ScreenFeast

Meta was easily the most toxic company I've worked for. There's a reason the Chinese call it "Squid Game". Others refer to it as "Hunger Games" or "Lord of the Flies". I think they're all accurate. The company culture is basically every man/woman for themselves. The performance review process (PSC) not only doesn't incentivize helping others, if anything it actually discourages it since everyone is stack ranked against each other. Imagine working on a team where every 6 months, one of you is going to get axed. Of course it's going to become toxic. "Bottoms up" culture is a complete farce - it's just a way for leadership to offload accountability. The Tech Leads (TLs) have all the power - owning the relationships and tribal knowledge to gatekeep projects to their buddies. Managers are "people managers" with limited technical understanding, who basically aggregate TL feedback and create performance review packets to calibrate with other managers and IC7+. The takeaway is that your destiny is in the hands of the TLs, and TLs unlike managers have no responsibility for your career. There are no repercussions for unethical behavior. I've seen managers and TLs throw others under the bus and get away with it. The only mission bonding the company together is individual self-preservation. Save your own ass to survive for another stock vesting, and throw someone else under the bus if you need to. That's why layoffs rarely impact directors/VPs or tenured IC7+ despite the fact that they're paid by far the most. Even this recent mass layoff that was supposed to "flatten" managers layers barely affected directors/VPs/IC7+, and fell predominantly on M1s - the lowest rung of the management chain. The culture is extremely performative and focused on box ticking and optics. Everything is about PSC (the performance review system) and perception. This means tons of meetings, useless AI slop posts, and top-down initiatives that don't benefit anyone but maybe help tick off the impact box of some go-getter at the top. Impact is not enough - it has to have sufficient complexity. So complexity is added for complexity's sake. The org I was in (Facebook ads) is 90% Chinese, and the entire leadership chain up to the VP level is Chinese. Mandarin is the primary language at the office, except in official meetings with non-speakers. Chinese work culture is very different from American work culture, with 996 (9am-9pm, 6 days/week), top-down nature, emphasis on saving face (eg. don't question your superiors), and toxicity being quite common. Naturally when an org is completely dominated by a single ethnicity that's notorious for not integrating, elements from their work culture seep in. Of the layoffs I witnessed in this org, 3/4 were not Chinese (just to be clear, most Chinese are very kind so don't take this as an attack. But it is a reality that I think most people outside this company are completely unaware of, and I question if leadership is even aware despite the fact that we're talking about the company HQ) I had the most toxic manager of my life here. I watched him deliberately set up a new hire to fail, driving them to needing to see a psychiatrist for anxiety + depression, and getting them fired. Then he suddenly disappeared for 8 months, before leaving the company. I could go on and on, but this is already pretty long and I think you get the point. Yes there are a lot of great, kind people here. I managed to transfer out of my first team into a new team with a great manager where everyone was very smart, supportive, and hardworking. But the company has its Squid Game reputation for a reason. Company culture comes from the top. It seems leadership is either too removed to notice, or maybe don't really care anymore because I guess they already made their billions and us plebs are expendable these days.

Koreans are surrendering life insurance policies to buy SK hynix, Insurance surrenders at the top 3 life insurers jumped 16% last quarter. Savings bank deposits fell below 100 trillion won for the first time in 4 years. Commercial bank time deposits dropped 12 trillion won since February. The entire financial system is being rerouted into 2 semiconductor stocks. When new money into a rally comes not from income but from liquidating safety nets, that is how the end of every cycle looks man, this is crazy ..... Investors over 50 now hold 62% of margin loans at Korea top 10 brokerages. Among those in their 60s, margin debt doubled from 3.9 to 8 trillion won in one year. These are people who spent decades in fixed deposits and real estate, now entering a semiconductor rally on borrowed money at record highs. When the KOSPI dropped 19% in March, leveraged investors in their 60s lost 20% on average. The rally recovered. same thing in smaller model happening in India - MTF, i feel this so stupid

$CSCO Q3 EARNINGS HIGHLIGHTS 🔹 Revenue: $15.8B (Est $15.54B) 🟢; +12% YoY 🔹 Adj. EPS: $1.06 (Est $1.04) 🟢; +10% YoY 🔹 Product Orders: +35% YoY 🔹 Networking Product Orders: +50%+ YoY 🔸 AI Infrastructure Orders: FY26 expected orders raised to $9B from $5B FY26 Guide: 🔹 Revenue: $62.8B-$63.0B (Est $61.6B) 🟢 🔹 Adj. EPS: $4.27-$4.29 (Est $4.16) 🟢 Q4 FY26 Guide: 🔹 Revenue: $16.7B-$16.9B (Est $15.82B) 🟢 🔹 Adj. EPS: $1.16-$1.18 (Est $1.07) 🟢 🔹 Non-GAAP Gross Margin: 65.5%-66.5% 🔹 Non-GAAP Operating Margin: 34%-35% Other Metrics: 🔹 GAAP Gross Margin: 63.6% 🔹 Non-GAAP Gross Margin: 66.0% 🔹 Non-GAAP Operating Margin: 34.2% 🔹 Campus Networking Orders: +25%+ YoY 🔹 Data Center Switching Orders: +40%+ YoY 🔹 AI Infrastructure Revenue: FY26 expected revenue raised to $4B from $3B 🔹 RPO: $43.5B; +4% YoY Capital Return: 🔹 Shareholder Returns: $2.9B in Q3 🔹 Dividend: $0.42/share 🔹 Share Repurchases: $1.3B 🔹 Remaining Buyback Authorization: $9.6B Commentary: 🔸 “Cisco delivered record quarterly revenue in Q3 and we saw very strong, broad-based demand for our products, demonstrating the relevance of our technology for connecting and securing AI.” 🔸 “Cisco is well-positioned as the critical infrastructure for the AI era.”

