Although I agree INTC is overbought currently(as is the entire sector, and good news are pretty much universally overbought anyway, that's just how the stock market works), I'm having a hard time taking this analysis seriously.
Yes, it's true that some(specifically 18A) of the successes Intel have had since the CEO switch were essentially part of the plan under Gelsinger. But to say that nothing has changed seems simply uninformed, and that's me being charitable.
LBT has done lots of things, including securing significant investment, cutting costs, made some good deals in the DC segment, and most importantly, started making real progress(still early days though) in finding actual foundry customers willing to commit to 14A. Intel under Gelsinger was approaching its foundry business in a "build it and they will come" sort of way, hemhorrhaging huge piles of cash and merely crossing their fingers that customers would show up at this point. One of the first things LBT did as CEO was make future development of 14A contingent on finding customers for it, which is precisely ehat he's been trying to do.
This quarterly report was the first during his tenure that showed some real financial progress: the quarter was profitable when analysts expected breakeven, sequential foundry revenue grew, 18A yields are up, guidance looked good. This, to you, is practically nothing? It seems to me that going from bleeding cash at an accelerating rate, to turning a profit, is about very much something.
And again, I agree that hype is a bit overzealous right now, but arguably the fact that there's market optimism about INTC again is a huge victory on LBT's part. Because how exactly is IFS supposed to attract customers willing to make multiyear commitments to their services if the company is universally seen as a sinking ship? To state the obvious, market sentiment can make or break a public company, no matter how disconnected that sentiment is from the fundamentals.
And to say Intel has no AI strategy seems disingenuous. LBT has addressed AI strategy quite explicitly in public, and you can look it up if you want.
I'm cautiously bullish on INTC in the long term. I do expect a correction at some point, just like I would for any stock that goes up more than 20% in one day, but to me that's just market swings. The daily machinations of the stock market are like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
> LBT has done lots of things, including securing significant investment, cutting costs, made some good deals in the DC segment
The only significant cost cutting is via layoffs, and that wasn't particularly different from Pat's strategy - LBT just added more layoffs.
I have no reason to believe those deals would not have been made under Pat. They were made because the state of 14A/18A was better. And they were better not because of anything LBT did, but just the progression that was ongoing under Pat.
The government investment is identical to the amount they had promised Intel under the CHIPS Act, except that now instead of a grant it's equity (a worse deal for Intel). There is an ongoing shareholder lawsuit that alleges the deal was made to stop Trump's online bullying, and wasn't made with the interests of the shareholders in mind.
The other big difference is, frankly, Trump. I don't think some of the investments (e.g. Nvidia) would have occurred had Trump not been in the office.
> Intel under Gelsinger was approaching its foundry business in a "build it and they will come" sort of way, hemhorrhaging huge piles of cash and merely crossing their fingers that customers would show up at this point.
That is naive. Are you seriously suggesting Intel wasn't actively courting potential customers? I know from inside knowledge in multiple companies that wasn't the case. And you don't need to take my word for it - potential deals were reported multiple times in the press.
As for hemorrhaging huge piles of cash, have you compared the financials with Pat vs now? As I mentioned before, the amount they're losing to Foundry hasn't changed - and that's precisely the complaint they had about Pat. In fact, the (valid) complaint was that all the funds were being routed to the Foundry, and thus Intel's products suffered (internally I know several teams complained they had to cut competitive features because they didn't have funding).
> 18A yields are up, guidance looked good.
They are no higher than was projected under Pat. As I said, Foundry-wise, everything is falling under the same trajectory as he had outlined - except the financials. They are worse than projected.
As for the actual yields, I can assure you from sources in multiple potential customers that based on the data they've seen, it's still "Not good enough to commit to a deal." Improved? Yes. Good enough for a top tier company to rely on them? No.
Yes, the revenue was a bit higher than projected, but that's because they projected low. And the reasons the projections were low is because, unlike Pat, LBT is not transparent. He gives little details, and so people make guesses. It's a classic example of transparency being punished.
On an absolute level, the revenues are still low, compared to what Intel was achieving just a few years ago. Back then, this amount of revenue would have been viewed as a really bad quarter.
> LBT has addressed AI strategy quite explicitly in public, and you can look it up if you want.
