I'm noticing a few commenters who work (worked?) at Google (inferred from comment history) who are critical of this person's actions.
First: you ought to disclose that information when commenting on a topic that relates in some way to your financial incentives.
Second: when I worked at Google under Chrome it was very common for individuals and teams to publish projects to open source repositories under Google-managed Github orgs. In fact, for most of my tenure ('15-'21) my team had license to publish to Github unilaterally (no approval from the open source office required). Great power comes with great responsibility, but also I would put to you that publishing an open source project like this one is part of Google's culture.
Firing seems an extreme consequence for the perceived damage of a long-tenured employee's behavior in this case.
Former Googler here, and one that has open-sourced projects while working in Cloud.
This is certainly not the case in other product areas and for specifically for something that uses the Google name.
If I was expected to go through a full IARC committee in order to get my little Discord bot open sourced under my own account, something that uses the Google name would likely have to get IARC + Legal approvals, along with a proper launch/privacy review.
The OP also notes that they had a competing product in the process of development when they "launched" theirs, likely leading to significant internal confusion, and is something that would've been caught during a review.
I'm gunna be real, this whole thing smells of "I'm purposely bit telling the whole truth" and looks like clout chasing.
Google contains multitudes. I don't doubt that your personal experience was the opposite end of the spectrum from mine.
I maintain that firing is an extreme resolution here (taking the claims at face value of course). Surely this employee has demonstrated the capacity to deliver impact and could be redirected if properly incentivized.
As a Xoogler you should know that the "impact" they want is, making leadership look good, what you shipped or even whether or not you shipped is nigh irrelevant.
I don't see anything about the product that made Google leadership look bad? I don't see that anyone else external to Google thought so either, before they fired him? Firing him makes them look bad, however.
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.
It does not contain people who flout Google's privacy, security, or intellectual property policies. Those people are, quite rightfully, un-contained from Google with speed they can't muster for anything else in the company.
It's weird that he even had the ability to create public repos inside the official Google Workspace org then. That said, I agree that some information seems to be missing. Like, why not instead fire the guy who announced the project on X and who I presume is his manager? Confusing.
Interesting. I did a bit of digging and the disclaimer about not being an officially supported Google product was there from the start. There was briefly a logo that used Google colors[0] but it seems extreme to fire someone over such a small misstep. I'd say either HR gave him a bogus reason like you said or he's not telling the whole story.
> This is certainly not the case in other product areas and for specifically for something that uses the Google name.
Sure, but it's a slap on the wrists. It seems like an extreme reaction.
> The OP also notes that they had a competing product in the process of development when they "launched" theirs, likely leading to significant internal confusion, and is something that would've been caught during a review.
Again, they could have just asked them to retire theirs in favour of the official one. Rather than be a problem, it could have been an opportunity.
If you work at Google, there's a very clear policy for doing any outside "work" (volunteering, an open source side project, a business, being on a board, etc.): if it's related to your day-to-day work and/or related to Google's business (which virtually anything software is), you need to fill out a disclosure form and get a go-ahead from legal.
Obviously a Google Workspace CLI is related to Google. Why would you release this without getting a go-ahead?
I'm sad that a clearly talented engineer who cares about users was fired. I wish more engineers cared enough to make things like this. But it seems like poor judgment from the engineer's side :(
(Note: I do work at Google. This is my personal writing, though. Nothing to do with my employer)
> getting grilled by legal about why the Google logo and brand colors are on the Google Workspace GitHub code repositories.
The wording is very ambiguous, but to me it suggests the opposite. If legal was question why the logo was on the account profile picture, not just that specific repo's content, that would imply the entire account was unauthorized, right?
It seems like the guy believed he was just doing his job for Google, not moonlighting? He released the project on Google’s own GitHub. It seems more like he misunderstood the necessary steps before making that release.
Exactly my thoughts. This reads to me like a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, and a scape goat being jettisoned to save face afterwards.
> It seems more like he misunderstood the necessary steps before making that release.
Dude worked there for 7 years. Saying "oh, he just didn't understand the policy for going through legal/management approval" just does absolutely not pass the sniff test.
