Linked List: July 29, 2025

Tuesday, 29 July 2025

Sony Sues Tencent for Allegedly Ripping Off ‘Horizon’ Video Games 

Reuters:

Sony released the first game in the Horizon series, Horizon: Zero Dawn, on its PlayStation 4 in 2017. The games follow a red-headed woman named Aloy as she navigates a post-apocalyptic world populated by human tribes and robotic animals.

Sony said in its complaint that it declined an offer from Tencent to collaborate on a new Horizon game last year. Tencent later announced Light of Motiram, which Sony said features identical gameplay, story themes and artistic elements to Horizon as well as many other similarities.

Sony said that video game journalists have characterized Light of Motiram as a “knock-off” of Horizon, including one who called the game Horizon Zero Originality.

Tencent is the Chinese software giant behind, amongst many other things, WeChat, China’s “everything app”.

The E-Book Editions of Timothy Snyder’s ‘On Tyranny’ Are Just $2 

Back in March I linked to and recommended Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, a cogent collection of 20 short essays. I was never a big e-book reader, both because I love printed books so much and because I welcome any respite from reading on screens of any sort. But if e-books are your thing, note that Apple Books currently has it for just $2. Amazon’s Kindle edition is also $2 — and the paperback edition, which is the lovely little thing I own, is an oddly but low-priced $7.31.

Amazon Is Selling M4 MacBook Airs for $200 Off 

These prices — which I presume are a back-to-school season promotion — are even lower than those during the weeklong “Prime Day” earlier this month, and you don’t need to be a Prime subscriber to get them:

These are make-me-rich affiliate links, as is this link for AirPods Pro 2 for just $200, $50 off.

Microsoft Introduces ‘Copilot Mode’ in Edge 

Sean Lyndersay, general manager of Edge at Microsoft:

For decades, the way we’ve used browsers has remained linear: open a tab (or 20), search for something, read a page, repeat. It’s a model that’s worked well, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until now. As AI begins to reshape nearly every facet of digital life, we’re witnessing a turning point in how we interact with the web. Now, it’s worth asking: is your browser working for you as much as it should?

Color me skeptical about the idea that my web browser should be “working for me”, rather than serving as a tool for me to work with. The AI hype cycle is pointing to a future where automated agentic web browsers surf automated AI-generated websites. Robots consuming robot-generated content — an infinite loop of AI onanism.

This is why today we’re excited to launch Copilot Mode, a new experimental mode in Microsoft Edge, and our next step towards building a more powerful way to pilot the web.

With Copilot Mode on, you enable innovative AI features in Edge that enhance your browser. It doesn’t just wait idly for you to click but anticipates what you might want to do next. It doesn’t just give you endless tabs to sift through but works with you as a collaborator that makes sense of it all. It keeps you browsing, cuts through clutter and removes friction to unlock your flow — all built to the highest Microsoft standards of security, privacy and performance trusted by billions of people and businesses worldwide — with you as the user always in control.

Microsoft is famously known for presenting interfaces that “cut through clutter” and “remove friction”. I’m sure this will be great.

I am reminded of the decade-ago Netflix strategy espoused by Ted Sarandos: “The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” I think something similar is behind Microsoft trying to make Copilot front-and-center in Edge, and Google’s concurrent move to junk up Chrome with AI-generated suggestions. Their goal is to make their web browsers chatbots faster than OpenAI can make ChatGPT a web browser.

HBO is still around. It even just got its name back. But Netflix won that race.

Google Chrome Adds AI-Generated Store Summaries 

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

Google on Monday announced an update to its Chrome web browser that will introduce AI-generated store reviews to U.S. shoppers with the aim of helping to determine the best places to make a purchase. The feature, which will be available by clicking an icon just to the left of the web address in the browser, will display a pop-up that informs consumers about the store’s reputation for things like product quality, shopping, pricing, customer service, and returns.

The feature, which is currently available only in English, will generate the summaries based on reviews from partners, including Bazaarvoice, Bizrate Insights, Reputation.com, Reseller Ratings, ScamAdviser, Trustpilot, TurnTo, Yotpo, Verified Reviews, and others.

I have never heard of a single one of these “partners”. It’s bad enough that so many web pages themselves are increasingly covered with distracting junk, much of it AI-generated slop. But now browsers themselves will be adding their own layers of distracting cruft atop the websites. The entire premise of Chrome — the reason for its name — is that it was originally designed to simplify the UI of the browser app itself, the “chrome”, at a time when Internet Explorer and even Firefox were increasingly cluttered and confusing. I feel like this is a sign that Chrome is completely losing its way — AI-generated slop from the browser layered atop AI-generated slop in the underlying web pages.

Dare Obasanjo, on Bluesky, takes this news credulously:

Google Chrome is now going to provide AI generated summaries of online stores covering topics like customer service, product quality, shipping, pricing and return policy.

This is on the heels of Microsoft Edge announcing Copilot mode earlier today. Apple’s Safari is being left behind in the AI wars.

I would argue that Safari is looking ever more like a proverbial glass of ice water in hell. These Chrome AI overviews (Chrome is also, for example, going to start presenting its own AI-generated menu summaries for restaurants) don’t seem like user-centric features to me. They seem like features designed to turn the dial up on Google’s slice of commissions from web transactions.