An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Oracle is trying -- and sometimes struggling -- to attract workers to Nashville, where it is developing a massive riverfront headquarters.
The company is hiring for more roles in Nashville than any other US city, with a special focus on jobs in its crucial cloud infrastructure unit. Oracle cloud workers based elsewhere say they've been offered tens of thousands of dollars in incentives to move. Chairman Larry Ellison made a splash in April 2024 when he said Oracle would make Nashville its "world headquarters" just a few years after moving the software company from Redwood City, California, to Austin. His proclamation followed a 2021 tax incentive deal in which Oracle pledged to create 8,500 jobs in Nashville by 2031, paying an average salary above six figures.

"We're creating a world leading cloud and AI hub in Nashville that is attracting top talent locally, regionally, and from across the country," Oracle Senior Vice President Scott Twaddle said in a statement. "We've seen great success recruiting engineering and technical positions locally and will continue to hire aggressively for the next several years." Still, Oracle has a long way to go in its hiring goals. Today, it has about 800 workers assigned to offices in Nashville, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. That trails far behind the number of company employees in locations including Redwood City, Austin and Kansas City, the center of health records company Cerner, which Oracle acquired in 2022.

A lack of state income tax and the city's thriving music scene are touted by Oracle's promotional materials to attract talent to Nashville. Some new hires note they moved because in a tough tech job market, the Tennessee city was the only place with an Oracle position offered. To fit all of these workers, Oracle is planning a massive campus along the Cumberland River. It will feature over 2 million square feet of office space, a new cross-river bridge and a branch of the ultra high-end sushi chain Nobu, which has locations on many properties connected to Ellison, including the Hawaiian island of Lanai. [...] Oracle has been running recruitment events for the new hub. But a common concern for employees weighing a move is that Nashville is classified by Oracle in a lower geographic pay band than California or Seattle, meaning that future salary growth is likely limited, according to multiple workers who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

A weaker local tech job market also gives pause to some considering relocation. In addition, many of the roles in Nashville require five days a week in the office, which is a shift for Oracle, where a significant number of roles are remote. For a global company like Oracle, the exact meaning of "headquarters" can be a bit unclear. Austin remains the address included on company SEC filings and its executives are scattered across the country. The city where Oracle is hiring for the most positions globally is Bengaluru, the southern Indian tech hub. Still, Oracle is positioning Nashville to be at the center of its future. "We're developing our Nashville location to stand alongside Austin, Redwood Shores, and Seattle as a major innovation hub," Oracle writes on its recruitment site. "This is your chance to be part of it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The answer seems to be educating the enterprise workforce, and creating smarter use cases

More than half of AI projects have been delayed or canceled within the last two years citing complexities with AI infrastructure, according to a research report commissioned by DDN, a data optimization company in partnership with Google Cloud and Cognizant.…

on the water photography has added a photo to the pool:

Creating New Culture on the Riverfront — "010 BUILDING" Complex Opened

A new complex, 010 BUILDING, opened on 1 December 2022 in the Naka River area adjacent to Canal City Hakata. It is part of Fukuoka City’s new project Riverfront NEXT, which utilises the waterfront space around Tenjin and Hakata. This is a new tourism destination that combines food and entertainment.

010 BUILDING
010 BUILDING aims to bring a new value to Fukuoka by transcending national and cultural frameworks and collaborating with the world’s top creators; the design architect is CLOUDS AO, a globally active architectural unit that has won numerous competitions, including the NASA Mars Habitat Project and the NY City 9/11 Memorial. Adjacent to Canal City Hakata, the building’s spiral silhouette, visible from a distance, creates a futuristic atmosphere.


Immersive ‘THEATER 010’
The centrepiece of the complex, THEATER 010, is a new form of experiential entertainment called ‘Immersive Theater’, which is not a conventional style to enjoy the show. The hands-on entertainment from New York and London’s hottest club, THE BOX, is a new kind of theatre experience where the audience is not just watching a show on stage, but is also immersed in the show together with the artists.


The restaurant is on the ground floor and the bar on the second floor; you can also watch the show with a meal and drinks.

Enjoy world-class cocktails at BAR 010　
BAR 010 is produced by Michito Kaneko, known as the world’s best bartender. Enjoy world-class cocktails, including authentic ones, pre-mixed and non-alcoholic ones, in a luxurious space with a view of the Naka River.

Innovative dining experience at GohGan
GohGan, located on the ground floor of 010 BUILDING, is created by two famous chefs. Fukuoka-born Tsuyoshi Fukuyama, owner-chef of La Maison de la Nature Goh, was awarded a star in the Michelin Guide for Fukuoka and Saga, and has been named one of the 50 best restaurants in Asia five times. And Gaggan Anand, owner-chef of the Indian restaurant Gaggan Anand in Bangkok, has been awarded first place in the ‘Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants’ four times. This is the first time these two have teamed up for a restaurant.