Plus there are 57 projects in that workspace from the same team, most using the same API, in quite a few the fired dev is participating. On top of that, the CLI project wasn't even deleted.
If there were/are real problems there, Google hasn't acted on them in any proper manner, and has not communicated properly with any of the parts involved, which is natural when legal/HR is involved.
Am I crazy for thinking that an employer should and has no say in whatever the fuck I do outside of work? As long as I'm not messing with company IP, I should be able to do what I want, no?
Like, I should be able to even berate my employer, as long as I'm not doing it from a persona that's directly tied to my employer e.g. my real name or git handle etc. They might not like it, but they sure as shit shouldn't be able to fire me for it. This would include working on extending a company's products, so long as I don't use the proprietary knowledge I'm privy to.
I realize that this guy published his thing under an alias directly tied to his work. My question was sparked from the general sentiment of your reply - and I am being genuine, sometimes I feel like this stance of mine is somehow "too radical"
I understand that this is not reality in most of the world, but I'm genuinely asking. I'm in the EU and I'm not in the software/silicon valley industry; if that helps with context.
Regardless of what you or I think of the policy, most major software companies (Google included) have clauses in your employment contract around how you represent the company in a real or percieved official capacity. This wasn't just some account persona; it was published as if it were an official open source product endorsed by Google (complete with branding). The author apparently didn't have permission or legal right to do so, and publicly violated their agreement.
Was the response short sighted? Up for debate. But unfortunately for the author, they have no real legal standing on this matter. Had it been their own repo, sans any branding, it would likely have been fine.
> I should be able to even berate my employer, as long as I'm not doing it from a persona that's directly tied to my employer e.g. my real name or git handle etc. They might not like it, but they sure as shit shouldn't be able to fire me for it.
There are many things you should be able to do publicly without repercussion from your employer. However, your example is berating them, and I'm taking that literally: "to criticize in an angry manner".
If I read this correctly, then you believe your employer should be able to fire you if you angrily criticize them in public under your name. I agree in principle, that could damage their trust in your ability to do your job. Depending on specifics, that damage could be enough to justify firing you.
I don't understand why doing so anonymously should change the potential damage to their trust in you, if they later learn you said what you did.
I pretty much agree with you in principle. I'm in the US (not in silicon valley but working in software for over a decade).
Given my stance on a lot of things though I don't know how much evidence this is that this view isn't "too radical" but my (biased) take is that a lot of good ideas are radical until they aren't, and usually the ones don't ever become mainstream have better counterarguments than anything I've heard or been able to come up with against this view. I still don't really expect it to change in my lifetime though (in terms of what's legally allowed) just because of how massive a shift it would be.
This ethos doesn't gel with the old ethos and that's where the disconnect comes from.
At one point Google was there to build cool shit and enable people to do it; not extract maximal amount of value and "being Evil" by the values of its time.
The open source policy described above was in place 16 years ago (I went through it to continue working on some existing projects), and I doubt it was very new then.
This is clearly something done in official capacity, during working hours, with the knowledge and support of his manager, who announced the CLI.
It says "This is not an officially supported Google product" because it's a DevRel sample/experiment, just like dozens of other Google repositories made by Google employees as part of their job.
That's because from what i gather so far it is a google repo with other tools using the same api they kept it in there since and even had it announced by the guy's manager at the time.
You know this GitHub account might be more official than I thought? Maybe the problem is more to do with their approval process, which I guess negates a lot of my comments.
Build cool shit and follow the proper release procedures for it. There is a huge difference between something unrelated to your employer on a personal repo, youremployerrepo/api-samples, and calling something "Employer Majorproduct CLI" on an official employer repo which is bound to be confused for an official release.
I would have been fired from every employer I've ever worked for of any size for doing something like that - including Google circa 2018.
None of that is relevant. You're working on things for their employer, they control when and if anything is released. Most of us have worked on projects that were cancelled - even when that happens you don't just release it anyway.
I was there in 2005 and we were basically told point-blank that we couldn't open source _anything_ without running it by a manager first. This was at a time where all engineers were basically housed in the main 4 buildings on the north campus, so not yet all that big. Not sure what grace they fell from, but I found it to be a nauseating sanctimonious place even then.
