Tag: email_newsletter

“Threads is massive, but its user base is lurkers and influencers. Like being in the audience of a Marvel movie, you may consume some professionally produced content, but you’re certainly not going to form any lasting memories. For the past year, Bluesky has been pure posters, locked in a room with each other, deprived of much of the dopamine that they need to maintain their frenetic energy. And Mastodon is a community of commenters and reply guys, decentralised to the point that it’s possible to have a nice chat, but difficult to discern a conversation arising from within”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/13/bluesky-twitter-jack-dorsey-social-network

“Microsoft has effectively backed itself into a corner from which no escape route is totally desirable. In many ways, the smart thing would be to combine the business models of Sega, which abandoned console development after the failure of Dreamcast and became a third-party games publisher, and Valve, which stopped being a developer and became a digital platform holder with Steam. In effect, it could abandon the Xbox hardware and concentrate on bringing Microsoft exclusives to other platforms while maintaining the Xbox name for a streaming service accessible via PC, phones and smart devices. But that would leave a lot of extremely unhappy Xbox fans”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/feb/07/pushing-buttons-xbox-future-phil-spencer

“This venue –and every publication is a venue with its own dress code and decor, its favoured clientele and font-choice aesthetic –felt more like the Garrick than a youth club: deep-chaired, wood-panelled, its resident critics ruthless and assured, unafraid to skewer whatever video game everyone else was busily fawning over. Edge’s writers became my tutors; they helped me develop a sense of taste, to recognise brilliance, and to mourn the distance between intention and attainment”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/jan/31/pushing-buttons-video-game-magazines

“Blizzard canceled its survival game Odyssey after six years in development largely due to its struggling technology. One factor behind those struggles may have been the company’s inability to retain or attract senior engineers, in part, because of a lack of remote-work flexibility.

But the hardest impact of this policy is that both companies asked people to move to southern California — where the rents are expensive and the cost of living is high — only to then take away their jobs.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that productivity does take a hit when people work from home. Maybe it’s especially hard for some disciplines, as managers have argued, and maybe it’s difficult to engage in creative collaboration on Zoom and Trello. Doesn’t matter. CEOs should recognize that no productivity boost is worth the short- and long-term repercussions of forcing people to move and then laying them off”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-01-26/video-game-companies-make-workers-relocate-then-fire-them

“Replaying a linear narrative game is like rereading a favourite novel: nothing changes apart from you. The way you feel, the age you are, the experiences you’ve had – these all contribute to your new experiences with the text. Vladimir Nabokov once said, “One cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” Perhaps we should think about linear narrative games in the same way.

Now that I’ve opened this experiential door, I will definitely keep it ajar. I guess movies and short novels are easier to re-experience thanks to their comparative brevity, but if we look at story games as an escape, a vacation from the new, they’re always worth revisiting. And they have things to tell us about ourselves”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/jan/24/pushing-buttons-last-of-us-2-remastered-replaying

“Defence” is not supposed to be about seeking justice from your enemy,” says Colleen Bell, an international relations scholar at the University of Saskatchewan. Yet that’s how the concept is largely perceived. Many have rightly questioned how many Palestinians Israel needs to kill before it feels it’s sufficiently defended itself. While international humanitarian law dictates that defensive strikes must not disproportionately harm civilians, there are no legal precedents that specify what is considered proportionate”

https://thewalrus.ca/what-does-defence-really-mean/

“If you still want to track down the point where bad IT became a crisis, then you have to look past the tech altogether. The Post Office declared, as fiat, that Horizon worked. From there, everything that happened after was the logical conclusion. If Horizon works, then the errors must be because of what the subpostmasters did. If they say they made no errors, then they must have committed fraud. If they committed fraud, then a conviction is morally just.

But Horizon didn’t work”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/16/techscape-big-tech-post-office-horizon-scandal-substack

“The craziest stat of all? There are 45.6 million tracks that generated ZERO streams last year. There were 10 tracks that had more than 1 billion.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-01-14/universal-music-layoffs-record-labels-need-a-new-growth-story

“He cites S&P Global’s estimate that, in transitioning to green energy, manufacturers will need more copper in the next three decades than the world consumed over the past 120 years. Demand for copper is expected to roughly double between now and 2035, to make hardware such as rechargeable batteries, solar panel heat exchangers, and wind turbine generators. The question now is whether biomining can scale up fast enough to meet soaring demand”

The Future of Mining Might Be Smaller than You Think

“Although Schwab’s book is a tale of frustration and even rage at the culture of secrecy and often incompetence inside Gates’s philanthropic world, it is also strangely heartening. Perhaps we are starting to solve the “Bill Gates Problem” by the creeping (if highly uneven) return of faith in the ability of public authorities to do better than private world-makers, alongside the ongoing discrediting of the tech saviours who enjoyed such a gullible audience in the early years of the millennium”

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2023/11/bill-gates-is-bad-for-humanity