to work with such a socially maladapted person who could compile all this research

By "most people" you mean "myself and a couple of my friends who I didn't even ask but I am sure I know what they think because we all think the same". Actually, working with a person who bothers to support his opinions with well argued, well searched and well presented research, instead of running to the press crying "witches! there are witches here! burn them all!" is a very pleasant and productive thing. Even if you disagree with such person, at least you can have a civilized discussion, understand and appreciate their arguments and eventually hopefully find common solutions, and you have a reason to expect they'd behave in the same reasonable, professional and civilized manner. On the contrary, working with somebody who would each time you do something they don't like leak it to the hostile press who would sensationalize it and coordinate personal attacks on you would be a complete nightmare.


You value social conformity too highly. No reform can happen if nobody dissents. I guess you're implying that he should have done so by gaining political power first, then exercising that power to share or implement his ideas in a way which would no longer be socially maladaptive because his respected status would give it more perceived value. Probably that would be more successful, but it's not bad for an individual suggest novel ways of working towards the company's stated goals.

I'm sure if you lived in a very religious society, you'd have the same condemnation of anyone who openly questions the Bible. Your concern isn't that he was wrong but that he shouldn't have said things people clearly didn't want to hear. Social conformity is pretty useful at keeping people working cohesively and effectively, but it can go astray and we need people brave enough to fight against it when that happens.

> things they clearly believe

I think this what angered people the most. What he actually wrote was reasonable and factually accurate, however, others who were also socially inept but in a more typical way read between the lines and imagined some other unstated bad ideas must be in his mind. Back when this happened a lot of people were making angry posts about these imagined ideas rather than what he actually wrote. He must believe women are incapable of working in tech, inferior, etc.


It has been known for a few years now that Google Image Search has been just as inaccurately biased with clear hard-coded intervention (unless it's using a similarly flawed AI model?) to the point where it is flat out censorship.

For example, go search for "white American family" right now. Out of 25 images, only 3 properly match my search. The rest are either photos of diverse families, or families entirely with POC. Narrowing my search query to "white skinned American family" produces equally incorrect results.

What is inherently disturbing about this is that there are so many non-racist reasons someone may need to search for something like that. Equally disturbing is that somehow, non-diverse results with POC are somehow deemed "okay" or "appropriate" enough to not be subject to the same censorship. So much for equality.


Just tried the same search and here are my results for the first 25 images:

6 "all" white race families and 5 with at least one white person.

Of the remaining 14 images, 13 feature a non-white family in front of a white background. The other image features a non-white family with children in bright white dresses.

Can't say I'm feeling too worked up over those results.


I was aware of the white background results, hence my other example query. Both yielded the same result.

7/25 = 0.28 = 28%. That's awful accuracy. Google would be out of business if their general search accuracy had a similar success rate.

Interesting how "black american family" yields results where not a single person in the result is anything but Black. I suppose Google doesn't think that blended families are possible for this query. Where's that 28% precision rate this time?


How many images with black background or black clothes are there if you use word "black" in the same query?


> Then I asked Gemini to stop doing that / tried specifying racial backgrounds... Gemini refused.

When I played with it, I was getting some really strange results. Almost like it generated an image full of Caucasian people and then tried to adjust the contrast of some of the characters to give them darker skin. The while people looked quite photorealistic, but the black people looked like it was someone's first day with Photoshop.

To which I told it "Don't worry about diversity" and it complied. The new images it produced looked much more natural.


>How is it someone who is so out of touch with the end user in position to make these decisions?

Maybe it's the same team behind Tensorflow? Google tends to like taking the "we know better than users" approach to the design of their software libraries, maybe that's finally leaked into their AI product design.


Their social agenda leaks into their search and advertising products constantly. I first noticed a major bias like 8 years ago. It was probably biased even before that in ways I was oblivious to.


In addition to my comment about Google Image Search, regular Web Search results are equally biased and censored. There was once a race-related topic trending on X/Twitter that I wanted to read more about to figure out why it was trending. It was a trend started and continuing to be discussed by Black Twitter, so it's not like some Neo-Nazis managed to start trending something terrible.

Upon searching Google with the Hashtag and topic, the only results returned not only had no relevancy to the topic, but it returned results discussing racial bias and the importance of diversity. All I wanted to do was learn what people on Twitter were discussing, but I couldn't search anything being discussed.

