This is completely misleading.

Even a cursory google search will give a rather long list:

- Giving Pledge: Ellison signed the Giving Pledge, committing to donate the majority of his wealth to philanthropy. Recently, he announced plans to donate 95% of his $373 billion fortune, focusing on science, healthcare, climate change, and AI research.

- Ellison Medical Foundation: Invested nearly $1 billion in biomedical research on aging and disease prevention before closing in 2013

- Lawrence Ellison Foundation: Supports research on aging, health, education, sustainable agriculture, and wildlife conservation.

- Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine (USC): Established with a $200 million donation to advance cancer research and personalized therapies

- Ellison Institute of Technology (Oxford): A for-profit philanthropic initiative tackling global challenges like healthcare, food insecurity, climate change, and AI. A new campus worth $1.3 billion is planned for 2027

- Significant funding for Oxford University through EIT partnerships, including scholarships and research programs.

- Lion Country Safari Acquisition: Purchased the 254-acre wildlife sanctuary in Florida for $30 million through his foundation, ensuring continued conservation efforts.

- Larry Ellison Conservation Center: Opened in California to rehabilitate and breed endangered species

I'm not a huge fan of his or how Oracle has conducted business, but his giving represents billions to charity, not exactly fitting for the "dung beetle" label people are so quick to apply to him.

Pledging and giving are not the same thing.

So he has pledged to give away 95%. But so far it seems like he has given very little, maybe 1%?

So according to you there's some magical formula for when he has to give it all away? If you were him, wouldn't you want a lasting legacy? Something that your wealth effects generations over decades or even a century?

Also, keep in mind he's already given away over $2B in charity, but even at 1%, that's still not very much for you?

My only point is that the parent post wasn't being misleading. No, 1% isn't much.

Yeah I would say 1% is not very much, even if it is $2bn. In fact, it's less because it's $2bn. Him giving 95% of his wealth away would affect his lifestyle about as much as most people giving 1% of their wealth away. Probably less. Him giving 1% away is completely insignificant.

I guess you could argue he can't give away 95% now because he wants to maintain control of Oracle... which is fair enough I guess. But still, 1% is not very much.

I don't understand how people can defend extremely wealthy sociopaths. He's a CIA contractor and a genocide supporter, and he's trying to consolidate media to censor certain narratives. The guy is a piece of work. And there's no way he contributed that much more than everyone else to capture most of the wealth generated by the work of his employees. Being more of an aggressive sociopath doesn't mean you did more or better work than everyone else in his orgs.

You must be talking about yourself, everything I said is easily verifiable with 30 seconds of research. Do some introspection - you are projecting.

Most of that is clearly going to his own charities for tax benefits.

Yeah I don't know why people shame dung beetles with association to him

It will be pretty imperceivable when you stay within the same ecosystem. If you went from your 17 and then went to a mid tier phone like a Samsung A71, you would notice a difference.

Display is something I for sure started paying attention to when I was jumping back and forth between Android and Apple when I went from my OnePlus to Apple and then to Samsung noticed differences.

Small improvements add up.

If GP picked up that 12 again, they’d notice.

Wife has a 16 pro, I’m on a 13 mini. Other than her phone being way too big I don’t notice any difference.

And why should I? Reading text on the web, calling, sms’ing, listening to music or using navigation does not require “next gen” hardware. Hell, it doesn’t even require current gen hardware. It would probably work just fine on 2000s era hardware.

HBO cancelled Perry Mason, one of the better done noir detective series. That was kind of the nail in the coffin for me. I still get it free because of my AT&T subscription, but I can't argue that Netflix has really come out with anything really worth watching either - Department Q and Mindhunter are only two that I think of that were decent.

I agree that the majority of stuff on streaming services is complete garbage and nothing is really "binge worthy" like it used to be. The one thing I used to love about Netlfix was going back and watching old movies like Chinatown or To Live and Die in LA. Those are all gone now, replaced with its own produced content that I just think isn't in the same league.

If your metric is only detective stories… i guess? But if you actually compare the quality of anything recent notable from HBO it's not even close. HBO cinematography, production quality, editing, script… its all levels above Netflix. Pick anything The White Lotus, Euphoria, The Last of Us, Peacemaker. Really anything.

Netflix feels like everything is cheap. Maybe Ripley was nice but thats it?

The last Stranger Things series, of all things, is probably the single most expensive media production in history. More expensive than Marvel films, than both Avatars, than all of Games of Thrones, than Rings of Power per episode…

It even dwarfs the budgets of the biggest games ever and is roughly on the level of the upcoming GTA 6.

It’s completely mad! For a quaint small-scale mild-horror story set in the 80s. I get that it’s popular, but it would have been just as popular with 1/10 of the budget.

Exact numbers are often unknown, so I may be wrong for some of the examples above, but it’s in that order of magnitude.

But I agree that Netflix feels cheap. The Rings of Power felt remarkably cheap too. But it’s a lot more about the writing and the artistic merit than about actual production quality.

But Stranger Things also feels kinda cheap. I am not sure what is it but there is just this "movie feel" that HBO production often achieve (Apple TV does this too) but with netflix it just isn't there. Not sure why.

Thank you for mentioning Department Q and Mindhunter — these were amazing. Netflix has a lot of content some of it is actually really good.

Mindhunter was cancelled for being too expensive.

There must be more to that story. Netflix, HBO, BBC and a bunch of others keep pumping out these kinds of crime dramas exactly because they are quite conservative bets. They are extremely cheap to produce, a handful of mid-range actors on very mundane locations. They can stay as a miniseries or expand later on as wanted. And if the writing is good some of them become incredibly popular and profitable.

