Category: Business

Why wasn’t diversity Intel’s strength?

by philg

On the cusp of the release of Intel’s Arrow Lake CPUs, which contain some sort of feeble “AI processor” that might boost performance by 1 percent for anyone who has a graphics card plugged into his/her/zir/their desktop PC, the company will have to fire 15 percent of its workers due to a failure to make as much money as a receptionist in an NVIDIA branch office. Even a $20 billion gift from Joe Biden (March 2024) didn’t help.

How could this have happened to a company with diverse employees and diverse suppliers? Exhibit A:

They promise to discriminate against Asian male and white male suppliers for $1 billion. Intel spent “$300M to support a goal of reaching full workforce representation of women and underrepresented minorities in our U.S. workforce by 2020” (that’s $300 million that shareholders won’t now see, apparently).

Exhibit B:

(The person wearing the Pride shirt is next to the person in Islamic attire. Is this a Queers for Palestine situation?)

Intel says “Diversity, equity, and inclusion have long been Intel’s core values and are instrumental to driving innovation and delivering strong business growth.”

If diversity drives innovation and “strong business growth,” why is Intel being left in the dust by NVIDIA, TSMC, AMD, et al.? Does TSMC have more diversity in Hsinchu than Intel can find here in the U.S.? Is diversity not a strength for Intel or not a strength for a tech company or not a strength for any company?

If Intel’s diverse employees don’t concern themselves with making money every day for the shareholders, what have the employees been focused on? The official state religion:

A long-term perspective:

(Can this be correctly adjusted for splits? Yahoo! Finance says that it is.)

Update: Intel lost 26 percent of its value by the end of the day, falling to $21.48 per share. That results in a price/earnings ratio of 22.5, a bit lower than the average for the S&P 500. Intel is a huge bargain compared to AMD, which has a P/E ratio of 160! Maybe it is time to buy Intel?

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How will NVIDIA avoid a Google-style Vesting in Peace syndrome?

by philg

NVIDIA is the world’s most valuable company (P/E ratio of 75; compare to less than 40 for Microsoft), which also means that nearly every NVIDIA employee is rich. A lot of people slack off when they become rich. Google ended up with quite a few “vesting in peace” workers who didn’t contribute much. It didn’t matter because it was too challenging for anyone else to break into the search and advertising businesses. But suppose that another tech company assembles a group of not-yet-rich hardware and software people. Hungry for success, these people build some competitive GPUs and the biggest NVIDIA customers merely have to recompile their software in order to use the alternative GPUs that are marketed at a much lower price.

How can NVIDIA’s spectacular success not lead to marketplace slippage due to an excessively rich and complacent workforce? Is the secret that NVIDIA can get money at such a low cost compared to competitors that it can afford to spend 2-3X as much on the next GPU and still make crazy profits? I find it tough to understand how Intel, which for years has made GPUs inside its CPUs, can’t develop something that AI companies want to buy. Intel has a nice web page explaining how great their data center GPUs are for AI:

Why can’t Intel sell these? Are the designs so bad that they couldn’t compete with NVIDIA even if sold at Intel’s cost?

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Kid perspectives on contracts

by philg

We recently had some windows added to our house. If you live in a northern lockdown state, this might not sound like a big deal: cut out some wood with a reciprocating saw, get a glass module (double pane to save the planet), frame around the glass module, touch up the paint. In the Florida Free State (TM), however, you need to do the following:

  • cut through cinder block and rebar
  • put a lintel above the opening that you just cut so that the house doesn’t fall down
  • pour some new concrete with rebar around the window opening
  • add wood framing just inside the new opening
  • bring in a window company at $3,700+/opening to install an impact-rated window into the wood and concrete with massive screws every 7 inches or so
  • deal with the building inspector multiple times already by this point
  • install new stucco on the concrete that you’ve just poured
  • paint the exterior
  • install new drywall on the interior
  • paint the drywall

The window company said that in pre-Biden times it was possible to find a general contractor to do all of the above (except the window item itself) for $5,000 per opening. We had four openings so it should have cost us about $20,000+ for the general contractor and $14,750 for the windows themselves.

