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trinsic2 8 hours ago

I know this will probably not come off very well in this community. But there is something to be said about criticizing the very thing you are supporting. I know in this day and age, its not easy to survive without contributing to the problem in some degree.

Im not saying nobody has the right to criticize something they are supporting, but it does say something about our choices and how far we let this problem go before it became too much to solve. And not saying the problem isn't solvable. Just saying its become astronomically more difficult now then ever before.

I think at the very least, there is a little bit of cringe in me every time I criticize the very thing I support in some way.

mrguyorama 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The problem is that everyone on HN treats "You are criticizing something you benefit from" as somehow invalidating the arguments themselves rather than impeaching the person making the arguments.

Being a hypocrite makes you a bad person sometimes. It doesn't actually change anything factual or logical about your arguments. Hypocrisy affects the pathos of your argument, but not the logos or ethos! A person who built every single datacenter would still be well qualified to speak about how bad datacenters are for the environment. Maybe their argument is less convincing because you question their motives, but that doesn't make it wrong or invalid.

Unless HNers believe he is making this argument to help Google in some way, it doesn't fucking matter that google was also bad and he worked for them. Yes he worked for google while they built out datacenters and now he says AI datacenters are eating up resources, but is he wrong?. If he's not wrong, then talk about hypocrisy is a distraction.

HNers love arguing to distract.

"Don't hate the player, hate the game" is also wrong. You hate both.

trinsic2 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Well said. Thank you. I just wanted to point out that there is some truth behind the negative effects of criticizing what you helped create. IMHO not everything is about facts and logic, but also about the spirit that's behind our choices. I know that kind of perspective is not very welcome here, but wanted to say it anyway.

Sometimes facts and logic can only get you so far.