Apparently Google is Dead Again?

A few days ago, yet another provocative headline caught my eye: "Google is awful now. An ex-employee's memoir reveals how it got this way" -- SF Chronicle

At some point, possibly in the early 2010s, maybe a bit earlier, Google staged a dramatic transformation, from being the among the world's most loved companies, famous among my generation for their "Don't Be Evil" mantra, into a place that occupied the same block in the public's mind as a Bond villain. So the headline itself is not surprising. The bigger surprise is that with everything else that has been going on with the world since then, all the wars, all the movements, all the new diets and injectables, the "Google is Evil Now" narrative still manages to hijack a headline or two.

On the Ground in Seoul: Witnessing the Great Freudenschade of the 2026 Memory Bubble

 

A sister entry to the technical article I just posted about the RAM shortage

A few months ago, back in May, I was in Seoul with the family. We were attending a gathering of friends, and I introduced myself to a fellow husband: 

"Where do you work?" I asked.
        "Samsung Electronics," he answered.
"Oh really, what do you work on?"
        "I work on the chemical mixes for chip wafers"
"Oh really! Congratulations!!" I said with a wink.
        "No... no, it's not me. I'm not one of them." he sighed.

Besides the Iran conflict, there was one consistent news story dominating the headlines, and on the minds of nearly every working citizen there: We were in the midst of a seemingly huge bubble. On the surface it seemed to be an entire melt-up of the KOSPI index, easily the top performer in the world. And right below that surface, most folks realized that the Korean stock market was being dragged up by two names: SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics (the company unit that oversaw Samsung Semiconductor).

The Great Memory Bubble: Why SK Hynix and Samsung Can’t Outrun China’s Asymmetric Tech Threat

Taken a glance at financial markets lately? You might think Korea’s semiconductor giants have unlocked an infinite money glitch.

Any remotely tech-savvy observer has already noticed that SK Hynix (I'll just stick with Hynix since that's what's printed on the chips I knew from back in the day) and Samsung have seen their valuations soar to dizzying heights, riding a wave of unprecedented demand for High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Hynix recently posted operating margins hovering around an absurd 76%—margins that look less like a hardware manufacturer and more like a software monopoly. Meanwhile, hyperscalers like Microsoft, Meta, and Google are dropping hundreds of billions on AI capital expenditure, booking out every scrap of global HBM capacity through 2027. Analysts are rightly skeptical, questioning if the traditional "boom-and-bust" memory death cycle is dead forever, replaced by a seemingly endless AI supercycle. 

I don't buy it. The bubble will burst, and the catalyst isn't just standard oversupply. It’s the same old game of the political pressure cooker forcing China to innovate around Western blockades at a pace the market continues to severely underestimate.

Nannies Abound — Cheat code for affluent parents, or just cheating at parenting?

Did you have a nanny growing up? Not just a sporadic babysitter, I mean. Personally, I've never considered myself as someone who would hire a nanny. The concept has always struck me as so... inequitable. My best guess is that there's a heavily proletarian side of me that has never gotten comfortable with the thought of subservience in certain social dynamics. I *think* the reasoning goes something like: If I'm capable of doing something myself, then I should always aim to do it myself. I almost never identify with the natural counterargument: that if my time is more valuable than the cost to hire help, that I should engage that help instead. Maybe it's because I never really think of my own time being inherently more valuable than someone else's. And the irony is that I use the word "proletarian", which might lead you to assume this is was ingrained in me from my years in China, but the DIY attitude is more probably from the Fresno years, when my family were truly working class. Anyways, some examples of my anti-domestic servitude mindset that come to mind:

Where the Wonders Never Cease

Reuters via Guardian

I woke up a couple days ago to this wonderful headline, and frankly an even more interesting photo. The graphic design seems pretty well done so a part of me wants to blame laziness and AI for this, among the most egregious errors I've ever seen from the US State Department, which was held in high esteem once upon a time. The various comments about Marco Rubio acting or looking "r*tarded", back from the 2016 election cycle, I never really paid much heed. Well, as a former Geography Bee nerd, it's got my attention now. The oldest federal government department, responsible for a fledgling United States' foreign affairs, either has no sense of geography, or has the quality control standards of a Stellantis factory floor manager. I weep for the women and men (and no other sexes!) who work at State. The ones remaining and still give a flying flip can likely be identified by their palms permanently attached to their face.

 

Besides Your Personality...?

 

Living the Dream...

Just saw this article while browsing the news, and I do have to say:

It's the feel-good story of the day.

There is a God.

Good things really do happen.

A few years ago, HR was one of the many hats I was wearing at the company, along with most functions other than product/engineering. For a growing company, was just too much. I asked our CEO to consider hiring someone who had a dedicated background in those respective functions to take over. Which, to his credit, he did. Biggest single mistake I ever made, assuming that a dedicated, experienced HR lead (and the clown car team that ended up being hired) would solve any problems. Nope. Instead, the dysfunction, chaos. And gross overspending from this team that ensued haunted the company for years.

