Posted by lukasgross 7 days ago
https://www.reuters.com/technology/googles-gemini-co-lead-no...
It gives some context on the contributions of each of the authors. About Shazeer, from the article:
Shazeer’s joining the group was critical. “These theoretical or intuitive mechanisms, like self-attention, always require very careful implementation, often by a small number of experienced ‘magicians,’ to even show any signs of life,” says Uszkoreit. Shazeer began to work his sorcery right away. He decided to write his own version of the transformer team’s code. “I took the basic idea and made the thing up myself,” he says. Occasionally he asked Kaiser questions, but mostly, he says, he “just acted on it for a while and came back and said, ‘Look, it works.’” Using what team members would later describe with words like “magic” and “alchemy” and “bells and whistles,” he had taken the system to a new level.
Ok, these peopl have all gotten extensive training on how to hype for the non-technical crowd without saying anything of substance.
He also saw LLM would replace search before anyone else, and that is something to look at the Lamda or GPT-1's output and think: yeah this will answer all of our questions one day.
HN is certainly curated - I've been "admitting" that since the day I got outed as a mod here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494621 (March 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507229 (April 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962942 (June 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8569117 (Nov 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15556105 (Oct 2017)
But we try hard to do the curation by principle, not by personal whim. What principles? Really there's just one: intellectual curiosity—we try to feature what enhances that and dampen what degrades it [1]. From that starting point, though, you can derive lots of other principles. Probably the most important is that snark and indignation are bad for HN (especially in combination!) because they drown out curious conversation. That's all that you need to see why I posted that reply to the GP; no personal preference required.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
These are preference-based but you're pretending they're objective. I find _your_ comments to be full of snark and indignation more than any you respond to, but of course you won't agree. (But because you don't agree, that makes me objectively wrong, I know.)
"Tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working class ways of communication, and covering them in elite preferences." - someone smarter than the average HN commenter.
But that doesn't mean they're arbitrary. There's such a thing as fuzzy quasi-consensus, and I can demonstrate it easily: if the moderation calls we make were not fuzzy quasi-consensuses, the community would storm the barricades and rip us a new one. There's no pastime that internet communities love better than piling on when the mods are wrong.
That doesn't mean we're always right—not by a long shot—but we're usually (maybe 70%?) in the ballpark of the median reader's interpretation—not because we're geniuses at reading the hivemind but because we've been trained to get it mostly-quasi-somewhat-ok through the sheer pain of community backlash. Operant conditioning is a hell of a drug.
So while the personal views and preferences of the mods have some effect (how could they not?), it's not the high order bit. The high order bit is the prospective community response, because we fear what happens when we get that wrong, and I assure you we have reason to fear it.
As for whether my comments are also rife with snark and indignation: I think you have a point there! And I'd be happy to discuss it further, if you want to.
Do you have any specific examples of where dang or another moderator posted in that way?
> Yes, in the sense that if there's nothing interesting to say about a quote then there's no reason to copy it into the thread.
This one was both snarky and indignant. Indignant that anyone would post something dang doesn't like on his site, and snarky that the the original commenter hadn't conformed to norms of what positions are acceptable to utter here.
“an attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm”
Source:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/snark
Indignant definition:
“feeling or showing anger because of something unjust or unworthy”
Source:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/indignant
So just based on these definitions that comment seems neither snarky nor indignant? There’s no anger because he’s a moderator calmly stating one of the rules of the site. And there don’t seem to be anything mocking, irreverent or sarcastic about him calmly stating the site guidelines?
I hope this is not accurate but I'm afraid it is: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273
Someone should write a bot to do this automatically. What is the HN policy on bots?
Sama, and any other founder, will always have a difficult fight against bureaucracy, and once you let a little bit in, the bureaucracy's sole purpose becomes to grow itself.
Easy peasy!
A dear friend of mine was doing R&D at a startup where management poured on a bunch of low-level management work that took him away from his joy, which was developing new tools and approaches to solving customer problems. He left, and went to another gig that promised him complete freedom to invent and discover. That job is at a Fortune 500 company that is slowly starting to pull its head out of its ass.
and tens of losing companies that make balloons or whatnot
The leaps forward need bloat. A startup can execute on specific vector direction way better.
