Horace Dideu characterized this as an unprecedented transfer of cash from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Oracle shareholders to NVIDIA shareholders. Those are companies with real, substantial revenues and until now, significant positive cash flow (yielding shareholder value.) Draining the tub this way is something that should worry those shareholders. But of course, it's a great year to be an NVIDIA shareholder, with all those other companies (plus OpenAI, Anthropic, and other smaller AI companies) all pouring their free cash flow AND their growing debt, into NVIDIA, and into other companies that supply AI data centers.

That paranoid, "The Zucker will do anything" side me is thinking, "Is this a case of Meta doing something to show their models can keep up with Anthropic/OpenAI?"

And the post above this one, advocating for 'AI hacking is a crime,' is on target. No mod points, so I'm commenting instead. BUT once again, the goal should be to not code these vulnerabilities in the first place! Liability (civil or even criminal) is probably a necessary condition to change how systems are constructed.

No mod points, I'd say +1 funny...

"The Elite Yak Clones" would be a good name for a rock band...

The savings come from the rate Oracle (or any other vendor) charges for a single Enterprise license, compared to the rate Oracle would charge each customer/project separately, summed over the set of projects. Is that clear enough?

(Frankly, that's a surprisingly low number for the savings.)

Advertising has been on this site for over 20 years now. The only difference is which ads are here, but that's all automated as well. We see slightly fewer mail order bride ads now, which is a likely a good thing, but otherwise its nothing different. There's no reason for a human to screen them.

DoD has been doing site licensing for Oracle for at least 25 years. On my project, we found a site license that covered our selection & use of Oracle back around 2001/2002. So NO NEWS HERE.

Without a site license, one would expect each Service and each Program to negotiate a separate contract with Oracle (or any other software vendor.) Enterprise site licensing is pretty common, both in government circles and in industry, with savings over a collection of individual purchases. So there's nothing unusual about this.

LG slips McAfee adware via Windows Update. What a collaboration of scumbags!

"TDS" is what you blame when you don't want to address the actual content.

No. They'll just say "that's how it's supposed to be". What you'd need is to make them use stuff that's better. Tesla is pretty good, according to a friend. Make them drive Apple CarPlay or Android Auto fully enabled.

I say this often, but honestly when was the last time any new code was written here? Stuff breaks over time but it has been years since anything was added or updated. We all know that of course Unicode is over 20 years past its promised rollout (beating even Duke Nukem Forever in terms of development hell cycle), but really it seems unlikely that there are any software developers left working for this site. I'm not sure there are any full time employees at Slashdot at all anymore.

In other words you can put the complaint in front of more eyes but it won't find any more eyes that can do anything about it.

I think part of the problem is that a lot of the people who design and manage user facing interfaces don't know how bad their stuff is.

That's the argument I heard when a defense contractor about why so many DoD systems specified Microsoft products, particularly Active Directory.

Of course, "following industry standards" relieves one of the responsibility of actually thinking about what you're buying, including life-cycle costs and security & quality of the products. In that way, DoD was no different than all the other CIOs. Microsoft understood that CIOs were their real customer, and did everything to convince CIOs that Microsoft (regardless of cost) was 'the least risk alternative."

What makes solar financially un-viable in Austin? I live a long ways from Texas so there might be something really obvious here that I'm missing. I know the solar power arguments are older than the hills at this point (I remember roof top solar panels from many decades ago) but I'm interested in what about that location makes it doomed to not work out.

Or is there just no way for Tesla to make it financially viable? Could a more honest company pull it off in a different way?