They were only "decent" then because everyone else sucked at getting a stable db. I tested 4 db in about 1990 and the other 3 worked badly. Oracle's install script had some poor assumptions but once worked around worked as a db. One of the DB got installed and kept getting "internal errors" and support says reinstall will probably fix it, so given we were evaluating it for 50+ installs that lack of understanding was unacceptable.

And unlike banks that fail and take others money with them, Oracle failing simply gets their assets (the db, the cloud and other things) sold to someone else, assuming the other possible buyer's don't also go all in on borrowing for AI and lose their shirts also.

It seems like double/triple dipping.

Cross license with Intel/AMD and get paid per cpu sold.

Cross License with Microsoft and get paid per windows copy sold for the software decode.

And criss license with all of the OEM hardware makers and get paid yet again for each machine sold that can decode in hw.

Great for Nokia to double and triple dip and get paid 3 times for the exact same users. This really indicates we have a royally screwed up patent system.

What I don't understand about all of the half-assed patent systems, is how they are allowed to sue HP and/or Amazon when the actual violator is Intel and/or AMD including the features in the graphics chip. And I would strongly suspect that Nokia has a patent sharing agreement with both Intel/AMD and so cannot sue them, so is suing all of intel's large customers. You have to love double-dipping...

Either Autocomplete on steriods or Correlation on steriods. Every useful right answer it gives is not original and simply a mis-mash of other's work. As you say, neither is a sign of any actual intelligence. But the believers say AGI is "right" around the corner. I predict it will get here the week before the Faster-Than-Light Drive goes operational, and the week after we get commercial Fusion working...

Not a surprise they are underwater.

I have personally heard(first hand, I retired so no longer work there) multiple people in the company(including at least one of the CEOs and Larry) hype AI as being able to compress and store medical images at lower resolution because when you use AI superzoom to enlarge/up-scale the lower resolution compressed image it can recreate the "original" detail and can be used for diagnoses.

Given they think AI is magic and they seem to believe Hollywood superzoom exists they will pay anything for that unobtainium, that is not ever going to be possible to ever do (under ANY conditions) because it for any given 4 pixels you attempt to zoom into up there are mathematically a huge number of (3x3,4x4) solutions and no way to determine which solution was/is true.

Linux MD raid had a spat of random issues were it appeared that multiple disks without a partition suddenly got partitioned (on a boot). And at least some of those people NEVER dual booted (so no windows). The leading theory was that a bios/EFI update decided that disks that it did not identify as having data needed to get "fixed" and have a GPT partition table on it. There were 3-4 different people that reported this in a 2-3 month window with none since then, with a wide variety of controllers, but a number of them started after firmware updates or motherboard replacements/upgrades. And I know enough "smart" developers that love to write code to "fix" things that they "know" are wrong and simply don't understand. I have also seen a software update "fix" (ie change) the partitioning because they decided the old way was wrong and did not consider there might be data on it.

In the recent past no one tracked most of these conditions that people get in old age. Alzheimers was first named in 1901. And a lot of people died young enough from various untreated common bacterial infections to reduce the size of the population old enough to even get Alzheimer's. Historical data is fairly limited, the data we have is at best poor to non-existent (not tracked, health so poor as to make what data that existed useless to compare), and for the most part we only even have useful data from that last 70 years ( before that general health of most of the population was generally so poor that a significant number of 18-25 year olds were not healthy enough to join the military in wwi, 11% had VD, 10% had TB, and there were other issues that disqualified).

Most of the "new" diseases we currently find are simply noticing some disease that was always there but our data was not good enough to identify it.

Ie like Zika. It was first identified in 1947, and at the time studies (in the area were it was found) identified that 6% of the population had anti-bodies for it, so no telling how long Zika had been around, and Yellow Fever and other similar tropical infections that were more lethal were bigger issues that would have made looking for Zika and other less lethal diseases not a priority.

So it is likely that Alzheimer's was always a problem but not really identified as anything other than one of the symptoms of "old age".

A bubble/hangover from all the money wasted on AI (basically a giant correlation engine) seems more likely than the Singularity.

I don't see any evidence that current AI is much more than the original Eliza program from the 60's on steroids.

And AI is making people stupid because they believe they can rely on it even though any answer it provides is just an answer provided by some other person someplace on the web. At best it is a better search engine except for the fact that it fails to provide a right answer often enough to make is useless.

They seem to be asking for a survey to make everyone "FEEL" better (after support calls and the like), but based on nothing changing and no responses I don't believe ANYONE/ANYTHING processes and/or reads any of those surveys. They surveys are just there to placate everyone.

It is similar to "your call is important to us, please stay on the line" and everytime I say to myself "if your call was important to me you would have more people to answer".

It boggles the mind how stupid companies are (both the employers and say BANKS). They want to train people to look for spam from 3rd parties, and then they send surveys and actual critical information that they want answered using 3rd party sites.

This is probably the #1 security violation (sending and expecting employees and others) to use/answer a 3rd party site that companies do without a single thought that they are increasing their security risk by their own actions poorly though out actions.

TimberSil/glasswood 10-15 years ago had lots of similar claims (wood pressure treated with sodium silicate--fireproof, rot/insect resistant). The company seems to have went away in a fury of lawsuits as most of the claims of how durable the product was were overblown.

Real non-ai tech support also does this, so AI is "improving" to be just has crappy as real 1st/2nd tier tech support. I have had non-ai tech support make random claims that make little or no sense to attempt to explain (and get me off the call so they could close it) the issue I was reporting. It is done all of the time, and seems to ignore what the software should do and/or what the code was designed to do. The goal seems to be to make something up to justify what is being experienced but they have no consideration of if it is even supposed to work that way or not, or if it is even reasonable to work that way.

Tech support often does random correlations/observations. They will declare that a Firmware upgrade fixes this (when if they had simply just rebooted and reset the hardware the device would not repeat the issue for years--ie it is "fixed").

No one with REAL intelligence would believe their AI/Neural net is actually Intelligent and know it was just a mostly well trained massive pattern matching program with no actual understanding of the underlying data. Hence the misfiring when the pattern matching does not quite match what it was trained on and giving random responses that make little or no sense but were the closest match.

Too many clueless people parroting AGI is just around the corner, when we really do not even have very good task specific AI, we just have a pattern matcher that can repeat what it has already been trained on and is in no way intelligent.

Checkers is a bit too complicated for T.

Tick-Tac-Toe maybe, but still tipping over the board because he loses even when going first...

The incompetence was using Lithium NMC batteries in the first place for a stationary application.

Companies in the US and Japan developed NMC batteries because they had higher power to weight. And power to weight makes sense in vehicles to boost range, but in stationary applications that power to weight really does not matter. Because they focused on the NMC batteries, they did not develop the safer (but lower density) LiFePO4 batteries (but Chinese companies did). Because the US/Japan only has good NMC batteries they use said NMC batteries for everything even when the density is not needed and ignoring the fact that once they catch on fire they are almost impossible to put out, unlike the LiFePO4 cells.

China uses LiFePO4 in vehicles, and even Tesla used to put them in one model but because the batteries were not domestic the vehicles did not qualify for as many tax credits.

One wrong step of we need high density and ignore the fire risk, and don't develop anything else. Given enough installations of NMC batteries a fire WILL happen simply because any manufacturing issue and/or accident will start a fire, and once started it will be very difficult to put out.