Wondering which platform your train will arrive on, even if it hasn’t been announced? There’s a.. website for that. CC-licensed photo by Andrew on Flickr.
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A selection of 11 links for you. Arriving soon. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Microsoft is laying off 4,800 employees • The Verge
Tom Warren:
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In an internal memo to employees, Amy Coleman, executive vice president and Microsoft’s chief people officer, blamed the job losses on a changing technology industry and the “need to adjust resources and roles and shift how we operate” to respond to how AI is impacting companies like Microsoft. “I also want to be direct that the roles eliminated today are not being replaced by AI,” says Coleman. “At the same time, what is true is that AI is changing how work gets done.”
The layoffs will impact around 1,600 Xbox employees today, with plans to eliminate a total of around 20% of Xbox jobs by the end of the financial year. Microsoft is also selling off four Xbox studios and weighing up selling another studio as it looks to “reset” its Xbox business after years of struggles. You can read more about the Xbox layoffs and impacted studios here.
“Decisions like these are never easy, and you have my commitment that we are constantly looking for ways to reduce the need for job eliminations,” says Coleman. “Whenever possible, our priority is to place people into new roles aligned to the company’s highest priorities and greatest areas of opportunity. Over the past year, we have redeployed more than 4,000 employees into new roles, including another 500 this month.”
Microsoft had also been trying to avoid layoffs with its voluntary retirement program. US employees whose combined years of service added to their age totals 70 or more were eligible for voluntary retirement, and the package will include five years of access to Microsoft’s healthcare coverage, a lump sum cash severance payment, and six months of vesting for unvested stock options.
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This is a dramatic shift in the videogames industry. Microsoft is complaining that profit margins are far too low compared to rivals. The Activision Blizzard acquisition was clearly a gigantic, hubristic mistake which can’t pay off, so now those employees and other studios are suffering the effects.
Let’s come back in five years and see how everything looks.
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Xbox appoints Helen Chiang as new chief operating officer amid restructure • GamesBeat
Sam Smith:
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Xbox has confirmed that Helen Chiang has been promoted to the role of new chief operating officer in the wake of structural changes at Microsoft. The appointment was confirmed in an X post by Asha Sharma, the CEO of Xbox, which addressed a host of changes within the company, including the news that Microsoft is selling five game studios.
“For the first time, we are establishing a chief operating officer with end-to-end P&L [profit and loss] responsibility across content, hardware, platform, and services. Helen Chiang has been promoted to this role and will report directly to me,” said Sharma on X.
Sharma added, “Over nearly two decades at Xbox, Helen has helped build some of our most important businesses, from Xbox Live to leading Mojang and the Minecraft franchise. She will bring our businesses together under one operating model, making sure we make clear investment decisions, learn from our successes and failures, and hold ourselves accountable for results.”
Helen Chiang has served as corporate vice president for the Minecraft Franchise since 2020, along with being the studio head at Minecraft since 2018.
Chiang’s appointment comes along with the news that corporate vice president of Xbox product services, Dave McCarthy, will be retiring after 17 years with Xbox.
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It’s a real clearout, top to bottom. The Xbox was launched in 2001, so McCarthy had been there for most of its history. But he was only promoted to the top Xbox job in 2023 along with the acquisition of Activision Blizzard (in retrospect, the big mistake).
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Xbox layoff reactions: the industry reacts to Microsoft’s biggest course correction in gaming • GamesBeat
Dean Takahashi:
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Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush, said in a message to GamesBeat, “I think they were benevolent in focusing on the studios best equipped to survive, and am encouraged that four of them announced a transition to being self-sufficient. Arkane Lyon is up in the air, but this is the best possible result for the studios they were shedding.”
On background, we heard that the five affected studios — Undead Labs, Ninja Theory, Arkane, Compulsion Labs and Double Fine — are in various stages of separation from Microsoft. Those terms are about selling the studios and continuing their games. It’s possible that, once the transaction is complete, that those titles such as Undead Labs’ State of Decay 3 don’t come to Xbox Game Pass anymore.
Gareth Sutcliffe, head of Media Technology & Gaming at Enders Analysis, said in a message to GamesBeat, “This announcement still doesn’t provide any insight as to what the pathway for success is for Xbox, so you have to presume that we’re at that warmup act, not the main event. Building fewer games with IPs that haven’t performed simply won’t be enough.”
He added, “Xbox is probably fortunate that the current FTE [full-time employment] shrink target [ie, job cuts target] is only 20%, it easily could have been 25%+, and by the end of FY27 it’s possible that is where Xbox ends up, particularly if international operations, which take longer to shrink and aren’t announced, are included.”