Now back to your point, what did X deliver with its lean ops? It seems that it needed 2 bailouts (one from xAI, and one from space X)
If the issue is inefficiency, tons of meetings, too much team alignment etc, then that's the issue that you need to tackle, and these issues can already appear in a 50-100 employee company. Sure, that's an easy problem to solve with a smaller size but unless you hired people for no reason, these people have a very specific set of problems to tackle and are often, in these companies, the best in class to tackle them, culling half of the company isn't going to make things better.
(And X rehired part of the laid-off engineers)
What percentage of Google employees are engineers...
You mean fire the very smart people who designed the core systems AND insult them so that anyone with options would never want to work there?
Has been in more of a maintenance mode with a multiple of those people. If anything, the pace of the product has improved. Regardless of what you think about Musk, the company he bought was a bloated mess.
You could cut Google's size by 40% and they'd still have more corporate employees than Apple.
(Google has ~190k employees, Apple has ~160k but 50k of those are retail staff, so ~110k corporate)
Sadly the gap between reality and satire has shrunk.
But yes. I also wish that show would come back.
Noam shazeer would be google head dreamer
We don't hear about Tom from MySpace.
Maybe Noam measures status differently.
All those engineers making 20M a year at Anthropic and OpenAI are going to back down to normal super high comp of 700k a year after their starter grants run out, and yes many will quit but the people who stay aren't moving the needle on their finances that much.
Uszkoreit wanted to build a more efficient/scalable language/seq2seq model that could take advantage of GPU parallelism (replacing RNNs which were the main approach to sequence modelling at that time).
Uszkoreit's insight was that although language appears sequential, it is in fact really part parallel part hierarchical, as can be seen by linguist's sentence parse trees where at each level there is parallelism/independence between the branches of the tree, with them getting combined at the next level up. This is what gave rise to the idea of a model that consisted of a stack of of parallel processing layers (transformer layers). I believe that attention was also part of the plan from day one, as this had already been proven to be valuable (Bahdanau) with RNN seq2seq modelling.
So, this is what Uszkoreit wanted to build, but by his own account he failed to come up with an implementation that matched or outperformed the prevailing RNN approach that he wanted to replace. At this point, Uszkoreit mentioned the idea to Shazeer, who got on board and eventually arrived at a performant architecture which was then pared back by an ablation process resulting in the initial encoder-decoder Transformer architecture. Shazeer later came up with the mixture-of-experts architecture, and also other optimizations after he left to found character.ai
I'm talking from plenty of group project experience here.
Why? If you read a research paper for its content this is not especially important.
This thread is more about the people of course, and here we care, but that's not the point of a research paper.
The research history leading up to this was interesting - there had been a bunch of work, in various domains, on "autoencoder" architectures used to learn compact representations for things like dimensionality reduction and sequence representation. The idea was to have an encoder-decoder pair, connected by a limited bottleneck representation, with the training goal of the decoder reconstructing the encoder input from the bottleneck representation.
One example of this was to learn a fixed size(!) sequence (e.g. sentence) representation using an LSTM-based autoencoder (LSTM->embedding->LSTM), which at the time seemed rather shocking - the ability to represent a variable length sequence with a fixed size embedding. Equally shocking was that you could use this for machine translation simply by connecting an LSTM encoder for one language to an LSTM decoder for another language.
This type of LSTM->LSTM seq2seq encode-decode architecture for machine translation was then improved by Bahdanau by replacing the fixed size representation with an attention mechanism so the decoder could learn to be more specific about input-output relationships.
This type of LSTM-based seq2seq encode-decode architecture, using attention, is what Uszkoreit et al set out to improve - to make more efficient by using a parallel vs sequential (RNN) architecture. The Transformer was never conceived of as purely for language modelling, or as an "AI" architecture. Later when the usage focused on language modelling (generation, not translation), the encoder was dropped since input and output are the same thing.
Equal contribution. Listing order is random. Jakob proposed replacing RNNs with self-attention and started the effort to evaluate this idea. Ashish, with Illia, designed and implemented the first Transformer models and has been crucially involved in every aspect of this work. Noam proposed scaled dot-product attention, multi-head attention and the parameter-free position representation and became the other person involved in nearly every detail. Niki designed, implemented, tuned and evaluated countless model variants in our original codebase and tensor2tensor. Llion also experimented with novel model variants, was responsible for our initial codebase, and efficient inference and visualizations. Lukasz and Aidan spent countless long days designing various parts of and implementing tensor2tensor, replacing our earlier codebase, greatly improving results and massively accelerating our research.
