Only one notch above junk level.
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It would be funnier if the whole stock market weren’t a scam machine.
I haven’t watched “The Big Short” in a long time… but aren’t BBB- rated things “dogshit wrapped in catshit”?
In the mortgage collapse that drove the world economy to the brink, the ratings agencies were rating dogshit in catshit as AAA, they certainly didn’t give it something more appropriate like BBB-. There was a good scene where Burry (played by Carrell) went to fitch and asked them why they hadn’t changed the rating on the MBS(shit sandwich) when the underlying mortgages were worth zero. The Fitch person said they didn’t feel the need to. They were of course being paid–and still are–by the companies they rate.
That was such a good movie.
Edit: i also liked Margin Call which is a fictional story about some traders seeing what was about to happen in 2008 and how they responded because of it in 1 night.
The acting was good, the script was ok, I had just read and learned so much about it all in 08-12 I was over it by the time Hollywood and the rest of the world got around to engaging with it.
Margin call I watched a few years ago and also liked.
It’s there in the S&P 500 between MSFT and PLTR on the left kind of in the middle (size of the box is the market cap of the company). It’s in practically every 401(k) in the US. BBB is somewhere in the middle of the jenga tower.
Replying to myself to put up a link to the jenga tower scene of The Big Short in case nobody has seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbiDrzTd8fE
And here’s the blurred Florida scene that follows, imagine the realtors are CEOs and the strippers are vibe coders who think their apps are perfect.
The adult entertainers are the VC investors. They’re pretty world-wise, but can’t be well versed on everything. So when someone sells them on something that sounds pretty good, they bite. The CEOs are the bros laughing about how great everything is, except in real life they don’t have consequences. All the CEOs get paid like it might be their last job so if they never work again they’re still fine.
It’s still impressive to see what the LLMs cook up when asked about programming problems. I’m coming back to programming from some time away from it, and it’ll give you the answer to the question you asked. If you ask it for an old way of doing something, it’ll tell you that. Then it slips and shows you a new way of doing something (I’m specifically talking about std::cout versus std::format and std::print), and the doors are wide open all of a sudden.
Then it gives you a technique for something and you spend hours debugging code only for the LLM to say that the solution it provided won’t work.
Prompt engineering is going to be a real thing whether we like it or not.
Oracle has been a castle built on sand for a long time. Their entire business model hinged on pulling off massive pricing bait-and-switches with large companies, and there’s only so many of those you can do before people get wise to it.
Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh, the lawnmower hates me’ – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s)
And
I actually think that it does a dis-service to not go to Nazi allegory because if I don’t use Nazi allegory when referring to Oracle there’s some critical understanding that I have left on the table […] in fact as I have said before I emphatically believe that if you have to explain the Nazis to someone who had never heard of World War 2 but was an Oracle customer there’s a very good chance that you would explain the Nazis in Oracle allegory. — also Brian Cantrill (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=24m)
I believe S&P should only give out two ratings: Standard and Poor.
(On that note, I don’t know why people assume that the ratings of a company named Moody’s are primarily based on facts and not someone’s current emotional state.)
Something something the Dow of Poo.
Everyone wants AI to be the next cloud boom until the bill arrives. Betting tens of billions on one customer whose own business model is still being debated is bold. If demand keeps exploding Oracle looks brilliant. If not, this could become the case study every finance class uses.
They’re also juicing their numbers. They’ve got obsolete GPUs on the books for years after they’re irrelevant.
Corporations lying on their books to decieve investors? Shocking!!!
That only happens on days that end in Y.
It’s not unusual, but it’s kind of a big deal for a corporation as large as Oracle to be doing it because it means they’re hiding tens if not hundreds of billions from showing up on the bad side of their account charts.
So they’ve got negative cash flow so that they could show epic growth, but the growth itself is hella juiced because the GPUs are only relevant for about 3 years till the new ones are out and make more AI for less power. And they depreciate them over 7 years. More than twice as long as they can or should use the GPUs for.
the growth itself is hella juiced because the GPUs are only relevant for about 3 years till the new ones are out and make more AI for less power. And they depreciate them over 7 years. More than twice as long as they can or should use the GPUs for.
We don’t actually know this for sure, yet. I had expected the A100 generation (released in 2020) to no longer be profitable to run by now, but the backlog in new data centers being turned on and the high demand from Anthropic and OpenAI still leaves those chips useful for inference. You can rent those 2020 chips out today at some price above what they cost to continue running (300W, so electricity prices of USD $0.20 per kWh would translate into about 6 cents per hour. Prevailing spot prices appear to be about $2/hour right now.