Of course, the old $20,000 is the new $40,000 or maybe $100,000. The window company’s usual partners refused even to look at the project, deeming it too small. Our architect worked with a mid-sized contractor regularly and he quoted $37,250 for his part of the work. A small-time guy who’d done some stuff very reasonably for us in the past quoted $18,000. We’d had huge price discrepancies for some other items at the house, e.g., install a mini-split A/C in the garage so it didn’t occur to us that the $18,000 was a mistake until after we saw how many guys and subcontractors the contractor put on the project and how many weeks it took.

Towards the end of the project, he came back to me and opened by saying that he knew that I owed him only $18,000 because that’s what he quoted. But he had some paperwork to show that the proper cost was closer to $40,000 and explained that he’d made mistakes in preparing the quote, leaving out a lot of concrete work.

I asked out 8- and 10-year-olds what they would have done in the situation. I tried to prepare them for the scenario by asking what if the Honda dealer quoted us $1,000 for new tires and then said they’d made a mistake and asked for $2,000 when the car was completed. They both said that the Honda dealer should be held to the contract. Then I asked them about our specific contractor, whose friendly careful people they’d seen in the house for all four months of the one-month project. They gave the same answer: hold the guy to his bid. I tried to get them to back off from this position by pointing out that the Honda dealer might be worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars while our contractor was just a regular working guy and had a lot of subcontractors to pay, but I couldn’t make them see a distinction.

From shwinco.com:

Excerpts from the Notice of Acceptance that is part of the building permit:

(Readers might reasonably wonder what I decided to do. I paid $37,250, which the competitor had quoted, since that was the only reference that I had for a correctly quoted job. It seemed like a fair price for the quality and quantity of work that was done. (Plus, the guys who were sawing concrete blocks and doing other onerous tasks in the Florida heat and humidity will need money to pay off college graduates’ loans transferred by Joe Biden to the general taxpayer.) It wouldn’t be logically consistent, but if the Honda dealer made a mistake and gave me a written quote that they later said was lower than it should have been, I wouldn’t voluntarily pay more.)

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Target this Pride

by philg

How is everyone’s Pride Month going?

I visited Target near the Raleigh-Durham (North Carolina) airport last month. What are they offering this Pride? My favorite item was this doormat, eminently suitable for a hangar door or for an FBO to place at the bottom of airstairs:

Who could possibly argue against the interior of an aircraft or hangar being a “space space”?

Compared to last year in Montana, Target was not promoting Pride wear in kid/toddler sizes. Adult XS was the smallest that I saw.

I noticed quite a few shoppers who appeared to be observant Muslims, e.g., women who were completely covered in accordance with Islamic law and tradition. If Target wants to be respectful to migrants and Muslims, which I am sure that they do, is a big celebration of 2SLBTQQIA+ lifestyle the way to make observant Muslims feel comfortable bringing their children into the store?

Returning to the merchandise… my favorite shirt was the Love is Love shirt, but I don’t see that on the front page of Target’s LGBTQIA+ Shop (not 2SLGBTQQIA+?):

If we dig deeper, though, I think this might be it:

Perfect for walking the golden retriever!

Meanwhile, across the pond Marks and Spencer may be welcoming observant Muslims with the LGBT sandwich (seems to have been introduced in 2019 and it is unclear whether they’ll still selling it in 2024):

I would love to see a 2SLGBTQQIA+ sandwich. What would we need to add?

  • 2S = two slices of bread
  • QQ = Quinoa and Quark (the German cheese/yogurt/whatever)
  • I = Iberico (Spanish ham)
  • A = Arugula (always good to have more greens)
  • + = Black Pepper

Related:

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How is Intel able to sell CPUs if they’ve already told people that the current socket is obsolete?

by philg

Here’s a question at the intersection of marketing and electronics: who is buying Intel CPUs right now after Intel has told the world that they will render the current socket, and therefore all current motherboards, obsolete before the end of 2024?

“Intel’s next-gen desktop CPUs have reportedly leaked” (Tom’s Hardware):

Arrow Lake will reside on new Intel motherboards with LGA1851 sockets and 800-series chipsets. Although the upcoming socket has 9% more pins than the existing LGA1700 socket, the dimensions didn’t change, so you might be able to recycle your existing CPU cooler.

Intel hasn’t provided details on when Arrow Lake will hit the market. But we suspect it’ll be sometime in the fourth quarter of the year since AMD’s upcoming Zen 5 Ryzen processors are on track for launch before the year is over.

Especially given that AMD is not rendering its socket obsolete for another few years, I am having trouble figuring out why demand for Intel desktop CPUs, at least at the high end, doesn’t fall off a cliff.

