How We'll build sustainable, scalable, secure infrastructure for an AI future | Hacker News Reader

How We'll build sustainable, scalable, secure infrastructure for an AI future

cloud.google.com

38 pointszekrioca17 comments

> Towards sustainable systems

The same words as 'Not sustainable systems'. This does nowhere near enough to create true sustainability. As long as we allow drivel corpo-blogspam like this, we will never be sustainable.

You don't build things that must be changed to be sustainable, you build things TO BE sustainable. That is true human centric design.

Also, “trusted,” but there is no mention of “trustworthy.”

Those are terms of art. Given the author of the blog post, I think they actually mean they are building regulatory infrastructure to get (coerce) people to trust stuff based on external / top-down policy, regardless of whether the stuff you have to trust is secure.

This is a great feature for state actors, regulatory compliance shops and Google shareholders, but it’s an anti-feature for end users and businesses that actually care about security.

I have a lot of difficulties to associate future and Google in the same sentence. All I think about is deprecation and shutdown when I see anything from Google.

All I think is Google having its lunch eaten by startups who move faster and build better software than whatever they cook up.

Not going to happen when Google (or other similar tech giants) can just buy out (and potentially shut down) their potential competition.

It already has happened

There’s a new buzzword in town that’ll be stamped on everything presentation and sales pitches

A couple months ago I was enrolled in an oracle training, in 1h I saw many instances of "AI" and "blockchain" repeated over and over again sometime in the same sentence.

Similar tones to oil companies ‘advancing energy progress’. They refuse to feel any pain in the transition and will only hold society hostage to maintain shareholder profits. It’s a twisted story that they rely on the free market to fix the issues while demanding tax credits and government research freebies while still manipulating legislation to their favor in every step.

Well if Google didn't bake planned obsolescence into every pixel phone and chromebook and coerce people to get new ones every two years that would actually do something laudable, but Google Wallet would cry so it's a no-go.

Pixel now has seven years of support and Chromebooks have ten years.

I was, in fact, aware of this! I just don't buy that Google would render this meaningless, and not even via /killedbygoogle. iPhones famously have this problem where they start to slow down whenever Apple decides it's time for you to buy a new device. I have no doubt that Google would cut engineering corners or employ every incrementalist trick in the book to still get the revenue of planned obsolescence while touting how sustainable the company is.

related .. new AI tech in the USA used to make city police services, as venture .. the words they start the press release with are .. yes you know it .. "sustainable". Apparently this word is flexible enough for almost any occasion !

My god, their "Sustainability" section is gross.

All the things they're suggesting are essentially programs to figure out, sustainability, and not at all actually programs that implement it.

'We're gonna have so many conversations at company-paid dinners about how we could make our business less environmentally-damaging! Aren't we great!? Please clap.'

The metrics one in particular is even more gross, because

> "This work will enable an apples-to-apples data-driven approach to assess the best approaches to help achieve our shared goals."

is just saying that they don't accept current sustainability methods as being 'fair' enough to them- not "apples-to-apples" comparisons- to allow them to consume more and emit more than others like they think they should be entitled to, just because they're larger.

Like, no, businesses do not have some inherent right to exist. If your business cannot exist without causing harm, no one has to allow you a 'reasonable' or 'fair' amount of harm to do as a baseline.

It's bizarre because realistically, Google as a company basically only consumes electricity. That's it's dominant environmental input. Even E-waste is going to be irrelevant - just put it in a container in the desert somewhere for the next 1000 years.

So their entire sustainability model can basically just be: "solar panels and some type of energy storage".

My thoughts on all of Microsoft’s sustainability objectives and claims too. Invest in about 10% real flashy offsets but buy some credits so sweep the rest under the carpet

It's make-work for bureaucrats.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com