To be fair, quality HR people do exist. Many people mean well, and certainly don't intend to do harm to an organization. Ownership and responsibility are so key. I fear that we've trained our professional HR teams to do the exact opposite: reduce risk, censor points of potential liability, and bury each other in mandatory trainings and legalese. On paper, everything can appear legit, and still deal a death blow to the company. I now realize why so few people trust their HR orgs --- and by extension, their employers.

It's probably one of the key hard lessons about work life that I've had to learn. I'd say that's what makes reading this news headline so oddly cathartic.

Help me AI: What the heck is up with the geediting blog??

[UPDATE Aug/2026] - since I first wrote about this, the blog has seemingly disappeared from existence. Note the missing graphic below, as well as the total absence of any trace of the previously written articles. My Google News feed thanks you, kind publisher who developed a conscience.

Do you use LLM/AI tools? I'm a horribly late bloomer. I didn't really start using any of the chat agents until around a few months ago. But whoa, I'm pretty impressed, when it saves loads of Googling, sifting, parsing, and compilation of facts here and there. It's just so helpful, especially with random stuff that I wouldn't have cared to spend any time investigating otherwise. But when a term paper-quality answer is readily available, I find myself asking some pretty random stuff. Here's one such prompt, from when I was first really interested, then really frustrated and annoyed by the endless articles like this seemingly popping out of nowhere onto Google News, one after another, about super sad middle aged people coming to a reckoning with some depressing aspect of their lives (don't get me started with the stock photos, either):

[Me] >> What's up with all the articles from geediting.com? Why are they so sad and popping up everywhere?

The Actual Thanksgiving Post + Menu for Today

On this Thanksgiving, I am thankful for my health, and that of my family. Married life is hard. Kids are hard. Parents getting older is hard. Life is hard. But there is so much that is going well, to be thankful for, and commonly skipped over as not even an afterthought. It's a good time to reflect on that, if even once a year.

I just got word not 24 hours ago that my uncle passed away a couple days ago. What a year. In May, I took my family to meet my aunt. She was in poor health already. Within weeks of our return to the US, I got word that she had passed. Combine that with my dad's emergency open heart surgery last Black Friday, and that means that within the past year, my father and his entire set of siblings had life-threatening conditions, and my dad was the only one who survived. For that alone, I am thankful beyond words.

I also recently got to spend a week back in the Bay Area, where I caught up with old friends pretty much every single day I was there. It was a great visit; refreshing for the soul. Some friends you lose, and some friends you lose touch with, and it's really hard to say which is worse. But I think as time goes on, you get to cherish every conversation that much more. For that, I am thankful.

Not cooking a full turkey this year, as nobody will eat the whole thing. So this year, I opted for some a smaller serving that will hopefully be tastier. Almost everything else will be "traditional". After all, I have to convince my kids later on that they had a somewhat "normal" childhood, and convince ICE that I'm American enough to not deport.

• Garlic butter roasted turkey thighs
• Chinese-style green beans
• Mashed potoatoes + gravy
• Roast brussels sprouts
• Mushroom soup
• Stuffing w/ jujube (because I didn't want to buy a giant bag of cranberries!)
• Roast Japanese sweet potato
• Blackberry pie

and as I'm typing this I realized I forgot to get cornbread. I have bread, but sourdough.

last minute grocery run? Wish me luck.

Not a Thanksgiving Post: Thoughts After Visiting Japan for the First Time in 6 Years

It's just before 7am on Thanksgiving Day. I've got a big [cooking] day ahead of me. Woke up early, scrolled through Instagram, and this popped up:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jewel Poudyal (@jewel_0620)

 And now here I am, tapping away.

Where Have All the Sane People Gone?

One of the things about emerging from the bubble of childhood is that with the loss of the local superstructure of authority, so much more responsibility is now placed on each individual. As adults, we have so much agency to thrive, as well as (frankly) to go the opposite way. For me as a new adult circa half a lifetime ago, that newfound sense of independence was thrilling. Perhaps encouraged by the fact that I was an only child and who grew up largely without the presence of my parents at most hours of the day, I relished being able to finally and officially plan and act by myself. Getting a driver's license, a credit card, a job, a life. It was great. It was naïve of me, however, to assume that the great "unshackling" granted by adulthood was universally positive. (Trigger warning on following content)

Don't Call Me Chinese American, Pt 2: Asking and Defining Identity

Continued from Pt 1

Remember back in high school, when there were different "groups"? You may have called them cliques or crowds. Some were preps, some were jocks (many were both). To my memory, hipsters were not a thing then, but goths were. I think emo, too? And at a magnet school I always felt that nerds got a lot more respect than Hollywood ever depicted. There were studious Asians and lots of gangbanging Asians, too. That was K-12 life. In adult life, we still have crowds, and I see a ton of confusion on an almost daily basis that surrounds the usage of which group someone belongs to. But set aside the groups themselves, even the nomenclature gives us trouble.