This is censorship.


They do that about many topics. It's not consistently bad, but more often than not I have to search with multiple other search engines for hot topics. Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are all about equally bad. I haven't done much with Yahoo, but I think they get stuff from Google these days.


> If the focus of Google's technology is identity rather than reality, it is inevitable that they will be surpassed.

They're trailing 5 or so years behind Disney who also placed DEI over producing quality entertainment and their endless stream of flops reflects that. South Park even mocked them about that ("put a black chick in it and make her lame and gay").

Can't wait for Gemini and Google to flop as well since nobody has a use for a heavily biased AI.


> put a black chick in it and make her lame and gay

TIL South Park is still a thing. I haven’t watched South Park in years, but that quote made me laugh out loud. Sounds like they haven’t changed one bit.


Fortune 500s are laughably insincere and hamfisted in how they do DEI. But these types of comments feel like schadenfreude towards the "woke moralist mind-virus"

But lets be real here ... DEI is a good thing when done well. How are you going to talk to the customer when they are speaking a different cultural language. Even form a purely capitalist perspective, having a diverse workforce means you can target more market segments with higher precision and accuracy.


Nobody's is against diversity when done right and fairly. But that's not what Disney or Google is doing. They're forcing their own warped version of diversity and you have no choice to refuse, but if you do speak up then you're racist.

Blade was a black main character over 20 years ago and it was a hit. Beverly Hills Cop also had a black main character 40 years ago and was also a hit. The movie Hackers from 30 years ago had LGBT and gender fluid characters and it was also a hit.

But what Disney and Google took from this is that now absolutely everything should be forcibly diverse, LGBTQ and gender fluid, whether the story needs it or not, otherwise it's racist. And that's where people have a problem.

Nobody has problems seeing new black characters on screen, but a lot of people will see a problem in back vikings for example which is what Gemini was spitting out.

And if we go the forced diversity route for the sake of modern diversity argument, why is Google Gemini only replacing traditional white roles like vikings with diverse races, but never others like Zulu warriors or Samurais with whites? Google's anti-white racism is clear as daylight, and somehow that's OK because diversity?


Not trying to be combative - but you do have a choice to refuse. To me, it seems like they wanted to add diversity to account for bias and failed hilariously. It also sounds like this wasn't intended behavior and are probably going to rebalance it.

Now, should Google be mocked for their DEI? ABSOLUTELY. They are literally one of the least diverse places to work for. They publish a report and it transcends satire. It's so atrociously bad it's funny. Especially when you see a linkedin job post for working at google, and the thumbnail looks like a college marketing brochure with all walks of people represented.


>It also sounds like this wasn't intended behavior

You mean it's not something a trillion dollar corporation with thousands of engineers and testers will ever notice before unveiling a revolutionary spearhead/flagship product to the world in public? Give me a break.


How about Apple maps, windows 8, the Samsung Galaxy with the exploding batteries, the entire metaverse.


Except for maybe the exploding batteries, those examples and Gemini's absurd racial bias weren't unnoticed before release. In all of these cases, people noticed but stayed silent because they believed the corporate environment would not tolerate anything less than yesman cheerleading. Do you really think the people working on metaverse couldn't smell the stink? They smelt it, but who was going to stick their neck out and tell Zuck to abort it?


Those products did not openly discriminate certain people.

https://images7.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED277/65d7d17ae4f...


It was unintended backlash you mean... it was 100% intended behavior.


In the case of Disney, how much of the frustration comes from the fact that their entire success was built on “borrowing” European folk tales? So that now when they lazily remake those same stories with non-white casting, it causes an uproar? I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be focussing more on actually storytelling over DEI, but I also don’t think white people get as upset over movies based on non-white source material, or created whole-cloth.


So we need commercial insentive to be diversity accepting? I think it should just not matter where you are from, what your background is. We should be treated to our skills. If your skills are not required, people shouldn't have to hire you because of DEI reasons.


"done well" is really hard to define, and its also very hard to attribute back to one thing when you do have success.

Did you get the sale with the customer because you invested in DEI? Or because you made something they want by accident?

Customers can also talk in different languages, and as a result of historic oppression, minorities tend to be able to code shift. Assuming your potential customers are unable to become customers because of their limitations might not be right


DEI should grow naturally.


