Linked List: February 28, 2024

Wednesday, 28 February 2024

Sony Is Laying Off 900 PlayStation Employees, 8 Percent of Workforce ★

Tom Warren, writing for The Verge:

Sony says it’s laying off around 900 employees of its PlayStation division, a reduction of its global headcount of around 8 percent. Sony’s layoffs will impact a variety of its PlayStation studios, including Insomniac Games, Naughty Dog, Guerrilla Games, and Firesprite. Sony’s layoffs are the latest in a wave that has been impacting the gaming and tech industries throughout 2024.

Seems a little ironic that after all the histrionics over Microsoft deciding to go cross-platform with some of their Xbox exclusive titles — ostensibly giving Sony an edge — that Sony is now having layoffs in their first-party, exclusive game studios.

I hope I don’t jinx them by pointing this out, but you know who isn’t laying anyone off? Nintendo. Chris Adamson, on Mastodon:

Someone want to bring back that Nintendo quote about how they don’t do mass layoffs because it’s bad for morale? Or maybe notice that Nintendo tends to do lots of charming, modestly-ambitious games instead of a handful of $200M AAA blockbusters?

In the end, did Nintendo actually win the Console Wars?

They may not have “won”, but Nintendo has never lost.

Richard Lewis Dies of Heart Attack at 76 ★

Larry David:

Richard and I were born three days apart in the same hospital and for most of my life he’s been like a brother to me. He had that rare combination of being the funniest person and also the sweetest. But today he made me sob and for that I’ll never forgive him.

Here’s a great story about Lewis — “the menschiest of mensches” — from Andy Lassner.

Are Customers Returning Vision Pros in High Numbers? Seemingly Not. ★

Ming-Chi Kuo:

According to my survey of the repair/refurbishment production line, the current return rate for Vision Pro is less than 1%, with no anomalies.

Does Ming-Chi Kuo really know how many Vision Pros are being returned? I don’t know. Probably not. But two weeks after Vision Pro went on sale there was a bizarre rash of stories suggesting they were being returned in droves, probably driven by this Victoria Song piece for the Verge, with the — I must say — mildly jacktastic headline “Apple Fans Are Starting to Return Their Vision Pros”.

As far as I can tell there’s no public evidence that Vision Pros are being returned in higher-than-typical numbers, just click-bait social media posts making a show of it. And anecdotally, everything I’ve seen or been told is that returns are neither higher nor lower than typical.

Textpattern Turns 20 ★

Stef Dawson, on the Textpattern blog:

Twenty years ago, the landscape was very different. There was advertising, sure, but nowhere near the scale of today. And, perhaps to celebrate the fact that Dean Allen’s newly created CMS was so small, nimble, lightweight, yet powerful — or perhaps because its creator was an eccentric genius — the fanfare surrounding the official birth of Textpattern was this:

Public Gamma 1.10 is up. I’m going to bed.

(from Textism)

That was it; the extent of the marketing campaign. Nothing more. Nothing less. A factual statement and an indicator that the road to reach it from the numerous alpha and beta releases throughout 2001 until its naming in 2003 and public release in 2004 had been arduous, yet worth it.

I don’t hear about it much, but I’m so glad to see Textpattern is still going. And man do I still miss Dean Allen.

Lina Khan Has Been a Terrible FTC Chair ★

Eric Seufert, in a thread on Threads:

I’ve been critical of the FTC’s strategy under Khan; in a recent podcast episode, I likened the FTC to the Washington Generals of technology antitrust. As conveyed in the Commission’s report by the FTC’s own staff, Khan seems to be engaged in an activist crusade moored to a very specific ideological worldview — “Big is de facto Bad” — that has resulted in a series of defeats.

The excesses of Big Tech should be constrained. But that has yet to be achieved with the cases brought by the FTC, many of which, to my mind, are predicated on a confused understanding of the way that consumers engage with and benefit from technology. I think this is especially true concerning the economics of digital advertising and the freemium economy more broadly.

Unless I’m missing something, under Khan’s leadership the FTC has accomplished nothing. It’s all for show. She ought to be one of the first appointees to be replaced if Biden wins another term. (Merrick Garland first, though. An ineffective but showboating FTC chair isn’t actively harming the country; Garland — obsequious to the beltway cult of Both Sidesism — has been an outright disaster for democracy itself.)