At least blessed teams we used GPUs when we were allowed, else CPUs. TPUs were basically banned in YT since they were reserved for higher priority purposes. Gemini was almost certainly trained with one, but I guarantee an ungodly amount of compute has gone into training neural nets with CPUs and GPUs.
Assuming the binary tree thing is the whole story, that still doesn't sound like a terrible choice on Google's part. Your first few years at Google you won't have enough leeway to do something like "make homebrew," and you will have to interact with an arcane codebase.
For tree reversal in particular, it shouldn't be any harder than:
1. If you don't know what a binary tree is then ask the interviewer (you probably _ought_ to know that Google asks you questions about those since their interview packet tells you as much, but let's assume you wanted to wing it instead).
2. Spend 5-10min exploring what that means with some small trees.
3. Then start somewhere and ask what needs to change. Clearly the bigger data needs to go left, and the smaller data needs to go right (using an ascending tree as whatever small example you're working on).
4. Examine what's left, and see what's out of order. Oh, interesting, I again need to swap left and right on this node. And this one. And this one.
5. Wait, does that actually work? Do I just swap left/right at every node? <5-10min of frantically trying to prove that to yourself in an interview>
6. Throw together the 1-5 lines of code implementing the algorithm.
It's a fizzbuzz problem, not a LeetCode Hard. Even with significant evidence to the contrary, I'd be skeptical of their potential next 1-3 years of SWE performance with just that interview to go off of.
That said, do they actually know that was the issue? With 4+ interviews I wouldn't ordinarily reject somebody just because of one algorithms brain-fart. As the interviewer I'd pivot to another question to try to get evidence of positive abilities, and as the hiring manager I'd consider strong evidence of positive abilities from other interviews much more highly than this one lack of evidence. My understanding is that Google (at least from their published performance research) behaves similarly.
Even the Rodney King riots didn't have as many deaths (gunshots or otherwise) as the worst EU football events. Guns are scary or whatever, and the US should definitely handle them better or ban them or something, but I still think I'd rather take my chances in an average US riot (give or take recent ICE murders) than something heated in the EU.
Maybe. They have the potential for faster semiconductors, but only after adequate modifications. Graphene isn't a semiconductor, and it isn't obvious that we'll find a way to fix that without (or even with) rare resources.
> Person who shows up to vote is legally allowed to vote
How does that work though? What's the root of trust identifying me as me to a government who, at most, has a written record somewhere of my birth, and definitely not enough information to tie that to any particular face or body.
I have to present my passport to get on a plane, enter into another country, register into a hotel and return to this country. I have to show either my passport card (another passport-like ID in the US) or my RealID-equipped drivers license to fly within the US. They also make me stand in front of a camera.
Nearly every nation on earth does this. It's nothing new. We have the technology and the means. This isn't a problem.
In a lot of places, it's a photo ID. Usually that required a birth certificate to get, and often a few more pieces of corroborating information to make it harder.
Without a root of trust though, how much good is that? When I needed a copy of my birth certificate to get a CA driver's license, I just sent my home state $10-$20 and pinky promised that I was me. Getting utility bills or whatever delivered to your favorite name isn't hard either. It's cheap and easy to bootstrap your way into somebody's identity.
Maybe the payout isn't worth it, but (a) empirically, people seem to be willing to spend a lot more than that per vote if necessary, and (b) it's not substantially harder or riskier to do that than to risk prison voting for a dead person or whatever else some fraudster might cook up; if we think this is an important system which people are trying to rig then the proposed cure just keeps honest people honest.
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