shaftway

My guess is that not meeting these commitments will actually help Oracle.

Oracle has been sitting on their heap of cash for a while now. They've had a lot of locked-in customers for a while. But as they started to bleed customers they looked for new revenue streams. I think the lawsuits filled that niche for a while

Eventually transforming themselves into an AWS clone became the plan, and last year there were all sorts of deals announced. But a lot of those deals were basically expectations, and Oracle didn't have a lot of guarantees that they were going to get the spend. They probably figured they had the OpenAI business and if that didn't pan out then they could offer database services to their existing customers. But to get any hope of any of that they need to lay out the cash upfront, to build the data centers and fill them.

But their existing customers hate them. Nobody will switch to Oracle willingly, certainly not for any kind of hosting. And Oracle bonds are Rated at BBB-, one step above junk status, so nobody wants to lend them money. They're shedding employees as fast as they can because they can't raise cash.

Ultimately, I expect them to renege on their datacenter contracts. But I think that'll probably be fine, because nobody was really going to use them anyway. The penalties are probably minor and Oracle will walk away from this whole thing without any of the obligations, and with a much smaller workforce that costs far less to maintain.

And then they'll go back to their rent-seeking. My guess is that in 2 or 3 years you'll see Oracle try to do a bunch of acquisitions of the modern tech stack to try to regain relevance and re-capture some of their lost market, and then go back to their old rent-seeking behavior.

I hear MongoDB recently lost their CEO; bet that makes them a good chunk cheaper......

"We estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual's visual field, before inducing seizures"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpPE85Jogjw&t=17s

There is zero chance I would approach a kid on their own that isn't mine. Because there is a very non-zero chance that someone would accuse me of that. If it gets to charges, even if I do successfully defend myself, then my name is mud and it costs me a ton.

I'd call security too. Not my monkey, not my circus.

I appreciate looking at it from another point of view, but no. We worked with a child therapist and checked in fairly regularly on progress and goals. We considered that aspect of it, but there were a few signs that this wasn't the case.

He wasn't very good at not getting caught. Half the time we caught him it was because he'd fall asleep watching videos and we'd find the laptop in his bed in the morning. Or some of the approaches just weren't very clever. At one point he took a computer from somewhere else in the house. He wasn't going to be able to put it back, so there was no way we wouldn't have found out.

This fit with his general problem-solving ability. He knew what he wanted, and he'd devise a way to get it, but he never thought things through after that. The consequences didn't matter; just like an addict looking for their next fix.

The addiction shifted a few times too. It wasn't always YouTube, but it was usually around technology (there was a short stint where it was about solving Rubik's Cubes, and maybe another around Lego).

Having a child with technology addiction, the struggle is real. It was my first experience dealing with real addiction. My son wanted to watch YouTube videos all night long. It's easy to say "don't do that"; it's harder to make it actually happen. He was 7.

We'd take devices and lock them up, but in the middle of the night while we were asleep he'd find a way. He'd plan it out during the day. He'd borrow his friends' school Chromebook, hide it in his room, download videos for offline viewing, and then wake up at 1:00 AM and binge watch.

We set up security cameras and would punish him when we caught him, but it didn't matter, because all he wanted was to watch videos, and no punishment mattered. He was going to watch them anyway. We locked devices in a safe, and during the day he'd figure out how to pull up security video and get an idea of the combination, and try every one close to that until he got in.

We considered locking him in his room at night, but rejected it because of safety and bathroom issues. Eventually we had to set up alarms around the house that would wake us up every time he got up. It took years of our sleep and mental health suffering, but we eventually broke him of it. Or he grew out of it. Who knows.

Technology is ubiquitous today. The schools require it. Society demands it. It's like if every house had a heroin dispenser. How would you prevent a junkie from getting their fix?

I want to always be able to do the next thing without worrying about getting to a point in my life where I'll need money to survive that I can't earn.

How do I do that?

Right now the next thing is to build neat stuff in my garage wood shop. One of the next things is going to be traveling in comfort. After that the next thing might be learning to fly a plane. But some day I'm going to be in a nursing home, and I don't want to suffer or be a burden on my family. The only real answer I see that gives me that kind of freedom (freedom from worrying) is to earn money now.

