• Llamatron@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    I’ve worked in IT for close to 30 years and I’ve never met anyone with a good word to say about Oracle. I remember them being notorious for auditing their customers and nailing them to wall for even the slightest perceived infraction of their convoluted license agreements. I don’t understand how they still exist.

    • Mikina@programming.dev
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      7 days ago

      JDK is the greatest scam ever.

      When something needs JDK, most people usually just download the first one they find without much thought, just like with any dependency, which is Oracle’s, instead of OpenJDK.

      Oracle will go after companies where their employees unknowlingly installed their JDK for some minor thing, and hit them with multimillion fine for breaking their license after a while. Or at least I remember hearing they used to.

      Blocking anything Oracle company-wide, especially JDK, is the first thing an IT admin should do.

      • rekabis@lemmy.ca
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        5 days ago

        A prior company I worked at had a compliance division whose work was about 80% Oracle. As in, their attention over preventing Oracle JRE installs in favour of Azul Java was 4× higher than ensuring anything Microsoft - or anything else under the sun, actually - was properly licensed.

    • rumba@lemmy.zip
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      7 days ago

      auditing their customers and nailing them to wall

      Vendor lock-in is quite profitable.

      Big on Govt projects too

    • dreamkeeper@literature.cafe
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      4 days ago

      I interviewed with them a few years ago and the dev I talked to said it was the best job he ever had.

      That was the only time I ever heard anything positive about Oracle.

        • mirshafie@europe.pub
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          6 days ago

          There’s relatively little information given how prominent these companies are. But the CIA was the first customer of both companies, and were most likely involved in their founding. Here’s a article to get you started on Oracle: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/oracle-s-coziness-with-government-goes-back-to-2820370.php

          John McAfee claimed he never used McAfee VirusScan. He never said why but while on the run in Belize he said no one should use VirusScan. My wild guess is that it might be because it scans for lots of stuff that aren’t in your interest as a user, and probably provides a convenient backdoor into your computer for certain people.

          If you want the weird stuff on Oracle there’s a crazy woman who’s obsessed with Larry Ellison that writes all kinds of things about him on a place called the Drey Dossier.

    • M137@lemmy.today
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      6 days ago

      I got my first computer at 15, in 2005, and even then they were very clearly bad just from my newbie experience and seeing forums posts. The word itself is so tainted for me because of them. One of the companies that “enshittified” way ahead of the curve.

    • kunaltyagi@programming.dev
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      6 days ago

      Their sales and especially enterprise sales team are good at convincing people that they really need MySQL. Once their pitch works, then come the lawyers and the nailing part

    • architect@thelemmy.club
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      7 days ago

      Yet they keep working for an evil company. They could have not done that. Had a little integrity. But no, so…

      Oh hey I’m from the future where you get judged harshly for where you choose to work.

      • Diurnambule@jlai.lu
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        7 days ago

        It is really performant for the job it is required to do, they sell haxadata server which have really high performances

  • rumba@lemmy.zip
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    7 days ago

    Start forcing users to use AI
    lose staff
    Fire staff so that AI can take over
    lose staff
    Find out AI can’t replace the users, get devalued
    lose staff

    seems pretty toxic

        • Cheebus@lemmy.world
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          1 hour ago

          Morally I feel I made the right decision, financially probably not but I’ll choose morals over cash any day.

          Won’t know if I’ll stay in IT yet for a few months at this new job, or if I need to pivot harder

  • Kurtismayfield@lemmy.zip
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    6 days ago

    Imagine failing this hard at your job and keeping it.

    And I know his job is to keep the stock price high… but 28 percent growth over the last five years in tech is still failing at your job.

    • Bieren@lemmy.today
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      6 days ago

      “Double digit YoY or get out. Doesn’t matter how many people you have to fire or how hard to exploit the ones you keep. Double digit or GTFO.” -Shareholders

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      Besides the usual CEO shenanigans, they really want AI to succeed, to replace usually leftist intellectuals with a far-right AI.

      • Kurtismayfield@lemmy.zip
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        5 days ago

        I want cold fusion, cancer to be cured for 1 dollar, and flying ponies. But I know I’m not getting those.

        They aren’t going to get true AI either.

  • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works
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    6 days ago

    Why does Larry Ellison give me such crazy uncanny valley vibes?! Is his head too long? Moustache too narrow? Generally too smooth? It has fucked me up all day scrolling past this image.

  • Mereo@piefed.ca
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    7 days ago

    Chinese open-source models are becoming the norm. You don’t need the latest model from ChatGPT (e.g., a Ferrari) to complete your task. A simple Honda will suffice (open-source models), and it uses a lot less energy since it runs on your home or company’s infrastructure.