Yes, I did. He came to Intel with a vision to position Intel strongly in the AI space. Then less than 6 months later, he announced he has more or less given up on catching up with Nvidia. What changed? He wanted to acquire an AI company, but the Board couldn't agree on it and while they were bickering, another company acquired them. And then LBT declared his surrender.
I have strong connections within Intel - both Foundry and Products. I speak to them regularly. I always get 3 responses:
- Things are as bad - no clear direction on what's going on (the layoffs never stopped, and they're still scrambling to keep their jobs)
- Things are as OK - they're as they have always been - no changes.
- Things are great! When pressed on what has changed, the answer is "Oh, nothing. But we're happy the stock is up!"
I've yet to hear from a single personal contact there that the changes that have been made has improved anything.
Pat had a rotation with all Intel Fellows. Each Intel Fellow met with Pat on a regular cadence. The one Fellow I'm routinely in touch with says he hasn't met with LBT, and nor has most Fellows he knows. No indication that LBT even cares what they have to say. The lack of transparency within Intel is quite notable. He gives no details during the quarterly company meetings, and has instructed the business leaders not to be transparent. The phrase "Oh, LBT is laser focused on results!" is heard often from them.
I'm not saying Intel is a sinking ship (well, Foundry might be). $20 was clearly undervalued. But $80 is clearly overvalued, as we all agree. And Pat was the sacrificial lamb.
At least here, there are randomly triggered checks by shop staff where they have to manually rescan anything before they let you leave. And possibly, those checks are more easily triggered if you do certain very strange things like buying nothing but many separate instances of "bananas' with widely varying weights. Wouldn't be too hard to program a set of rules for the most obvious red flags.
And of course, the area is wide open and well covered by cameras, and usually self-checkout means paying by card or google pay or something, which will tie your identity to the purchase.
Riyadh, a city of 7 million people gets basically all of its drinking water from desal plants in the Persian Gulf. If those plants get knocked out, they're just gonna "fly in drinking water"? So with some napkin math, assuming 1 litre of water per person per day(which is extremely conservative considering they're in the desert heading into the hottest part of the year), that's 7 million litres of water every day. Can they "fly in" 7000 tons of water every single day? And where is all this water coming from? I have serious doubts about Saudi Arabia having "no problem" doing this.
I often think about the shuttle program in relation to all these crazy complicated, wildly expensive, and incredibly fragile space telescopes we're sending to LEO or the Earth-Sun L2. Would be damn useful to be able to repair/upgrade these things like with Hubble.
Obviously I realise the shuttle program was pretty far away from being able to head out to the Earth-Sun L2(AB, and wasn't even working towards it. But man, it would be nice to have that ability.
For JWST, for example, besides not being designed for repair, it is incredibly delicate and having a spacecraft approach would likely destroy the heat shield and break it permanently.
Dude, Lichess is entirely funded by donations. There's only so much money to go around.
And Thibault iirc is the kind of person that's not terribly interested in earning lots of money. Of he wanted to, I'm sure he could make bajillions elsewhere in tech, because he's that good. But he apparently prefers to only work for a "measly" upper middle class salary and doing something he's really passionate about. And I thank him for it, because lichess is awesome.
Why? Nothing wrong with running your network interface in a VM. There are reasons for doing so even if drivers aren't an issue. Qubes OS does this, for instance, for security reasons.
Windows also does. Almost everything is a VM in windows these days.
It's just how things work these days. If you'd say "I run my VPN client in a docker container" it would raise a lot less eyebrows. Yet it's not very different, really.
Though conceptually I'd frown at having to run Linux. I'd prefer upgrading the hardware to a supported chip.
Definitely not independent kernels but my guess is he's referring to Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) - it gets turned on by default if your Win10/11 system has virtualization enabled.
One such example security solution is memory integrity, which protects and hardens Windows by running kernel mode code integrity within the isolated virtual environment of VBS. Kernel mode code integrity is the Windows process that checks all kernel mode drivers and binaries before they're started, and prevents unsigned or untrusted drivers or system files from being loaded into system memory.
Why not? FreeBSD has never been intended as a batteries included, everything "just works" out of the box OS. It's meant to have a bare minimum install and let the user choose how things are set up. You can disagree with that philosophy, but that's not an indictment of FreeBSD. Just go use something that aligns better with your preferences.
