This particular source seems sketchy, but the broader context supports the core of this story.

There was a report in January from TD Cowen that Oracle needed to free up cash as banks tightened up lending for data center deals, and that certain projects were on hold and in jeopardy of being canceled. That same report projected that Oracle might lay off 20,000 to 30,000 workers.

Then, just this last Friday, Bloomber reported that Oracle and OpenAI canceled their plans to expand their flagship data center in Texas as part of their $500 billion “Stargate” initiative. Here’s the Reuters article describing it at a high level, because the original report is paywalled.

So everyone is looking back at that January report and seeing the recent data center news as confirmation that Oracle wants to free up cash by laying off staff.

It might be possible to use separate accounts related to separate interests

That’s what people should do. And the natural consequence is that there is code switching, where people subtly use different jargon and references and writing style when talking to different audiences.

Nobody is gonna correlate my shitposts or joke comments to my work email, because the way I write in a professional environment is totally different from the way I write with my friends and family, or in casual contexts organized around different interests. Even between different friends, family, or colleagues, I have a sense of my audience, and my tone/style differs significantly for different people.

So at that point, if I have a Linux/technology account and a separate account for the sports I like and a separate account for the local things happening in my city, who’s going to be able to link them by their very different textual styles?

Reminds me of an AI tool that could identify authorship of articles with surprisingly high accuracy, and then they peeked under the hood and realized it was just looking for the author byline at the top of the article that says “By John Doe,” where it completely failed if the article didn’t explicitly say who the author was.

Because each sensor broadcasts a fixed unique ID, the same car can be recognized repeatedly without reading a license plate. This makes TPMS-based tracking cheaper, harder to detect, and more difficult to avoid than camera-based surveillance, and therefore a stronger privacy threat.

This seems like a real stretch.

Cameras and automated license plate recognition are absurdly cheap at this point. And cameras have much greater range and reliability than whatever wireless signal interception this is, which the researchers have said is effective up to 50 meters.

Meanwhile, from the office where I sit (which happens to be more than 50 meters above street level), I can see a highway and read the license plates of all the cars maybe 100-300m away. Plug in a cheap phone as a simple webcam and I can probably log all the license plates that drive by, maybe even correlate that to makes and models of vehicles for redundancy.

And who’s going to detect that I’ve got a cell phone camera pointed out of my office window, or that I’m running that type of image recognition on the phone?

Am I out of touch? No, it’s the lawyers and judges who are wrong.

Seriously though, these are the same people who made it so that you can own a piece of land, so whatever criticism you want to lob at that foundational role of who gets to say what the law is, it applies equally to all forms of property, a manmade concept to begin with.

A human can start off a process by their own design, but with the details implemented by phenomena not in their direct control, and still copyright the resulting work.

If I take a funnel full of paint and let it drip onto a canvas in a pattern caused by the movement of a pendulum, and incorporate random movement from wind on a windy day, how would you assign a “percentage” of human creation there? What about letting the hot desert sun melt some crayons into another canvas where I placed the crayons but didn’t control the drip pattern? What if I record some barking dogs but auto tune it into a melody? Or photograph the natural beauty of a wave crashing onto shore? These are all things that can be copyrighted, even if they’re inherently dependent on natural phenomena not in the artist’s control, because the process itself is initiated or captured or designed by a human author.

First of all, “Intellectual property[sic]” is a not a thing. There are copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, but they are all significantly different from each other. Trying to lump them together under a single term is disingenuous at best, and using the word “property” in that term is biased loaded language.

You don’t get to redefine words like “property” or “intellectual property” how you see fit, completely untethered to the way the legal system uses those terms with specific meaning.

Intellectual property rights include all of those things, in the same way that copyright can include copyright over text or musical compositions or sound recordings or photographs or building architectures. But note that copyright over each of those types of media is subject to its own rights and rules, and you’ll need to apply the correct rules to the correct contexts. But it’s still useful to group similar concepts together, and have a name for the category. That’s why people refer to intellectual property.

A property right is a thing the owner is entitled to, and a natural right.

This is a naive take. Property rights are natural rights? No, property rights are defined by the legal system of whatever sovereign nation you’re in. And they’re limited by whatever rules of that legal system are.

If I own land in the U.S., I’m still required to pay taxes on it, and to enforce my property rights against adverse possession, lest I lose that property to the state or to a squatter. If I don’t record my ownership with the county recorder I might lose the property to someone else who comes along and records them buying it from the guy who sold it to me (and fraudulently sold it twice).

Property rights can be chopped up and distributed in different ways. I might own a house but rent it to a tenant and have a mortgage on it from the bank, each of whom will have certain rights over that land, despite me being the owner.

And property can apply to tangible things (a painting, a car), intangible things (a checking account balance at the bank, a certificateless share of stock in a corporation, a domain name registered with ICANN), and all sorts of concepts in between (the right to use a particular mailbox in a post office, an easement to use a driveway over my neighbor’s land, the right to use my name and image in a commercial, a futures contract that entitles me to take delivery of a whole bunch of wheat on a particular day at a particular time in the future). All of those are property, and recognized as property rights in U.S. law.

What copyright actually is, is a temporary monopoly granted at the whim of Congress. It’s a license, not a right.

Licenses are a right to do something. In fact, copyright owners assign licenses to others to use that intellectual property all the time.