Pretty sure that the agreement that Google employees sign (a "contract") when hired reflects exactly that. At least at did when I joined (I left > 3 years ago, speaking here only for myself...)
The answer is not that it matters, but as a matter of financial and legal controls they need to know and approve. Do they care? They probably are delighted, but also want to get all the paperwork set up to avoid problems.
The space this comes from is the legal undue influence side where they need to give notice to shareholders about potential conflicts of interest, and it needs to be in the form of having a clear positive audit trail that they have told people to follow a clear policy with no grey area so that any deviation is an accident not willful failure to get people to tell them.
In California, no. Under Labor Code section 96(k), you generally cannot be disciplined or fired for engaging in legal outside of work activities. If they do, you can sue for lost wages.
That's political speech, and specifically protected in California outside of work. If you fire your employee for political activities outside of work, you still have to pay them, because they're going to sue you for lost wages, and win.
Then you don’t know the history of the non-compete agreement in the tech industry.
For decades, people were wringing their hands and holding themselves back from living well because they couldn’t possibly work for another software company after Google, Microsoft, whomever - because the contract stated they couldn’t work for competitors.
Well, then States showed up and said “that’s not even legal”, and people stopped handwringing.
But before, it looked very much like this thread.
If I was working for a dentist, none of your questions would be viable (let alone reasonable) for the employer to be asking.
Legally, yes. I mean it still depends on a lot of things but mostly at will employment contracts will have clauses about such things. You will have to get approval from legal before you can get on a board of even a dog rescue or a glove repair company. A practical consideration is simple like if you are a google exec and you are on board of a dog rescue company and that company gets hit with allgeations that you are just shooting all the dogs and selling their meat to some foreign nation. News will cover it as "Google Exec on Board of Evil Dog Rescue Company" so you extend that repuation risk to Google as well since you are actively employed there. Obviously an extereme example but that's the kind of logic they think of.
Morals imo often have nothing to do with law, but fairness does.
But that’s not who is being discussed. Why create a new topic?
If a low-level employee is part of a rescue accused of shooting all of the dogs, that’s just another day.
> News will cover it as "Google Exec on Board of Evil Dog Rescue Company" so you extend that repuation risk to Google as well since you are actively employed there
No problem with a standard morality clause in the contract, so they can pull the plug when you embarrass them.
I do have a problem with the idea that I need to check in with my employer every time I take a shit in my personal life.
Its not a new topic, the same applies for any employee as well. And no that's not just another day from the pov of google. That example was too extreme but even for minor things that can be a security concern etc if they are in active positions like that.
Also we are not talking about pooping? Why change the topic?
That’s why I went with it - yes, a one-of-thousands engineer (or janitor, for that matter) from Google who also headed or even founded a dog shelter that shot all of the dogs is non-news, as far as Google and their legal team are concerned.
Same as an employee’s “pooping”.
Enforce or enact a morality clause, or explicitly pay me not to do things - beyond that, my business after hours is mine.
"Right" is a pretty dubious way of framing it when basically every company works this way. You don't really have any choice in the matter. Passing a law about this wouldn't be removing any rights of individuals any more than we "removed" their right to enter a contract for pay lower than minimum wage or with unsafe working conditions.
A more fair way of phrasing it would be to say that we should remove the right of companies to require it.
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 :)
Bottom line, he did something that affected the company without any authority. His action implied the product was Google blessed without the company fully knowing about it. Google has spent billions to protect its reputation and then you have a random guy put out a self create product without the company even knowing. They had a case for suing him for millions. Of Course, they wouldn't have been able to collect but it would have been hell for him. They also had a case for criminal fraud. All in all he's lucky he only got fired.
No they didn't. Any judge would laugh the big corporation out of the courtroom over this. The amount of evidence in favor of the employee would turn this into a frivolous lawsuit.
>Of Course, they wouldn't have been able to collect but it would have been hell for him.
You're assuming that an improbable event happens and are extrapolating from there. A more realistic case is that this is settled out of court simply to avoid involving the court, which is exactly what happened here: they fired him.
