Oracle cannot possibly be expecting to meet its bets here. My own empirical one-person observation is that my friend worked there in the group that went around the world standing up their new cloud datacenters, and he was there from basically 2019 to earlier this year. They laid him and half his team off earlier this year. Absolutely nonsensical if they're really building out cloud data centers. Because that's exactly what his job was for the previous 5 years....
Can anyone make that make sense? The team was like 15 people and is now 7. Not exactly a large enough team to build out billions of dollars worth of data centers... Maybe they're just going to contract that all out, but this guy and his team were a very smooth, very well greased machine for standing this stuff up quickly and reliably.
From my limited second-hand understanding of orcl, a team that operates in a smooth and well greased manner is quite the anomaly. I could see why the company would have an immune response to it.
Very unlikely to be the technical build team at fault for that.
Real estate, legal, permitting, utility connections, construction, plant fit out, testing and certification, security, customs and immigration, and shipping all need to happen first - and every one of those has room for huge amounts of uncertainty and delay, more so if you're doing it internationally.
There aren't many shortcuts that you can take when you're dealing with a complex combination of hardware, property, and law.
Technical staff are easiest to pin the blame on in any given situation. All those other fields require enormously more people skills and political inclination.
If you are in an org like that and there is an effort to pin something on technical people inappropriately the reaction when there's solid push back approaches total hysterical breakdown since it's so unexpected. Even if the tech staff "win" they'll be marked for the rest of their time there.
That matches my experience at google. Getting the land and approvals was the most time, then the basic site prep and building shells and utilities, then basic building fit out, and then finally the actual tech installs.
The real way to increase throughput is to first slow down and smooth out the inevitable bumps by adding adequate slack and building up an inventory of shovel-ready projects as a buffer - and then to start running multiple teams in parallel.
The fact that OP's friend experienced Oracle doing the exact opposite of this lends credence to the idea that they're under pressure and are perhaps panicking.
yes but sometimes a VP gets fired, new VP comes in, and says "we'll outsource this" or "we'll use this home grown team doing something else" and unfortunately tons of people are caught in a layoff, even if they were good.
Well I guess we can assume that this means it's not the reason senior leadership laid them off because senior leaders definitely never scapegoat their underlings or have too little competence to correctly assess why things failed!
Obvious troll. Calling Orwell a rich kid who got his feelings hurt is obscene. I challenge anyone who says that to work as a plongeur for even one week. Or to live on only toast and tea, bumming around the work houses in the UK. He never begged for money from anyone, he only worked during this time, and his book on the topic is remarkable. It's a must read for anyone who's ever worked in the food service industry.
His work house experiences informed 1984. The original poster in this comment thread is just trolling beyond belief, and also, seems to have no grasp of the topics at hand what so ever.
I personally agree that pre-buying is silly in today's world of digital distribution. But I will point out that most pre-sales now come with a digital item or two or five that's exclusive to pre-orders. Additionally, if you pre-order, you can sometimes download the game a day or so ahead of time, and then have it "unlock" when it's released, allowing you to play at minute 1. I'd wager GTA VI is well over 100 GBs, so this is actually a reasonable benefit, especially considering the potential for CDN crashes at launch time.
That's right. I forgot about the ability to pre-download the game before the official release, which might help the servers. That also remove the joke "Patch day 1 (of the size of the game)" which I always found ridiculous but became a standard practice.
Having the game of that size is the only excuse I accept for not releasing a physical version, but because no blu-ray will handle it, it starts darker days for game preservation. I love the fact that I will be able to undust my old PS4 in a couple of years and play GTA V without relying on the PlayStation Store. But we knew these days were counted.
The author is coming from the games industry. As an arts based industry, AI is EXTREMELY divisive. The author really will lose friends over even so much as touching AI in certain ways, because the artists that built the games industry were already badly abused, and now, they're being squeezed out entirely. For business developers, AI is somewhat less existentially terrifying, as it can be seen to be really empowering to an experienced user.