He left Google in 2021 to co-found Character.AI. In 2024, Google brought him and some Character.AI researchers back via a licensing/talent deal with Character.AI (reportedly around $2.7B). He was then made a Gemini co-lead.
Now he’s leaving Google again for OpenAI.
Exciting times!
Google bought him back (with lots of money) and made him one of the leads of Gemini.
His raw skills are likely atrophied by now from delegating and operating at higher levels. His entire value is mostly political now.
If he can’t play the political game and win, he’s useless. He would probably just go to some other organization where people aren’t immune to his lore.
Google is a different place today than even 5 years ago.
What is exiting about this?
Google lost three critical years chasing AGI, and got acquired by SpaceX, now a Dyson Sphere startup whose pitch deck is just: "What if we put a paywall around the Sun?"
Do you know what a motion to dismiss is, by the way?
>> Megan Garcia had no idea her teenage son Sewell, a "bright and beautiful boy", had started spending hours and hours obsessively talking to an online character on the Character.ai app in late spring 2023.
People become obsessed with them. The builders have to know that their 'customers' are explicitly people with mental issues. Nobody sane or normal is talking to these things.
If you want to see how bad it is go checkout the reddit discourse when OpenAI deprecated one of their older models. Thousands of people acting like OpenAI had 'killed' their partners and best friends.
There are a lot of grey areas engineers work in when it comes to social stuff, privacy stuff, etc. There's no grey area with these. You're trying to hook people who are unwell and the people working on it should be ashamed.
---
Edit replying to below post, as I am rate limited:
> Talk about misrepresentation. Either way my comment didn't mention the legal case. I was simply pointing out that anyone working on building those types of bots is sick. They take advantage of vulnerable people, milk as much money as they can from them, and want to wash their hands of any responsibility when it eventually goes wrong.
You replied to my post, so I thought your post perhaps had some relevance to mine rather than being unrelated soapboxing.
I don't particularly agree with your soapboxing, at any rate. Character.AI was not a "relationship bot" company. Like any LLM, they could simply be prompted to respond as such, in the same way that ChatGPT can. As you pointed out yourself, ChatGPT has the same issue with people forming parasocial bonds, despite not attempting to cater to that market in any way at all. Should people who release chatbots be legally required to censor them heavily when users attempt to use them for anything other than technical questions? That seems excessive, and it seems that ascribing moral responsibility of that degree is akin to holding video game, music, or movie producers responsible for violence committed by someone who saw a piece of violent media. Moreover, how far does it go? Should distributing open-weight models be made illegal, because you're making available something that can't be censored?
Talk about misrepresentation. Either way my comment didn't mention the legal case. I was simply pointing out that anyone working on building those types of bots is sick. They take advantage of vulnerable people, milk as much money as they can from them, and want to wash their hands of any responsibility when it eventually goes wrong.
Not really.
Altman couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag.
Noam is OTOH and IIUC the real deal.
Novo Nordisk hired you to find a cure for obesity.
- This is your full time job, and this is what you are paid for. The company also invests in a lab, in machines, in other employees, etc, so all of you together can figure out.
You find Wegovy, and poof, you run away with the recipe and sell the product on your own.
- Yes, you just scammed your boss, you made him believe that you were working for him, but actually you were using the company resources to your sole benefit.
It's not about loyalty, it's about integrity.
It's the same type of people whom you hire and pay to develop a platform, and then they steal the code, and never deliver this platform to you. Terrible business practices, but isn't it how Facebook happened too ?
Unless you think that employees are like indentured servants, and Novo Nordisk owns not only Wegovy but the people who work on it.
(recall that OpenAI thought GPT-2 was too powerful to release for approximately tantamount reasons)
also "empty handed" is just unnecesarily dramatic, he left all the knwoledge base he helped build, that's google's IP and is worth m(b?)illions
should he have been obligated to stay at google for the rest of his career?
I have no dog in this race as I'm not fond of either OpenAI or Google.... but employees not being loyal to their big tech employers is a wild thing to be concerned about in 2026 when year after year many large tech companies (Google very prominently among them) continually post record profits and still lay people off by the thousands.
