You're in a startup-biased forum. If you don't like it as a hobby, how about thinking how the openness is good for business? Your buddy can start a company making Framework-compatible tablets, or a mini server rack, or Framework-compatible keyboards (ortholinear layout please!), etc.
I think you are confused about how Hacker News works. I have only ever made three submissions, and a dozen or two comments. You can't get fourth from either of those.
I think a lot of this in general is a simple matter of the population itself getting older, with the nobel prize bit being compounded by the fact that today's problems are orders of magnitude harder than yesteryear's problems.
They do but they have explicitly given up the game of competing to be the first to the next fastest smallest digital logic (i.e. cutting edge nodes).
Micron is still pushing DRAM and NAND tech but it's more for cost cutting since they are strictly commodities. The work it takes to be a pure-play fab like TSMC is pretty different - lots of working with fabless vendors to bring up their chips. Even Intel isn't any good at this (yet). It's a collaborative process.
That's not foresight, it's out-of-hand speculation. But I guess people who don't wildly speculate would never invest in crypto in the first place, heh.
I remember some discussion about that a while back on HN. The TL;DR is a) he does say that and b) he would say that, since lzip is effectively a competitor to xz.
That said, I've been using pixz (which is compatible with xz but can do parallel decompression and a few other things) for many years on many dozens of terabytes of compressed data and have never had any problems.