>They also had a case for criminal fraud.
No, they didn't.
I'm not sure in what alternative universe you're living in here.
It’s a CLI for Google Workspace. Google Workspace is a genuine Google Product.
Edit reply to person below (sorry, rate limit):
> Just because you work for Google does not mean you can release products under their name.
Releasing open source projects that use company APIs is about 50% of the work of devrel staff. The rest is making content about what you and your customers did/could build.
Google Workspace is but the CLI is not. These are 2 related but different products. Had he just released it under his name then that wouldn't have been such a big issue, maybe, but he used the Google logo which implied it was Google blessed. If I did the same thing, they would have a case for suing me. Just because you work for Google does not mean you can release products under their name. Google spends countless of man-hours to make sure whatever product they put out is as good as possible. And support it on any issues that are found along the way. All companies protect their logo to a high degree simply because of the implications it has when people see it.
It was not released under his name. It is in Google's own googleworkspace Github Organization, alongside 57 other similar projects that consume from the same API.
People are making a crazy amount of assumptions in those threads only to defend Google and dunk on someone who was just fired.
The repo belongs to Google, the organization belongs to Google, the job of the fired dev was to produce code just like the one he was fired for, and there's 56 other repos with similar code in there, a lot of them using the same API.
Yeah, it's pretty telling that comments like the one you replied to are all over this thread, and every time a response like yours is posted, no one seems to have any rebuttal. It's pretty clear that there's plenty of precedent for what this guy did and no legitimate reason to consider it a departure from what he and his coworkers had been doing for a while.
If you only read a condensed summary of what happened, you might be able to come up with a narrative that fits those high-level details that makes the firing seem reasonable. That narrative has no basis in reality though, other than being the theoretically plausible justification they came up with for firing him.
Here's the rebuttal, look through these https://github.com/orgs/googleworkspace/repositories , one is not like the others. They're things like Python samples or a Google Drive picker web element. The 56 other repos probably got properly approved and this one didn't. This one also got a Twitter announcement saying "Introducing the Google Workspace CLI..." at the same time Google was working on an official Google Workspace CLI.
It's also possible this is all wrong and the author followed all the rules. That wouldn't be because Google actually benefits from making up reasons to fire good employees, only cause someone on the inside was scapegoating or glory-hogging. Tbh I doubt it.
I mean, the GP is being overdramatic but releasing a vibe coded cli frontend for an official product in a google github org and that uses your google account credentials is a big deal no matter how unofficial you claim it is in the readme.
This is extremely precedented. Google developer relations people do exactly that, all the time. Or at least they used to, all the folks I used to follow have left the company. You’ll find lots of open source projects in Google’s repositories which are just personal tools they built to scratch an itch, but are published under Google‘s name because that’s the preferred approach per their internal legal guidance.
I don’t know if this guy is telling the full story or not, I can see potential aggravating factors, but on the surface it’s a lot more reasonable than you’re letting on
It's true that it's rare to get fired for a tiny breach of policy, which is why I'm skeptical that the breach was so tiny as the post makes it seem. Corporate legal departments are busy, they do not generally go around grilling people (his words!) unless something's gone terribly wrong.
One obvious scenario where someone might be canned despite doing no real damage, and where legal might be forced to intervene, is if they made a knowingly false representation to obtain launch approval.
So is it normally allowed to publish a non-Google-affiliated repo under Google's brand? This seems weird to me, and I can't understand why he didn't just do it under his own name.
I did work at Google until a year ago, when I quit and sold my stock, but not in a team that remotely deals with open source so idk how this works.
Simply put: all work published to Google repos is implicitly affiliated with Google.
In my team's case we would include expectation-setting language in the README.md so that it was clear that the project was not an officially-supported Google product.
As far as I know, no-one ever lost their job for failing to set that expectation. A gentle correction from legal was sufficient to set the world right.
When I was there, there was no universal process; different teams had different processes based on their focus. There was a launch process for Google products and there was the open source office for approving open source code (which amounted to a rubber stamp in my experience; they mainly checked for boilerplate issues). As I said above, my team and others were allowed to publish at our discretion.