The Attention is all you need paper has Google logo, not character.ai
As an outsider, I'd be really curious to understand why, given how well positioned they seem to be in the AI battle:
- huge, quasi unmatched data war chest
- huge, quasi unmatched, planet-scale infrastructure
- native AI chip design and production (TPU)
- the core ideas for what we now know as "AI" were invented there
- deepmind, enough said
- pretty much the deepest pocket of all the AI players with the possible exception of MSFT
- a massively large user base and reach to deploy AI to (Android, YT, Cloud, Search, Email, ...)
- supposedly one the best engineering culture of the valley
Why do the best people leave ?
Why do their AI product always come in 3rd place ?
Why can't they seem to take the lead, both in terms of product design or in term of raw LLM performance?
The only answer I can think of is:
- culture is completely broken
- management sucks something fierce
- company is so fat and rich no one is actually interested in winning anymore
Google at its core is not a dev tools company and it has become evident that is where the money is given the verifiable nature of software. Hixie's reflections on his tenure at Google still ring in my head to this day, though I have never worked there[1].
The people at the helm of Google no longer see the company's identity as something which must be channeled through a product or an experience. Some will point to the DoubleClick acquisition, others will point to Google Reader, or Pichai's ascension. Despite his very short tenure, MBA/McKinsey-brain is a very real phenomenon and it's no mistake that it shaped the "promotion packaged as a product launch" culture that steered Google away from seriously betting on anything that wasn't ads. To quote the signull tweet linked elsewhere in this thread, you can have everything at Google, except for permission.
Most importantly--I don't think there's a single tech product where I can point and say "Google wouldn't do that". You can contrast this with say, other Alphabet companies which don't suffer from this remotely as much. It is VERY clear what Waymo and YouTube are trying to accomplish, and while it frequently makes a ton sense for the companies to share infrastructure and product knowledge, YouTube does an exceptional job on the product side of making it very clear what they would and wouldn't do. They have experimented and shut down experimental features before (is their MOOC functionality still around?), but since it's fairly clear Google specifically is no longer working in service to the mission of providing the world's best digital portal for accessing information, I think it would behoove of them to figure out what their mission is.
Noam is the real deal, he was pretty legendary within old-time ('00s) Google engineering. Paul Buchheit had a story about interviewing him with the "how to write a spellchecker" question and then him coming up with something better than the state-of-the-art, then basically delivering Google's spell corrector in his first 2-week Noogler project.
"Google and Character.AI agree to settle lawsuits over teen suicides" - https://www.axios.com/2026/01/07/google-character-ai-lawsuit...
Be aware...very disturbing: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/e2e8fc50-a9ac...
Considering what character.ai is, maybe he should have at least taken a shot at it.
The tea leaves were pretty easy to read, too; LLMs will eventually be commoditized. Once that happens, the only road to profitable AI will be paved with 1) branding and 2) cheap compute. Apple does not possess cheap inference hardware whatsoever. Their GPUs are raster-focused, inefficient and expensive for their dedicated compute role. Unless Apple crawls back to Nvidia with their tail between their legs, TPU inference was their only real option. The deal was even more obvious when you used Apple's local foundation models; they're downright eclipsed by the quality of Gemma. Once Apple Intelligence was announced, it became clear that Apple was the branding component in search of a strange bedfellow to thumb their nose at Nvidia.
We don't really see this type of opportunism in the hardware space. Case in point, the TPU is a pretty big accomplishment that successfully competes for inference and stimulates the need for cheaper compute.
Seems like there are some insights here!
edit: it seems the post has been removed but comments are viewable.
1 liner summary:
To put it lightly, the dude was politically outspoken and held strong beliefs.
To some it still means favoring any existence of a Jewish state. The inertia isn't there because aside from the original partition plan being pushed by the UK, other countries have attacked Israel several times later in ways they would've have withstood without outside support.
it was actually Likud's official election slogan in the 70s and 80s just as ... oh, let me check, Netanyahu, was getting involved in all of this, formally becoming Likud's leader in 1993.
And the destruction of Israel is the explicit goal of Hamas as stated in their charter.
"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it" and called for holy war to establish an Islamic state across historic Palestine.