But just because I was wrong on 2020 chips, originally sold for about $15,000 in a low interest rate environment, doesn’t mean that I’m wrong about 2024 chips, the B100s that use 1000W and were sold for $35,000, requiring a ton more specialized cooling, power, and network infrastructure. Or the 2026 R100s that use 2000W, and whose prices I can’t seem to find published anywhere, but were set after the memory companies basically locked in their record breaking prices for their HBM. That’s an unsustainable path and at some point, data centers start struggling to find users willing to pay the bare minimum necessary to continue turning a profit on GPU usage.
I doubt the 2024 chips stay in service to 2031. And I’m really, really skeptical that the 2026 chips stay in service to 2033, especially after NVIDIA switches to yearly release cycles next year.
I blame low interest rates.
Speculating on someone who themselves are speculating that their customer’s speculation will be fruitful is exactly what low interest rates encourage. Everyone likes the extra activity that produces on the macros, but it just makes the market less accurate.
Interest rates basically set how permissive the market is with its todo list. The problem is when you let yourself do anything, and then also let yourself get distracted doing something that might help something that you maybe shuldn’t be doing anyway. This is not a functional life. It’s a busy life, but not functional.
If you want to kill AI, raise the interest rates. It will cause a recession, which sucks. But frankly, humanity will survive a recession and it will be temporary. A higher interest rate market solves real problems that benefit actual people within a near horizon. What we don’t need is people working 14 hour days, slaving to keep their heads above water, working for companies engaged in far-off speculative race for world dominance; we wouldn’t want them to succeed at anyway. That’s 100% what we’re all doing, and it is interest rates that modulate that.
Raising interest rates will kill all of those jobs involved in that, and sadly a few more from the shock. But those people weren’t doing anything productive for humanity anyway. It’s better to have them lose those jobs and then later redirect their labor towards something productive. In the long term they are digging themselves out of having a job with their current path anyway.
Are another 30,000 employees getting laid off?
they are hiring more, so they can reach their layoff targets
for the paramount-cw MERGER, it likely will be more if goes through. right now the blue states are suing to stopt he merger.
Oracle does layoffs regularly. Theres always another one coming.
On the one hand, I hate layoffs. On the other hand, clearly whichever employees get laid off next haven’t been doing anything useful because literally nobody at Oracle has.
Funny story: I raised a support request with Oracle last week to confirm if one of their products was vulnerable to Januscape.
When I got a copy-pasta ‘no’ I asked why there was an Oracle-issued advisory for kernels the product ships with.
A couple of days later they updated the SR with ‘yes, please update’
LOL
I bet the first response was AI
OpenAI is going to kill Oracle & I can’t wait.
The scorpion and the frog.
Except oracle is more of a venomous toad
I hope Larry Ellison feels it, but he probably won’t.
Hope he goes insolvent and State of Hawaii then takes Lanai back through eminent domain.
And also sell off his media empire.
I hope the orcas finally catch their white
whalemale.
he needs a new skinsuit like rfk jr.
How would we know?
Has the bubble popped now?
Also wtf is with that website? “Data Tracking Consent required for free use”? I’m like 99% sure that’s a wilful and deliberate GDPR violation.
No they let you opt out of sharing data with the hundreds 3rd parties they share your data with…by clicking reject next to each of their names on another page…
It probably is legal and if you follow the money I’m willing to be there is some lobbying form who argued to get a provision like this snuck into GDPR during some backroom deal.
Took me longer to do that than to read the article.
Never has it been so clear to me that I was the product.
Edit: IANAL, it seems to be legal under the GDPR because they offer an option to pay for the content. Idk about the preselected form to turn off individual advertising cookies, that still seems like it would still be an illegal dark pattern under the GDPR.
Unfortunately it seems to be legal currently, despite being completely against the spirit of the GDPR.
https://noyb.eu/en/court-decides-pay-or-okay-derstandardat-illegal
Nice forum sliding
Couldn’t happen to a nicer company
bad bad bad -
Big budget bust.
BIG BADDA BOOM!
(minus)
I wonder who they’re going to sue to get out of this one.
No one, they’ll just have the government bail them out. They’ll call their collapse a national security risk, threaten to sell their share of US Tiktok back to Bytedance, claim that they won’t be able to protect the sensitive medical data of millions of Americans, etc. Whatever it takes to convince Trump that they’re too big to fail.
claim that they won’t be able to protect the sensitive medical data of millions of Americans
As an IT guy at a cerner hospital they can barely keep that shit running as is. Their cloud/ai services go down weekly, they managed to fuck up our HIE implementation at every turn, and it takes weeks for a Service Request to get traction, including followups and escalations…but if “support” attempts to call you their call centers are inherently flagged as spam.
Ah, I don’t miss that industry at all… Fucking clowns in every company.
Is SAP still fucking up every single deployment?
Ellison is in the AIPAC club. He can have whatever he wants in the US.