I mean, the last Stranger Things series, of all things, is the single most expensive production in history. More expensive than Marvel films, than both Avatars, than all of Games of Thrones, than Rings of Power per episode… It’s mad, for a quaint small-scale mild-horror story set in the 80s.

There is no way Mindhunter was simply too expensive.

Fincher shoots for very long, does a lot of takes, lights everything like a film. Likely spends a lot of time in the editing room either himself directly or tinkering with the directors that direct the other episodes.

Notice how Mindhunter didn’t “look” like other Netflix shows. The reason for that is they lit it like a movie. And that takes time and money.

I work in the industry. The reason Netflix shows look a certain way is because they are not given the time to do it differently and are shooting almost documentary style or at least much much faster than a regular “prestige” show. Now a good director DP duo can still make this look good, even though it’s hard to do 20 set ups (low budget speed) instead of 5-10 a day (high budget). But that velocity means you shoot at twice the speed. Which is huge considering film costs are people costs. Production is often the expensive segment of a show like Mindhunter.

Fincher likely wouldn’t have agreed to drop episode count or shoot them faster, so they didn’t continue.

I wonder if it’s a matter of the platforms optimizing for the wrong metrics, or whether people just stopped paying for quality.

It's hard to motivate high quality at high cost on subscription based platforms. We all pay the same price regardless of whether the content is barely palatable or great, and we all want new content frequently.

Better then to pump out a wide range of mediocracy to attract and keep as many subscribers as possible.

To me it died when they changed acceptable series length to 6 episodes on GoT. I really miss the days of 24 episodes, split into 12 episodes runs. I dont care that you spent the income of a small nation on the 6 episodes, I prefer you spread that money on 12 or more episodes so we can get story telling again.

Today's "TV shows" are more like TV movies that where split in into 3 1 hour runs.

Those people left for Apple.

Reportedly.

Mindhunter was cancelled - too expensive.

>> This time out it feels more like "we can do existing [thing], but reduce the cost of doing it by not employing people"

I was doing RPA (robotic process automation) 8 years ago. Nobody wanted it in their departments. Whenever we would do presentations, we were told to never, ever, ever talk about this technology replacing people - it only removes the mundane work so teams can focus more on the bigger scope stuff. In the end, we did dozens and dozens of presentations and only two teams asked us to do some automation work for them.

The other leaders had no desire to use this technology because they were not only fearful of it replacing people on their teams, they were fearful it would impact their budgets negatively so they just quietly turned us down.

Unfortunately, you're right because as soon as this stuff gets automated and you find out 1/3rd of your team is doing those mundane tasks, you learn very quickly you can indeed remove those people since there won't be enough "big" initiatives to keep everybody busy enough.

The caveat was even on some of the biggest automations we did, you still needed a subset of people on the team you were working with to make sure the automations were running correctly and not breaking down. And when they did crash, since a lot of these were moving time sensitive data, it was like someone just stole the crown jewels and suddenly you need two war rooms and now you're ordering in for lunch.

This is what Netlify does. Hook up a private repo and deploy. Make a commit and it auto builds and you have a CI/CD pipeline. This is what I build all of my static sites with. You can do almost any JS framework like React, Angular, Vue, etc.

Netlify does way more than this, but it makes hosting static stuff super easy.

https://www.netlify.com/

All of my static sites that I've built lately have been done on Netlify. Super easy to hook up to Github and the form handling is a breeze. I've known Mathias going back to when he was personally answering emails and promoting JAMSTACK so you can say I'm a bit biased. lol

Netlify is a great company that I'll always support.

>> Going with the flow seems like a bad advice. going Analog as in iRobot seems the most sane thing.

I've been doing a lot of photography in the last few years with my smartphone and because of the many things you mentioned, I've forgone using it now. I'm back to a mirrorless camera that's 14 years old and still takes amazing pictures. I recently ran into a guy shutting down his motion picture business and now own three different Canon HDV cameras that I've been doing some interesting video work with.

Its not easy transferring miniDV film to my computer, but the standard resolution has a very cool retro vibe that I've found a LOT of people have been missing and are coming back around too.

I'm in the same age range and couldn't fathom becoming a developer in the early aughts and being in the midst of a gold rush for developer talent to suddenly seeing the entire tech world contract almost over night.

Strange tides we're living in right now.

Kind of crazy, but I've always written my own resume and cover letters and even my stuff is being drowned out by the same slop. It frustrating getting your AI resume filtered out - its an entirely different thing when you do things to stand out, and its still being drowned out.

Says a lot about the current state of hiring in the tech.

I wish I could just mail my printed resume. That extra little bit would add some authenticity…

>> the pushing of AI may be leading to a massive waste of money and resources

And massive amounts of energy to run these new fangled AI data centers. Not sure if you lumped that in with "resources", but yes we're already seeing it:

A typical AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 households, and the largest under development will consume 20 times more, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). They also suck up billions of gallons of water for systems to keep all that computer hardware cool.

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/14/nx-s1-5565147/google-ai-data-...

>> Some people have trouble doing meaningless intellectual pursuits like crosswords, sudoku etc.

My Dad is like this. I'm like this. My son is like this.

Unless we're busy, pushing ourselves to build something, fix something or just outside doing something we don't feel the reward.

My Dad told his motto, "A rolling rock gathers no moss - until it finally stops rolling." He told me that in his 50's - he's in his 80's still out in the garage refinishing old furniture and giving it away. The drive the man has just never burns out.

Yeah! I can definitely see myself doing that. I told family and friends that my ideal way of death is a quick death by the computer when I'm over 80 working on some projects. I just have to move forward in some direction.