someone did, determined it would make them look bad, and pawned the assignment off to a junior executive to take the blame.

if it works then they delegated successfully and the project is winning and if not then they blame the neophyte VP and walk away with another quarterly bonus anyway.

If the numbers dont add up it's fucked anyways who cares just send it

Also worst comes to worst government will have to bail them out to not cause massive unrest

No time to think, go go go.

You would think, right?

Energy is the largest OPEX by far (70-80%)... taxes second.

https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-datacenter-cost-breakdown

The cost of electricity is (almost) negligible compared to the cost of having GPUs sitting idle. Electricity from fuel cells can be twice as expensive, but even then, it represents only about an extra ~15% of the amortization cost associated with keeping the GPU hardware idle.

There is no way it's 3% if they're getting electricity from the grid, even if they get their cooling from somewhere else (eg lake/river water or outside air in winter). Median DCs are anywhere from 25-40% (depending on the jurisdiction's electricity costs and how much cooling they need). Hypercaler datacenters tend to be even more dense than the median traditional ones.

That seems surprising - source? What's the other 97%? Does this include ops staff?

Electricity is only 3% of opex for a data centre?

I'm really wondering about the air filtering needed for this to work. Gas turbines are already quite sensitive to bigger particles in the air but for the fuel cell membranes, this could be a much harder problem.

The literally dirty secret is that a Bloom fuel cell is a device for turning methane into hydrogen on demand to fuel a hydrogen fuel cell. It's still emits CO2 and oxides of nitrogen like a gas turbine. They should be a lot quieter though.

In Motorsport a gas tank is called a fuel cell. That may be where the confusion lies

I had that exact thought when SoftBank got involved :)

It’s like if I see the EU announce a large investment in AI, always makes me nervous given how we are often late to the party

What makes to possible collapse of Oracle worse is that they have an actual business too that is currently getting cannibalized to feed the AI projects. If coreweave fails that is bad but oracle failing will be worse.

Does that jeopardise the Warner Bros deal?

> he's old.

He's only 82, and he's got a billion-dollar nonprofit dedicated to keeping him healthy. Don't count on him being on the way out.

Trumps blessing basically equivelent to stating AI is large scale fraud. Thats essentially what it means when he praises things: either he expects fraud or is congratulating.

It's shocking to me that he was aware of it and yet considered it an unrelated defect that can be individually corrected, and not a flaw that blows the entire idea wide open. To me it seems that this outcome was unavoidable and that this is the equilibrium his system will settle into earlier or later. Opposing the concentration of power is harder than making it happen. Even strong regulations only need to spring one leak somewhere for them to get in and get the ball slowly rolling. It's a ratchet. If he knew about this, then his ideology was like boarding an already slowly sinking ship and hoping someone would just keep scooping out the water and throwing it overboard at a sufficient pace forever.

Adam Smith never believed in an "invisible hand". He uses the concept to disparage the fantasy of "self-regulating" free markets. Even before capitalism did we understand that markets needed rules and regulations, it took centuries of propaganda and of demonizing the opposition as "luddites", then "communists" to convince the majority that we needed to abolish all rules for the economy to flourish.

A deregulated market is terrible for the environment, the economy and pretty much everyone and everything. It only gives more relative wealth (and power) to the oligarchs, who then lord over us unopposed.

We must indeed.

In maybe 2004 I developed a small application using Python and Oracle. It was miserable. Admittedly I paid all the little costs (figuring out how to connect in the first place, waiting many seconds for the client library to initialize itself, etc) and got no benefits whatsoever from scale. Even back then, MySQL would have been far better, and early-2000s-MySQL was pretty bad.

I’ve heard that at least the Oracle client is not as bad these days.

With software products you can pretty reliably tell they're dogshit when the sales team targets the C suite. The security industry is riddled with that. Deals done over steak dinners and yacht charters don't translate to working, reliable software.

I've lost count how many "cloud-native application deployed on Azure" at my job have turned out to be this. Installed by random contractors who have since left of course.

please don’t trigger my ptsd like that, thanks

> there's a whole family of pool-corruption bugs that have workaround config settings and everything

Back in 2018, a former Oracle developer explained what it was like working on Oracle DB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

> Here is how the life of an Oracle Database developer is:

> - Start working on a new bug.

> - Spend two weeks trying to understand the 20 different flags that interact in mysterious ways to cause this bag.

> - Add one more flag to handle the new special scenario. Add a few more lines of code that checks this flag and works around the problematic situation and avoids the bug.

> - Submit the changes to a test farm consisting of about 100 to 200 servers that would compile the code, build a new Oracle DB, and run the millions of tests in a distributed fashion.

> - Go home. Come the next day and work on something else. The tests can take 20 hours to 30 hours to complete.

> - Go home. Come the next day and check your farm test results. On a good day, there would be about 100 failing tests. On a bad day, there would be about 1000 failing tests. Pick some of these tests randomly and try to understand what went wrong with your assumptions. Maybe there are some 10 more flags to consider to truly understand the nature of the bug.

> - Add a few more flags in an attempt to fix the issue. Submit the changes again for testing. Wait another 20 to 30 hours.

> - Rinse and repeat for another two weeks until you get the mysterious incantation of the combination of flags right.

Seems like their comment is still valid today.

My favorite bug of the .Net connector is how the entire API supports async operations, but the underlying implementation can't tell two different executions of the same query apart, so it's random whether each call will get their own results or some other ones.

But polluting the poll with unusable connections is just Oracle copying the MS-SQL's thing. The C# recommended coding practices will automatically deal with this. (Not that you would want to follow them, but you may want to look and copy this part.)

That should just be illegal. The right to measure or to publish things is not about their software, it's a personal right, so Obstacle shouldn't be able to remove your right in their license agreement.

What an honor for Professor De Witt (no relation to my handle).

My handle notwithstanding, I'm smart enough to not take legal advice from HN but nonetheless I cannot stop myself hence the rhetorical question: how is a EULA clause like that even enforceable? If this isn't going against freedom of speech then this surely it's against some consumer protection laws?

The cynical answer to that I guess is "a lot of money funding a legal team the size of a warlord's militia" and also "lobbying" but even then it doesn't track to me that this clause could have even that much of an effect as a scare tactic?

To be fair with Oracle, every software has it's idiosyncrasies and for many corporations the devil you know wins every time. The problem starts when new projects start adopting such a hopeless stack.

As currently practiced, yes. Non-dividend non-voting shares might as well be pokemon cards. Their only real value lies in getting somebody else to buy them, and new money has to flow in from the outside. The question isn't "will it collapse?", it's "when?"

Damn did not expect to see that username this morning. Shouldn't you be soldering flipdot panels?