Look, to be very clear: Hamas is absolutely a terrorist organization who has caused constant harm to both Israelis and the average Palestinian they purport to represent (there have been no elections since 2006, Hamas are the only people with weapons in Gaza, and the average citizen might as well be a hostage - and frankly they’d turn against Hamas a lot more if Israel didn’t steadily inflict collective punishment against them like turning off their electricity or even drinking water for days or weeks for actions of Hamas. All that is doing is making sympathizers of them).
Now that is a valid use of the term. I think the problem it that Zionism means so many different things it is nearly useless as a description. It seems more useful as a slur which has become very common in some circles.
"The inertia isn't there"
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying Israel could be defeated without US assistance?
> Are you saying Israel could be defeated without US assistance?
US and UK, yes. Not just cause of the weapons and money to Israel. After them, the top recipients of US foreign aid in the area are the bordering countries Egypt and Jordan, so that they don't attack.
And how is that?
Israel has a population of 10 million people and a very modern military and nuclear weapons. If it's existence was ever truly threatened things would get VERY ugly.
I have doubts about their ability to self-defend because otherwise we wouldn't be giving so much money, the situation would be stable. Even if they can severely hurt the attackers, it doesn't really matter if the attackers stop at nothing. We just lost a war against Iran despite having full air superiority and killing their leader. And especially if you're considering the scenario where Israel never got Western support, and thus never got those advanced weapons.
It's pretty obvious from the emotional response that you've got some kind of horse in the Israel-Hamas war that I don't, which is fine, but I'm not gonna get called a liar too. So bye.
My only emotion is exhaustion at hearing the same lies told over and over.Israel razed Gaza to the ground. It was a genocide.
It's true that Nazism lacks the religious aspect, and Zionism lacks the pagan aspect.
I hope you can agree that these are aesthetic differences.
Both movements advocate for one ethnicity having the right to live on a particular part of the land, ime. ethonationalism (Nazis: "Blood and soil" vs. Zios: "The chosen people who god promised the land to"), both movements are expansionist (N: "Lebensraum" vs. Z: "Buffer zones" and "Greater Israel"), both movements subjugate another ethnicity that they deem lesser and evil (N: Jews, Black people, Roma, vs. Z: Palestinians, Arabs).
Both movements have commited genocide against the other ethnicities.
So, are Nazis pigs? If they are, then the label fits Zionists as well.
You're absolutely right, and this is antisemitic propaganda. Israel left more than 20 years ago and didn't return until 2023 due to Hamas terrorism.
They certainly didn't return:
- for five months in 2006 for Operation Summer Rains
- or again in 2006 for Operation Autumn Clouds
- or again in 2008 for Operation Hot Winter
- or again in 2008 into 2009 for Operation Cast Lead
- or again in 2012 for Operation Pillar of Defense
- or again in 2014 for Operation Protective Edge
- or again in 2018 and 2019 for incursions and special-forces actions, like that covert IDF operation in Khan Younis that got fucked up and led to a firefight deep in Gaza (but that couldn't have happened, because they left back in 2005, right?)
- or lastly, before October 7, in 2021 in Operation Guardians of the Walls.
None of those large named operations could have happened, let alone anything smaller than named operations, like special forces or commando raids, because those things are purely Hamas propaganda, and not formal IDF operations.
Right?
Hamas thinks it can destroy Israel with force. It can't anymore than native Americans can destroy the US. And Hamas trying and failing over and over and over and over has made the lives of Palastinians much worse. Hamas gleefully kills any Palestinians that point this out or oppose them in any way.
Just for comparison after Germany lost WW2 they lost 25% of their land and 14 million German living on it were expelled. Has Germany spent the last 78 years trying to get it back? No. Instead they have been doing the smarter option which is creating a peaceful and rich country, which is what the Palastinians should have done.
You're right. It -is- exhausting. Because I never said a word about the merit, or lack thereof, of Israel's actions or reactions, or Hamas'.
I just commented that Israel has spent multiple years in Gaza "since they left".
HOWEVER, you absolutely stated, and get bent out of shape multiple times in this thread alone, at anyone even hinting Israel set foot in Gaza since 2005:
Someone comments saying this exact thing, "Israel has been operating in buffer zones", etc., etc. and you?
"Israel left... Stop telling obvious lies."
Also, it might not be permanent occupation but when you're back there nearly every year for 3-9 months, it might not feel like you ever really left.
