Whenever I see a post from a connection, 2nd or 3rd order connection or even just a suggested post from someone at one of the big tech companies, I feel a mix of disgust and sadness. Let me explain why: I’ve never met someone with a good reason to work for one of these companies, and the people I have met, namely one systems reliability engineer, when asked, spun away from and try to reverse my questioning why you’d want to work for such a source of societal troubles as a skill issue. If you’re one of the FAANG engineers like her you’re welcome to judge me, I’ve never applied to work for one of those companies and don’t plan to, so you can indefinitely deflect my judgment as “you’re jealous” or “you just don’t get it” or “20\( is \)20”. “Alphabet” (read: Google) has locked up one of the world’s largest tech sector sub-sectors: search. They did this with monopolistic tactics like large bribe payments to potential competitors like Apple and Mozilla who would likely try their own hands at running a search engine except they’ve been bribed. They’ve now been convicted of this criminal monopolistic behavior and the sentencing is to come later. “Meta” (read: Facebook) allowed genocide in Myanmar with it’s absconding the need for moderation. It learned teen girls were killing themselves at higher rates because of instagram and they did nothing. Apple cynically re-sells commodity hardware like ram and disk storage for insane prices, creating a mechanism for charging both their poorest and richest customers for everything they can take them for. “X” (read: twitter) now allows adult content to roam free on it’s platform with a minimum user age of 13. The CEO is a crypto-scamming rent-seeking fascist who ejects journalists from his sandbox when they point out very true things that make Elon look bad. These companies can hardly be painted in a positive light, and until recently they leaned very heavily on the use of renewable power sources and growing efficiency in computing to claim they were “green”. In all likelihood it was ineffective green-washing but still the “green” self-label babies were proverbially thrown out with the efficiency bathwater when this LLM/AI bubble got it’s start back in ‘22. These models use an absolutely mind-bending amount of electricity and water and they’re poised to keep regions of the grid on the edge of stability for years to come.