Linked List: October 21, 2022

Friday, 21 October 2022

Bungie Might Be Working on a Marathon Reboot for 2025 ★

Owen S. Good, writing for Polygon:

Bungie intends to reboot its seminal, 1990s sci-fi shooter Marathon, according to a report on Thursday. The game, said to be in a pre-alpha state, will return as a squad-based, team-extraction type multiplayer shooter, according to Insider Gaming. Bungie did not acknowledge the rumor, Insider Gaming said, and a public relations agency declined to comment. [...]

Marathon, which launched in 1994, was a critical and commercial success and, notably, an Apple MacOS exclusive. So were its two sequels, 1995’s Marathon 2: Durandal (although a version for windows launched one year later) and 1996’s Marathon Infinity. The series launched one year after Id Software’s groundbreaking Doom for MS-DOS and Windows PCs, and was a standard-bearer in Macintosh desktop gaming’s brief heyday from 1995 to 1997.

That would be “Mac OS exclusive”, with a space, thank you very much. And indeed, Marathon exemplified the heyday of Mac gaming. Just a fantastic game in every regard. I hope it’s true that Bungie is rebooting it, and I hope they do it justice.

(That said, the description from Insider Gaming of the game Bungie is purportedly working on sounds nothing like Marathon, and more like some fool at Bungie found “Marathon” in a dusty folder named “Unused Intellectual Property”.)

Lara Logan Is Too Crazy for Newsmax ★

Justin Baragona, reporting for The Daily Beast:

Nearly a year after she was kicked to the curb by Fox News for essentially calling Dr. Anthony Fauci a Nazi, Lara Logan was on Newsmax’s primetime airwaves pushing QAnon tropes, invoking blood libel, and fear-mongering about a “global cabal” planning to “dilute the pool of patriots” in the United States with “100 million illegal immigrants.” [...]

“Newsmax condemns in the strongest terms the reprehensible statements made by Lara Logan and her views do not reflect our network,” the network said in a statement. “We have no plans to interview her again.”

Wingnut goes on Newsmax and spews such craziness that they’re banned from the network generally isn’t notable news. But Lara Logan was once the chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News. Going from a contributor on 60 Minutes to getting banned by Newsmax is like going from playing for the Yankees to getting kicked out of a beer league softball squad.

DHH (and Fred Brooks) on Twitter’s Headcount ★

David Heinemeier Hansson:

When WhatsApp was sold to Facebook in 2014, it had almost half a billion monthly users, but a team of just 50 people running everything. Compare this to Twitter, which today has a staff of 7,500 to manage half the number of users. Yet Musk is the crazy one here for suggesting that maybe Twitter could operate with a mere TWO THOUSAND employees? Please.

Being understaffed hurts any team or business in obvious, intuitive ways. You have more work to be done than people to do it. You can see it today, nationwide, in restaurants.

Being overstaffed hurts a team in counterintuitive ways. It feels like throwing more engineers at a project ought to make the work go faster. But it doesn’t, past a certain point. Fred Brooks published The Mythical Man-Month in 1975, wherein he coined Brooks’s Law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” To my knowledge, there are no known exceptions to this axiom. It is always true.

WhatsApp circa 2014 — with 50 employees and 500 million users — is a good counterpoint.

Bloomberg Reports That Biden Administration Is Considering Security Reviews Regarding Elon Musk’s Acquisition of Twitter ★

Jennifer Jacobs and Saleha Mohsin, reporting for Bloomberg:^*

Biden administration officials are discussing whether the US should subject some of Elon Musk’s ventures to national security reviews, including the deal for Twitter Inc. and SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, according to people familiar with the matter. [...]

US officials have grown uncomfortable over Musk’s recent threat to stop supplying the Starlink satellite service to Ukraine — he said it had cost him $80 million so far — and what they see as his increasingly Russia-friendly stance following a series of tweets that outlined peace proposals favorable to President Vladimir Putin. They are also concerned by his plans to buy Twitter with a group of foreign investors.

This is a plot twist I did not see coming, but feel like I should have.

* Take Bloomberg’s so-far exclusive reporting on this story with a large grain of salt, of course, especially as it pertains to national security. Bloomberg is the publication that published “The Big Hack” in October 2018 — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all, was vehemently denied by all companies involved, has not been confirmed by a single other publication (despite much effort to do so), and has been largely discredited by one of Bloomberg’s own sources. By all appearances “The Big Hack” was complete bullshit. Yet Bloomberg has issued no correction or retraction, and their only ostensibly substantial follow-up contained not one shred of evidence to back up their allegations. Bloomberg seemingly hopes we’ll all just forget about it. I say we do not just forget about it. Everything they publish should be treated with skepticism until they retract “The Big Hack” or provide evidence that any of it was true.

Evans Hankey Is Leaving Apple ★

Mark Gurman with the scoop of the week:

Apple Inc.’s head of hardware design, Evans Hankey, is leaving the iPhone maker three years after taking the job, creating a significant hole at the top of a company famous for its slick-looking products, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Hankey was named to the post in 2019 to replace Jony Ive, the company’s iconic design chief for two decades. Before taking her current role as vice president of industrial design, Hankey spent several years at Apple reporting to Ive. Since then, she has reported to Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams.

The departure was announced inside the Cupertino, California-based technology giant this week, with Hankey telling colleagues that she will remain at Apple for the next six months. Hankey oversees several dozen industrial designers, and the company hasn’t named a replacement.

Interesting, to say the least. Hard to imagine that there’s a more prestigious job on the planet for an industrial design executive than the top spot at Apple.

The Washington Post: Musk Plans Massive Layoffs at Twitter ★

The Washington Post:

Twitter’s workforce is likely to be hit with massive cuts in the coming months, no matter who owns the company, interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post show, a change likely to have major impact on its ability to control harmful content and prevent data security crises.

Elon Musk told prospective investors in his deal to buy the company that he planned to get rid of nearly 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 workers, whittling the company down to a skeleton staff of just over 2,000.

Even if Musk’s Twitter deal falls through — and there’s little indication now that it will — big cuts are expected: Twitter’s current management planned to pare the company’s payroll by about $800 million by the end of next year, a number that would mean the departure of nearly a quarter of the workforce, according to corporate documents and interviews with people familiar with the company’s deliberations. The company also planned to make major cuts to its infrastructure, including data centers that keep the site functioning for more than 200 million users that log on each day.

I’ve had a few friends and sources inside Twitter over the years, and I’ve long heard that Twitter is vastly overstaffed. There’s just no reason for Twitter to have so many employees given the scope of what they offer today. And it’s ossifying for a company culture to carry a lot of dead weight. But Twitter has had a hiring freeze for the last six months, and roughly 25 percent of employees have left in the last year — so their headcount is quite a bit smaller today than it was before Musk launched his takeover bid.

I suspect they’re still overstaffed. But a further 75 percent reduction would be cutting with a machete, not a scalpel. Maybe a machete is what Twitter needs, I don’t know, but if this is the plan Musk pursues, it’s drastic. It’s also possible that Musk is floating this drastic proposal now so that a big staff reduction — but far smaller than 75 percent — will taste more palatable when it comes.