Replying to @⁨artyom@piefed.social⁩

I mean that’s one of the big draws of capitalism right? Much of the state’s power is derived from its elite oligarchy and their industrial contributions, in exchange for basically having a blind eye turned to anything they want.

When you allow structure of such importance to exist as a business, you balance your house on toothpicks.

Therefore, you can allow them to snap and tumble your whole home down a cliff; or you can treat them as part of the state (but, only when they need it. To keep up appearances.)

Replying to @⁨fizzle@quokk.au⁩

I 100% agree if we’re talking about employees with the capacity to earn more than a living wage.

You can’t tie people to the actions of the company they’re working for if they’re living paycheck to paycheck.

Employees in the tech sector can absolutely afford to not work at Oracle or Flock or any one of the other antihuman shitholes like them. For a lot of these people all it took for them to sell their morality was a chance to make six figures.

Replying to @⁨fizzle@quokk.au⁩

I’ve resigned on ideological grounds twice. It’s hard to do, especially if you don’t have a safety net or savings to tide you over until your next job. That being said, I think that executive pay should be reduced to compensate for job losses (as a payout to all the people who got fired) anytime shit like this happens. Make the C suite take accountability for their gambles.

Replying to @⁨fizzle@quokk.au⁩

We’re still throwing out morality platitudes on tech workers as we’ve watched since COVID as the tech sector at all levels has bled jobs, senior staff looking for positions for 2-3 years in some cases.

It’s impossible out there. I have moral objections to the way my company operates too but if I quit now my family will lose everything. I mean thankfully I’m not exactly crushing orphans in the orphan crushing machine but in a sane market I would look for something a little more aligned with my personal ideals. However just like buying a stick of RAM for a reasonable price, it just ain’t happening right now.

Replying to @⁨fizzle@quokk.au⁩

You’re still part of the corporate machine if you work at Walmart or McDonald’s, they won’t pay you enough to feed your family and I doubt the job is satisfying.

Like you do realise it was standard operating procedure in the US tech scene to apply for at least 400-500 jobs BEFORE the layoff craze that’s lasted years now, right?

It’s different in my country but it took me 3 whole months to find a new job when unemployed which was pretty bad compared to my previous experience. A bit later it took my friend a YEAR to get a new job. Now their boss is saying every engineer should be providing at least 3x value to customers using AI and they have no option but to stay at this job because nobody is hiring.

Replying to @⁨fizzle@quokk.au⁩

Mate, I know people who are having trouble finding jobs at shops, let alone anything that pays enough for an adult with responsibilities to be able to afford to take it.

How many small businesses do you think are hiring these days?

You’re incredibly privileged if you think everyone can just afford to do whatever it is you do that you don’t benefit a single corporation. I assume you’re an artisan who crafts something out of materials you get from your own land or something.

Replying to an earlier post

I never said anything about not benefiting a corporation - you seem to have imagined that.

Some corporations have shit objectives, others do not.

There are loads of people who work for companies and really believe they’re making the world a better place through their work.

You’re trying to present an argument that you need to work for an AI company or whatever to put food on the table, but it just doesn’t stack up. Plenty of people are not starving and are not doing that for a living.

Replying to @⁨fizzle@quokk.au⁩

Some corporations have shit objectives, others do not.

The objective of a corporation is to make money. Doesn’t really matter which corporation.

There are loads of people who work for companies and really believe they’re making the world a better place through their work.

And most of them would be wrong I’m sure. They’re just making profit for a corporation. I’m sure most OpenAI and Anthropic employees also feel like they’re making the world a better place.

I’ve had exactly one job in my life that wasn’t software engineering. I was definitely making the world a better place, as I reduced e-waste generation by tons upon tons. Specifically, I fixed thousands of laptops slated for landfill, many of them fairly new and high spec so they’d get several years of usage after refurbishing.

What did I get in return? Poverty, timed piss breaks so I’d hit my targets (since nearly half of the already low salary was paid out as a “bonus” - after I left they raised salaries to keep up with minimum wage increases, but then reduced the bonus so they wouldn’t actually have to pay people more). The owners were also unhappy that the profit margin was only 55%, they wanted to see 60% profit margin. Probably so they could sell the company for even more money. This was a 3 year old company making over a hundred million in revenue… On a 55% profit margin. Renting a studio apartment was about half my income, utilities included.

Every job since then has been a tech job of one type or another. None of them AI companies, but it doesn’t really matter if you’re doing payroll, healthcare, whatever. Ultimately you’re just doing your job so some rich dude can buy another yacht, or so that the owner’s wife could sell the company to a private equity company after nagging her husband into suicide because he didn’t want to sell but she wanted to retire. And I DO work for a small company now, as a contractor, but you won’t believe the insane luck and circumstances that got me into this job when layoffs were already happening everywhere.