> The League of Nations gave Britain mandatory power over Palestine in 1922. British rule and Arab efforts to prevent Jewish migration led to growing violence between Arabs and Jews, causing the British to announce its intention to terminate the Mandate in 1947. The UN General Assembly recommended partitioning Palestine into two states: Arab and Jewish. However, the situation deteriorated into a civil war. The Arabs rejected the Partition Plan, the Jews ostensibly accepted it, declaring the independence of the State of Israel in May 1948 upon the end of the British mandate. Nearby Arab countries invaded Palestine, Israel not only prevailed, but conquered more territory than envisioned by the Partition Plan. During the war, 700,000, or about 80% of all Palestinians fled or were driven out of territory Israel conquered and were not allowed to return, an event known as the Nakba (Arabic for 'catastrophe') to Palestinians. Starting in the late 1940s and continuing for decades, about 850,000 Jews from the Arab world immigrated ("made Aliyah") to Israel.
Also, it was Ottoman territory for hundreds of years up to WWI. I've had friends tell me for some reason about how Palestine was an independent country before... literally wasn't.
A non-zionist Israel would be one where all peoples had the same right, e.g.
It was never actually Palastinian land. It was Jewish land, then Roman land, then Ottoman land, then British land, then Jewish land after Palastinians attacked Israel and lost. At no point were the Palastinians ever a sovereign country and in fact they incredibly foolishly rejected the UN offer for one.
"other creeds and ethnicities should be second class "
Approximately 2.5 to 2.6 million non-Jews live in Israel, comprising about 25% to 26% of the country's total population. This is compared to less than 1% of the population of Gaza being non-muslim.
The Palestinians are the people who lived there. The Zionists expelled half of them and razed 500 villages to the ground in 1948. It was an ethnic cleansing. They denied them the right to return.
There was a Palestinian identity and there was a Palestinian society. They revolted against the Ottomans, and the British promised them sovereignty. The British betrayed them and caved to the Zionists, and the rest is settler colonialism and apartheid.
Right, like stomping around the comments claiming that anything less than pretending Israel didn't set foot in Gaza between 2025 and October 7, 2023 is filthy Hamas propaganda, the existence of at least six formally named IDF operations being just a pesky bit of reality that can be easily run over by a Merkava Mk V main battle tank.
Or, who am I kidding, of course it won't.
Just for comparison after Germany lost WW2 they lost 25% of their land and 14 million German living on it were expelled. Has Germany spent the last 78 years trying to get it back? No. Instead they have been doing the smarter option which is creating a peaceful and rich country, which is what the Palastinians should have done.
The Palestinians were the only people living on the land before the settlers came. That included Jews and Christians, because Palestinians are not a homogeneous group.
The Zionist settlers are not indigenous, they had no right to settle there. They also took the UN resolution and just started a war where they razed 500 villages. I'm sure if the Palestinian side had won, they would have expelled the settlers. But that is only natural. And beside the point, because the Palestinians didn't start the war, and of course uou expel invaders.
And native americans were living in Canada, US, and Mexico before settlers came. The Palestinians are hardly unique in losing land in a war. In fact this is basically the norm in human history. What is almost unique is how Palestinians have made their lives much much worse pathetically trying to get the land back when they have absolutely no chance of doing so, anymore than Native Americans do.
The jews living in Israel in 2026 are indigenous in the sense they are NOT leaving so any scenario where they do is a stupid fantasy. the Palestinians DID start the war, they rejected their own sovereign state in favor of gambling for everything and lost. But they have spent 78 years just refusing to accept reality while Israel has grown rich and powerful.
Israelis are not indigenous (there are rare exceptions of Mizrahis or Jerusalem Palestinians with some form of citizenship), they are colonists.
It doesn't matter if Israelis are indigenous or not because 7 million people are not going to leave.
It's not rare at all, the majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi.
If you mean citizens of the State of Palestine, that’s a political matter, and zero Jews have that citizenship.
If you mean something along the lines of “unbroken lineage of ancestors who never left Palestine", that would also exclude many people who we all consider Palestinian, such as Arafat himself who was born in Cairo.
More specifically there are 0 Jews living in areas under control of the Palestinian Authority, or in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen.
Thank you for providing a perfect example of how the word zionist has become a replacement for kike among jew-haters.
