Intel has practically nothing to show for an AI capex boom for the ages. I suspect that Intel is talking about it early for a shred of AI relevance.

What you're seeing now is an "offer you can't refuse" to the fabless designers to direct private capital to Intel by the US for national security reasons and some political points. It buys Intel cash which it desperately needs for its foundry efforts and is a quasi-bailout of Intel shareholders and debtholders. The problem is that Intel doesn't know how to be a foundry in terms of volume and breadth of customers and will need an indefinite amount of capital to learn.

It takes some time, but it helps to take a somewhat adversarial approach and try to falsify your introspection. That's why writing is important. It forces you to lay out the structure for later review. When you just think about something, how that thinking "felt" makes up a lot more of your judgement than the actual coherence or validity.

You need to be able to step outside yourself which is easier said than done, but that's a good skill for a variety of reasons. Writing is an important way of doing it. It's like a snapshot of you in a moment of time that you can review later when you are a slightly different person. Sharing your introspection with others who you trust but don't think like you can also help: good friends, therapists, mentors. LLMs can be great for this sort of thing if you approach it with healthy skepticism and avoid leading it to your answer of choice (but if people can't, who knows where they'll end up).

Setting time boundaries help a lot. Also, resetting your mind by doing something that doesn't bend much to navel gazing helps. Your garden doesn't give a shit about your thoughts. I took judo on a trial run once. Your mind clears very fast when somebody is trying to re-introduce you to the ground.

I think that today, people's ability to do this has greatly diminished. Technology has made it much easier for people to get trapped in those staircases just because it makes them feel good in the short-term. With networks, it's even worse because now they are comforted by the shared experience. Those staircases become the identity and reality rather than something to escape from.

The structuring of your thoughts and emotions, by nature, forces a certain amount of meta cognition and distance from your feelings as you can more easily identify and further think about the insights, inconsistencies, etc. You have a scaffolding that you can continue to build on or rebuild.

Beyond the immediate thinking, it's also interesting to see how the thoughts on something change over time or how they relate to other topics. Now, I'm thinking about my thinking rather than just focusing on the immediate topic.

Deep thinking without a sense of permanence can be great as a start of ideas. You need a low cost way for ideas to form where you can pick the most promising ones for more introspection. But without permanence, there's this danger that you get lost in your half-formed thoughts because it has a lot of "feel" in it and makes it hard to build on or critique. There's a danger that you end up going down an Escher staircase mentally and emotionally that seems like the logical, immediate thing to do but is a contradiction at a higher level.

One "Product CEO" had a material chunk of her responsibilities re-allocated to Tan after he came on board with him frequently saying that their product roadmap has been subpar.

Perhaps this says more about Charlie than Intel.

But if you look at the past CEOs, Intel had Krzanich (fab guy), Swan (CFO guy who didn't even want the job but they couldn't find anyone else), and Gelsinger (design guy and Grove disciple) in 11 years. I'll even throw in Jim Keller, not a CEO but still The Chip God, who left in frustration after two years.

What's the one common problem that all of them had despite all their different backgrounds? Getting relevant nodes to market and scaling them up. Their foundry efforts (v1 and v2) have been disastrous. The CEOs or MBAs perhaps were a friction, but they aren't the root cause. Technology Development has been the center of power that the fabs and products revolved around for decades.

Markets obviously can be wrong, but to think that markets are so inefficient that it confuses book value with liquidation value for a company like Intel is much more wrong.

I think what's more disconcerting if you are an Intel fan is that Intel likely now recognizes that 18A will not have the impact that they originally thought when the ex-CEO "bet the whole company on 18A." Rather than dump more resources into it, they are instead trying to get ahead of the problem by moving resources to 14A which in theory has broader appeal.

But I find that whinging that work should fit my worldview becomes dis-empowering quickly. The temporary dopamine hit from getting sympathy venting and believing that the rest of the world is crazy makes me feel like something has changed when nothing has or perhaps will. And that just causes me to feel worse over time.

It's also interesting to see how opinions of what is fair, right, reasonsable, etc start to change as the contributor becomes a manager of a team and then an owner. The individual's context can have a lot to do with shaping the opinion.

I still see a lot of people worship Gelsinger just because he was supposedly the engineer CEO messiah that Intel needed. But he had a flawed strategy made worse by naive, arrogant execution.

When I have similarly strong opinions, I do act on it because I enjoy seeing how right or wrong I was. Markets are a harsh, expensive teacher. You either learn a trick or two about uncertainty, overconfidence, humility, etc, or you run out of money.

I think you're better at it than you're letting on even if you decided to not play. You already understand the properties of the game.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40117834

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

In 2022, Intel is going to have its first negative free cash flow in at least 15 years. It's going to have negligible free cash flow for the two years after. All of its cash flow and then some is going to build out fab capacity and node tech as it tries to dramatically increase capacity for its design business and its foundry business. Meanwhile, their most lucrative business segments, in particular datacenter, are getting gobbled up quickly by the competition. In Q1, Intel decreased -5% in cloud YOY despite that segment growing quickly.

If you believe that everything will go well with Intel, then this is money well spent and the stock is cheap. But given their historic difficulties and the quality and quantity of their competition in XPU design and manufacturing, there's a meaningful chance that their profitability will be greatly diminished.

"I am always recommending people using burner but I was nervous and fomo the "Monkey Kingdom Mint. Never thought it was not a legit mint link in official discord."

Some people can't learn by theory. They have to learn by practice. FOMO isn't a mistake. That's just greed calling the shots.

The best way to learn how to control FOMO is to experience its consequences. The only question is how much tuition are you willing to pay. He paid a lot.

As the saying goes: Bulls make money. Bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153917

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Intel strikes me as historically one of the more ethically challenged companies that heavily relied on monopolistic power. And then when it got into trouble and that monopoly's cracks were widening at a good pace, it started waving the flag after spending $20B+ on stock buybacks.