Even if this person violated that process, it is an extreme consequence to fire them for that infraction.
>there was the open source office for approving open source code (which amounted to a rubber stamp in my experience; they mainly checked for boilerplate issues)
In 2018 I applied for a permission to work on an open-source project, in my own spare time, and I was denied. The problem was the license (AGPL is like poison to corporations), but it's my after-hours side project anyway so I still don't get why it mattered.
They basically deny everything. They say they don't want to give bored people a reason to leave, but that's seemingly outweighed but not wanting to give bored people something besides their day job to focus on. Even at Google, plenty spend non-work hours on work, instead they might spend it on a side project.
They don't really have the teeth to deny it if you live in California, where there are laws partially invalidating those non-compete clauses, but most people will just accept it.
It's a fair point that it's still up, though looking just now for two minutes there are at least some issues with auth[1] which would make me really not trust it.
It was just speculation about what could be bad enough if they really did have permission to release it, but the OP is being so cagey below now I'm just wondering if they got release permission but misrepresented what they would be releasing or something.
> and is official [1]
FWIW no idea what you're trying to point out on that page unless you mean the one link to a different project in the same github org indicates the org is official, but that never seemed in doubt in this thread of comments.
> If that's a real problem and fireable offence, then there's people at Google that should be fired ASAP for failing to delete this repository.
Unclear what you're referring to here. Was it "misrepresented what they would be releasing"?
If that's the case, I disagree that the repo still existing is on its face evidence against that theory. It could be a perfectly fine tool, but if you lie on a release checklist, depending on what you lie about, it's easy enough to imagine a fireable offense. There are multiple ways that "it's easier to ask forgiveness" can backfire if there are legal things or organizational things you are knowingly avoiding.
Again, this is just speculation. I wouldn't personally fire someone for releasing a library that got popular, but its also speculation to suggest that's the only reason he was fired.
Maybe at this point it's even more disruptive to delete it since people are using it. There's a real reason to not want someone to release an official-looking CLI when you're already doing an actual official one for the same thing.
Idk if the firing was justified since he supposedly followed process and had manager approval, but that's only one side.
I don't know that I'd call the repo "non-Google-affiliated", but whatever it is, it is still up [1] in a google-owned github organization [2], which also includes several other repos with the line "This is not an officially supported Google product," such as this one that's two years old [3].
So, yeah, whatever it is, I'd say it looks normal.
This project is in an organization that has 57 other public repos with code by several other Google employees, is linked to by Google own documentation, and the only public member of the organization is (hopefully still) a Google employee.
Google has multiple Github Organizations that have all degrees of oficial-ness to it.
This is not someone releasing something in their private account and plastering Google logos over it.
First, to your point, I'm Not a googler or ex googler.
That being said, for what little may be worth, No company I worked for would be ok for me releasing unauthorized code to official public report with official logo and company name without some approval / discussion / disclosure, at whatever appropriate level that may be m. I'm curious, On your previous team, did your manager know and approve of open source publications? Team mates? Did they have names like "Google Hangouts X" and accompanying logos etc?
I guess what strikes me negatively and mutes my empathy is the "zero lessons learned" part of the tweet:
>>"I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted"
I'm not quite silicon valley enough to use the word disrupted unironically, and certainly not self-unaware enough to proclaim that as the one and only reason for my misfortunes. I hope they and any family they have are ok. I feel if they had actual grievance with the firing, they should've gone through appropriate legal remedy. Twitter drama is just a zero-win game to me :-/
So if this is a case where they weren't legally in the right, but were morally in the right, which is far more subjective, it makes sense to go the Twitter route since if they were morally in the right people would support them while legal discourse not. So morally they had a cool idea, put a lot of imagination and effort into it, it's an idea that was valuable to people, and maybe a big corp was blocking them for egotistical or whatever reasons, to me it makes sense what they did. I don't know if that was the case, but if a corporation is forcing you to with legal means not do what is perhaps your life work and good value for the society, there must be way beyond legal to do it. But clearly the pettiness of the company is showing here, who cares if this confuses people a bit, there's many other good ways to solve the situation by Google.
