"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing 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 * about you, the lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." --Bryan Cantrill

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hobo123 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

What about a guy with a lawnmower intentionally chopping off your foot? And what about a CEO making decisions on behalf of the corporate entity called Oracle?

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cyanydeez 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

more and more it seems like he's referring to billionaires more or less.

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burnte 37 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The flaw in the analogy is that oracle is made of people. It's not a lawnmower, it's a group of people with human motivations and human thoughts. It's true they don't HATE people, but it's also true they absolutely have no conscience in negotiations and have zero concern about relationships.

	▲	dan_q 34 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> It's true they don't HATE people Maybe so, but perhaps the most successful part of the AI marketing pitch has been exploiting management's hatred of labor (and vice versa). A significant motivator for a lot of the nonsensical AI layoffs and initiatives over the last three years has been that it's a great opportunity for management to get ill on their slaves. Tech labor got a little too big for their britches during the hiring spree of 2021, and AI was a great opportunity to take them down a peg, even if it offered little in the way of ROI.
	▲	pmkary 33 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Oh you fell into the trap... Just don't anthropomorphize Oracle...
	▲	18 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
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	▲	TimTheTinker 34 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		How many bureaucracies in history have behaved in deeply misanthropic ways, especially when led by misanthropic leaders? Don't underestimate the power of the desire to keep one's job to cause a large organization to behave towards its own self-perpetuation despite the moral lines that must be crossed by individuals to do so.