And I live in a mostly sane country where you can still theoretically get by on a job doing whatever. Now imagine you’re in Silicon Valley, earning 200-300k a year, paying a mortgage on a tiny house that cost well over a million, and your options for getting a new job are McDonald’s, Walmart and whatever other stores are shit enough to work for that they’re always looking for people, which are now paying a super high wage of $20 an hour because California. You still sure you want to change jobs?

Only way to get out without ending up homeless is literally to save up for multiple years working in that job you hate. Golden handcuffs pretty much.

Do try to remember that it usually takes years to get into another field of skilled work and you start at the bottom of the ladder, making shit wages and not everyone can just share a small apartment with roommates, some people have families

Replying to an earlier post

This is just the same false dichotomy you’ve been presenting all the way along: starve or sell out.

The undeniable and obvious fact you’re avoiding is that loads of people have jobs that they find satisfying in a “life well lived” kind of way. There are loads of corporations who’s employees believe in what they’re doing.

Your timed piss break anecdote is not an example of a satisfying job. A job where you make minimum wage is not an example of a satisfying job.

It doesn’t take years to get into another field, and you don’t start at the start because you take all your skills and experience with you, obviously. I’m in my 40s, young family, working on a postgraduate degree in something tangentially related to the field I’ve been working in for 20 years. I do find my current job satisfying, I’m just weary of it. People can and do change professions all the time.

Objectively, this is very much a case of “I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas”.

Like I said at the start, you don’t get a free pass just because you’re not a CEO.

Replying to @⁨fizzle@quokk.au⁩

“Hurr durr I’m incredibly privileged and the job market has been kind to me so it’ll be kind to everyone”

You realize that most people can’t just drop everything they’re doing and get a degree, right? And a lot of people have jobs that require them to actually be present more than a few hours a week so they can’t do it while staying employed either?

A bachelor’s degree alone takes three years. Then you’re gonna have an internship at some point before anyone even considers you able to do a job in another field. How is that “doesn’t take years to get into another field”?

The undeniable and obvious fact you’re avoiding is that loads of people have jobs that they find satisfying in a “life well lived” kind of way.

And there are billions in the world who don’t have that.

There are loads of corporations who’s employees believe in what they’re doing.

Yea, but they’re still working for a corporation. They’re all still contributing to the same machine, doesn’t matter if they’re directly working for a tech company or not.

Your timed piss break anecdote is not an example of a satisfying job. A job where you make minimum wage is not an example of a satisfying job.

It was an example of a job where you actually do good for the world. That’s what those kinds of jobs are like. You get abused to pieces because the company has a noble mission so you’re more likely to stay around. This btw was considered to be head and shoulders above the company it metastasized out of (founders of the original company sold it and had their family members start up a competitor so their noncompetes wouldn’t matter, then everyone got laid off a while later by the new owners). It now employs 500 people, or about 0.5% of the city’s population if you include pensioners, children and everything.

I’ve heard of tons of problems with so many other companies in other industries too. Not paying salaries on time or at all, closing down with zero notice when the owner moves abroad and transfers everything out of the company bank accounts so nobody can be paid their last salaries or severance, forcing people to work unpaid overtime… Tons of small businesses pay you in cash so they can save on tax, but that means you don’t get national health insurance or pension contributions…

Quite literally, the job market out there is shit, getting worse every year. You should count yourself lucky that you’re in an industry where you can just hop into a tangential industry and have skills carry over, or that your job affords you enough free time to get a degree, or that you’re not working for capitalists. Gratz, it’s a one in a million job you found yourself in, same as me. But the thing about one in a million jobs is that there are only a few thousand of them in the world.

Replying to @⁨Kissaki@feddit.org⁩

It’s a trend. Years ago there were no patches finished after the main document. Then, it started appearing, to the point that they created a section warning about late patches. It was ok, because probably 99% of their clients must be on top of Linux x86-64. So, these patches were always available in time. This time, not even this patch was available. It was delivered a day later. Others, are scheduled for a week later, and sometimes, they reschedule.

I don’t have inside information. I only see the trend.

Years ago, patching a database was a big task, basically having to rebuild the dictionary. Then, they automated and changed stuff and things got super simple. Suddenly everything went downhill, to the point that last time I had to patch the patch.

I thought they were doing this on purpose to push us to their cloud service, but layoffs are a much simpler explanation. Occam’s Razor.

Replying to @⁨FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world⁩

Yeah. Wisconsin sticking up for itself.

And Oracle’s only angle was, “You’ll regret this. People will go elsewhere!”

Seriously, I don’t see what data centres give their hosts. They barely require a workforce after setup, they rip through resources, they fuck with the environment, they offer no municipal services, and they’re eyesores. At best they’re a form of property tax revenue and I guess rates revenue.

Replying to @⁨PattyMcB@lemmy.world⁩

it’s ruining the industry right now. when the bubble bursts and the datacenters crater it will be a new golden era for farming!

