etruong42

I frame it more of a moral problem. Like, at least 90% a moral problem as a conservative estimate. People need to care in aggregate. There are forces that make people care less. Perhaps US healthcare is a prime example. Medical professionals are burning out, prices are going through the roof, and outcomes are getting worse all at the same time. If there are doctors who are working themselves ragged AND people are still paying through the nose, why is healthcare still getting worse?

The same forces that we can see as plain as day in U.S. healthcare are affecting... everything.

You might be presuming a culture that protects free expression. Free expression is hard to protect. Sure, you could express your experience, but it could threaten or offend someone "with power" and they use their "power" to punish you and suppress the ideas you're trying to express.

Define "republican". I am sympathetic to many sides. I would equate this comment to a comment that asks "how can you liberals/wokists/etc defend this" if the post were about California's "Stop Nick Shirley Act" or something.

For those without the power to change reprehensible institutions, invoking this level of tribalism only further entrenches those with power because we remain powerlessly bickering with each other rather than uniting.

It also goes to explain why comp is so high for executives. Executives leaving may also leave a terrible impression to the market.

To be clear, even if this is an accurate observation, I am not arguing in favor of high executive pay.

> The market rewards being right in a way that no argument ever will.

Identifying the market is also important. There's the free market of capitalism. Then there are the other powers even in that market that can still say you're wrong, such as regulators, governments, politics, violence, etc.

If you're looking for an outcome, you still need to assess the circumstances that can generate that outcome, even if the author has identified one particular strategy that people often get wrong and one possible alternative.

> nobody other than Justin is owed a clearly articulated reason

Justin has made this a public issue through their public declarations. If Justin is owed a clearly articulated reason (as you have stated), then Justin has essentially shared that right to the public. If "Google" claims that Justin has been given that reason (which does not appear to be the case), then someone is essentially lying, and this (hypothetical?) claim should be the focus of our conversation.

> But I would wager that in most situations it's better that the company stays silent.

I agree, it's "better" for the "company" by minimizing the risk of blowback to the people with the authority to terminate Justin. It is definitely not better for the "company" as a whole or society as a whole. We have an extremely credible person claiming that the "company" fired them for creating a product that people loved and without any claim that they broke the rules. The "company" has not provided any explanation to other employees about what Justin did so that other employees could avoid the same fate!

I would say this is where our language has shaped our thinking. You used the word "company" in a way that I would argue that it means the authority structure. If we define "company" to also mean collectively all the people of the company and our collective place and impact in the world, I don't think we could conceivably say that "it's better that the company stays silent", especially in this case.

Create a product that people loved? This could have been redirected to make leadership look good. This event demonstrates that impactful products can be extremely polarizing - you could become the hero or the villain or a bit of both. You can no longer be a quiet contributor.

I currently work at Google. If the Eye of Sauron ever casts its gaze on me, I'm sure my history of critical posts will be silently used against me.

The public face that Googlers put on is extremely sycophantic to Google, imho. At best, this sycophancy is unconscious, self-preserving behavior in a vicious culture that can fire someone like Justin Poehnelt who ostensibly created something people LOVED and still fired them without a clearly articulated reason that counterbalances their positive contributions. At worst, this sycophancy is conscious, brown nosing behavior in order to climb to the highest rung of the career ladder by shedding all burdens of self-consistency, self-reflection, and noble intentions.

Please don't read into this comment what isn't said. I'm not saying Google is entirely evil, nor am I saying everyone other than me is sycophantic. There are those who recognize the callous culture that is often present at Google, and generally speaking, this bad behavior is only called out by Googlers in subtle ways, such as random HN comments :)

This is also my experience at Google, and I have not really figured out the incentives. Plenty of people seem _perfectly comfortable_ with the idea that they are being paid tens of millions of dollars when nothing that they do matters. And it takes enormous effort to get anything actually done in the face of our enormous bureaucracies. I have a few hypotheses:

