[binary132]

People are never ever ever allowed to realize maybe sometimes bad things are bad once the chickens come home to roost. An antisocial belief they held fifteen years ago needs to define them forever, because people are just machines for receiving guilt and wrath, they can’t learn anything from suffering personally, or if they can here’s why it’s bad anyway.

Also engineers building stuff to spec are exactly the same thing as venture capitalists

[Silagi]

More specifically, someone actively building on top of Amazon decrying the exploitation of workers and the environment is demonstrably hypocritical.

And "engineers building things to spec" are not the same as those giving the orders, but they should take a measure of responsibility for the things they build. I think most people generally agree about the culpability of those following orders when people are harmed. I'm not even saying they should necessarily be held accountable; just that moralizing about it is hypocritical.

[tedmiston]

"Anyone who uses < public cloud computing > is hypocritical" is a pretty insane take, even for HN.

All technologies have benefits and costs — choosing and using a technology does not imply the nonexistence of tradeoffs. One can give sufficient consideration to the downsides, and then determine that the upsides outweigh them. It's not rocket science.

[Silagi]

Sure, but those people who "considered the downsides" shouldn't then moralize about the exploitation of workers; they're contributing to it. It's explicitly hypocritical. They're explicitly deciding the exploitation is worth the upsides for their or their company's benefit.

I'm not excluding myself from this. Just chafing against this grandstanding by people actively contributing to the same problems, and especially annoyed by the people saying we should pause development because it's going to affect people's jobs. This isn't new.

Edit: I'd also like to point out that "Public cloud computing" doesn't really capture what I said; the OP of the article is specifically building on Amazon, which has a well documented history of worker exploitation. Even building on Azure or Google cloud would be more defensible in the context of the article they wrote.

[tedmiston]

I generalized the statement from one cloud to big public clouds categorically to show by hyperbole that ... what difference does it make?! [One can find analogous critiques of Azure, GCP, etc.]

Last year, AWS did ≥ $100B in revenue across millions of customers. But where do you draw the line exactly? "Everyone who uses < thing > is < problematic >" feels extreme.

[binary132]

I could even agree with “is problematic” although I don’t see it as black and white, but “is problematic and therefore doesn’t get to comment / needs to own this / did this” is definitely not a legitimate critique of the critical discourse.

[kentm]

I don’t think they’re trying to imply that at all. But arguing that it’s bad without a mea culpa comes across as inauthentic.