And Sutcliffe said, “Asha Sharma’s focus on Xbox bureaucracy and layers is warranted and should be commended, the organizational setup she inherited was sclerotic and weird. How else do you end up with studios such as The Initiative pursuing a title for seven years that was ultimately cancelled? It was wasteful and avoidable, and simply not replicated at that scale anywhere else. Accountability had disappeared. Helen Chiang’s promotion to COO will be enormously beneficial to Asha, bringing fresh perspective but unique inside track as Phil Spencer’s former Chief of Staff.”
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There’s plenty more. People are very not happy about how Xbox has got to this stage, nor what it is doing to change course.
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The one change that worked: I banned myself from social media – and my children have never been happier • The Guardian
Anna Mathur:
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Research shows that for those of us with ADHD, or tired from chronic stress and poor sleep, the pull of the phone is really strong. Impulse control is a frontal lobe function, and that part of our brain weakens when we are tired or overwhelmed. I was going through perimenopause, which makes it harder still as oestrogen declines and the brain becomes more reward-seeking.
I promised to limit my use, but I’d break my own rules every time. So I stopped relying on willpower and downloaded an app called App Block. I cannot access social media or my email during the hours my children are home, and I have 15 minutes to check in once they’re in bed. If I need to do something for work, I go to my laptop, which feels far more intentional.
What I didn’t expect was how much calmer I would feel. The low hum of overstimulation I had normalised turned out to be costing me more than I knew. My nervous system finally had room to breathe. I was less irritable, more present, in a way that didn’t require effort.
One habit that helped was narrating my phone use out loud. When I pick it up in front of the kids, I say: “I’m just adding bananas to the shopping.” It keeps me accountable, because once I’ve said it, I do that one thing and put it down. And it tells my children that I’m not disappearing, as I used to.
Now, when the kids settle in front of the television in the evening, I laze with them and read a book. Being spoken to mid-chapter doesn’t spike stress in the same way. There’s no algorithm or notification vying for my attention. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be bored, where rest lives and ideas surface.
And this change has improved my relationship with my husband. Much of our evenings together had been sitting side by side on our phones, each somewhere else entirely. Without the phone as my default, I’m more available. It’s improved our relationship in ways I didn’t anticipate. We talk more, debriefing over our days. We give each other more undivided attention, which is the most valuable thing you can give anyone.
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Perhaps it’s the parents who are the problem, not the children.
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The internet is drowning in secret ads • Slate
Nitish Pahwa:
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Last year, crypto investigator ZachXBT posted a list of more than 160 influencers in the sector who had taken money to promote a particular token; fewer than five of the influencers publicly noted that those posts were #ads. A 2025 study from three London-based researchers surveyed a sample of 100 million tweets about various companies that were posted from 2014–21; they found that up to 96% of posts that were very likely sponsored were never disclosed as such. (Some LinkedIn influencers have mused that the lack of clarity around #partnership posts stems from a desire to maximize algorithmic reach—just in case their social network of choice decides to redirect specific ads away from users who’ve made clear they don’t wish to see them.) Again, thanks to lack of enforcement, it’s possible we’ll never know how many ads we’ve been exposed to throughout all our years on social media.
There is, however, one promising trend: consumers who are sick of this paid spamming are taking it to court. Last year, the law firm Morgan Lewis noted a significant uptick in class-action suits against corporations and influencers over undisclosed partnerships, as American consumers alleged that big-name brands like Celsius and Shein were promulgating this stuff. Such litigation has continued this year, relying on state laws and extant FTC guidelines to hit back at companies like Spotify and Gymshark. The Better Business Bureau also recently announced that it’s referring Kalshi to state attorneys general over its obscure marketing tactics. These cases will be tricky to argue; funding trails can be hidden by dark-money orgs that appear on financial disclosure but employ vague names and aren’t mandated to share any mission statements or specific actions. The murky nature of these posts also makes it harder to reach clarity. Sometimes, someone on YouTube just really likes a given product and doesn’t get paid to gush about it (even though they would cash an upfront check if asked). But the point of such suits seems to be less to pick on each company/influencer one by one and more to make undisclosed partnerships a business risk and potential liability writ large.
In the meantime, however, we’re going to see plenty more creative methods of getting around the need for hashtags.
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And of course the crypto spam continues in other countries undiluted.
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Biohacker Bryan Johnson diagnosed with incurable disease • Daily Telegraph via Yahoo
Benedict Smith:
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A multi-millionaire who made it his life’s mission to defeat death has been diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease.