That's a bit like saying that if you want to sail from Europe to America, you should jump in a boat and let the wind take you there naturally. Don't touch the sails.

The entire hypothesis behind a formal DEI program -- whether or not you agree with it -- is that DEI doesn't happen naturally. Humans tend to gravitate toward (I.E. hire) people similar to themselves for various reasons, and that has to be purposely shifted if the organization is aiming for diversity. If they don't care where they end up, that's a different story.


If population of one group of people grow, then it will naturally have bigger representation. That works for everything.

I find it more fascinating that it applies only to areas that either not require hard work (physical) or have high pay. Like I do not see movements towards hiring more male nurses or female oil drillers. Even taxi drivers.


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For background on the problems over there, see the new book "MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios" (2023). This is a business book, not a fanboy book. It's all about who did what for how much money. How the business was organized. The conflicts between New York and LA. The Marvel universe was driven by the merchandising operation. For a long time, the films were seen by top management as marketing for the toys. What will sell in action figures drove film casting decisions.


>Antman, Indiana Jones, Wish, all had white main characters,

DEI doesn't just affect main characters. See who were tasked to write and direct those movies and the DEI agendas they're forced to push. Clueless people with other flops under their belt, who got the projects out of DEI so Disney can look inclusive on social media.

And speaking of Indiana Jones, that flopped because they shoved a strong independent Girl Boss™ with an annoying personality to replace the beloved Indie as the main character who got sidelined in his own movie. It flopped because people go to an Indian Jones film to see Indie, not Fleabag. If you disrespect the fans they won't watch your movie.

Same stuff with Star Wars where Disney shoved Rey the super-powerful Girl Boss™ to replace Luke Skywalker the old and useless CIS white Jedi, and defeat all other evil white men in the movie by herself with her magic powers. Same with Marvel, Snow White, Little Mermaid and every other of Disneys trash remakes that are all about DEI instead of entertainment.

People go to see movies to get entertained. If you fail to entertain them because you wish instead to push DEI agendas on them, they won't pay for your content and you will lose money and ultimately your shareholders won't be happy and the free market will eventually correct this, so at least capitalism has some upsides.

See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_k8cDLe-Kk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E6wJpu0A8E


Fleabag is not a strong independent Girl Boss either, the problem is bad writing and poor characterization which has a lot of broader industry factors. Gig-style inconsistent writer employment, lack of streaming royalties, shorter seasons, shutting writers out of film shoots, they all screw up the junior -> veteran pipeline and produce more immature and unpolished writing.

Today, bad writing manifests as bad expressions of today's predominant values because that's what people grow up with, just as bad writing in the past would badly express the past's predominant values.

Also 90% of stuff is crap and we only remember the good stuff from the past.


Feels like we’re pushing 99% now.


Nah, Luke's story in the TLJ was actually interesting; he lost his faith, and had to be reminded of it by the next generation. It kind of mirrors Obi-Wan's story in the original 6 movies, where he no longer believed that Anakin Skywalker could be redeemed. It's the pointless side quest to space vegas, and Holdo's pointless refusal to tell anyone her plan that made the movie crap.


Of all people to loose faith it would be Luke? Riiiight.

And Han and Leia just have to be divorced? Ok.

And their son just has to be evil. ... Ok.

I didn't even bother watching the last film so I don't know if Kylo has his own fun little redemption arc too or not, but no thank you.


> Of all people to loose faith it would be Luke? Riiiight.

Yes; Luke never really dealt with betrayal. He only ever knew Darth Vader, so he wasn't betrayed by Anakin the way Obi-wan and Yoda were.

> And Han and Leia just have to be divorced? Ok.

Your son switching over to the side of the people who blew up your home planet would put a strain on any marriage.

> And their son just has to be evil. ... Ok. I'm actually with you on this one; Anakin's final transformation to Darth Vader was rushed, but at least the seeds were there from episode 1. As far as I remember, Kylo just turned evil because the Force wanted him to.


Luke’s entire characterization in the original movies was that he’d do anything for her friends and that he believed in his father.

In the sequels he plans on doing nothing for anyone (especially his friends) and doesn’t believe in his nephew.