The billion dollar question is unnecessarily short-sighted and hedonistic. It advocates that you sell your future self short by doing what your present self wants. We are ever-changing bags of meat, and what you want in 10 years is almost certainly not going to be what you want now.

It's basically contingent on the AGs suing those companies as well.

> and paying the same amount, split between the two companies.

So it's a bucket of crabs

> On merchants who netted ginger, cinnamon and rhubarb from the Nile. In medieval price lists, a pound of ginger sold for the price of a sheep; a pound of saffron, the price of a horse.

A modern horse costs $3000 - $8000. Saffron at the grocery store costs $5 - $20 per gram, but you can get it for wholesale at $1000 - $5000 per pound.

So saffron is about the same affordability now, even though it's more common.

Both. AI code review is built-in, but there's always a second human in the loop.

I'm concerned that there are people pushing on the code generation front, the code reviewing front, and the laziness front. Eventually they're going to all meet in the middle, and there will be a significant number of engineers who are using AI to write and review the code, rubber stamp it, and push it into prod, with disasterous results.

I used the Microsoft Surface Duo, and the experience was terrible. I carry a Pixel 10 Fold, and 90% of the time I use it closed. But when I want to watch a video, or I want to show someone something. The bezel very much ruins that experience. And the Duo went even further by having hidden pixels, which made some UIs completely unusable.

That said, I hardly think that foldable is the peak. I'd prefer a rollable phone that I can expand the screen on, with maybe an edge display.

And the price is the real kicker. For the vast majority of the Android population, a phone at a price point about $1000 is just a non-starter.

Thanks for the assist, I typed it up from memory.

Not a fix for the battery, but if you're on Android, enable developer settings and change your animations to 0.5x speed (there are three settings to change). Every OS animation will take half as long. It makes an aging phone feel much snappier.

> "In a worst case scenario, the hillside can liquefy and actually slide into the community," Assembly member Pilar Schiavo, D-Santa Clarita, said at a news conference last month.

Once again, proving that Idiocracy (2006) was prophetic, and not just satire.

I've been going lighter and lighter and am down to a backpack that I carry (mostly just meds and electronics) and a small suitcase that I could carry-on, but I usually check. But my spouse packs heavier and heavier every year. It's a way to cope with anxiety; you think of everything that can possibly go wrong, and you make sure you have that mitigated with something in your carry-on.

And that's why on our last trip we had 9 pounds of dog food for our service dog, in cold packs, in our carry-on. "But what if there's a problem with the flight, and we lose our luggage, and we can't get to a pet food store for the whole two weeks?"

Spoiler: The cold packs didn't last, the food spoiled, and we had to go to a pet store.

My parents had a sailboat, and just walking around the marina there were a ton of clever names. My favorites were:

- Ménage à cinq

- Never Again II

It's not completely irrelevant, especially if you're planning to move back eventually.

If you're a decent software engineer, living in North Elbonia, making $20,000 / year, that's just enough to cover mortgage on a $100,000 house and live. In 30 years you've got a house and that's it.

Or you could move to the Silicon Valley and make $400,000 / year and that's just enough to cover mortgage on a $2,000,000 house and live. In 30 years you've got a house and that's it.

But when you sell your house, move back to North Elbonia, and buy a house there, you've got $1,900,000 banked. I'd take that deal.

My in-laws never had the money to save for retirement, so they got suckered into a reverse mortgage in Florida. They saw it as a way to have some spending money in their old age, but now that they've spent it and they're upside down it's a prison. They want to move to another area, closer to family, but they have no equity, and so no means to get a new place.

I'd imagine that falls into the bucket of a boomer with a mortgage.

On today's puzzle, `WROGHT` was rejected, and I got `GROWTH` just in the nick of time.

Two years ago I'd agree with you. Today I'd be concerned that an executive order would direct FEMA not to help out of spite against CA politics. I can already hear the arguments, blaming us for living in a high risk area.

I don't. Growing up our house was built in 1910. In '88 we do a retrofit, just in time for the '89 earthquake. Zero damage to the house or anything in it. Friends nearby who didn't retrofit had cracks. They were in the process of figuring out how to handle it when the firestorm of '91 made it moot.

But I'm in new construction. Built in 2015, so I think I'm good on seismics.

I'm insured, but I'm considering dropping insurance for the most likely disaster: earthquakes.