He's saying he went through the proper approvals. Google apparently doesn't think so. Not getting the full story here, but IF he really didn't get approval, I don't buy the whole "doing the right thing" argument. Could've done that without Google branding. If he got approval, Google is hurting itself in its confusion.
In any case, all I see, is that he built a cool thing, and Google failed to make it work whatever the process was. This is failure on Google's part in my view.
Even if he didn't do the proper process, this is just a CLI wrapper, and they should have made it proper after, not fired the person. And they should have thought long and hard why a person felt this had to be done. Or alternatively why was the person able to publish something as a new repository in their devrel github org if the release process is so vital for whatever reason.
Even if you have or had the legal right or whatever, it doesn't mean that you have to actually act on it. It speaks to some other sort of motivation to me.
It'll probably be both, they look on the inside but the employee is still fired. Doesn't matter if they decide later that the unofficial CLI is better than the real one, it's not justification to publicly break process.
> I'm not quite silicon valley enough to use the word disrupted unironically,
Same. Especially next to Google, all I can think of is "serious consequences for disruptive behavior" which meant breaking into an exec's office to protest
Most big companies attract rule followers. They err on the side of avoiding taking risks like this, which is why they work there (and why there’s so many in this thread talking about rules). It benefits big companies to have mostly rule followers because you can’t have a too many people going in different directions. You need stability and a unified direction, that usually comes from the rulers making the rules. The fewer rule breakers generally find their way to the top, or get canned
This employee’s decision to break the rules, while addressing a real need in the market, must have really pissed off some people above, for better or worse. Google could have just rolled with it but I’m sure it would have stepped on someone else’s plans. Career defining moment, but they didn’t have the political capital it seems. I don’t think they will have much trouble finding work elsewhere though
See also: Power: Why Some People Have It--And Others Don't
Corporations have money and money attracts lawyers. Some discipline would have been required for the trademark stuff because you have to be very careful about it or lose your job.
Now, did something cause other issues that converted this from formal "don't do that, use the official process" and nothing more? Sounds like something caused this to escalate. It could be toes were stepped on, could be a bad reaction to the warning, or could just be wanting to cut employee numbers in a shortsighted way.
Yeah I think I he could have done a better job communicating in that thread that creating Workspace CLI was literally his job. He didn’t go rouge or didn’t follow the process.
He was officially Google DevRel and routinely created such tools in the past. It’s not crazy to assume that if you build 56 tools and everything was fine, 57th tool should be the same.
If one Googler mentions anything about the past, another with supposedly longer tenure will come to call him/her not an OG original googler, and say that year wasn't the golden era of Google but an earlier year was
> First: you ought to disclose that information when commenting on a topic that relates in some way to your financial incentives.
I've never ever seen anyone, especially Apple shareholders disclose this here whenever they brush off something Apple did with malice - Eg. slowing down users' phones, spying on their siri recordings, etc.
Throttling is to avoid overloading degraded batteries. Replacing the battery alleviates the slowdowns. Apple didn't want your phone to shut off at 15% when the battery can't supply enough current to sustain full performance.
Siri recordings are only ever stored to improve Siri. Apple does not share personal data or recordings with advertisers. There was a lawsuit based on coincidence alone.
> Siri recordings are only ever stored to improve Siri. Apple does not share personal data or recordings with advertisers. There was a lawsuit based on coincidence alone.
Apple told the Guardian: “A small portion of Siri requests are analysed to improve Siri and dictation. User requests are not associated with the user’s Apple ID. Siri responses are analysed in secure facilities and all reviewers are under the obligation to adhere to Apple’s strict confidentiality requirements.” The company added that a very small random subset, less than 1% of daily Siri activations, are used for grading, and those used are typically only a few seconds long.
> Apple didn't want your phone to shut off at 15% when the battery can't supply enough current to sustain full performance.
That's what they told you to believe. Every other manufacturer also had smartphones with batteries at the time and they were not doing this FYI. That was just marketing speak by Apple. Please stop citing marketing speak.
This is not the core issue, though. The core issue is not disclosing financial incentives while commenting something positive / negative.