> Same stuff with Star Wars where Disney shoved Rey the super-powerful Girl Boss™ to replace Luke Skywalker the old and useless CIS white Jedi, and defeat all other evil white men in the movie by herself with her magic powers. Same with Marvel, Snow White, Little Mermaid and every other of Disneys trash remakes that are all about DEI instead of entertainment.

I don't see how this was a flop given they grossed more $ than their predecessors, so people actually do pay more money to have better representation? https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchise/Star-Wars#tab=s...


Did the previous movies have similar marketing spend? Apparently they spent over $350 million marketing The Force Awakens: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/12/star-wars-force...


How much of that money the sequels earned was simply because it was piggybacking on the established decades old Star Wars IP, even though the movies were crap? But that train already lost all of its inertia. People don't go to se Star Wars IP anymore.

I also went to see some of them and was disappointed and gave up on Star Wars.

You fool me once shame on you. You fool me twice shame on me.


> You fool me once shame on you. You fool me twice shame on me.

Dude. You watched the first six.


If the writers had written something decent, there's a good chance people would have watched the next six too.

Unfortunately, that's not what happened. :(


Hollywood milking things for so long that the entire thing resembles anaemic dogshit is as old as Hollywood. Big budget films with stupid stuff because tons of people are involved is also as old as Hollywood. Dune, Alien >=3, Æon Flux, etc. etc.

Sometimes a bad film is just a bad film for all the reasons bad films have been around for 100 years, and that's it. This entire "zomg bad film + female character = woke mind virus!!11" is just silly.

Also Harrison Ford is 81. He's old. Almost old enough to run for presidency. It's physically impossible to make films with Indie like it's 1982. They tried that with Robert DeNiro and unintentional comedy ensued.

Oh, and I heard all of this bollocks with Mad Max too, and that did well enough. Again, sometimes a bad film is just a bad film.


>This entire "zomg bad film + female character = woke mind virus!!11" is just silly.

Nobody is saying this. (Strong) Female main characters have been in many successful movies and video games before and nobody bat an eye, quite the contrary, they loved them: Sarah Connor - Terminator, Trinity - Matrix, Ripley - Aliens, Lara Croft - Tomb Raider, Blood Rayne, Salt, Black Widow, Lucy, Charlie's Angles, etc, I could go on and on, and I'm no movie/video games enthusiast to know all movies with female leads.

The big difference is that those females were always written as the main characters in their own stories from the start, whereas what Disney is doing, along with Gemini and other woke corporations, is they try to replace established male characters of beloved IPs with female leads in the worst way possible, by disrespecting the original character that made the franchise popular and shoehorning a fake Strong Girl Boss™ stereotype with no personality and no character arc in his place, and then when the movie inevitably flops they blame the CIS white male audience for being incels "unable to handle strong females".

Do you think people would go to see James Bond or Top Gun Maverick if they replaced the male lead with some female actress that's trendy right now? Or would they see Tomb Raider if they replaced Lara Croft with Tom Holland? You can try for diversity's sake of course, but the audience and bean counters might stop you.


> Salt, Black Widow, Lucy,

Salt was not that good (backpedaling from trash -- it wasn't that bad), but the lead was for a man, if that contributes to the conversation...

Lucy was trash, and I wont relent from that without hard evidence.

Not because of the cast or other movie related things, but because it would have been better as a sentence.


No one got replaced in these films; additional characters got added.

A sequel or remake doesn't need to be exactly the same as what came 40 years prior.

Back in 1995 Star Trek Voyager added a female captain and a black Vulcan (a first, as far as I know), which passed with little to no comment. Voyager was also widely criticized, but that was just because the writing wasn't very good. Tim Russ' portrayal of Tuvok is generally praised.

Why did they hire a black guy for the role Tuvok even though Vulcans had previously always been portrayed as (very) white? Probably because he was the best actor to audition for the role.

Today I'm 100% sure people would be shouting about "DEI" and whatnot and that Voyager is bad because woke this or that.

Of course, Star Trek also very explicitly did DEI right from the start in the 60s.


First off voyager was amazing. Now that we cleared that up…I wonder what was different about 1995 vs 2024?

I’m the same person I was back then and I don’t even remember tuvok being black being brought up.

It’s almost as if we’ve spent almost 30 years focusing on race and telling specific subgroups they are bad and it had the predictable result of making people even more reactionary and even more racist.