In the games industry, AI usage immediately eliminates a human job. Why pay a pixel artist if AI can generate 100's of unique little people pixels in seconds, and output them in the right format? Hollywood is going through the same thing: the companies that are building AI for Hollywood have to do so in the bushes, hiding. You don't see them advertising or flashing cash. That's because no one involved in using their wares wants anyone to know they're using them, lest they alienate the highly-talented people they still need to fill the gap between concept AI and full theatrical release AI.
In the software world, we are worried about AI. In the creative industries, they are absolutely pants on fire, screaming at the sky, burning down the village terrified of AI.
Everyone in the games industry is badly abused. Mostly because so many want to go into it. And yet game publishers continue to struggle with profitability because budgets have ballooned. I honestly think there's just not enough room in the market for the number of game studios we have today, at least not unless management improves and gets costs under control.
For one small idea, we probably don't really need Ron Perlman, Keanu Reeves, Kevin Spacey, Kit Harrington, Gary Oldman, Kiefer Sutherland, Willem Dafoe, Peter Dinklage, Samuel L. Jackon and Ray Liotta doing voice acting.
A friend of mine is an artist working in the games industry. So far nobody has been fired. They all simply started using AI to be more productive.
They care more about doing their job well than some artistic ideal that only works in practice if you don't have to care about things like food and shelter.
> Why pay a pixel artist if AI can generate 100's of unique little people pixels in seconds
Because someone who knows something about pixels needs to make a judgement. It is rare to see a machine-generated artifact (picture, video, text or code) that's good on the first try. And not always a non-specialist can see the issue.
Same thing why we still need human software engineers, even though a machine can generate code. Someone with actual understanding of the problem needs to make a management decision. Just like engineers see code slop (design or implementation) that laypeople vibe-coding don't recognize, artists see the visual slop where layman eye glances over.
Honestly, IMHO, this whole panic is artists' own creation. Instead of educating others on how to spot the issues (and thus reaffirming that expertise still matters - nothing had changed, and probably nothing ever will), a notable fraction went all-in on neo-luddite ideas, as if they don't know the history of their own craft and adjacent creative industries (I guess many really don't, or at least it doesn't click). Evaluate new tools, make use of them when they provide value, skip them where they fall short, and most importantly reaffirm that fancier brushes don't replace the artist in a human society - this is an already well-tested and proven strategy. Ring the existential bells when we'll get to the question of machine cognition rather than just intelligence.
Same for the engineering. Don't shy away from new tools, use them where they're a good fit, don't waste time when they are't (but periodically check out if something changes), explain everyone why you still matter - just to push back on unfortunate misconceptions.
The fact that a lot of companies' upper management went delusional and decided they want to replace humans witch machines (as if don't need responsibility anymore) doesn't help. But - hey - already plenty of stories how it bites them back, so while this period sucks, it's not exactly fucked, just in a state of (a pretty much expected) confusion.
Dishing out pixels or lines of code got somewhat cheaper. Expertise cost remains the same, though.
>Because someone who knows something about pixels needs to make a judgement. It is rare to see a machine-generated artifact (picture, video, text or code) that's good on the first try.
Not if nobody cares for the end product that finely.
And even if it was true, one person can make the judgement, while automation erasing 5 others that would have worked in both the judgement and the graphics wrok.
> Not if nobody cares for the end product that finely.
Yes. But a non-negligible number of people do care. If nobody would've cared, we wouldn't have this drama.
> one person can make the judgement, while automation erasing 5 others that would have worked in both the judgement and the graphics wrok.
Yes. In other words, new tools had increased people's performance for mechanical work - individual units of that can be arguably done faster than before. So hypothetically one person can do a work of five. Note of that erases those people and their skills. The real underlying issue is that demand for it doesn't catch up because world's coincidentally fucked (through a series of unrelated issues, such as a quite few global conflicts) and economies aren't exactly thriving outside of a few niches du jour.
I strongly suspect that if we would've had a flourishing economies around the world, the demand would ramp up and artists (and engineers, and writers, and everyone else whose performance could've been positively affected by new tools) would be in greater position than ever before.
>So hypothetically one person can do a work of five. Note of that erases those people and their skills.