> That's what they told you to believe. Every other manufacturer also had smartphones with batteries at the time and they were not doing this FYI. That was just marketing speak by Apple. Please stop citing marketing speak.
So? Apple could just be the only vendor that cares enough about older devices in the wild to ensure they continue to function properly. Keep in mind that this very issue, of shutting off before the battery is actually depleted, plagues all sorts of older Android devices. Also keep in mind that Android devices typically struggle to get updates for 2-3 years as opposed to Apple's norm of 5-7 years. This only changed recently for a few vendors.
> This is not the core issue, though. The core issue is not disclosing financial incentives while commenting something positive / negative.
Having opinions on something you're invested in is a big gray area in general. It tends to cause people to blanket ignore you.
>> Siri recordings are only ever stored to improve Siri. Apple does not share personal data or recordings with advertisers. There was a lawsuit based on coincidence alone.
I read it again. Is that really spying? Is it spying that the activations were accidental, is it spying that they are grading them, or is it spying that sensitive data sometimes appears in recordings? Is it spying that the sensitive data ends up making its way to subcontractors? I don't get what makes this spying to you. All of the above?
My iPhone 6 was throttled so hard I could barely type. When they finally gave an option to disable the throttling, the phone didn't shut down randomly, it was fine. Most other people had already bought new iPhones by then, I only had mine cause idc so much about using a phone.
Sure, I can believe maybe Apple legitimately thought my phone was going to randomly shut down, not that they wanted to slow it to make me buy a new one. Then Apple could've disclosed that they're throttling iPhones due to a known battery defect. They hid that until they were caught. They subsequently discounted the price of battery replacements, but that's still an extra cost that shouldn't have been there. The phone was way too young to be having these issues.
So yeah the iPhone 6 was well below the quality people normally expect from Apple. But it was the only time they screwed up so bad. The thing about planned obsolescence via OS updates is still true and accepted as a constant, your iPhone realistically has 10 years of life. I'll still choose iPhone over the Samsung hamas phones, but also not gonna be gaslit about batterygate, it was real.
Disclaimer: I own 99% of the entire Apple corporation, this is legal advice, this is medical advice
Subsidizing makes no sense when there's no - possibility of a - moat. Although it's very possible that China in general subsidizes Chinese labs in some way so they maintain pressure on US labs. But you only have to look at proxies such as OpenRouter to see that the individuals aren't doing any subsidizing on per token costs.
We are living in a ZIRP-like era where builders at the fastest pace layer have misattributed their velocity to exponential gains in model capability. In fact, they are surfing on decades of careful effort to build a robust foundation of highly reusable software libraries.
This strategy will seem to work really well until the economy that enabled that foundation to form is hollowed out. Then, there will be a reckoning (but we will have no choice but to march forth from there).
It's not just software libraries. Specs, applications (the browser!), expectations, device integrations, operating systems, etc. So much that starting from scratch seems impossible.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with you, but my brain cannot comprehend how machines can advance such interconnected systems while keeping humans in focus.
Perhaps I shouldn't have watched the Animatrix again.
> This strategy will seem to work really well until the economy that enabled that foundation to form is hollowed out. Then, there will be a reckoning (but we will have no choice but to march forth from there).
There will only be a reckoning if models don't get much better.
If they do get much better you can just have them refactor, fix bugs in, or replace the existing codebase.
The concept of tech debt is sort of meaningless if you anticipate intelligence gains in models to continue.
Its already speeding up human decision processes, and while ethics / alignment may seem unique to humans we also see normative expressions in monkeys or apes (like the experiment where one is given a grapes, the other cucumber).
A lot of ethics is based on symmetry: symmetric relations, equal rights, equal voting power, ... symmetries sound rather mathematical if you ask me, and decision structures have historically been pressed towards democracy (or at least depiction of it). One could say that modeling humanity as an empire with a king, ignores the will of sometimes hungry farmers with pitchforks. To prevent the occasional "implicit democracy" (royaltycide), it turned out in the interest of the king to recognize the powers of those farmers, and to formalize it in the decision making process. Or at least pretend to.
