LetMeEatCake

My recollection is that the shift started pre-covid. Anti-vaxxers were originally predominantly left leaning but I think it hit the 50/50 range somewhere around 2012-2014. At least in the US. Trump shifted it even more, then covid+Trump just completely inverted where it had been a generation prior.

Apple is the only customer after TSMC's N3B node. Everyone else wants N3E, which will not be available until next year. N3E has better yields but worse performance, while being easier/cheaper to manufacture. The increase in yields is greater than the loss in performance.

If TSMC didn't offer terms to make up for the faults of N3B, there's a very real chance that Apple would have balked and stuck with N4 again. In this case, Apple had a strong hand: without Apple, the entire N3B line would be idle and the capital expenditure to set them up would be wasted. If yields improve enough Apple might stick with N3B in the future, which would save TSMC even more money and allow them to shift back over to a better (for them) pricing model.

Apple had a comparatively strong hand for these negotiations.

Apple has been pricing on what the market will bear for a long time, maybe the entirety of the iphone's existence. Prices may go up; they may not.
Apple will not be financially obligated to increase prices as a result of cost changes: an iphone costs something in the $300-500 range to manufacture, and Apple charges $800+ — even a doubling of the cost of the SoC will not fundamentally alter Apple's pricing calculations.

Price increases for the 15 will be determined entirely by if Apple thinks the market will bear that price increase such that doing so would result in more profit for them.

It's been that way since ~90nm nodes. First large scale 90nm production was for a revised PS2 chip in 2003. Intel's launched in 2004.

Node names haven't lined up with node sizes for nearly 20 years now. Not a recent development.

The High Speed Rail project is still underway. It's been hit by endless cost increases and delays, but it's still happening — Musk didn't succeed there. Initial operation for the first segment (Bakersfield to Merced) is, rather depressingly, planned for the early 2030s.

The delays and cost overruns are ridiculous but also absolutely standard for the US. This country is atrocious at building anything more advanced than a single building.

Microsoft got Zenimax and was then rather excessive in how they handled it, and that is a large part of what prompted this degree of pushback by regulatory bodies.

If Xbox wants to leave the door open for future acquisitions they are very much aware they need to tread carefully moving forward.

This reads like a rather optimistic take to me.

What Microsoft learned here is that they can buy a publisher (Bethesda), make that publisher's games exclusive, and still get the biggest gaming acquisition in history approved by regulators.

Microsoft will likely pause acquisitions for a bit, but everyone else that wants to get into/stay in gaming is going to look into them even more than before. I'd be surprised if Sony doesn't end up buying someone decently large (but not as large as Activision: Sony cannot afford anything like that). Everyone seems to think Sony would go for Square Enix but I think they would make a different choice.

They have been picking their battles.

Breaking an existing company up into multiple smaller companies is an order of magnitude more difficult for a US regulator than stopping a company from buying another one. The FTC is running face first into a legal system that has methodically chipped away at anti trust law for generations. That's the obstacle here, not picking the wrong battles.

Last I saw he was projecting late 2024, if I remember right.

This is my answer to the topic question too. I read books 1 and 2 as they came out and I'd need to re-read everything from start to finish to properly get back into the series. I've been waiting for the release of book 5 to be close before I start that re-read. Assuming no further delays, I can start next summer.

I'm not surprised but I am disappointed. No idea what's going to happen with the CMA but it looks like they're ready to roll over and die in exchange for minor concessions.

Guess I'll look for a silver lining... Hopefully Blizzard's games will come to Steam after? That's not worth such an enormous amount of consolidation, but if the consolidation is going to happen, hopefully we at least get that out of it.

Diablo is very different from Starcraft.

I think if people are just after a multiplayer-focused RTS that Blizzard is still capable of delivering a top quality experience.
Where I am skeptical is their ability to deliver a top quality single player campaign. SC2's campaign had some of the worst gaming writing I have ever seen — and I've seen a lot of bad writing in games. The missions themselves felt over-designed / QA'd to the point of just being tutorials for individual units.

They can do the multiplayer, I'm confident they could pull that off. I also don't have any interest in that. Can they make the single player experience fun? I'm skeptical, but would like to be proven wrong.

My guess is about two years, give or take. By then they should have worked their way through most/all of their porting backlog and can settle on a cadence they want instead of a cadence they are stuck with due to resource constraints. And two years has sounded like the ballpark of what they want based on their statements and general behavior with games.

I had a Galaxy S5 which I think was IP67 (someone fact check me on that)

According to wiki, you remembered right!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S5