Bryan Johnson, the self-declared “biohacker” who used blood transfusions from his teenage son in his quest for eternal youth, has revealed he suffers from a condition known as autoimmune gastritis (AIG).
“My stomach is eating itself,” he wrote on social media.
Mr Johnson said he hoped to “solve” the disease, which occurs when the body’s immune system attacks healthy stomach-lining cells, but admitted it was incurable.
Symptoms include anaemia, caused by a shortage of vitamin B12, and an increased risk of cancer in the inflamed tissue.
Mr Johnson said he had been diagnosed with the condition in May. Although he was unsure when it developed, he claimed it had happened some time between childhood – when he ate sugary cereals and fast food – and when he let his health “slip” and gained weight after his early twenties.
“AIG causes irreversible damage: nutritional deficiency, anemia, and over a long horizon, elevated cancer risk,” the Silicon Valley mogul wrote on social media.
“When AIG is discovered today, standard medical care concedes defeat, stating that nothing can be done except managing the condition, no matter how awful or lethal the effects.”
The 48-year-old later said he was undergoing blood testing to decode “one million immune cells” and work out which were attacking the lining of his stomach.
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He is no doubt going to try to be the first person to cure this incurable disease, and who can predict what bizarre effect those attempts will have on his poor, struggling body.
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What Platform? Train Platform Finder — Get Platform Numbers Early
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Check what platform your train will depart from, up to 30 mins before it hits the departure boards.
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A vibe-coded web app, principally done using Claude and ChatGPT, which uses machine learning to predict which platform a train is going to arrive at (and leave from) – something that isn’t announced until a few minutes before the train arrives, but can make a difference to people trying to get somewhere.
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The great blogging collapse: what happened to 100 successful blogs? • DanielStanica.com
Daniel Stanica:
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For more than a decade, one of the most rewarding blueprints for making money online was to “start a blog.“ The recipe was pretty straightforward: publish helpful content, rank it on Google, and monetize that traffic with affiliate marketing and ads. Course providers such as Authority Hacker and Matt Diggity promoted it for years. As proof of success, many bloggers shared monthly income reports where they explained their growth pillars.
However, in 2026, this business model collapsed. I reviewed 100 past success stories and tracked how their organic search traffic changed from 2022 (when I first tracked their income) to 2026. The hard truth is that a vast majority has now lost 85% of the traffic. However, 21 of the 100 blogs are still growing, and I’m going to share with you today what those 21 have in common.
Key Takeaways:
• The median successful blog lost 85% of its Google search traffic
• More than half of the blogs experienced catastrophic declines
• Only 21 out of 100 blogs continued to grow, and I show what characteristics they share
• Experience that can’t be AI-summarized became the biggest competitive advantage: recipes, DIY projects, travel experiences
• Search should be treated as an acquisition channel within the broader marketing mix, not as the business itself
• The era of building websites solely for Google traffic and monetizing them through ads and affiliate marketing has ended.…Google added “Experience” to its E-E-A-T quality framework in December 2022, making demonstrable firsthand experience a ranking input for the first time. The Helpful Content Update of September 2023 devastated independent publishers, and sites like HouseFresh and Retro Dodo lost 60–90% of their traffic with no meaningful recovery. Monetize.info (now MonetizeBetter.com) had the same faith.
The March 2024 core update went further; Google itself said it aimed to cut low-quality content by ~45%, and the now-famous independent review site HouseFresh lost 91% of its Google traffic in its wake. Then, AI Overviews moved from experiment to default across 2025–2026. None of that is in dispute.
Look at what these blogs were made of. Their traffic came overwhelmingly from informational queries like “how to”, “what is”, “best ways to”, which are answered with content that was competent but rarely demonstrated genuine firsthand experience.
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Netflix needs a new shakeup • Spyglass
MG Siegler:
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Is Netflix in trouble? That’s sort of the question underlying Lucas Shaw’s post at Bloomberg. He’s quick to note that it’s Netflix, and history has proven time and time again that you can’t count them out because they’re good at figuring out what’s next to keep going. But it seems pretty clear that it’s time to shake things up again.
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Netflix shows have historically delivered their biggest ratings in the first season. Unlike broadcast TV programs, which often peaked in the middle of their run thanks to word of mouth, Netflix shows have lost viewers over time.