  - Career progression is still a motivation. If there are enough sufficiently motivated people in the organization (whether they come from upper management, middle management, or frontline workers), leaders need to harness that motivation and move it in a direction and potentially dole out career rewards. Otherwise, that motivation that is not properly harnessed can be destructive.
  - Similar to the previous hypothesis, they might axed _because_ nothing they do matters. So they may thrash about, making enough noise and movement to convince enough people that they might actually be doing something important, and it would be risky to dismiss them from their position.
  - Turf wars/politics/etc. If you do "nothing", then you look replaceable. If you're just a very expensive paper-weight, someone may try to usurp your highly-paid paperweight position. Thus, the nash equilibrium is to do something that makes your position less likely to be usurped by making it look difficult or that you are uniquely qualified to do it.

> I've heard tales of 300k/yr engineers that just sit there and wait for a manager to ask if they're blocked, or just sit there until they're told what to do.

This is widely presumed to reflect reality within a 1-2 degrees of separation from myself as well as from many of the people I speak to. Part of the problem is that there is always plausible deniability. Like the adage of how unwise it is to fire custodians just because you never see a mess and therefore you never actually see the custodians do anything, it may be "unwise" to lose the presence of these 300k/yr engineers just because they somehow actually keep things going smoothly.

> I constantly reiterate to people, whether they're reporting to me or not, that they need to speak up when there's a blocker.

This is presuming a particular/healthy culture where open communication is valued, appreciated, and not punished. This is not always the case, and an "objective description of a blocker" could result in some bruised egos where it transforms into blame upon some person or team for being or causing the blocker. People who experienced these cultures may be waiting for private conversations (such as 1-on-1s) that minimizes the risk, and they may be waiting to identify you (or whomever they are talking to) as a person who could make communicate the nature of the blockage in a politically favorable or neutral manner. All of this may be happening without the people involved consciously aware of this behavior of pushing out information through private conversations. And this maintains plausible deniability for ALL parties. The person who is blocked is never identified. The person who may have been the blocker is never identified. And hopefully everything gets fixed before anything is actually worth escalating.

Your story (and the other posts commenting on lack of intellectual curiosity) fits into a larger model of the world that I prescribe to. Being labeled "well-known" or "smart" doesn't seem to require intellectual openness anymore. In fact, openness seems to be penalized. Being open means potentially exposing yourself to scenarios where you are not the smartest/authoritative, and that reduces your authority, so you avoid those scenarios to preserve your authority. Even when you are not "the authority", being open could be a threatening signal to the authority, where you and your "openness" could be a vector that introduces ideas/scenarios that reduces their authority. So long as authority is solidified by this lack of openness, actually being open could limit your career potential.

Seeing this happen in real time is helping me understand how authoritarian regimes/institutions/movements rise to power.

> It has never been cheaper or easier to influence millions of people, either deniably-subtly (though omission, selective results, "hallucinations" etc) or via sock puppetting.

I would argue it is already happening. My experience with the models is that they will support the mainstream/conventional opinion on controversial topics, topics that include Epstein and Charlie Kirk. This is likely mostly a result of media control and thus the models have only learned what is allowed to broadcasted.

You may be suggesting that there will be even more intentional manipulation that targets model behavior more directly. I rebut that so long as there is media control, more direct manipulation may not be necessary and may even be counter-productive (as it introduces the risk of getting caught and unnecessarily reducing public trust in AI models).

P.S. Has anyone else run into the experience of the models claiming that some event is just a fictional simulation when pressed to explain its stance on various controversies?

While I work for Google, I don't speak for Google. I might have some observations that might help explain poor documentation. If I had one word, I would say "politics". The less political the technology, the easier it is for the experts to speak freely. The more political the circumstances, the more difficult it is to speak freely, identify real experts, call out mistakes or errors that might make someone lose face, etc. The more political the technology, the more people might put on the line in terms of their career, so the more dangerous it may be to say anything.

The first one to reach AGI is the winner-takes-all. AGI or something similar will result in exponential progress to super-intelligence since AGI can just improve itself.