    Because of that, I predict that we’re going to see a lot of financial hardship among AI companies.

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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      7 days ago

      Open-weight not open source mostly. And they’re not keeping them open weight forever. Once they’ve truly surpassed the west, their future models will likely be closed down too so they could charge Anthropic level pricing and turn a profit.

      • Guilvareux@feddit.uk
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        6 days ago

        I don’t know how much they’re actually doing to surpass the West tbh. A lot of the success relies on distilling closed models, and running the models cheaper with almost comparable effectiveness. If the Chinese are showing that such profit/investment strategies in closed models are weak and can be easily decimated by a competitor, what motivation would they have to adopt one?

        • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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          6 days ago

          If their models truly are reaching parity with new western models as many claim, then it can’t be from distillation alone, they must be gathering their own datasets too. It takes months to train a new model.

          Also distillation only really saves you the data collection and preparation (categorization). Training is still expensive, as is inference. It’s likely architectural changes that are making their inference cheaper (MoE vs dense models for one), not sure if they’ve gotten any good methods for making training cheaper.

          • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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            6 days ago

            There is zero proof of distillation. Minimax 2.7 development was surrounded by moderate use of Claude. M3 is their latest generation, and pretty solid, but its performance cannot be attributed solely (or even 5%) to distillation, and that is only lab that has been accused of significant API use. These claims are all 3-4 months old by now, and Anthropic blocked China access after publishing the accusations. Repeated BS is BS from losers trying to lobby for support.

      • dil@lemmy.zip
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        6 days ago

        Deepseek v4 flash as it is now is perfectly fine for the basic agent stuff I use it for which is basically remote controlling my computer from a distance without using remote desktop. Not sure id be effected significantly if they blocked off their future models.

      • dil@lemmy.zip
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        6 days ago

        Hop on rednote, they aren’t fans of their own AI and were collectively throwing fits when claude got banned there.

    • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
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      7 days ago

      it uses a lot less energy since it runs on your home or company’s infrastructure.

      A CPU-cycle requires energy no matter where it is. The open source models may be more efficient, or you may distribute the power usage over a greater geographical area. But you’re not using less energy because you’re running the model at home.

      Because of that, I predict that we’re going to see a lot of financial hardship among AI companies.

      I do like the idea that open source will kill tech giants.

      • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        You are correct. OpenAI etc. valuations are based on the difference between revenue and cost. The key part is that open source breaks the monopoly. It stops excessive rent being charged (now or in the future) to use Ai models.

        Tech giants will still exist, but closed model advantages won’t.

  • irish_link@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    No matter how much I try, all I see in this picture is Mel Brooks as President Skroob sniffing Air out of a can.

    • NottaLottaOcelot@lemmy.ca
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      6 days ago

      So now they HAVE to double down and fund this AI infrastructure, because sunk costs dictate that they can’t admit to a bad decision and hire back the terminated employees.

      Just because it’s costly doesn’t mean they aren’t going to push forward with all their might, unfortunately

      • stringere@sh.itjust.works
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        6 days ago

        Anyone with sense still locked in to Oracle products needs to find their nearest exit strategy.

        I know it won’t be easy, but the alternative is going to be a lot messier when they completely go to shit and you lose everything.

  • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Fucking wild to read the article. Oracle got pissy because regulations said you can’t just shove datacenter electricity costs on people.

    • architect@thelemmy.club
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      7 days ago

      People shouldn’t be working for super villains.

      People stand around wondering why the fuck these companies are able to do what they do and these billionaires the same. WELL BECAUSE YOU WORK FOR THEM CHAD. IT’S LITERALLY YOUR FAULT!

      • KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        6 days ago

        In a shitty job market, a job for the supervillain is better than starving and being homeless.

        This rhetoric comes from a place of privilege.

        • Bazoogle@lemmy.world
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          6 days ago

          Lmao, they are quite literally saying it is the suffering peoples fault. Evil supervillains literally find and abuse any leverage they can get to make people work for them, depriving them of any other option. That’s why they’re supervillains to begin with.

        • wewbull@feddit.uk
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          6 days ago

          It’s not shitty enough to completely leave your ethics at the door. You might need to take a little less pay, or work on something less interesting (although we’re talking about Oracle here).

          Somebody who landed a job at Oracle had options. That is until today. Now they have 21,000 other people to compete with.

          It’s the people somewhere like Nvidia I have some empathy for. They thought they were building gaming tech and they’ve ended up building the apocalypse.