I'm in CA, and even though I'm not on top of an active fault, I'm close enough to be impacted. When the big one gets here, if it's big enough to affect me, then everyone else will be affected. I don't have any reason to expect them to stay solvent if a third of the CA population files for benefits.

I've thought about taking the money I pay for earthquake insurance premiums, and instead putting it on polymarket, betting that an earthquake will happen. If it doesn't, then I'm no worse off than I was paying for insurance. If it does, then polymarket just distributes my "winnings".

Convince me to keep my insurance.

I'm also currently at Google.

> [Googlers live in a] vicious culture that can fire someone like Justin Poehnelt [...] without a clearly articulated reason

At the end of the day, nobody other than Justin is owed a clearly articulated reason. Not other staff, and certainly not members of the public.

If you were the one fired, would you want HR to announce that you were fired for taking Sundar's special cookies out of the cookie jar labeled "For VIPs ONLY!!!"? That seems like a trifling reason to me, and maybe not justified. But maybe I don't agree with the general population, and maybe that would be held against me in the future.

As the recipient of that information you're welcome to share it. And I haven't seen Justin clearly do so. But I would wager that in most situations it's better that the company stays silent.

You mean the ex that he actually did make contact with?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czp6cXAsHj8

How large is too large?

I'm American with a roundabout very close to my house. The inner radius is 10 meters with an island in the middle, and single lanes in all directions. I have witnessed it successfully navigated at well over 100 kph.

Also, it's not a speed thing. I've seen this at another roundabout near my house. There's a school dropoff near it, so in the morning traffic backs up through the roundabout onto one of the entrances. The rules are that traffic in the roundabout has the right of way, so nobody lets anyone from one of the side streets in.

Not if the economy actually does recover, or at least "looks" like it recovered on paper. Inflation helps with that.

The average inflation over the last 10 years has been just north of 3%. If you have tenants today that are paying $500k/year, in 10 years they should be paying almost $700k/year with 50% occupancy. If you can string the bank along for another loan then your valuation is $28M instead of $20M. As the owner you can effectively take money out in this scenario.

If the bank won't refinance at that rate, then you could lower your rents by a bit in the last year. If you lowered your rates back down to $500k/year then you invite a bunch of new tenants, and now you can show high occupancy again.

Would it though? Thanks to CA Prop 65 every place I go has a warning that I'll get cancer if I take one more step. If I'm walking into a nuclear waste storage facility I'll never know because of warning fatigue.

Yeah, em-bee. You should just be not shy.

As a fellow shy person, I feel the pain when someone basically just tells you to get over it.

As a user I actually appreciate it. But most of the stuff I google is coding questions.

Before if I asked a question, the top 3 results would be StackOverflow. I'd click into the first one and find out that the question was subtly different than mine making its answer useless, but it included a lot of similar words. Go back and click into the second one. It's exactly my problem, asked three years ago, no answer. Go back and click into the third one. Same question, but it's been answered. Great. But the accepted answer has a score of -3 and another answer has a score of 5. So which one do I follow? Whoops, it's actually neither of them, because the library has broken both of those workflows.

Now I get my answer right away 90% of the time. And if I don't then I scroll down and I'm not worse off than I was 2 years ago.

I think OP is referring to the 80's movie WarGames - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames

At the end a strategic defense computer is asked to play Tic Tac Toe against itself and suddenly "learns" about no-win scenarios. Then it does the same with nuclear launch scenarios, and finds that they're all no-win. It decides that nuclear war "is a strange game", and "the only winning move is not to play".

This is the result of systemic problems at Google:

- Launching is rewarded, keeping the lights on is not

- The hot new teams get far more resources than tried and true ones

You could sum this up in three words as "new is better".

This is why Google Home is getting worse. It worked well enough, but nobody gets promoted for keeping it like that. People get promoted for launching something new on that platform and cherry-picking statistics to show that they had "impact".

This is why everything at the keynote was AI. AI is the new hot dumpster fire that every resource is being poured into. And including AI in every product gives so many people the opportunity to launch new stuff, and demonstrate "impact".

And while I/O is for developers, you'd be foolish if you thought that Wall St. wasn't paying attention. Stock was down $10 for the day before I/O started, but during that keynote it gained $5. It didn't hold it, but clearly the keynote affected the stock price. Sundar knows this.