[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.