There are indoor seating that can be enjoyed while looking at the kitchen, which conveys a live atmosphere, and terrace seating along the river. The mixture of French and Indian cuisine is full of surprises. This restaurant will bring a new wind to Fukuoka’s culinary scene.

Source: Fukuoka City Official Tour Guide

photo-tez has added a photo to the pool:

永観堂

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

HEERLEN (ANP) - De bestuurder die donderdagavond tegen de gevel van het Zuyderland-ziekenhuis in Heerlen is gereden, is aan zijn verwondingen overleden. De politie meldt na onderzoek dat het ging om een noodlottig ongeval.

De bestuurder reed met een personenauto rond 20.30 uur eerst achteruit tegen een glazen pui van het ziekenhuis. Direct daarna reed hij vooruit, dwars door een gevel van een ander deel van het ziekenhuis.

De bestuurder werd overgebracht naar de eerste hulp, waar hij overleed.

Door het ongeval werd de afdeling spoedeisende hulp van het ziekenhuis gesloten en die was tegen het einde van de avond nog altijd niet open. Het ziekenhuis adviseert mensen uit de omgeving die met spoed medische hulp nodig hebben de huisartsenpost te bellen en bij levensbedreigende situaties 112.

XScreenSaver 6.14 is out now, including iOS (soon) and Android. A whopping eighteen new savers this time! As I mentioned last month, I wrote a new XScreenSaver module that is API-compatible with Shadertoy, which means that I am now able to pull demos written that way into the XScreenSaver fold. These 18 savers are the first of that batch.

A limitation here is that I can only redistribute Shadertoy-derived savers that have licenses that are compatible with the rest of XScreenSaver.

The default license on shadertoy.com is "CC-BY-NC-SA", and so the vast majority of uploads use that. However, that license, by prohibiting commercial use, is not an open source license, and is more restrictive than the license used by the rest of XScreenSaver. For a Shadertoy saver to be distributed with or within XScreenSaver, it must be licensed under a compatible license, such as: MIT, BSD, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA or CC0.

So this first batch of 18 new savers are the ones that I was able to find that were both interesting and compatibly-licensed.

If you know of other cool Shadertoys that use one of the above licenses, please send them my way, and maybe I'll include them in a future release.

Likewise, if there are some others that are really good but that are not compatibly licensed, let me know about those as well and maybe I'll ask the author if they'd be willing to relicense them for inclusion. It's worth a shot.

(XScreenSaver does not, cannot and will not load the savers from shadertoy.com directly, because reasons, so let that idea go.)

One odd thing that you may notice about these is that they are oddly static as far as screensavers go, which is to say that despite their complexity, they draw the exact same scene every time. Most things written for Shadertoy generate each frame based on time-since-launch, without any mechanism for external sliders, or a random number seed. That's just how they're written.

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Anyway, about the new XShaderToy framework that powers these new savers:

You may find that performance sucks on your machine. That means your GPU is not good, oh no. In particular, the Raspberry Pi 4b sucks at running most of these. Crank down the "Resolution" slider for a better frame rate.

To make these work in the wider XScreenSaver ecosystem, I had to target four different versions of GLSL that are all stupidly and arbitrarily incompatible with each other, both in the set of available library functions, and in basic syntax of the language such as the type promotion rules and whether integers exist.

• Linux: An OpenGL "compatibility profile" context anywhere from 3.1 to 4.6. Pi is 3.1, some other Linux devices are other versions.
• macOS Cocoa: An OpenGL 4.1 "core profile" context, which means no backward compatibility affordances for earlier versions.
• macOS X11: OpenGL 2.1, yes, 2.1.
• iOS: OpenGL ES 3.0. Note that "OpenGL ES 3.0" is not "OpenGL 3.0", it is "WebGL 2.0". This is all completely sane and normal.
• Android: An OpenGL ES context anywhere from 3.0 to 3.2.

So I had to write a bunch of compatibility shims to, for example, make code written to the "OpenGL ES 3.0" API able to run on an "OpenGL 2.1" system. And it's a complete shitshow. Maybe it will work, most of the time. Huge thanks to Carsten Steger for helping me understand this nonsense.

And of course thanks to the original authors of these "new" savers for putting there work out there, and under compatible licenses: mrange, otaviogood, nemerix, kali, jaszunio15 and 3w36zj6.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

Hide and seek, Yuri Yuan Ye

This is the winter of our discotheque, Alfonso Duran