Re 1: People keep lumping Google with Amazon and Meta, but Google does not sell your private data and alerts you if it finds out the government to accessed your data. People keep assuming that because the general tech community sells data that Google does it too, but check their privacy policy or just ask anyone who's worked there. They don't.
User data at Google is locked up tighter than fort knox. That's why the Snowden leak was such a huge deal, because the NSA was taking advantage of a security flaw that Google didn't know it had to scrape user data. Google patched it immediately after they found out.
It is designed with privacy as an intent. It's right on their home page, they say the data never leaves your phone. It's in their privacy policy too. Those are legally binding.
FWIW I don't really like tech companies in general. They're monopolies.
That said, I really admire Google's environmental policies. I worry a lot about global warming and habitat destruction. They're doing better than any other tech company on that front.
Other companies will just lie about their emissions. Like Amazon claiming it's 100% renewable (it's not even close). Google has been honest and clear with it's emissions numbers since the beginning. And it has never been afraid to call out when they were wrong. For example, they recently updated their numbers when they realized one of their accounting methods was wrong. No other company has kept themselves as honest as Google on environmental things.
It's a big company with 170k employees. I can name a million examples of it doing shitty things. Like shutting down Inbox. But the environment is far more important to me than some product I didn't pay for.
I've been a big fan of monorepos because it leads to more consistent style and coding across the whole company. It makes the code more transparent so you can see what's going on with the rest of the company, too, which helps reduce code islands and duplicated work. It enables me to build everything from source, which helps catch bugs that would only show up in prod due to version drift. It also means that I can do massive refactorings across the company without breaking anything.
That said, tooling is slowly improving for decentralized repos, so some of these may be doable on git now/soon.
Honest question, why does the fediverse like firefox so much? This is not a common opinion to have on the internet, but everyone here and on mastodon seems to have it.
Companies' hiring processes have become very slow. I applied and got interviews with 4 companies. I only got offers from 2 of them because the others were so slow. Meta was the slowest, 6 months to first interview.
That said, the offers were $800k/yr and $500k/yr total comp so I can't complain. The catch was mandatory in-office in downtown SF. I'd have to move. It was a hard decision if I'm being honest.
They invested over $3.1 billion in renewable energy projects with an expected combined generation capacity of approximately 4.5 GW. That's twice as much energy as all their datacenters combined.
The author neglected to link to the actual report. Page 34 and 35. The Scope 2 stats the article cited don't account for clean power generated.
Their link for the claim "Google cited AI as the cause" doesn't mention power at all.
The link for the Microsoft numbers takes me to a report saying the 30% number is for Scope 3 emissions, which have nothing to do data center power usage.
Re 1: People keep lumping Google with Amazon and Meta, but Google does not sell your private data and alerts you if it finds out the government to accessed your data. People keep assuming that because the general tech community sells data that Google does it too, but check their privacy policy or just ask anyone who's worked there. They don't.
User data at Google is locked up tighter than fort knox. That's why the Snowden leak was such a huge deal, because the NSA was taking advantage of a security flaw that Google didn't know it had to scrape user data. Google patched it immediately after they found out.
Amazon, Meta, and Uber, are much less scrupulous.