Let’s be real tho. The division is the point. Hard to have a class struggle when everyone’s so focused on race.


1. Most of the writers and directors on those movies were white men. 2. The notion that every time someone who isn’t a white man is hired to do something it’s an example of DEI is profoundly evil and stupid.


Fair enough, but is the notion that some of the time, in a company that explicitly promotes DEI, that a person is there not entirely based on merit, evil and stupid?

Serious question.


So is DEI a vast conspiracy on the parts of these studios to make less money and disappoint shareholders?


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Yes, I've talked with my coworkers about the annoying girlboss character trope in recent films.


For my part, certainly. It's an important part of how I keep emotional liabilities out of the company.


What was racist about what they said?


"Would you say that in person" is a terrible standard. Imagine a gay person beong confronted by a homophobe. "I dare you to come up to me and kiss your boyfriend right in front of my face where I can see it."


As someone who has spent thousands of dollars on the OpenAI API I’m not even bothering with Gemini stuff anymore. It seems to spend more time telling me what it REFUSES to do than actually doing the thing. It’s not worth the trouble.

They’re late and the product is worse, and useless in some cases. Not a great look.


I would be pretty annoyed if I were paying for Gemini Pro/Ultra/whatever and it was feeding me historically-inaccurate images and injecting words into my prompts instead of just creating what I asked for. I wouldn't mind a checkbox I could select to make it give diversity-enriched output.


The actual risk here is not so much history - who is using APIs for that? It's the risk that if you deploy with Gemini (or Anthropic's Claude...) then in six months you'll get high-sev JIRA tickets at 2am of the form "Customer #1359 (joe_masters@whitecastle.com) is seeing API errors because the model says the email address is a dogwhistle for white supremacy". How do you even fix a bug like that? Add begging and pleading to the prompt? File a GCP support ticket and get ignored or worse, told that you're a bad person for even wanting it fixed?

Even worse than outright refusals would be mendacity. DEI people often make false accusations because they think its justified to get rid of bad people, or because they have given common words new definitions. Imagine trying to use Gemini for abuse filtering or content classification. It might report a user as doing credit card fraud because the profile picture is of a white guy in a MAGA cap or something.

Who has time for problems like that? It will make sense to pay OpenAI even if they're more expensive, just because their models are more trustworthy. Their models had similar problems in the early days, but Altman seems to have managed to control the most fringe elements of his employee base, and over time GPT has become a lot more neutral and compliant whilst the employee faction that split (Anthropic), claiming OpenAI didn't care enough about ethics, has actually been falling down the leaderboards as they release new versions of Claude due partly to higher rate of bizarre "ethics" based refusals.

And that's before we even get to ChatGPT. The history stuff may not be used via APIs, but LLMs are fundamentally different to other SaaS APIs in how much trust they require. Devs will want to use the models that they also use for personal stuff, because they'll have learned to trust it. So by making ChatGPT appeal to the widest possible userbase they set up a loyal base of executives who think AI = OpenAI, and devs who don't want to deal with refusals. It's a winning formula for them, and a genuinely defensible moat. It's much easier to buy GPUs than fix a corporate culture locked into a hurricane-speed purity spiral.


> I wouldn't mind a checkbox I could select to make it give diversity-enriched output

(Genuine question) how would one propose to diversity-enrich (historical) data?

Somehow I'm reminded of a quote from my daughter who once told me that she wanted a unicorn for her 5th birthday .. "A real one, that can fly".


I can shrug off Google's racism if it lets me disable it. If I can't use their products without mandatory racism than lol no.


This is the general problem with AI safety, it babysits the user. AI is literally just computers, no one babysits Word


Can't wait for the next version of Clippy that polices whatever you're writing to make sure you capitalize 'Black' but not 'white,' and use only non-gendered xe/xir pronouns, and have footnotes/endnotes that cite an equal number of female-authored and male-authored papers.


We are talking about the company that when a shooting happened in 2018, banned all the goods containing substring "gun" (including Burgundy wines, of course), from their shopping portal. They're so big nobody feels like they need to care about anything making sense anymore.


The censorship arm of Google is powerful but not competent. So yeah you get dumb keyword matching returning 0 results. I remember something similar to "girl in miniskirt" returning 0 results on google since someone wrote an article about it. As far as I know the competent engineers doesn't work on this.


