Good to hear.

No of course I am not down with tracking BS.

But I do use some smaller niche sites (for some of them I have subs or patron) and I would not want them to be hit (no clue what ad providers they use).

This is strong validation for viability of the 18A process, now let’s see what the performance of Panther Lake is like.

Because this will cause problems for independent website operators.

Blocking ads is one thing, but this risks fucking up their digital advertising accounts.

This is an excessive approach that risks collateral damage to 3rd parties who are not involved.

I have no issues with blocking ads (internet is unusable without ublock origin + Pihole), but actually simulating clicks is IMO not the right approach.

IMO, this is a bit much.

It’s one thing to block ads, it’s another thing to essentially participate in an ad fraud scheme. If this simply hurt Google, I would have no issues (they are corrupt criminals, an American oligarchic institution), but you also risking harming independent sites that have done nothing wrong.

They have non core units that haven’t been spun off (or shut down)?

Do you think I want to consent to an arbitration agreement

In many countries mandatory arbitration agreements in a B2C context are invalid. They have no legal power.

I am surprised it took so long for discussion around mergers/acquisitions with Taiwan’s #2 and 3# (there is another foundry smaller UMC in Taiwan) foundries to appear in the news.

The combined company would later invest in research and development in the U.S. and could eventually become an alternative to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s top chipmaker, according to the assessment. TSMC holds significant shares in the markets for both mature and cutting-edge chips.

Eventually become an alternative to TSMC? A rather bold goal.

The highlights of the speech sound somewhat generic, but then again, what else would Tan say?

And we won’t be able to evaluate Ian’s legacy until 3-4 years from now. New products and initiatives in the next 24 months are all tied Gelsinger IMO.

The powerbank comes with some minor smartphone functionality as a bonus.

First time I’ve heard of this brand.

8GB RAM, 256GB storage, big screen for ~€250 where I live. The CPU looks very weak, but acceptable for €250 price.

The brand name doesn’t work that well, although it sounds worse in English than in other languages IMO.

Regular ublock origin does a great job for both automated and manual page cleanup.

For cases when the page is still borderline unusable, Firefox’s reader view is a must.

Bread and circuses

Following Panther Lake, Intel plans to launch Nova Lake CPUs in 2026. Nova Lake is expected to push the envelope even further, with early reports suggesting it could feature up to 52 cores using the Coyote Cove and Arctic Wolf architectures. The product will likely leverage a mix of Intel’s internal manufacturing and TSMC’s advanced nodes to improve yield and ensure supply chain resilience.

I wonder whether primary motivation for including TSMC in Nova Lake it to maintain competitive pressure on their foundry or if it is a forced risk management measure.

Not surprising the both AMD and Intel have given up on the consumer high-end segment.

At the prices in that segment, people are going to go with Nvidia almost by default.

This became obvious with the launch of Nvidia’s Blackwell accelerators a year ago. The chips boasted 5x the performance uplift over Hopper, which sounded great until you realized it needed twice the die count, a new 4-bit datatype, and 500 watts more power to do it.

The reality was, normalized to FP16, Nvidia’s top-specced Blackwell dies are only about 1.25x faster than a GH100 at 1,250 dense teraFLOPS versus 989 — there just happened to be two of them.

Sounds like Nvidia is trying to pull a Multi Frame Generation style misleading promo tactic with enterprise GPUs too.

The real solution is to buy mid-range smartphones for $300-$400 (it’s a mature market, mid-range devices are good enough for almost everyone) and even if you do break your screen, you can get a replacement for like $120.

I remember when Stadia was being launched, one of their execs (not Phil Harrison, someone just below him) posted a very defensive message on Twitter complaining about the jokes and claiming that they are committed to Stadia.

And we saw how that worked out. I wish I had a link to that Twitter thread, it would make a great addition to my “comedy” screenshot folder.

Anyone with even a superficial knowledge of Google’s product strategy (their exclusive focus on “a septillion users in year 1”) and an understanding of the gaming industry (making good games and gaming platforms is very difficult, it requires creativity and just dumping billions and hiring tech executives isn’t enough) could see that Stadia was almost certainly dead on arrival.

They could also engage in competition and increase compensation for their employees.

As per this article:

Wages in the U.S. are roughly triple those in Taiwan.

I am assuming the difference less pronounced in highly skilled semi-conductor positions, but still.

This is why you don’t use any products/services from Google other than some of their mainline products. And even with something like search or maps, it’s a good idea to move away from Google specifically and any American tech company in general (I would argue this relevant for people living in the US too).