Even if it were true that Tan were a 100% hardcore chicom sleeper agent; this whole thing would still be a pitiful little sideshow given that he only got the job after a long string of honest, god-fearing, red blooded, American suits shareholder-valued the company into a position of alarming decline.

The cutting he has been doing does have the disconcerting taste of someone juicing today's numbers at the expense of tomorrow; but unless the problem is that that's supposed to be American Private Equity's job; an executive cutting the future to ribbons to propitiate the shareholders in the short term is hardly something you need a foreign saboteur to do when we've been actively rewarding that for some time now.

Even if you think that just shakedowning your way to foreign investment is a cool plan; why would you want a direct intel competitor to take a major stake in the company rather than just some unrelated capital-handling outfit?

Sure, 49% isn't a controlling share; but when Intel's current problems include technical deficiencies relative to TSMC and shareholders who want more shareholder value it doesn't seem like it would take much wheedling on TSMC's part to arrange a deal that looks like a shiny little technology transfer; but essentially involves having Intel management take an ax to their R&D and engineering capabilities in order to make line go up and keep shambling on as the discount brand to which TSMC transfers some of its older or less loved processes in order to get credit for 'investment'.

It's not clear that merely recapitalizing the company would necessarily fix it; but they'd either have to try to make it work or try to chop it up for finance meat; while TSMC is probably the single best-placed company to offer it a quick, easy, permanent position of inferiority; which seems like what you wouldn't want if you are trying to preserve or expand domestic capability.

They'd rather flush the greatest democracy ever down the toilet than let gays have equal rights or women get abortions or whatever the hell is woke this week. .

A weird mixture of yes and no. People will absolutely lose their shit over 'the woke mind virus' turning frogs gay and filling every women's locker room with the trans menace; People will also dismiss the possibility that perhaps industrial quantities of novel endocrine disruptors might have an effect on humans as an alarmist con by scientists just in it to score those fat stacks of grant money.

In a related vein the only form of air pollution we will take seriously is 'chemtrails', the others are just communist hoaxes to Agenda 21 capitalism; and all vaccines will be presumed neurotoxic until further notice while it would be crass to note how many insecticides are nerve agents with familiar sounding mechanisms of action.

You know, rigorous intellectual consistency.

Never let the Federalist Society do your CRM implementation.

This certainly doesn't mean it will go unhacked; but it's the software running in the VBS enclave that remains active. TPM2/secure boot are prerequisites for that.

Volatility in DRAM spot prices certainly isn't anything new; but it probably doesn't help that we've got a push by the high end vendors to move more HBM at fancy AI part margins while also being at the somewhat annoying point in the DDR4/DDR5 transition where you can still put together a pretty plausible computer with either; but you need to pick a completely different GPU to do so; rather than it being one of those where memory controllers currently support both and it's just a question of how they laid the motherboard out.

DDR4 parts were hanging around because they were only modestly less powerful and platform costs were lower; but if DDR4 prices move unexpectedly that's a lot of writing down someone is going to have to do and potentially some rapid shifts in the ratio of DDR4 to DDR5 parts.

I wonder if that is what they are alluding to when they say ""People with less than a college education are creating a lot of value — and sometimes more value than people with a college education — using our product".

Depending on how finished and drop-in vs. how in need of fiddly integration and customization at the customer site for their systems 'our product' is the open roles implied by that line could range from "you could be an analyst monkey; maybe even analyst monkey II if you seem like a bright sort!" to some more intricate and visible customer facing integration project stuff(which is were some outfits probably would have a cultural preference for candidates with prestige credentials); but when c-suite says that you can create value as a user that normally isn't to be read as a statement that there are openings at their level; and if they wanted to be either more vague or differently specific they could have been.

Don't worry; the glorious agentic future also includes firing everyone who isn't far enough up the food chain to have a proper office. Won't be a problem.

Designed to sound more dramatic than it may actually be.

It seems worth mentioning that they are specifically saying that among people they hire they don't treat prestigious degrees differently and sometimes get better results from people without them. They don't actually say anything about whether they ignore degrees in hiring; or whether they find a correlation between degrees and hireability.

The statement is certainly constructed to sound more dramatic than that; and depending on their hiring practices it may actually be; but "if we think you are good enough to hire we don't continue to uphold a caste system based on where you did undergrad" is not a terribly radical position to take. Not one that everyone actually does take; but not terribly uncommon.

Using a "by the pound" bottom feeder for offshore contract labor is its own reward. Paying 20-30% of the unit cost of a qualified domestic employee generates a "savings" that's just a mirage. When you layer in poor execution, incompetence, and using anthill labor that nullifies the "cost advantage," the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

My father was a consultant; and he always told me that there were two very different types of client: Some clients had a decision they needed to make that raised questions they didn't have the expertise to answer, other clients had a decision they had made for which they wanted additional justification. The former wanted actual analysis both of whether the questions they had were the questions they should have and the answers to the questions they should have. The latter absolutely wanted the performance of analysis, clearly shoddy work or an obviously stacked deck(metaphorical or slide) defeated the point and made the cynicism of what they were doing too overt; but they were not hiring you first and foremost to get them an answer they didn't think they could get themselves.

I am significantly less clear on how much benefit the first class of clients is getting from 'AI', allegedly there are some narrow use cases where performance actually lands in the same ballpark as hype; but the second class of clients could absolutely do as well, or better, in terms of adding prestige and second-opinions-were-obtained cred to whatever decision they already wished to arrive at; given the absolute mania for anything you can call 'AI' in management circles at the moment.

If you are basically calling in McKinsey to add gravitas to your layoffs that seems like business they are either going to lose or have to do at pitifully low margins to keep up with the 'AI' guys; I just don't know what percentage of their business is mostly about adding prestige or letting an outsider be the one you can point to when the axe starts coming down vs. actual analysis where asking the right questions and getting the right answers is important; where AI hype could still make landing gigs harder; but the bot will have to deliver or the pendulum will swing back after a bunch of embarrassing failures.

TCS (Tata Consulting) announced last week they were going to be laying folks off.

https://www.hindustantimes.com...

Though they are claiming these are not driven by AI.

It will be interesting to see the impact on the hordes of consultancies that specialize in low bidder "ant hill" labor to do things like "eyes on glass" for operations, man call centers, and perform basic coding. I suspect that model is about to be turned on its head.

Best,

The part that I suspect they genuinely don't like is that the "MicrosoftXTA" CPU vendor code, which corresponds to a Windows ARM device(which I think at this point means 'Qualcom'; possibly a VM on a mac?) is meandering between .08% and .07% and back.

Despite those systems being genuinely well above average in terms of bringing remotely mac-like battery life to Windows; and(despite...optimistic...MSRPs) often appearing on sale at decently attractive price points; it appears that some mixture of apathy, incompatibility, and the total disaster that was the rollout of 'recall' and 'Copilot+ PC' seems to have just cratered those; at least among people who touch steam even casually.

Could be that windows-on-arm is flying off the shelf somewhere else; I don't have MS sales data; but when what was supposed to be the halo product of the win11/Glorious AI product era is under .1%, beating out those well-known Debian gamers by .01 to .02%, they can't be entirely thrilled.