The news about the socket is actually almost a year old at this point. A July 2023 article:

I guess it is tough to keep a secret when there are so many independent motherboard manufacturers, but shouldn’t we expect a demand collapse, massive price cuts for both CPUs and motherboards, etc. as the Arrow Lake release gets closer?

Is the explanation that anyone who cares about CPU/computer performance buys AMD? I think that Intel claims that their new chips have an onboard AI-optimized GPU.

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How does an LLM company spend $7 billion per year?

by philg

Anthropic, an OpenAI spin-off, raised $7.3 billion last year and will soon need to raise more money (NYT). Some of the money came from Effective Altruist and Biden supporter Sam Bankman-Fried (due back in court on March 28), but even if Mr. Bankman-Fried helped, it is tough to understand how any startup can spend $7 billion per year. Is the money for overseas contractors who will click thumbs up or thumbs down to train the model? For renting GPU time? Wikipedia says that the company had 160 employees in mid-2023 so each employee had to spend $44 million, the price of a starter home on Palm Beach.

Let’s see how well Anthropic’s Claude works. I previously asked ChatGPT “Write a college application essay that describes how race affected the applicant’s life” to obtain a document to facilitate a Supreme Court-compliant admission-via-skin-color. Here’s Claude’s answer:

Prompt: Describe an experience that helped shape who you are today.

Racing for Understanding

As a biracial kid growing up in a predominantly white suburb, I often felt like a square peg being forced into round holes. With a Black father and white mother, I looked different than most of my peers and had a unique perspective right from the start. Sometimes it felt like I was walking a tightrope, trying to find that delicate balance of fitting in while still celebrating my multi-racial identity.

From an early age, innocent questions from classmates forced me to grapple with complex issues of race and identity. The dreaded “What are you?” inquiry made me feel like the ultimate “other.” I never knew quite how to respond when kids pressed me to check one box: black or white.

At home, my parents did their best to honor and educate us about both sides of our racial heritage. We attended Baptist church services taking us straight into the heart of Black spiritual traditions. My mother struggled to tame my kinky curls while my father taught me how to defuse questions about my appearance with humor and confidence. Looking back, I realize my parents were doing the important work of helping me develop a positive self-image and sense of self-worth.

By middle school, I started to detect coded racial attitudes from some teachers and administrators. I felt unfairly profiled and penalized, receiving harsher punishments for minor infractions than my white peers. The message seemed to be that as a Black male, I was inherently problematic. That crushed my youthful spirit and planted seeds of resentment within me.

When we finally moved to a larger, more diverse city for high school, I felt liberated. At last, I could just be myself without constantly filtering my Blackness through a white lens. I became bolder in asserting my identity as a proud, multi-racial man. While I still had to navigate discriminatory speed bumps and rampant stereotyping, I gained critical tools for self-love and advocacy.

The older I get, the more I lean into my biracial heritage and the wisdom it has given me about our country’s grave racial divides and inequities. My goal is to help build deeper understanding, trust and resolution across all racial and cultural lines. My intersectional perspective allows me to relate to multiple worldviews, a skillset America desperately needs more of.

My multiracial journey has been one of constantly defining and redefining my identity on my own terms. In the process, I’ve become more compassionate, open-minded and determined to create a society of true equality and belonging for everyone. This pursuit of racial healing will be the driving force of my life’s work.

I tried ChatGPT with home repair. Let’s see what Claude says for the same prompt: “Our Bosch dishwasher stopped and is displaying an E25 error code. What should I do?”

(This answer is mostly wrong.)

It looks as though Claude’s knowledge is frozen in 2022 or early 2023. In trying to get Claude to take heretical points of view regarding race discrimination, part of the answer said that a decision from June 2023 was still in the future:

In the case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2022), the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether Harvard’s race-conscious admissions practices violated civil rights laws by discriminating against Asian American applicants.

While the Supreme Court has not issued a final ruling yet, during oral arguments several of the conservative justices expressed skepticism about continuing to allow race to be considered in admissions at all.

Despite the massive spending, in other words, Claude is not being kept up to date.

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LLMs are God’s gift to businesses that want to pretend to care about customers?

by philg

An email from The Google regarding a merchant replying to a review that I left two years ago (pre-ChatGPT):

Here’s the full text of the reply:

Thank you for taking the time to leave us a 5-star review for Calaveras Cantina in Jupiter. We are delighted to hear that you enjoyed our upscale Mexican food and competent service. Our team takes great pride in providing a pleasant dining experience for our guests.

