> Output is a lot harder to measure, which means it can be fudged easily.

First and foremost, this is about Oracle. For the short period I worked there, my impression about culture and tech was: mediocre. Not excellent, not poor but just a around average.

Which raises the question: why is it such a successful company commercially? I believe it's being ruthless to customers, employees and suppliers combined with cooking the financials.

Which bring me to your remark about output being difficult to measure. Imho Oracle had been exceptionally good at manipulating and obfuscating their output. And this was true long before AI came to the scene.

Oracle is mediocre because it could be.

That's probably where you'll end up if you're a company where that's an option.

No one was ever going to switch databases to a better DB as long as:

1) they did the bare minimum to ensure no alternative existed where switching made any sense.

2) they never charged too much where it made sense to switch thinking along the lines these businesses made decisions.

It's like the resource curse played out on a company scale.

If you have no incentive to get better, you won't.

> Which raises the question: why is it such a successful company commercially?

Tons of mediocre enterprise software is built on Oracle DB.

Why enterprises are vendor locked-in? There are very few large enterprise players in every industry that implement all kind of ISO, standards, got an army of business analysts to generate million of requirement pages. Any new player must fight against that artificially overblown legacy systems, design and prove migration process is possible etc.

Here are just a bunch of industries my family/friends worked in and had first hand experience with these legacy systems - Airline (PSS), Banking, Healthcare, Hotel, Telecom.

Sad, but true.

And if they had it their way, Oracle would have similarly strangled every last customer of Java, MySQL, OpenOffice, Solaris, etc. to squeeze out every last dollar.

And then make it look like they're innovating.

So glad to no longer be working for these clowns

Not a subscriber, but I understand your call for retribution.

I suppose the silver lining is that they are putting the responsibility for age verification adults. Which imo is better than requiring everyone; kids get a free pass to the kids stuff...

Unless they're changing things with some sort of automated classification, then it's users who designate which servers and channels have adult content.

In my experience, you run the risk of getting your server shut down in small servers if someone reports it. Or risk losing your community server status in larger public servers until you come back into compliance.

Also in my experience what teenagers are going to do when they hit an age gate is use a fake picture/video. Sometimes they'll get banned for that and then they'll make a new account and do it again.

Yeah I agree. I actually see most of the stuff in the teens mode as a feature

They should disable ads and algorithms from social media by default and give those only for verified adults!

I'll reply for both you and GPP,

I don't know if this will personally affect any servers I use since they're not obviously adult, but I assume the slope will be slippery and if they're doing a faceID system now it will only get worse. Article says "analyze a user’s video selfie, which Discord says never leaves the user’s device"

...are they really going to implement a facial recognition algo in the browser, or is this a "download our app or fuck off" situation? I'm guessing the latter.

I pay for nitro as of now (not for much longer). If absolutely nothing else, I'm not going to give them monthly payments (which generally required a CC. Aka "I'm an adult") and still not be trusted to be an adult.

And that's the thing, these policies are always loose and will be abused.

- M rated game? Okay, it's adult only now. Sure.

- Emulators? Well they can play adult stuff. Now they just happen to add friction on something that is convenient for billionaire studios.

- LGBT content? Well you're talking about sexuality. Of course you need to be an adult. Here let's take face scans and totally not be a sitting duck for any malicious parties looking to identify traditionally disenfranchised people

The escalation is fairly obvious at this point. We've seen it happen in real time.

Please consider re-posting as "Show HN" or adjusting subject line

This has those Hotmail migration vibes off the early 2000s.

And yet, somehow my wife still has a hotmail.com address 25 years later.

And "a very limited number" may mean "though we pretend to be a big company, we have a limited number of customers and while they all pay licence fees, most are not actually using the product in production."

Ivanti isn't exactly a small company. It's products are used in fair amount of the F100's out there so any risk on their part can have an outsized influence.

That's why you hire a CSO: Chief Scapegoat Officer.

You pay them a million per year, and fire them when a breach happens.

Way cheaper than improving security.

Fair enough, but they also have a deeply embedded New Public Management culture.

> On top of that Patreon is a closed centralized platform that's bound to have issues like this and that's where I very much prefer using protocols (vs platforms) that enable the same. There are very similar solutions to Patreon, but based on nostr and related protocols.

The problem here isn't that Patreon is centralized, but that the app store is. Apple could easily require a cut from any app using nostr and related protocols. Or simply ban them altogether.

Not saying government mandates are ideal, but I don't see any other way to force some sense into Apple (or Google). App stores should be some sort of independent institutions (non-profits) but companies have no incentive to cede that revenue. Until that happens, best not download from app stores unless absolutely necessary.

To many users, an app seems to be perceived as the blessed way to access the web. While on a mobile, they are mostly a way to organize symlinks or bookmarks. Except, off course a web browser does its best to protect the user while most apps don't.

Meanwhile I continue doing the Lords work by telling kids that apps are not the internet. Hopefully, that 95% percentage will eventually decrease.

It's not users who are pushing this. It started off with just superfluous but optional apps of websites. Now every year I find there is something I used to be able to do, which I now must own a smartphone to do. And it's not just getting discounts at coffee chains, it's increasingly stuff like accessing healthcare plan benefits, or verifying my identity for banking

A few sites throw up a blocking screen to download the app, which disappears once you spoof a desktop UA. But the big problem is businesses now having no web interface at all

Very good point, though I believe it's both market push and consumer expectation.

Because we have such limited control over our devices, they effectively provide the security of a jail locking down what users can do. That is appealing from a healthcare or banking perspective because it obfuscates the client-server API and gives exact control over the UI. As a bonus, the coffee chain gets to glean lots of details from your phone that would be unavailable in a browser.

As individuals we can do little more that push back: don't let yourself be trapped by coffee chains (go to a different one) and bother your bank's service line about having to use their app. The rest is up to government intervention, I fear.

>To many users, an app seems to be perceived as the blessed way to access the web. While on a mobile, they are mostly a way to organize symlinks or bookmarks. Except, off course a web browser does its best to protect the user while most apps don't.

That is an education problem. What do school computer courses teach these days? Do schools even have computer literacy classes anymore? Do they still teach students about the internet?

The OS is what protects the user. Have you ever seen the prompts asking the user if they want to share their location?

This made me realize, Firefox needs to create a launcher that just creates PWAs out of bookmarks (or vice versa). That way, people get the "app feel" without needing to download every single app.

> However, if I were closer to the front end of my career, I'd certainly be looking to change, perhaps to technical writing.

It's tough for Juniors. I recommend specializing on one or two systems aspects, like performance, reliability, security. Understanding is design, how to measure the aspect, how to reason about it, knowing which levers to pull.