It just doesn't magically take them out of the universe or turns them into unskilled persons.
But it does magically erases those people with those skills as needed employees.
>The real underlying issue is that demand for it doesn't catch up because world's coincidentally fucked (through a series of unrelated issues, such as a quite few global conflicts) and economies aren't exactly thriving outside of a few niches du jour.
Why would that demand have to "catch up"? Just because we can do something faster or automate parts of it doesn't guarantee demand will go up, even in a good economy. No shortage of jobs that vanished forever in a similar even, despite the economy going otherwise up. Even more so now, where it's fucked up anyway, of course.
> Just because we can do something faster or automate parts of it doesn't guarantee demand will go up
It's not guaranteed, but why wouldn't it? It's digital entertainment and art, and the market is not saturated, there's still tons of ideas unexplored. If more people would have spare money they can spend on digital purchases instead of making ends meet - I'm pretty sure there'd be more people seeking ways to earn that money. Especially if production just got cheaper.
Correct me if I'm wrong, please, but every time production got cheaper for something that isn't obsolete (and art and stories are never obsolete), the markets became more and more flooded.
>It's not guaranteed, but why wouldn't it? It's digital entertainment and art, and the market is not saturated, there's still tons of ideas unexplored.
Because there's only so much "digital entertainment and art" people practically care for, and already people were saturated and bored with all the crap out there pre-AI too.
I surely can be, but I don’t see it so far. How the latter suggests the former? The demand doesn’t have to scale infinitely - I don’t believe the demand is or was anywhere near saturation.
Tons of music that nobody listened to is certainly nothing new. Predates “AI”, and even Internet for sure. What would be indicative are shifts in distribution of listeners outside of extremities (excluding top hits and low audience both), but I’m struggling to formulate a good criteria to watch out for (and then we probably don’t have the data). If not a distribution, maybe a dynamic of total listening hours over time adjusted for income and inflation fluctuations may suggest if there was ceiling or not.
There’s something to the series induced boredom, though. Increase in quantity paired with a feeling there’s not much to actually watch is something I can relate to. I’m not sure how to tell oversaturation fatigue from actual lack of interesting (at specific moments) media. Thanks, that’s something to think about.
What gets me is that LLM writing has an inhuman voice. Of course we know the tells. Not only this, but that. You're exactly right! —
The woman and man AI voice endemic to YouTube and ilk is also tremendously off putting. M5Stack has a bunch of these videos, and it devalues what they're doing.
And then... Transformer "art". It is some of the worst drek I've seen. I smell it a mile away. It's easily seen by slop english-like characters. Or too glowy humans. Or overall fake feel. For pixel art, I can perhaps see it. But for anything it just feels... Gross.
I'm completely sure management LOVES it cause its cheap and devalues humans.
> And then... Transformer "art". It is some of the worst drek I've seen. I smell it a mile away.
Hating that every third or fourth ad now is AI-generated. So much worse than what entry-level graphic designers can put out while putting them out of work.
> I'm completely sure management LOVES it cause its cheap and devalues humans.
And the tragic bit is that instead of educating them about the pitfalls so everyone's on the same page, a lot of brave hotheads are literally calling for a class war
> educating them about the pitfalls so everyone's on the same page
What? They know what they're doing, they have access to the same information we do. There's just too much money in it for them to care about irrelevant things like product quality or the continued employment of anyone but themselves. Their prosperity and usefulness in their position is fully reliant on them not being on the same page. Their incentives are completely different from ours.
> They know what they're doing, they have access to the same information we do.
Who? I'm not talking about a few well-known sociopaths that run few well-known transnational corporations and have means to pump and squeeze biggest markets for profit (though I doubt they really know what they're doing). I'm talking about your casual folks in management roles in tons of companies of all sizes out there. Our peers. Just like us, on average, they, put frankly, don't know shit.
There is no "here's how we cook now, when new tools are invented" vetted guidebook anywhere. Can't be - no one had a head start long enough to prove anything. Almost everyone out there are more or less blind kittens from the same litter, applying some heuristics to poke around to see what works and what doesn't, learning what's not to do as it bites us in the ass.
