Well if AI can be used to help missiles target large yachts and trophy homes…
Remember when it was “Don’t be evil”
Lol.
It feels good to say that I’ve been rid of Google for a while. They can shove Play Serives and Store too.
How is it with notifications and location nowadays? That’s my main concern about switching. SafetyNet or dog developers enableing “check if app installed from playstore” stuff?
Anything that uses FCM doesn’t get push notifications. That’s most of them. Very few apps work fine, others I have set up to use UnifiedPush. Unfortunately Proton Mail requires manually checking. I’ve not had any issues with location.
I’ve had one app straight up refuse to work at all and others that throw up an “enable Google Play Services” at every launch (dismiss it and it still works), but it’s nothing critical so I don’t care. Most of my apps come from F-Droid anyway. I haven’t had enough time without the play store to see if other apps trip the play integrity api stuff. Even if it did I don’t care.
But apps can’t hijack my entire screen anymore, battery life is improved, naturally privacy and security as well. No more “update available” pop-ups on app launches or that pop-up to scan all apps that I kept having to decline. No more anxiety from waking up to a bunch of marketing notifications. There’s also just the plain satisfaction of being free.
Google has Android by the balls but I’m so jaded and done with this corpo hell world shit to put up with even their privileged system apps anymore, even if it’s less convenient. Maybe Linux phones will become viable.
Again? Didn’t they try this once already?
Well, that’s…… ominous.
And sorta SkyNet’ish.
We pledge this until we change our mind
Every large corporation ever
Like my organization that pledged to be 100% renewable energy based by 2025 and they promised that right up until early 2024, where it suddenly disappeared from the internal website, and now no one talks about it.
But in fairness they made absolutely zero progress towards this goal in the previous 4 years, so it was pretty obvious they never really meant it anyway.
Every corporate pledge ends with “unless we can monetise it”.
When they removed their “don’t be evil” motto, I thought it was hilariously bad optics but probably came from some misguided thinking that if they stopped talking about the potential for evil, people would stop wondering whether they had bad motives and needed the motto to keep straight.
It became clearer and clearer that they removed the motto because they felt it was holding them back from greater profits and was skewing employee behaviours in ways they didn’t want and bringing up objections to policy ideas that they wanted to avoid. It was never about the optics, it was about the profits.
Now, when Google removes a pledge not to make portable killer AIs and skynet, you have to accept that it’s because they see making portable killer AIs and skynet as hugely profitable for them, and they don’t want any good intentions or moral behaviour getting in the way of that profit.
A thing I want to point out about publicly traded companies is that they are legally required to maximize shareholder profit.
So if a CEO refuses to do something immoral that would increase profits, the shareholders can sue to have them fired and replaced with someone else.
Not protecting any company here but this entire system is fucked and clearly leads to enshittyfication and immoral actions becoming the norm.
Absolutely.
Corporations are people, my friend.
Sociopathic people.
The canary has died.
The canary died back when they removed “don’t be evil”. I think the canary was just resurrected as a Horizon Zero Dawn mech canary.
I think I want to read more Sabatini the next weekend. No modernity at all - and plenty of such “pledges” always turning out a lie.
Provided I won’t learn a person who went offline almost a month ago is fine (other than severe burnout as expected). The only mutual acquaintance (who is supposed to know their real address etc) hasn’t yet read what I wrote them. I’ve went offline for longer periods of time, but it’s still scary.
“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”
- Groucho Marx
For some reason I’m just seeing a headline with no hyperlink. Here’s the link if anyone else has the same issue
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/04/google-removes-pledge-to-not-use-ai-for-weapons-from-website/
Yea, it’s just the title and no link. To the top with you for the source!
This clearly means the AI will be used for fire solutions and guidance, right?
Not threat detection and target identification, right?
annakin_padme_meme.jpeg
didn’t they remove “do no evil” a long time ago, too?
No.
Um, yes?
Following Google’s corporate restructuring under the conglomerate Alphabet Inc. in October 2015, Alphabet took “Do the right thing” as its motto, also forming the opening of its corporate code of conduct. The original motto was retained in Google’s code of conduct, now a subsidiary of Alphabet. Between April 21st and May 4th of 2018, the motto was removed from the code of conduct’s preface and retained in its last sentence.
Between 21 April and 4 May 2018, Google removed the motto from the preface, leaving a mention in the final line: “And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!”
They kept it within their internal code of conduct, but it’s been quite a while since that was their public motto.
To be fair, breadsmasher didn’t ask if it’s the public motto, they asked if they removed it. And they didn’t remove it, as it’s still in the public code of conduct.
So… they didn’t remove it, they moved it.
But that’s really neither here nor there, as it’s just words. I’ve never known a company to care much about words over profit.
The Google Graveyard will be littered with the bodies of people now. Fuck them, move to something better for the world.