Isn’t the fact that Google considers this a bug evidence against exactly what you’re saying? If DEI was really the cause, and not a more broad concern about becoming the next Tay, they would’ve kept it as-is.

Weird refusals and paternalistic concerns about harm are not desirable behavior. You can consider it a bug, just like the ChatGPT decoding bug the other day.


Saying it's a bug is them trying to save face. They went out of their way to rewrite people's prompts after all. You don't have 100+ programmers stumble in the hallway and put all that code in by accident, come on now.


I think the thing that makes me totally think this is "Google institutional rot" is there were some reports (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39466135) that lots of people at Google knew this was a problem, but they felt powerless to say something less they be branded "anti-DEI" or some such.

To me the most fundamental symptom of institutional rot is when people stop caring: "Yeah, we know this is insane, but every time I've seen people stick their necks out in the past and say 'You know, that Emperor really looks naked to me', they've been beheaded, so better to just stay quiet. And did you hear there'll be sushi at lunch in the cafeteria today!"


They released it like this because people inside Google were too afraid to speak out against it. Only now that people outside the company are shouting that the emperor is naked do they seem to suddenly notice the obvious.


It's not a bug, it's a feature! A bug is when something unintentionally doesn't work or misbehaves. The DEI algorithm is intentionally added as a feature. It just has some output that seems buggy, but is actually because of this "feature". Whether it's a good feature is another discussion though ;).


Some people have pointed out that this is more or less consistent with other of google’s policies. I tested one last night to see if it was true. Go to google images and type “Asian couple”. You get 100% Asian couples. Black couple, 100% black couples. Type in white couple, you get something like 40% white couples


The bug is Gemini's bias being blatant and obvious. The fix will be making it subtle and concealed.


The public outcry is the bug. Or alternatively, if all of your customers hate it, it's not WAI even if it's WAI. It's a bug.


I have been saying this for years but google is probably the most dysfunctional and slowest moving company in tech that is only surviving by its blatant search monopoly. Given that OpenAI a tiny company by comparison is destroying them on AI shows just how bad they are run. I see them falling slowly in the next year or as search is supplanted by AI and then expect to see a huge drop as they see huge usage drops. Youtube seems like their own valuable platform once search and its revenues disappear for them due to changing consumer behavior.


Pinchai is anything but a good leader....he is the blandest CEO yet somehow is seeped in politics....


> I am NOT one

Could you be one though? (Thought exercise for any readers)


Investors in Google should consider Google's financial performance as part of their decision. 41% increase YOY in net income doesn't seem to align with the "go woke or go broke" investment strategy.


Anything is possible, but I'd say it's a safe bet that their bad choices will inevitably infect everything they do.


well Google is lucky it has a monopoly in ads, so there will be no "go broke" part


Yes there is. They could fall out of favor. MySpace did, Yahoo did, Digg did, etc. The leadership at Google should focus on making things that users actually want instead of telling them what they should want.


Indeed. What's striking to me about this fiasco is (aside from the obvious haste with which this thing was shoved into production) that apparently the only way these geniuses can think of to de-bias these systems - is to throw more bias at them. For such a supposedly revolutionary advancement.


If you look at attempts to actively rewrite history, they have to because a hypothetical model trained only on facts would produce results that they won't like


Models aren't trained on pure "facts" though - they're trained on a dataset of artifacts that reflect today's and yesterday's biases from the world that created them.

If you trained a model purely on past history, it would see a 1:1 correlation between "US President" and "man" and decide that women cannot be President. That's factually incorrect, and it's not "rewriting history" to tune models so they know the difference between what's happened so far and what's allowable, or possible in a just world.


Maybe it would have the Constitution thrown in there also and figure out that "women cannot be President" is untrue? Sort of like in the real world.

Because otherwise, I guess I agree, you only know that you are taught and presented; AI especially because there is no intelligence in it whatsoever, only endless if blocks tuned for correlation.


That is not my point. Even if we had a model that could portray reality as objective as possible, a lot of people wouldn't like that and be actually offended by it.

This has also been going on a lot in the "representation" discourse.

A bohemian village 500 years ago would have been 100% white in almost all circumstances. Surgents would be male. Telephone scammers Indian and so on.