Why do people(you, in this case, but this is a very common fallacy) assume that advocating for one thing(idleness) is implicitly advocating against its opposite(work)? We can do both, just not simultaneously.
Because the article's title is "The Importance of Being Idle" not The Importance of doing something that you enjoy"? It's all-too-easy to enjoy being idle, but ultimately it's also a bit mindless, and this deprives us of deeper forms of enjoyment and engagement.
it seems like you are interpreting this as an argument for "not doing work" - but it's not the case. It is more so saying that rest is important too. You ever have the experience that you are bashing your head against something, take a break to stop working on it, and come back refreshed and solve it quickly? Just because something is important, doesn't mean you should do that thing, single-mindedly, at the expense of other things.
Leaving aside the wealth gap factor, which I do agree is important:
When I think back to using computers as a kid, both at school(starting in 1999) and at home I don't think it's all that black and white wrt just playing at home vs learning useful skills at school.
At some point in the early 00s my underfunded elementary school acquired a bunch of old windows 95 computers. We would have classes where we mostly did basic touch typing, MS Office etc. At home, my middle class parents had also managed to find me some old outdated clunker. And yes, most of my time at home was spent playing games, chatting with friends on msn, pirating mp3s etc.
But I'd say I learned orders of magnitude more from my frivolous activities than from whatever we did at school. At home I was learning things like: online research(into warcraft cheat codes or quest guides for Runescape etc); software troubleshooting(having to reinstall windows because I downloaded malware on limewire or otherwise borked my install somehow); fast typing(from chatting with friends about whatever 12 year olds like to discuss.
Probably 90% of my typing practice back then came at home, not at school, and there was no touch typing. I could type 100+ wpm on just 4 fingers by the time I was in middle school. Never actually learned to properly touch type until I had force myself into it 5 years ago due to RSI); English as a second language(from various forums, irc, etc, hard to avoid back then); And I believe one of my first forays into programming was trying to get a cracked game with a broken .bat installer off TPB to work. I had a friend who got into it via Morrowind modding.
Actually, come to think of it, most of computer class was also in reality spent sneakily playing flash games and/or messing around with the computer settings just to screw with the next student/teacher to use it.
Even generalising beyond computers, I think a remarkable portion of the skills and interests that end up defining us as people, can be traced back to stuff we did trying to avoid boredom as children.
To summarise though, I do think computers have a place in school. But especially at an elementary school level, I think play should be a significant portion of their use, because play is how kids explore the world and themselves.
The next(I think? It's in -CURRENT now anyway.) version of OpenBSD will be adding VLAN awareness to veb(4). Should make my OpenBSD home router experience much easier.
Yes, it's true that some(specifically 18A) of the successes Intel have had since the CEO switch were essentially part of the plan under Gelsinger. But to say that nothing has changed seems simply uninformed, and that's me being charitable.
LBT has done lots of things, including securing significant investment, cutting costs, made some good deals in the DC segment, and most importantly, started making real progress(still early days though) in finding actual foundry customers willing to commit to 14A. Intel under Gelsinger was approaching its foundry business in a "build it and they will come" sort of way, hemhorrhaging huge piles of cash and merely crossing their fingers that customers would show up at this point. One of the first things LBT did as CEO was make future development of 14A contingent on finding customers for it, which is precisely ehat he's been trying to do.
This quarterly report was the first during his tenure that showed some real financial progress: the quarter was profitable when analysts expected breakeven, sequential foundry revenue grew, 18A yields are up, guidance looked good. This, to you, is practically nothing? It seems to me that going from bleeding cash at an accelerating rate, to turning a profit, is about very much something.
And again, I agree that hype is a bit overzealous right now, but arguably the fact that there's market optimism about INTC again is a huge victory on LBT's part. Because how exactly is IFS supposed to attract customers willing to make multiyear commitments to their services if the company is universally seen as a sinking ship? To state the obvious, market sentiment can make or break a public company, no matter how disconnected that sentiment is from the fundamentals.
And to say Intel has no AI strategy seems disingenuous. LBT has addressed AI strategy quite explicitly in public, and you can look it up if you want.
I'm cautiously bullish on INTC in the long term. I do expect a correction at some point, just like I would for any stock that goes up more than 20% in one day, but to me that's just market swings. The daily machinations of the stock market are like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
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