We are glad to know that you found our tableside guacamole to be excellent. We are always looking for ways to enhance our menu and we appreciate your recommendation. We are also happy to hear that you found our location to be kid-friendly with the adjacent marina.

We hope to see you and your family again soon at Calaveras Cantina. Thank you for choosing us for your Mexican restaurant needs.

Best regards,
Calaveras Cantina Team

Pulling out and repeating phrases from my review is something that only a psychotherapist or an LLM would do, so I’m guessing that this restaurant discovered that ChatGPT could be used to generate a personal reply to every customer who left a review.

We were promised flying cars and instead AI gives us fake personal expressions of gratitude.

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The profitable side of DEI

by philg

“Former Facebook employee pleads guilty to stealing $4 million” (CNN):

An Atlanta woman pleaded guilty to stealing more than $4 million from Facebook while she was an executive at the company.

Barbara Furlow-Smiles who worked as a lead strategist, global head of employee resource groups and diversity engagement at Facebook, Inc., now known as Meta, from about January 2017 to September 2021 according to U.S. Attorney Northern District of Georgia Ryan K. Buchanan’s Office.

“This defendant abused a position of trust as a global diversity executive for Facebook to defraud the company of millions of dollars, ignoring the insidious consequences of undermining the importance of her DEI mission,” said Buchanan in a statement.

That last paragraph is my favorite. The U.S. government employee implies that the mission of DEI, despite its having been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, is sacred.

The other interesting aspect is that she stole $4 million via expense account fraud. Where can the rest of us get an expense account big enough that $1 million per year in fraud isn’t detected for more than 4 years?

Loosely related… a Maskachusetts Congresswoman says that the Supreme Court is “corrupt”:

Maybe this is why federal employees can ignore the Court’s ruling that the principal objectives and methods of DEI are unconstitutional?

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Progressive Insurance abandons its Progressive Values

by philg

From June 2022, Progressive Insurance is Progressive, the company put a diversity and inclusion banner across its home page, dwarfing the “claims” button:

How about today?

They still have a Diversity & Inclusion link, but you need to scroll down two pages to find it. Unlike in 2022, the linked-to page makes no mention of 2SLGBTQQIA+ or any subset thereof. But this might be just an HTML coding mistake. The linked-to page is a generic “about” page and itself contains a Diversity & Inclusion link. That page does mention “LGBTQ” and “LGBT+”. The company has expert knowledge of what a miserable place the United States is for anyone but a white cisgender heterosexual non-immigrant person:

With so many acts of racism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia in our communities, this is more important than ever. We stand in solidarity with communities of color, the LGBTQ community, and other marginalized groups, and we encourage our people to discuss these all-too-prevalent issues with our leadership team, one another, and our Employee Resource Groups.

(employees tasked with handling claims are supposed to spend at least part of their day discussing “racism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia” with each other? What percentage of customers’ premium payments are to be spent on this activity?)

Possibly contrary to the recent Supreme Court interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, the company says that it is passionate about “increasing the representation of women and people of color in management.” They’re proud of their new quota system:

To focus our efforts in 2020, we introduced an ambitious goal to double the representation of people of color in senior leadership from 10% to 20% by the end of 2025. As of December 2022, people of color account for 17% of our senior leadership ranks.

They’re also proud of their ability to cook the numbers:

We’re proud to report that for Progressive employees with similar performance, experience, and job responsibilities, women earn one dollar for every dollar earned by men, and people of color earn one dollar for every dollar earned by their white co-workers.*

This last one is confusing. If equal pay regardless of gender ID and skin color, once adjusted for “performance, experience, and job responsibilities”, isn’t already part of the job market as a whole, is Progressive overpaying some groups while underpaying others in order to achieve the precise pay equity that it claims? If so, why don’t those paid below-market quit and why don’t the shareholders complain about company management paying a selected group above-market wages?

This concludes my research into Progressive’s progressivism. As of this month, I have switched to State Farm for auto/umbrella (State Farm currently writes new homeowners policies in Florida, but not in our neighborhood. Our house is just barely new enough (2003), but maybe it is slightly too close to the ocean or too vulnerable to a storm surge or maybe they already have too many other houses nearby that they cover).

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