Monthly Archives: January 2022

Article note: Geez. Good for the dude who hacked that thing out for funsies, especially since I can't think of a way to monetize it without ruining it.

Enlarge / The New York Times is buying Wordle. (credit: Wordle)

The New York Times announced today that its Games division would be purchasing Wordle—everyone's favorite five-letter-word guessing game and emoji-square generator—for a number in the "low-seven figures."

The sale caps a meteoric rise for the simple game. It rode word-of-mouth recommendations and glowing media coverage to prominence, was subject to multiple copycat apps that Apple removed from its App Store, and inevitably generated backlash from people who don't like it when other people have fun in public.

"At the time it moves to The New York Times, Wordle will be free to play for new and existing players, and no changes will be made to its gameplay," the Times notes in its press release. Presumably after Wordle has moved, the Times will tweak its gameplay and impose a registration requirement or paywall as it sees fit. Many of the Times' games, including Sudoku, Spelling Bee, and the mini-version of its crossword, can also be played for free without signing in or registering. But a subscription is required to play the full version of the crossword puzzle and access the NYT's crossword puzzle archive.

Article note: Can... can we not have the entire entertainment industry be (abusive, but that's redundant) vertical monopolies?

Enlarge / Well, we didn't necessarily see this one coming. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Sony | Bungie)

After Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, talk turned to how Sony and its PlayStation division would deal with the fallout of the purchase. If the Xbox becomes the exclusive home of Call of Duty games, would Sony be left out of the megaton first-person shooter space? Would Sony fire back with a major acquisition of its own?

On Monday, Sony announced plans to acquire Bungie and its Destiny series of shooters in a deal reportedly valued at $3.6 billion (in an email to Ars Technica, a Sony rep declined to confirm that figure). Somehow, this pricey purchase includes a firm pledge from Bungie, despite its new corporate overlords: Bungie's "future games" will not be PlayStation exclusives.

Bungie had clearly prepared to announce this news to its active Destiny 2 user base, which plays on a variety of non-PlayStation platforms like Steam, Google Stadia, and (of course) Xbox. Its Destiny 2-specific FAQ confirms that the game's current content map is set until at least 2024, when a project dubbed "The Final Shape" launches. All planned content will continue to work cross-platform without any PlayStation "console exclusive" forks or DLC, the company said.

Article note: Oh no, it looks reasonably compelling. Must avoid the expensive time-sink for at least a couple months.

Enlarge / Pokémon Legends: Arceus is as close as we've ever gotten to an open-world Pokémon game. (credit: Nintendo)

Last year's by-the-numbers Pokémon Diamond and Pearl remakes did even less than most Pokémon games to spruce up and modernize the series' decades-old formula. That's understandable for a remake of a 2006 Nintendo DS game, but the games were still disappointing follow-ups to the more adventurous Sword and Shield.

The good news is that if you've been waiting for Game Freak to really shake up Pokémon's gameplay without totally burning it to the ground and starting from scratch, Pokémon Legends: Arceus is the game you've been waiting for. Part Pokémon and part Breath of the Wild, Legends takes the free-roaming "Wild Area" concept from Sword and Shield and updates the series' catching and battling mechanics to match.

That's not to say it's a perfect fusion of those disparate elements. Its mission-based structure gets pretty fetch quest-y, it leans heavily on an over-familiar roster of existing Pokémon, and the aging Switch hardware sometimes struggles to make it look good, especially when docked. But despite those problems, the whole package works together surprisingly well, and it makes the Pokémon feel fresher than it has in quite a while.

Article note: Group ownership of hardware assets wasn't modern enough or something, so we got polkit and it's constant weird state and js/xml config nightmare. ...and the parser that broke is pkexec's sloppy handling of argv.

Article note: It doesn't look _as_ heinous, but "Let's let the world's largest advertising broker insert ~~spyware~~ behavioral profiling code into browsers running on users' machines" just seems fundamentally gross.

Enlarge / Vivaldi's graphic on FLoC. (credit: Vivaldi)

After widespread opposition from the rest of the Internet, Google is killing its "FLoC" plans.

The company wants to get rid of the third-party web cookies used for advertising tracking, so it proposed FLoC ("Federated Learning of Cohorts"), which would have let its browser track you for the benefit of advertising companies. With FLoC dead, Google is floating another proposal to track users for advertisers. This time, the system is called the "Topics API." There are currently no implementation details, but Google has posted info about the Topics API in a blog post, in developer docs, on a GitHub page, and on a "Privacy Sandbox" site.

Google's Topic API plans are just now being shared with the world, and the company says the next step is to build a trial implementation and gather feedback from the Internet. Hopefully, the EFF, Mozilla, the EU, and other privacy advocates that spoke out about FLoC will chime in on Google's new plan. The Topics API gives users more control over the tracking process, but if your core complaint was that browser makers should not build user tracking technology directly into the browser for the benefit of advertising companies, you'll still find fault with Google's plan. Google is the world's biggest advertising company, and it's using its ownership of the world's biggest browser to insert its business model into Chrome.

Article note: IMO, good. Not pure, simple good, but ARM is too much of a cross-entity standard for a company that behaves like nvidia has tended to to be a good steward.

Enlarge (credit: Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket)

Nvidia may be walking away from its acquisition of Arm Ltd., the British chip designer, according to a report from Bloomberg.

The blockbuster deal faced global scrutiny, and Nvidia apparently feels that it hasn’t made sufficient progress in convincing regulators that the acquisition won’t harm competition or national security. “Nvidia has told partners that it doesn’t expect the transaction to close, according to one person who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private,” Bloomberg reported.

In a further sign that the deal is likely to be abandoned, SoftBank is also working to take Arm public, according to the report.

Article note: Oh, that's fun. The accepted documentation was tellingly nonsense, so they _taught themselves the tools_ to figure it out. That "tracing back to fundamentals" is one of the things I find most delightful about retro-computing. Working all the way back from a glitchy behavior, to a scope trace with unexpected timing, to "This thing is running a very sane serial protocol at the less-sane-sounding 18.958Hz frequency," to correlating to the components and determining that it ties back to a455kHz oscillator with a 24x divider, because 455kHz oscillators were common for AM radios.

Article note: I'm always hopeful that these incidents will teach the *ahem* managerial class about open source, the degree to which they rely on it, and the degree to which they haven't been paying, and make them start supporting their dependencies. It's not _likely_ because of the culture of crass exploitation, but ...yeah. Hopeful.

Article note: I'm always hopeful that these incidents will teach the *ahem* managerial class about open source, the degree to which they rely on it, and the degree to which they haven't been paying, and make them start supporting their dependencies. It's not _likely_ because of the culture of crass exploitation, but ...yeah. Hopeful.

Article note: The leading edge of this AI hype cycle is crashing! I was ready for AI Winter 3 like 4-5 years ago, maybe people will start doing things that might pan out again instead of that hustle.