And the copyright itself is not property over an idea. It’s the right to copy something specific that has already been fixed in a particular physical medium. If you come up with an idea for a melody, you don’t own the copyright until you write it down.

You’re just pretty far off base because you don’t understand how broad the word “property” is, and you don’t seem to want to examine just how man-made other forms of property are, and think that copyright is something special and different.

Motorola Mobility was spun off from Motorola in 2012 and sold to Google. Then Google sold it in 2014 to Lenovo, the Chinese company that had also previously bought IBM’s entire personal computer business.

Original Motorola, renamed Motorola Solutions, retained the rights to the Motorola name in everything except cell phones, and continued to manufacture radio and communications equipment and other signal processing equipment (including stuff like cable TV boxes). They remain a major contractor for militaries, law enforcement, and fire/EMS emergency responders.

If we’re talking about Motorola cell phones, we’re talking about the Chinese owned company, not the American owned company.

I have no idea why a thin client would need a 2.5Gbps NIC.

I know bandwidth isn’t latency but for a thin client having a rock solid network connection to the virtual desktop server is pretty important for the user interface. I’m guessing pushing video and animations can require pretty high data rates, too.

Yup.

LTE can support something like 300-400 connections per band and there are 16 primary bands licensed in the US. 5G and mm wave open things up some more, including beam forming techniques that may allow an antenna array to communicate with two devices on the same frequency at the same time.

But at the same time, each carrier only gets some of those bands, and they want to separate bands by physical space so that neighboring cells are using different bands, and in 3 dimensional space there can be a lot of neighbors. And 300 passive connections simply keeping the connection alive are different from 300 active users trying to actively transmit and receive significant data. Plus real world interference will always make devices come up short from the theoretical max performance.

Temporary/mobile towers go a long way, though, for temporary surges in demand, like sporting events. Things have gotten a lot better on game days in certain places (especially small college towns whose populations basically double on game day, with everyone jammed into a single stadium for about 4 hours).

Yeah, one of the two was a pure safety play, not even ethics.

If I sell the military an ATV for shuffling things around on base, I might engineer a speed limiter to prevent the ATV from going faster than what its safety features are rated at. But a demand that I remove the governor so that the vehicle can go all lawful speeds totally misses the point. Whether it is illegal or unethical to do so, it’s still bad engineering to use dangerous technology beyond the scope of what it (and its safety features) has been designed for.

I’m just not connecting the dots. The amount of money they’re spending on this is astronomical, and they are burning through the cash they have at a rate they can’t sustain, while they’re fighting for their future against Google, Anthropic, plus xAI and Perplexity and others, and maybe foreign competition like Deepseek that the government can’t fully shield them from. While also competing with major data center companies themselves, who may want to build data centers for other non-AI purposes, too. And those competitors have deep, deep pockets.

If they don’t have a revenue model that actually keeps them afloat, then all their capital expenditures will end up going to benefit someone else.

In other words, the central thesis that they want to choke out competition from on-device models kinda ignores that they’re facing a much more immediate, much more pressing threat from their data center competition. It’s like trying to corner the market on snow shovels when a hurricane is bearing down.

Plus one important thing worth noting is that OpenAI purchased the option to buy that much memory, enough to persuade the memory manufacturers to change their own investment decisions for the next 5 years. They’re not necessarily going to actually buy that much. And in theory could sell that option to others. 40% of the market is enough to really move prices, but not enough to actually corner it and exclude others from buying memory. They’ll just have to make it more expensive for themselves at the same time that they make it more expensive, but not impossible, for their true competitors also outfitting data centers.

This operating system contains code known to the State of California to cause cancer or reproductive harm.

Like what?

Wasn’t LFP commercialized at EV scale like a decade ago? It went from like 0% market share to majority market share in about a decade.

Yeah but firewood is like 5 kwh/kg, or 4 times the energy density of TNT. We drive around with wood in our cars all the time.

It’s funny. I see the phrase “AI doomsday scenario” and I immediately picture devastating cascading consequences caused by someone mistakenly putting too much trust in some kind of agentic AI that does things poorly and breaks a lot of big important things.

I’m just not seeing a scenario where AI causes devastating disruption based on its own ultra competence. I’m much more scared of AI incompetence.

There are a bunch of lithium ion chemistries that have come to market more recently.

LFP sits in the low cost marker while NCA is the highest performing of the mass market batteries, and NMC is somewhere in between.

Sodium might be coming for LFP’s low cost position, and is already beginning mass production (some Chinese manufacturers expect those models to hit the road in a few months).

If you think rechargeable battery R&D from 10 years ago isn’t making it into mass produced products today, you’re just not paying attention.

The judge controls when the jury is in the room. So the jury enters last, only after the judge orders them in. And the judge can order them out at any time to have discussions outside their presence, too.

Same with RAM.

Unfortunately, the RAM shortage is caused by a RAM component being diverted to specialized packages that can’t easily be converted into normal RAM. So even a bubble bursting won’t bring RAM onto the market.

Well if you want to read about the many battery chemistries currently in use in EVs, there’s this article:

https://insideevs.com/news/782685/all-ev-battery-chemistries-explained/

As the article explains, there are several chemistries that have already come and gone, and the current models being sold use a few competing chemistries with their tradeoffs. Some of the up and coming chemistries are also already being mass produced.

So whatever it is you mean by “leap,” it sounds like it’s already been happening in the last 15-20 years.