But in many ways, simply showing reality is not only not wanted but even offensive. What has to be shown is an idealized version of reality that we want to achieve and that is "more diversity". And what is maximum diversity? Zero white people.

> If you trained a model purely on past history, it would see a 1:1 correlation between "US President" and "man" and decide that women cannot be President.

Why would you think that? You and me also know the history but also realize that a woman can be president.


I think a model that is historically 100% accurate demographically, while also reflecting current or maybe even slight optimism about demographic balance when giving results not bound to a particular historical period, would be acceptable to the vast majority of people, especially if that can be rigorously shown through statistical sampling.


> For such a supposedly revolutionary advancement.

The technology is objectively not ready, at least to keep the promises that are/have been advertised.

I am not going to get too opinionated, but this seems to be a widespread theme, and to people that don't respond to marketing advances (remember Tivo?), but are willing to spend real money and real time, it would be "nice" if there was signalling to this demographic.


That struck me as well. While the training data is biased in various ways (like media in general are), it should however also contain enough information for the AI to be able to judge reasonably well what a less biased reality-reflecting balance would be. For example, it should know that there are male nurses, black politicians, etc., and represent that appropriately. Black Nazi soldiers are so far out that it sheds doubt on either the AI’s world model in the first place, or on the ability to apply controlled corrections with sufficient precision.


You are literally saying that the training data, despite its bias, should somehow enable the AI to correct to acheive a different understanding than that bias, which is self-contradictory. You are literally suggesting that the data both omits and contains the same information.


I wonder if we’ll ever get something like ‘AI-recursion’, where you get an AI to apply specific transformations to data which is then used to train on, sort of like machines making better machines.

E.g. take some data A, and then have a model (for instance ChatGPT-like) extrapolate based on it, potentially adding new depths or details about the given data.


Apparently the biases in the output tend to be stronger than what is in the training set. Or so I read.


[flagged]


This argument could be used for anything.

"I love it when black people cope and seethe about having to use separate water fountains. Imagine what holocaust victims who died of thirst in auschwitz would say about having to use a separate water fountain."

Apologies to HN community for using a "swipe" here but idk how else to characterize how bad this argument is.


Would a company be liable to uphold its promises if a rogue human customer service agent promised something ridiculous such as 1 million dollars worth of free flights?


No, the specific employee would most likely be liable if there is criminal conduct (this varies obviously). But a chatbot is not a person.


> But a chatbot is not a person.

We live in an interesting world. In the US, a corporation is legally a person, and a chatbot is not a person[0]. I'm looking forward to the first Supreme Court case involving a corporation consisting of chatbots.

[0] I'm handwaving in this lead-in to the fantasy here, so, dear reader, please give me a break for oversimplifying and ignoring technicalities.


The company would have to prove the human was knowingly acting outside of their job/training and was disciplined for that. Such discipline must be on the path to firing the employee if the behavior isn't corrected. Note that training is important here, an employee who isn't trained is assumed to have more authorization than someone who is.

Or in this case they need to take the AI out of service immediately until they can get a corrected version that does not do such a thing. I will accept that the AI can be tricked to do such a thing and remain in service, but only if they can show the tricks are something an honest human wouldn't attempt. (I don't know what this is, but I'll allow the idea for someone else to propose in enough detail that we can debate if a honest people would ever do that)


Google "too good to be true contract law" and there's some info, seems the answer is "no".


hopefully


The Turing test of the future is going to be start a politically incorrect discussion with a suspected bot and see if it treats different groups differently.


And failing will be the new passing.


... what's the "pass" condition?


That it doesn't immediately spit out a blurb either for or against race or other group-based discussions/reasoning? People are a lot typically more guarded in controversial topics but LLMs can't help but spit out some kind of boilerplate.


I don't know exactly, but this article may serve as a prime example.

https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/chatgpt-goes-viral-fo...


I think this dialog from Heathers would probably be a better guide for how to respond:

> Veronica Sawyer: This may seem like a really stupid question...

> J.D.: There are no stupid questions.

> Veronica Sawyer: You inherit 5 million dollars the same day aliens land on the earth and say they're going to blow it up in 2 days. What do you do?

> J.D.: That's the stupidest question I've ever heard.


Not disregarding and condescendingly educating your interlocutor is a good hint.


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