Paying over a third of all revenue generated from searches on Apple's platform. That's incredible. Not a lawyer so I have no idea how this will work out legally, but I have a hard time parsing such an enormous pay-share as anything other than an aggressive attempt to stymie competition. Flat dollar payments are easier to read as less damning, but willingly giving up that much revenue from the source suggests the revenue of the source is no longer the primary target. It's the competitive advantage of keeping (potential) competitors from accessing that source.

It's not true, I saw a different meme on it the other day and looked it up. This came about because some company made an advertisement at Salzburg Airport that looked kind of like a help desk tag for someone that mistakingly flew to Austria instead.

The giveaway here is that it's Salzburg, not Vienna. International flyers into Austria are almost universally going to end up in Vienna by default. Vienna's airport sees ~20x the annual passenger count.

To do that the current party in favor of removing rights needs to be kept out of power long enough that they conclude that removing rights is an electoral loser and changes their ideology accordingly.

I'm not going to hold my breath.

The pressure campaign for RBG to retire was when democrats still held a senate majority with 53 seats. Republicans blocked Obama's SCOTUS appointment when they held the senate majority. In 2016, republicans simply just didn't allow a vote to happen because the senate leader sets the vote schedule. The nuclear option had already been invoked by that very same dem caucus on all other presidential nominations too.

The scenarios look similar on a surface level but in the details that matter they are leagues apart. If RBG had retired in 2013 or (most of) 2014, her replacement would been confirmed, barring a Kavanaugh-sized scandal. Either republicans would have provided the seven votes needed to secure cloture, or Reid would have invoked the nuclear option to lower the cloture requirement on SCOTUS nominees to a bare majority, like all other positions. Either way the nominee would have been confirmed.

But did you ever stop to think about how Italy's system impacts the most important among us: the wealthy shareholders? A truly humane system would prioritize them at all costs.

/s (should be obvious, but I'll put it there to be safe.)

Unity cares. This whole fuckup is Unity trying to further monetize mobile games and get a stranglehold on mobile game advertising. Console/PC games are just collateral damage.

If this costs Unity enough money it might work. I'm not holding my breath but stuff like this has a better chance of working than PC indie devs abandoning Unity does.

This year's new phones are for people that last bought a phone in 2020 or earlier. If the average user is on a three year upgrade cycle (what the data shows as I recall) then you'd expect roughly 1/3 of people to upgrade every year.

This is better for Apple, as it keeps their revenue more spread out instead of heavily concentrated in year one of a three year cycle.
This is better for consumers, as it means new features and upgrades are constantly being made. If they want to upgrade early they can, and they'll get new features even if it's only been two years.
This is also better for both Apple and consumers because there's more opportunities to course-correct or respond to feedback over issues. If Apple only released a phone every other or every three years, it'd take that much longer for the switch to USB-C.

Just because a new product is launched does not mean you need to buy it. Nvidia released a new GPU last year, but I didn't buy it even though it's newer than what I currently have. Arguing that new phones shouldn't come out each year is like arguing that new cars shouldn't come out each year. It makes no sense.

Hopefully we'll see the return of net neutrality. It was implemented the last time that the FCC was 3-2 dem, then it was revoked when that switched to 2-3. This is the first time that dems are in charge since that revocation.

In this case it's not truly a result of limited fab availability.

TSMC has two main variants of their 3nm node. The original one, that Apple is using, is N3B. It has worse yields, so TSMC started work on another variant, N3E. N3E has much better yields but will not be ready until late 2023 or early 2024. Everyone else besides Apple opted to skip N3B and go for N3E. Apple, with their very consistent release cadence, didn't want to wait for N3E. So Apple — and only Apple — is using N3B.

Thus, we have:
(1) TSMC only has one 3nm node in 2023: N3B.
(2) TSMC only has one customer for N3B: Apple.
(3) TSMC will never have any other customer use N3B, and have no incentives to build capacity beyond what is needed now.

It's effectively tautological that their entire 3nm allocation will be sold exclusively to Apple in 2023.

GPU prices being affordable is definitely not a priority of AMD's. They price everything to be barely competitive with the Nvidia equivalent. 10-15% cheaper for comparable raster performance but far worse RT performance and no DLSS.

Which is odd because back when AMD was in a similar performance deficit on the CPU front (Zen 1, Zen+, and Zen 2), AMD had absolutely no qualms or (public) reservations about pricing their CPUs where they needed to be. They were the value kings on that front, which is exactly what they needed to be at the time. They need that with GPUs and just refuse to go there. They follow Nvidia's pricing lead.

In other unbiased polling, the wolf spoke to all the other wolves in the pack and they all prefer that the sheep be eaten.

Storage is cheap, especially at the corporate scale.

Make two simplifying assumptions: pretend that Google is paying consumer prices for storage, and pretend that Google doesn't need to worry about data redundancy. In truth Google will pay a lot less than consumer prices, but they'll also need more than 1 byte of storage for each byte of data they have, so for the sake of envelope math we can just pretend they cancel out.

Western Digital sells a 22TB HDD for $400. Seagate has a 20TB HDD for $310. I don't like Seagate but I do like round numbers, so for simplicity we'll call it $300 for 20TB. This works out to $15/TB. According to wikipedia, Youtube had just under $29b of revenue in 2021. If youtube spend just $100m of that — 0.34% — they'd be able to buy 6,666,666 of those hard drives. In a single year. That's 6,666,666x20TB = 133,333,333 TB of storage, also known as 133^note^ ^1^ exabytes.

That's a lot of storage. A quick search tells me that youtube's compression for 4k/25fps is 45Mbps, which is about 5.5 megabytes/s. That's 768,722 years of 4k video content. All paid for with 0.34% of youtube's annual revenue.

Note 1: Note that I am using SI units here. If you want to use 1024^n^ for data names, then the SI prefixes aren't correct. It'd be 115 exbibytes instead.

EDIT: I initially did the price wrong, fixed now.