Matisyahu's Blog

Finally a night without rain which has allowed me to go for a 11.6km walk and when I came back I jumped in to have a hot shower. The weather is a bit cold outside but I can handle the cold with a good jumper and I guess it is a good incentive to walk at a fast pace to keep warm. It always feels good after working all day to get out of the house and get some fresh air, see the sights and sounds even if it is at 10-11pm – the night crew is out doing upgrades on the rail lines which is great to see.

I’ll be popping down to the supermarket on Monday to grab a few items to get me through the day and then on Tuesday I’ll do a bit shop because at the moment my cupboards are more or less empty with only a few tinned goods left. On Tuesday the Snakehive case for my phone will arrive which is a bit annoying because at the moment it is at the Auckland sorting facility so I would have thought it would come down on an overnight track from Auckland to Wellington but for some strange reason they don’t have a truck that does it – either that or the courier service I paid for doesn’t qualify for it.

I’ve been following the development of Windows 11 25H2, specifically regarding the work they’re doing around finding a way that security products can operate in user space after the whole Crowdstrike fiasco. What will be interesting is whether we’ll see maybe a solution to the persistent issues surrounding Easy Anti-Cheat causing kernel panics. In a perfect world gamers would flat out refuse to buy games that include Easy Anti-Cheat which would force the hand of the games companis to come up with a better solution but given how so many gamers are like drug addicts needing their fix – perpetually whining about the price, increasing system specs, buggy releases etc but ultimately caving in when push comes to shove.

As for the whole Intel situation – I think the end goal is to spin off the fabrication side of the business into a joint venture with either Samsung or TSMC then Intel signing an exclusive contract with that new joint venture. At the moment I have heard that they’ve got issues with their 18A technology and the 14A is looking uncertain unless they can secure a big customer such as Apple. I could imagine Apple maybe pushing TSMC into buying half of the spun off Intel chip fabrication business which would ensure that TSMC has Apple, AMD, nVidia and Intel locked which would help the tech giants avoid the significant tariffs that Trump recently announced. The benefit to Intel of selling off half of its fabrication division would bring in enough money to make the big investments to catch up to AMD. It will be interesting to see what happens given that Intel has many challenges ahead of itself but then again this is the end result of being at the top for so long that they took their position in the market for granted and are now realising that being at the top doesn’t last forever – you have to continuously fight to maintain that position.