Always been like that - humans learn from their failures. Most - we do during our training and experimentation days (which directly translated into our professional knowledge of things to be avoided), but this time we got caught with our pants down, when many say we gotta try to find something ourselves, or lose out to those who tried and found something of value, and there's something to it.
One can argue the writing was on the wall for years, but ask around and be surprised how many people actually had time and mental capacity to do the predictions, and if they had - how accurate those predictions were. In my bubble, most people are still trying to make sense of things past the very basics. Slightly past "all things AI now", onto "okay, for real, how do we learn to use this where it's a benefit, and don't use this where it's a liability" stage.
Even if you potentially have access to the information (others' experiences and discoveries), you gotta dig it up from all the surrounding noise. Figure out how to validate it. Actually validate it. That's a ton of unplanned effort.
Spend some time learning about the concept of the excluded middle[1]. It is something that will be useful on your life going forward, it might even save you a lot of trouble.
I am writing a post about that for my blog but it's still not there so ... check back later? Lol.
Anyway, in this particular scenario, a co-worker not being my friend does not mean we are enemies.
I am a board member of this org, and I wanted to post the link for donation in here. GOAT is dedicated to open sourcing and open copyrighting materials, schematics, and standards for accessibility hardware. Remember the guy with the robotic legs, and the manufacturer turned them off remotely? That kinda stuff simply cannot be allowed to happen.
GOAT is a fantastic organization, and when Andrei, who wrote this blog, asked for help with his wheelchair, GOAT found the parts he needed, put someone on a plane to his country, and installed the equipment. Andrei was able to go the park for the first time in years, as a result.
Calling the Economist anything resembling "leftist" is emblematic of the psychosis in the system. The Economist is what the Wall Street Journal was before Murdoch bought it: Focused on encouraging long term thinking, gains, and wisdom, while reporting on the short term trends. The Economist is the absolute embodiment of the old man and the kid joke from the Sopranos:
The investor: "Hey dad, let's run down this hill and fuck that cow!"
The Economist: "Be patient, son. Let's walk down this hill and fuck 'em all."
Legislation and court rulings have shown that shareholders get everything they want, ever. They want Southwest to stop checking 2 free bags? It happens. Etc. Ad Nauseum.
Somehow, we need legislation that says companies are beholden first to their employees, then to their customers, THEN to shareholders. I don't know how to do that. Co-ops are the only real answer maybe?
“Southwest has been under increasing pressure to raise revenue and improve returns after activist hedge fund Elliott Investment Management took a stake in the airline last year and pushed for changes to the carrier’s business model.”
Elliot showed up because southwests entire computer system imploded over the holidays which cost them massive amounts of money and reputation. Changes were absolutely needed at southwest.
The US actually has a legal structure for employees to have beneficial (+ tax advantaged) ownership of their companies, the ESOP (employee stock ownership plan). It's a legal structure where a trust buys the company from the original owners on behalf of the employees and then allocates a percentage of those shares to the employees each year.
Since it's basically a leveraged buyout of the company by the employees, it provides a much more ethical succession option (IMHO) for privately held companies with founders who want to step down but do not want to sell to private equity. I wish more people were aware of it as an option.
The poster you're asking this to is probably talking about plug-ins. Plex, very long ago, supported plug-ins, but it no longer does. Plug-ins were usually for adding in support for other media scrapers (porn and anime), or even other media types, like audiobooks.
Additionally, Plex tends to revise their UI and inner workings in a way that favors everything but the core media sharing platform. They add TV stations, they mix in their streaming ad-supported channels with your search results, and push them before the friends and family stuff, making it tough to help other navigate to shared libraries.
I think, overall, Plex is a good shepherd for their product, but everyone knows the enshitificaiton process is inevitable. It's just a question of how long the timeline between "Plex is usable" and "Plex is sold to private equity and is now utter shit." I've been pleasantly surprised with the length, so far. But having an escape hatch is always a good idea, and Jellyfin seems to be nearing a parity.
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