Don't Call Me Chinese American, Pt 1

I can't remember when exactly but it must be over 20 years ago, I was watching a news program on ABC (it would have been Diane Sawyer's Primetime or Barbara Walters' 20/20) whose topic of the week was ostensibly on race relations. An interviewee spoke about her decision not to use the term "African American" to refer to herself. It's been a long time (back when John Stossel was still a credible mainstream journalist) so I'll do my best to paraphrase, but it was to the extent of "I don't have any real connection to Africa. I've never been there. No one I know has ever been there. Just call me Black." It stuck with me in ways that have only multiplied since I first heard it. In the years since, I've decided to take a similar position with respect to the term Asian American, and by extension, Chinese American.

On the In-N-Out Heiress Being the Bigger Person

Knowing that I'm a sucker for any news about In-N-Out Burger, mostly coverage on when locations around Portland are finally going to open, Google News offered me an article that hit me from a different direction: [Fortune] Heiress Lynsi Snyder became President of In-N-Out aged 27. She’s been betrayed by colleagues but refuses to have ’emotional distance’ with her team

The clickbait portion of the article obviously emanates from the word betrayed. That's what caught my eye. After all, scandal remains the most effective dog whistle for readers of "journalism". And the why? Like many others, I've been betrayed at the workplace — it's still pretty fresh for me.

Traumatic Events, Part 3: Bonus Round

Among the memories that haunt me, Part 1 and Part 2 did a good job of capturing most of the linguistically-based incidents. Other similar incidents abound, however. While these were not (strictly speaking) due to the fact that I was a non-native English speaker, the cultural disconnect certainly didn't help.

So as a bonus, here are some more tiny random nuggets of embarrassment from childhood, curated and ranked:

Ugh, SMH

Traumatic Events in the Life of an ESL Learner, Part 2

Did you enjoy my last post? I used to hate Ben Stiller movies like There's Something About Mary and Meet the Parents because it was just non-stop cringe at the characters' long trail of misfortunes. But clearly they connected with some audience, so presumably at least some of you like reading that sort of story. So here are some more: 

Traumatic Events in the Life of an ESL Learner, Part 1

Preface: Over the last few years, I've often found myself mentioning to friends the various insights that beset me since becoming a father. Chiefly, that children are magically, simultaneous reminders of our mortality and immortality. I spend a good part of every day thinking about a concept that I previously detested: legacy. What do I want to share? What do I want to teach? What do I want them to know about me? And like clockwork, I'll revisit some topics within the sea of my own memories that I'd want to bookmark and write about. One such topic, pervading throughout my life, is multilingualism.

Is your primary language today the same language that you first acquired and grew up using? For me, it's complicated but I'd have to answer no. Outside of what I use for my family, my primary language is now English. But it's not my first language. That would be Northeastern Mandarin. My mother was an English Language professor when I was born, and made it a personal project to train me to speak English. To what extent upon arriving in the US at age 6, I have no recollection, but apparently enough that after starting school stateside, I was swiftly kicked out of the ESL program and was reinserted into "general population", to borrow prison-inspired terminology.

I'm a firm believer that the "stickiest" memories are the traumatic ones. Events that seem no big deal to an adult may easily seem like the end of the world to kids. So, I've picked out some of the most traumatic memories stemming (mostly) from being a non-native speaker of English.

I'm Back! (...?)

Me, typing away at the library.

So, back in 2020 I wrote a post called, "A Long Overdue Post", in which I wrote a bit about the then (and now, and as always) pressing issue of racial injustice in this country. From the title, I also indirectly called myself out for ostensibly being absent from blogging for nearly two years, as is noted from the date stamps — markers upon which I have come to rely, since clearly I haven't been keeping very good track of time...

My first (and likely only) experience with a Northeastern Chinese restaurant in Portland

So I discovered after moving to PNW that Portland apparently has a restaurant that purports to serve Northeastern Chinese food. Won't lie, I got really excited upon finding out. I bookmarked it in my mind to try it out, and on the occasion of my wife's birthday, I decided to order for pickup.

Now, I had already found a truly authentic restaurant not too far away that takes care of all of the basics. We don't order Chinese food (or any other food, for that matter) too often, but when we do, it's usually to avoid the mess/cleanup/lingering smell at home, not because we don't know how to cook it ourselves. What can I say, cuisine-wise we're not that open to experimentation anymore.

As soon as I unpacked the bag at home, I realized that I made a horrible mistake. Here is the Google Maps review that I felt compelled to write (after the break):

Thoughts on the 20th Anniversary of 9/11

I visited the dentist for the first time since the pandemic began yesterday, and as I stared at the x-ray screen, especially the date stamp, I said, “Tomorrow’s 9/11”. And we both exchanged our stories from that day. She was a 7th grader then. I was in my sophomore year of high school.

My morning routine during high school years was: wash up, head down to the kitchen for a bite, and watch a few minutes of GMA/ABC News before walking to the school bus stop. When I turned on the TV, the special report was already underway, and started with the replay of the North Tower first. Ignoring the voice over from Peter Jennings (to this day, my favorite news anchor of all time) I reached the same conclusion as most others: what a horrific accident. That conclusion was short-lived, as it cut straight to the South Tower crash. On the bus, our driver who usually had the dial set to KISS Country, had the news feed on. We listened in horror and astonishment as one of the towers collapsed.