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?