I believe machines will be able predict the preference sentient creatures would prefer in terms of decision structures, but I don't believe it will be able to predict (without human exposition) those novel preferences that stem not from sentience but from being specifically human properties (i.e. irritants which are quasi universal for humans, etc.), some of them humans know how to make predictions for (we can run expensive simulations modeling what happens when protein X is exposed to substance Y, and then make heuristic predictions of the effect on a full human in a realistic environment). So at a fundamental level I agree: machine learning models are not guaranteed to help much in predictions concerning entirely unexplored territory, neither by humans nor by natural selection. But it will definitely be capable of replacing the average human job, which doesn't involve consensual exploration outside of the homeostasis required in the implicit job description, that seems entirely automatable, regardless if its physics, mathematics, (harder than computer science), let alone programming.
It won't be able to magically systematically correctly predict out of distribution datapoints, it could only explore it like humans could by trial and error.
For everyone claiming that this is a trope of LLM text because it is a trope in the training data: how do you know this trope doesn't emerge during RLHF?
> What is reality? Obviously, no one can say, because it isn’t words. It isn’t material—that’s just an idea. It isn’t spiritual—that’s also an idea; a symbol. Reality is this: [GONG]. You see? We all know what reality is, but we can’t describe it. Just as we all know how to beat our hearts and shape our bones, but cannot say how it is done. - Alan Watts
Brand new industry, massive capital, dropping inference costs, increasing availability of compute, cost centers / subsidized subscriptions are common in SaaS, heavy competition, no public information on actual utilization rates.
How much is Waymo burning a year? 3B on 300M ARR? Anthropic is what 5B on 20B ARR? Waymo is 3x older. Why don't we hear such confident statements about how subsidized their rides are?
It's one thing to speculate it's another to parade it as fact. Even if the S1 reveals an unprofitable business today, you can still only claim it's unlikely.
> How much is Waymo burning a year? 3B on 300M ARR? Anthropic is what 5B on 20B ARR? Waymo is 3x older. Why don't we hear such confident statements about how subsidized their rides are?
We do. We hear it less often because no-one is talking about how Waymo changes how we all need to work or whatever, that's all.
Do people commonly argue Waymo isn't subsidizing rates?
Also, we do have some evidence for my position:
- We know that the consumer Claude plans provide _way_ more tokens than you could get if you were paying API prices. This is a huge part of why Anthropic's limits on other harnesses for subscription customers is such a big deal. So either their profit margin on API tokens is absurdly high, most consumer subscribers don't come anywhere near their rate limits, or they're losing money on the consumer subscriptions.
- It appears that complains about people running into rate limits are common, which suggests the "consumers usually don't use much of their subscription" explanation is incorrect.
- We also know that Anthropic has just become profitable, almost certainly driven mostly by enterprise customers. This rules out the "they make a very high profit margin on the API" explanation, since if that was the case they'd likely have been profitable much earlier.
Taken together, I think the case that their consumer subscriptions lose them money on net is pretty strong, even though their enterprise subscriptions (and API pricing) does make them a profit.
> I think the case that their consumer subscriptions lose them money on net is pretty strong, even though their enterprise subscriptions (and API pricing) does make them a profit.
To be clear I'm not arguing against this position, just questioning the confidence with which people claim that the current consumer subs are not a sustainable offering and a merely temporary.
Whether sustainability is achieved by raising prices or hoping that costs can be brought down, you have to acknowledge that the status quo is unsustainable. If it were sustainable nether change would be necessary.
With respect, you were manipulated (either by founders or by investors). Startups leverage employees' pro-social leanings to make them feel good about a fundamentally anti-social enterprise.
First: you ought to disclose that information when commenting on a topic that relates in some way to your financial incentives.
Second: when I worked at Google under Chrome it was very common for individuals and teams to publish projects to open source repositories under Google-managed Github orgs. In fact, for most of my tenure ('15-'21) my team had license to publish to Github unilaterally (no approval from the open source office required). Great power comes with great responsibility, but also I would put to you that publishing an open source project like this one is part of Google's culture.
Firing seems an extreme consequence for the perceived damage of a long-tenured employee's behavior in this case.
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