I know plenty of devs who just want to farm, or hunt, or build shit.

I can’t wait for the farming industry to be disrupted when 100,000 seasoned engineers descend upon companies like john deere. they’ll be like a plague of locusts that will blot out the sun forever.

Replying to an earlier post

To fund the rapid expansion, Oracle took aggressive efficiency measures and enacted a sweeping wave of layoffs. By the end of fiscal year 2026, the company’s workforce was slashed by about 21,000 employees, a decline of roughly 13%, from 162,000 to 141,000 workers. The deep cuts followed an operational restructuring driven in part by the internal adoption of AI technologies.

If I read this new article right, they’re just talking about the layoffs from ORCL’s March/April 2026, which was their last fiscal year, which ended May 31 2026. I think this is just repeating old news. Anyone else read it that way?

As a result, Oracle is now required to provide cash collateral or a letter of credit in the astronomical sum of over $7 billion just to connect the building to the power grid, a setup whose ongoing maintenance will cost the company more than $100 million annually.

That seems to be what this article really has for news and that’s really funny, IMO. Go get ‘em, Wisconsin.

Replying to an earlier post

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.

Replying to @⁨mereo@piefed.ca⁩

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.

Replying to @⁨eestileib@sh.itjust.works⁩

Current marginal cost is certainly negative.

The expectation is that development costs will get cheaper (model design solidifies), Training costs will get cheaper (no need to retrain the whole model) and running costs will get cheaper (datacenter economies of scale).

All this is still true.

OpenAI, anthropic, Google etc. will generate excessive by being able to charge more than cost because their models are vastly superior.

Is likely to be false.

Replying to @⁨Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world⁩

Datacenter economies of scale do not seem to be panning out, 'cause they’re buying into a RAM cartel who knows they’re desperate.

Coreweave’s reports say that the GPUs are 85% of the cost of a data center, and that they’ll last 6 usable years. This isn’t like building a facility like TSMC, datacenters feel more like COGS than capital to me, and those aren’t businesses I would want anything to do with even if I didn’t think they were all run by conmen who are rapists or racists or both.

Replying to @⁨boonhet@sopuli.xyz⁩

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?

Replying to @⁨Guilvareux@feddit.uk⁩

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.

Replying to @⁨boonhet@sopuli.xyz⁩

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.

Replying to @⁨llamatron@lemmy.world⁩

JDK is the greatest scam ever.

When sonething needs JDK, most people usually just download the first one they find withoit much thought, just like with any dependency, which is Oracle’s, instead of OpenJDK.

Oracle will hit 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. Pr at least I remember hearing they used to.

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

Replying to @⁨tutter@lemmy.blahaj.zone⁩

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: sfgate.com/…/oracle-s-coziness-with-government-go…

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.

SFGATEOracle's coziness with government goes back to its founding / Firm's growth sustained as niche established with federal, state agenciesOracle's coziness with government goes back to its founding / Firm's growth sustained as...

Replying to @⁨sanitation@lemmy.today⁩

I wonder if it’s related at all to this ongoing trend ( How Money Works on YouTube). Tech Bros got sore about the post-epidemic culture at their companies: People wanted to work from home, and knew that their talent was important so they got bold asking for pay raises and benefits.

And the tech bros took this personally. So first came the RTO mandates (which got rid of some techs, specifically the best and brightest) and then came later layoffs, some of which were blamed on AI automation.

AI automation was never actually that much further along.

Anyway, they laid off too many people, to the point that the remaining workforce didn’t know how to run the business and the tech. So they had to hire back some of the greybeards, and are still replacing lost positions with rookies fresh out of college.

YouTubeBig Tech Cut 950,000 Jobs... And Then Hired Them All Backby How Money Works

Replying to @⁨uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone⁩

I think this layout is 100% about S&P downgrading Oracle’s credit rating to one step above junk. They’re on the hook for the WB acquisition and the data centre build out for OpenAI, both of which look hugely negative. Wisconsin (data centre location) just sent the a bill for $7B because they don’t trust oracle to pay the future costs to the state the development would incur.

With no credit rating, and not much liquid cash all they can do is cut costs. Hence layoff.

Replying to @⁨sanitation@lemmy.today⁩

Sane regulation. You like to see it.

$7 billion required collateral. , $100 million annually, $15 billion

Oracle’s argument of “this investment is worth $15 billion” is not only entirely besides the point, which the regulating government office rightfully refuses, but "‘worth’ in your state or city is entirely pointless if it incurs not that amount of local public gain but only public cost. It’s a stupid, misleading argument.

I’m really interested in what that 21k employee loss mean in practice. In a hype-craze it’s probably not sane restructuring and letting go of unneeded personal and inefficiencies, I assume.

Replying to @⁨KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zone⁩

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.