Let's compare figures like, say Nick Fuentes and Hasan Piker.
Fuentes regularly spouts vile anti-semitic rhetoric, painting up a picture of Jews as greedy schemers.
Piker always makes it clear he is talking about Israel, not Jews. Painfully so.
I have not seen a single self-odentified leftist say anything anti-semitic IRL. But I have seen right-wingers do this.
And this same story is reflected in politicians statements as well. The right is anti-semitic.
The ADL claims that the left is, but that is because the ADL wants to conflate Israel with the entire ethnic group of Jews. Which is an obvious and silly bad faith trick. You're also doing the same thing.
"God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse be upon the Jews, Victory to Islam"
And it's not really about religion. It's about Palestinians specifically, who are indigenous to Palestine, and are under Israeli apartheid.
The Palestinians who have been exiled by Israel, and their children, cannot live where their grandparents lived (even though they should have a right to return, under UN resolutions that Israel has accepted), but any Jew from, let's say Brooklyn, does.
Also, Islam is the only faith in Israel which is not allowed to self-organize. It is singled out among all religious communities as the only one who is not given this right. Which is of course incredibly discriminatory.
There isn't a single jew living in Gaza. Why is that?
It is very much about religion. Hamas is an explicitly Islamic supremacist organization that calls for the destruction of Israel as a religious obligation.
If you had the option to live as a full citizen in Israel, being told you're part of the dominant ethnicity that's treated as human beings; or staying in Gaza, where you are being bombed to death by the IDF, I wonder which you would choose?
Your argument is essentially stating the conditions of apartheid as negative for dominant ethnic group. I didn't know someone could be so divorced from reality.
They fail to understand that their skill doesn't generalise.
That and the hyperglazing and platforming they get for having said skill makes them a prime candidate for exposing how average they are.
> "I do not believe that humans have an attribute called gender," Shazeer wrote, news site the Information reported Friday. "I do not believe that G-d puts people in the wrong bodies. I do not believe that it is okay to sterilize children. You have the right to your beliefs. I do not share them."
It's not dumb, and it's ridiculous if Google really has a problem with this. But it also says he kept accusing coworkers of being antisemitic, which clearly crosses the line into disrupting work.
And of course he's not directly accusing his coworkers of "sterilizing children", but he's 1) using language that compares politically sensitive health services that many of his coworkers or their families may have used and/or may feel defensive about to atrocities and 2) accusing his coworkers of supporting atrocities. That feels quite disruptive and inappropriate in the work environment IMO.
Anyway, to double back once, it actually doesn't really "assume it's a medically necessary procedure"; we can soften it to something like a "medically desired procedure" and the point in fact still stands that Shazeer's wording - which really should be the point here, not re-enacting the tired trans healthcare debate - is deliberately incendiary and manipulative. Broadly, no one is advocating for parents to be sterilizing their children as an end to itself, so it shouldn't be characterized as such.
Another controversy is physician-assisted s–... euthanasia. Some doctors would consider it medically necessary, but they can't legally perform or even recommend it, as it's considered murder. They can in Canada. Abortion of a viable fetus not threatening the mother is illegal in all 50 US states, but legal in many states in earlier stages, again based on what the states consider murder (but the doctor judges what is viable or a threat to the mother).
Anyway if gender-affirming care is just medically desired but not medically necessary, the sterilization is accepted but not necessary. I agree with the spirit of the wording, even though it's imprecise, because it highlights that children are taking on an irreversible side effect. It's a short quote and not a whole essay where he gets to clarify.
For me it was a really confusing issue until I became close friends with someone whose childhood best friend is trans.
If he was born a decade earlier, he probably would have killed himself (this was the path he was on, which is incredibly tragic and all too common); the gender dysphoria invoked depression was unbearable.
Instead, he was able to work through therapy and medical care to understand his gender dysphoria and receive gender affirming care in his late teens.
Now (over a decade post treatment) he’s among the most cheerful people I’ve ever met. He inspires joy as a band teacher, is inspiringly happily married, and is raising a beautiful baby girl.
I often think about him when people talk about the issue in the abstract. The hundreds of children whose lives he’s impacted for the better, let alone the lives of his friends and family. Removing gender affirming care is implicitly saying you don’t want any of that to happen, because the logical conclusion of removing is people like him in a pit of depression and despair that often ends in suicide, all over an affliction that they did not choose.