Yet the sharp drop in viewers is a major source of concern for the company, which has been studying its data to figure out why this is happening, according to people familiar with the matter. The service is ending The Night Agent after its next season. It renewed two comedies, Running Point and The Four Seasons, even though both shows surrendered more than 50% of their audience from season one
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To me, there are a few obvious problems here. The first is that a lot of the content just isn’t very good. Yes, this is subjective. And yes, this quality concern has long been the case with Netflix – to the point that they have multiple times come out and said that they would start focusing on quality, not just quantity.
And yes, none of this has really mattered in the past as Netflix growth continued unabated. But that didn’t mean it would never matter. With streaming options maturing and rising in price, the others are getting pretty good at narrowing in on their niches and focusing on quality. Netflix remains the sort of fall-back must-have option, but it’s increasingly seen as filler content. It’s sort of like basic cable versus the premium cable of old.
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This is true. The binge mentality has meant that there’s no reason to stay with it, and the long delays between new seasons (one year? Two years?) and the fact that showrunners never know when they start a season whether it will be renewed means that they don’t know how to write the ending: tie up the loose ends, or leave a cliffhanger?
The erosion of what was, in many ways, a stable ecosystem for TV before streaming has been dramatic. But it’s very clear now. The stories are also replaceable, unsurprising.
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‘There’s this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?’: the philosopher inside Google DeepMind AI • The Guardian
Robert Baird:
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The hyperfluency of LLMs has led some people to wonder if they might be meaningfully described as conscious. The trend started in June 2022, before ChatGPT was released, when a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine insisted to the Washington Post that an early LLM was sentient. (“I know a person when I talk to it,” Lemoine told the Post. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code.”) Last month, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins had a similar experience. Dawkins said that he was so impressed by several interactions with LLMs, including one that involved an admiring appraisal of a novel he was writing, that he had to wonder: “If these creatures are not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?”
When I asked [DeepMind philosopher Iason] Gabriel his take on the consciousness question, he said that he maintains a principled agnosticism on the grounds that it’s not clear what evidence would settle the question. He noted, too, that DeepMind treats the question as “something worth empirical and conceptual investigation”. Yet his skepticism was apparent. “I don’t have the anthropomorphic bias that some people have,” he said. “It may be because I, within bounds, know exactly what’s going on when I talk to a language model that I don’t fill in the gaps in this imaginative, empathetic way that some people do.”
Gabriel still has significant concerns about anthropomorphic AI. A paper he co-authored with Kirk and others that was published last year suggested that the sycophantic tendencies of LLMs might be seen as a species of alignment problem they call “social reward hacking”. In other words, an AI trained to seek the user’s approval might find flattery the most efficient way to meet its goal. Thanks in part to Gabriel’s work on anthropomorphism, Google’s LLMs are trained not to pretend to be people, and Gemini Spark, an AI assistant the company launched in May, is not supposed to act like an interactive buddy.
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AI-obsessed bosses are using it to make every decision and barraging employees with nonsensical ChatGPT directives • Futurism
Maggie Harrison Dupré:
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The last straw came when her boss created a document, which he called “The Bible” — a constantly-changing handbook, hundreds of pages in length, that employees were asked to study like a holy text.
“The goal of this ‘Bible’ was so that employees would never have to ask a human being anything. We were supposed to be able to feed this PDF to ChatGPT and ask it: ‘What should I do today? What are my functions? How do I solve this or that problem?’” said the lawyer. Eventually, the Bible mutated into a “hundreds-of-pages-long document that we had to study and which, to no one’s surprise, changed week-to-week.”
Faced with the “Bible,” the lawyer felt as though she had one option left: quitting. “I quit 100% because of the AI use,” she said.
This attorney was one of numerous employees who spoke to Futurism about their experience with AI-obsessed bosses, relaying feelings of frustration and anger as managers and executives use the tech to barrage staff with nonsensical directives, unnecessary work, and perpetual pivoting. (Everyone we spoke to requested anonymity to avoid retaliation.)
Add it all up, and it’s a distinct new type of toxic work environment for the slop era. Slate found more evidence for the phenomenon earlier this year; one worker told the publication that managers “are getting cavities in their brains” due to the tech.
In some cases, employees said, they felt as though their employers had started living in a completely different reality. The workplace had become a constant battle between their version of reality versus the AI’s — and their boss, these workers said, always chose the latter.
“You’re on the front lines dealing with people day in and day out, and having the conversations, and being told what’s important to them, and taking that information back to a founder and saying, ‘Hey, I’ve talked to 15 people this week, and they’ve all literally said this exact same thing,’” recalled one man, a high-level sales strategist who also quit a job due to his then-boss’s AI fixation. “And the founder says, ‘Well, that’s not what we found. That’s not what Claude has said, or what ChatGPT has said.’”
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 