The transformer architecture itself was published 8 years ago

This is amazing ingenuity and collaboration.

I wonder if Rainbolt (or other GeoGuessrs) gets regular requests for consultation, or maybe he should if he is not already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Rainbolt

I also suspect there is a vortex of temptation as you become an increasingly interesting person. Rich, famous, powerful, well-connected, beautiful etc are all interesting characteristics to nefarious people since those characteristics can advance their own nefarious interests. I suspect that, as you become an increasingly interesting person, you must actively defend your peace. It's not like they actively undermine their own peace, at least not always.

This vortex of temptation appears to have many points of origin, such as cults like Scientology, or particular persons such as the casually described "gold diggers", or... whatever organization Epstein is a part of, etc.

Is it particularly wild? There are many possible interpretations of your statement. Do you expect the people on this site to be particularly different from the voters who almost put Trump into office 2016 and actually voted him into office 2024? Or did you mean to express shock that anyone at all would vote for Trump compared to voting for someone like Biden?

(As a US citizen self-identified moderate) I think I understand some of the intentions of de-dollarization. Being the reserve currency is an exorbitant privilege of forcing the world to allow the US to essentially print money that the world ends up using. It is not a privilege that "the average American" gets to enjoy for many, many reasons. It might be telling that no other nation is trying to fill that role of reserve currency with their own currency; perhaps it's not as much of a privilege as we might think. Given the political climate, both domestic and foreign, I think de-dollarization has large potential upside for the well-being of humans.

I see the US trying to position itself so that it is no longer the world power/world police, or at least significantly reduce the magnitude of the role it plays as the world police. This will bring about a new world order and upend existing diplomatic relationships which will bring about chaos and uncertainty.

I disagree with kidnapping Maduro and posturing to annex Greenland on the grounds of national sovereignty; I actually like the rules-based world order (even if I am not so attached to the USD being the reserve currency).

The actions of the Trump administration clearly and perhaps even intentionally puts the US hegemony at great risk and thus also invites much chaos. This, I still humbly see the possible upside. The Trump administration is also accelerating the deterioration of the rules-based world order. This, I do not particularly support, though I see the possible counterargument that this is only accelerating what was game-theoretically inevitable anyways.

It's nice to see someone else (unsurprisingly) reached identical conclusions as me! I would like to try adding a 3rd reason: dumb subordinates don't upset the apple cart because they don't really have the capacity to do so, and people in power hate upsetting the apple cart as they love the status quo that puts them in power.

Smart, moral people have practically a compulsion to improve things, or at least call out idiocy.

I would also add the need for an actual reason to promote the PHB, and I would argue that one quantifiable way upper management can try to argue for a promotion of the PHB is how "hard they work" (regardless if they achieve results or not). Putting in many, many hours also help promote PHBs who will defer to authority.

It also helps explain the phenomenon where the manager class becomes soulless. Institutions that focus on preserving their own power rather than creating value will promote people (at least to middle management) who are willing to put their nose to the grindstone, sacrifice their health and relationship, producing nothing of value, all to walk on some concept of a career treadmill faster.

Money has limited impact and has all sorts of drawbacks.

A more impactful change from firms might be to celebrate and reward community contributions of their own employees. This can establish a more productive culture than just money. If an engineering company is willing to donate money (yay!), perhaps consider making sure that employees are celebrated for contributions they make in a manner that is similar to how we currently celebrate monetary transactions.

For an example of the opposite, Google laid off their entire Python team, something that also made HN front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40171125

The Google of 2026 is a very different Google of 2006. In 2006, everyone who left Google had only praises to sing about the employer they were leaving! It is very telling when the Google of 2026 has had years of highly reputable engineers voluntarily leaving (even before the layoffs) who are so bold as to openly criticize Google in the social environment that we're in. Openly criticizing Google requires great personal fortitude, since being a critic only burns bridges and reduces your career opportunities. That is to say nothing about the criticisms that never get published outside of Google.