This is where the “medically necessary” part of gender affirming care comes from.
I didn’t understand it before I knew him and his story so I don’t begrudge people who are in shows I used to walk in. But I’d encourage people to try to understand and lead with empathy and meet people where they are.
It's different now and children are being encouraged to transition. They aren't just told that some are naturally uncomfortable with their gender, but that conforming to a gender is abnormal. Way more are doing it than before, and even afterwards are committing suicide at high rates. So I can't support it. I still think people should have the right to do it on their own dime, and won't judge them for it either way. I can't trust any studies on this anymore because it's become politicized and weirdly speech-policed. This isn't a unique or nuanced opinion, it's probably the majority one and I sound like the rest.
The range of human (mis-)behavior is extremely wide, so I wouldn’t doubt that some doctors and patients are doing what you fear here. I don’t think we should form opinions on such a broad situation on the basis of a few extreme people and situations.
The question I would ask is would you rather have more people suffer from not having care, than some people suffer from receiving care that they later regret? The latter is something that’s incredibly sad, no doubt, but it’s an intractable and tragic side effect of offering major medical treatments and interventions in general; the “false positive” aspect is not unique to gender affirming care, either in its existence or its magnitude. (The politicizing of the false positive is, though, because gender in general is incredibly politicized).
Gender dysphoria solved by one-way-door gender affirming care is quite rare (there are many intermediary steps people can try and ultimately be helped with), but education about the issue and the availability of treatment helps people like my friend. I think it’s pretty unambiguously positive to universalize the availability of that care in the same way as any other form of healthcare and education, because it’s genuinely the only way some people can feel comfortable in their skin. And although there may be problems with the standard of care, the standard for care can only improve with time and experience.
Maybe 15 years ago there was an option to have neither, maybe we can go back to that. As it already is in some other countries.
Google knows Shazeer's value & paid $2bn to c.ai for it: Its undesirable for anyone (regardless of their seniority) to engage in a discussion without being invited to it. Flaring up discord isn't how someone in a leadership position at a huge company is supposed to operate. It is another thing if they've got the "fuck you" money & a few feathers to rattle; then they do whatever without care.
> But it also says he kept accusing coworkers of being antisemitic
Per reports, Sergey Brin said something similar in the internal forums, too. Don't think its the only problem. After all, Shazeer can literally pick & choose where they want to work, and probably has more leverage over GDM than GDM does over him.
(To my understanding, the closest equivalent is “ummah” in Arabic, where the connotation is flipped: goy can refer to a Jewish person but typically does not, whereas the ummah typically refers to Muslim peoples as a collective but can also be a general stand-in for “nation” or “world.”)
Which is why I think that story is very likely bullshit. It’s from an account that very frequently posts pro-IRGC content, and has previously used “the G word” itself.
I explained my reasoning for avoiding the word downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48591986
Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to participate here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
the second post is actually about (a) me having understanding for a position of someone i disagree with harshly, and (b) the logical structure of an argument, not the underlying topic itself. it was in reference to the content of the link that was posted.
anyway, mods can take it down, i get why the rules are there. you're also right to ask folks to keep it clean. but i stand by it; dude just seems to have a trifecta of awful traits and i'm so so so tired of super rich tech dudes ruining the world.
as evidence, what it _means_ to be a man, woman, etc, differs from society to society. if you ask me to quantify this precisely, i will struggle. but it's plain for all to see.
I think you're putting words into peoples mouths there.
Acknowledging that there is a social construct we generally know of as "gender" and acknowledging that certain stereotypes and common understandings of that concept exist is not at all the same thing as demanding that people should fit into the narrowest stereotypes that you can think of.
Also worth noting that you acknowledging the existence of sexist stereotyping is an acknowledgement of the existence of gender as a social construct.
An example of using the category normatively would be saying someone isn't American because they burn the flag. My experience is that most of the people using "gender" normatively don't differentiate it from sex.
The idea that gender is a social concept is so blindingly obvious that, like bbeonx I kind of assume that anyone making comments like yours about "common sense" is either blindly parroting talking points without thinking about them, or arguing in bad faith.
What's even worse is Google refused to work with the American military in the past, but as soon as it was Israel, #1 priority for them. So it's pretty clear where their loyalty is.