UNDERSTANDING GaN vs. SiC Lately investors new to semiconductors and new to power electronics have been asking me about "GaN vs. SiC." There is no GaN vs. SiC. Power semiconductors are defined by two variables: voltage blocking capability and switching speed. These trade off against each other, and different applications sit at different points on that curve. SiC is the right material for high-voltage, high-power applications where switching speed matters less than raw blocking capability. Utility-scale solar and very large (larger than 50 MWh) battery systems should often be served by SiC because their value driver is primarily the energy content. This is also why traction motors (like EVs and locomotives) can use SiC –– the computation environment is relatively simplistic so the slow speeds are acceptable. SiC devices today block up to 10 kV and switch cleanly at those levels. Nothing else does. The most interesting area of power development, though, is in projects where the value driver is a mix of energy, power, capacity, and harmonics. Like a data center. Or a grid-supporting 5 MWh BESS. Or V2X devices that link electric cars and trucks up to the grid. This requires deft computational power handling. These are ~all of the interesting next-gen power applications. You serve your local need well (charging the car, powering the data center); but you are also performing ultra high-speed grid support activities. GaN owns the sub-3 kV space, and it owns it decisively. At voltages below 1.2 kV — consumer fast chargers, server power supplies, EV on-board chargers, microinverters — GaN switches at frequencies an order of magnitude higher than SiC, in a fraction of the package size, at a cost that follows a steep downward curve driven by HVM in consumer electronics. The 140-watt USB-C laptop charger uses GaN switching at a million times per second. A comparable 1990s power supply was four times larger and ran hot enough to need a fan. That cost and density curve is not stopping. The framework is simple. If your application is above 3 kV and switching speed is secondary to blocking voltage, use SiC. If your application is below 3 kV and you need speed, density, and cost efficiency, use GaN. Between roughly 1.2 kV and 3 kV is contested territory where the answer depends on the specific thermal, cost, and frequency requirements of the design. The cost trajectories of the two materials reflect their origins. SiC crystal growth happens above 2,000°C at a rate of roughly 100 to 300 microns per hour — a thousand times slower than silicon. Each step up in wafer diameter, from 4-inch to 6-inch to the 8-inch transition now underway, requires reinventing the thermal field and crucible design from scratch. 6-inch SiC substrates fell roughly 30% in price in 2024, driven by Chinese overcapacity, and the move to 8-inch wafers should cut per-die costs another 30 to 40% once yields stabilize — but those gains come hard and slow. GaN's cost curve is of different stuff entirely. Because GaN-on-silicon grows on standard substrates, it inherits the economies of the silicon ecosystem. 150mm GaN-on-Si wafer prices have fallen roughly 40% since 2020. Prices have crossed below $1 per transistor for high-volume GaN devices. The industry is now moving toward 300mm GaN-on-Si, which will yield 2x more chips per wafer than 200mm. That cost curve is being pulled by billions of consumer electronics units and the grid gets to ride it for free. GaN does have a ceiling. At medium-voltage grid applications — like 34.5 kV — GaN cannot block the full line voltage directly. This is where GaN challengers go wrong. They presume that the only architecture possible is a direct, centralized, single-device approach to handling large voltages. Not so. The more interesting path is to keep GaN operating within its native voltage range — below 12 kV — and build the medium-voltage function from an array of GaN-based modules. Each module runs at GaN's switching frequencies, which are high enough that the transformer inside each module shrinks to the size of a paperback. The aggregate system handles medium-voltage grid connection without exposing any single device to voltages it can't block. What you lose in architectural simplicity, you gain in speed, redundancy, cost, and manufacturability — because you're building from parts that already exist in billion-unit volumes on a known transistor cost ramp. Stacking GaN will do something consequential: bring semiconductor switching speeds to grid scale. And thus bringing a cost profile that follows true high-volume manufacturing economics rather than industrial green-metal-cabinet economics. But the putative "competition" between these semiconductors isn't a reflection of reality. There isn't a winner, really. The grid needs both materials deployed where each is strongest.

The financial sector just hit an all-time low vs SPY Banks are the ultimate canary. The most cyclical. They see rising delinquencies, tighter credit standards, and collapsing loan demand *before* GDP rolls over (remember loan loss provisions all beating?) Very late cycle.