As a Google engineer, I believe it is largely accurate to say that we "don't care", or at least "not caring" is the emergent behavior at Google. There are many things we don't care about at Google that I think would shock many engineers who have a healthy amount of pride in craftsmanship. It's hard for me to precisely describe why we "don't care", but I will try anyways.

As the parent commenter has pointed out, pulling in client code can be very large. If the backend team owns the client code, they may not be properly incentivized to improve the product of the clients, sadly. And calling it the backend "team" might be overly simplistic. There may be additional layers to the the client code owned by other teams, such as different protocol implementation and definitions of those protocols, etc. Pushing for change can be viewed negatively, since it could leave a poor impression. E.g. if you improve someone else's code, that could make them look bad, and that would have negative consequences for you as you have violated (a variation of) Greene's first law of power: never outshine the master.

Since the code and the organization are so convoluted and complicated, it's a lose-lose proposition. If you mess up your optimization, you will get blamed. Even if you succeed, you may have reduced someone's reputation of someone you can't even identify in the bureaucracy, and thus have made an enemy of someone you can't even identify.

I got one of these: https://chompshop.com/collections/chompsaws/products/chompsa...

So long as you have a steady stream of cardboard (whether from packages shipped to your home or it ends up in your friendly neighbors' recycling), I anticipate that you could always make things, solo or with friends.

I've heard that one can use wheat paste as cardboard glue.

My hope is to have the combination of a cardboard "saw" and cardboard glue is to result in something like (nail-free) carpentry that kids can perform nearly entirely unsupervised.

Even making simple shapes that can go into dioramas and be props for roleplaying would already be great, I hope!

Brookline was rated Best Places to Live for Quality of Life in the U.S. in 2025-2026 by US News which "measures how satisfied residents are with their daily lives, and takes into account factors like crime, quality and availability of health care, quality of education and average commute time"

I also live nearby.

I say it as a matter of having eaten other sausages as well and discussing the various sausages with my peers (if I may extend the analogy).

I'm a Google engineer. I often don't even recommend our products.

The internet was about freedom (to most of its initial creators). It is now a cornerstone of the surveillance state. And yet, independent journalism is now possible only mostly through the existence of the internet.

AI & crypto may end up in a similar bucket. It is a paradoxical enabler of both freedom and imprisonment. No one gets to build a technology a declare a problem solved. Alfred Nobel made nitroglycerin safe and thus paradoxically ended up being called the Merchant of Death.

Freedom is not free. It is an eternal struggle.

I am grateful for the builders who try to build something for freedom. I do not spurn them when their invention gets corrupted. It is now our job and the job of future generations to fight the corruption.

Those in power (such as those in the corporate managerial class) are trying to consolidate power by replacing humans with AI. There is the nice story of trying to improve overhead and increase efficiencies. There is also the ugly story of those in power trying to leverage AI for expert opinions even in the face of dissenting human experts.

For now, the human dissenters have a lot of leverage because AI still makes very clear and obvious errors sometimes, and it would be a political nightmare for a decision-maker to be accused of erring on the side of AI by recognized human experts who dissented. I wonder if there will come a time that AI opinion would be on par or even favored over the human expert because the human would be considered more fallible. This doesn't even have to be true - it only has to be sufficiently perceived to be sufficiently true.

Power tries to centralize and consolidate. See the largely successful attempts to consolidate media outlets like local news stations as an example.

The abstract suggests that elites "shape" mass preference, but I think the degree to which this shaping occurs is overblown in many ways (and perhaps underestimated in other ways, such as through education).

AI, even if it is not powerfully "shaped" by the "elites", can push mass preference in predictable ways. If this is true, this phenomenon by itself allows the elites to tighten their grip on power. For example, Trump's rise to power upset (some of) the elites because they really didn't understand the silent, mass preference for Trump.

This could also slow social progress, since elites often cause stagnation rather than progress. AI could generate acceptable, "expert" opinions for the issues that they usually would rely on experts today. I see some signs of that today, where those with authority try to prefer the AI answer in opposition to dissenting, human expert opinions. Human experts seem to be winning, for now.