2026-02-23 00:26:29
Brendon Bigley: Bluepoint Games Shuttered by PlayStation for Some Unfathomable Reason
Are we sincerely supposed to believe that in a world where the entire industry is bending over backward to remake and remaster every game under the sun, the studio that’s arguably the best at it can’t find a path to profitability?
Bluepoint has released some of the most critically and financially successful remakes released over the past decade. Why Sony decided to shut them down is beyond me, and I think it's a big mistake for the company. It should be noted that for the past couple of years, Sony has had them working on a God of War live service multiplayer game, and I just think this is another chapter in the sad, horrible mistake of Sony pivoting to live service for no reason at all over the last few years.
This is also another example of why I don't love when big companies acquire small studios. Blue Point was a reliable and successful development house before Sony acquired them in 2021. And they weren't able to release a single game after the Sony acquisition, and have now been shut down. Just as seems to be the case with other smaller studios once acquired by Sony or Microsoft. They have great success on their own. And then their output drops once acquired by the Megacorp, and they're shut down a couple of years later.
2026-02-22 02:00:53
I've used Plausible for my analytics since 2021, and I've been quite happy with it. It just works, it's pretty good from a privacy angle, and it gives me a nice UI for showing essential metrics without being overwhelming. I'm currently paying $12/month for it, which I think is fair enough, and seems to be a grandfathered deal, because looking at their current pricing page, I'd pay $29/month if I signed up now.
That said, I'm always interested in cutting costs when I can, and for reasons that will make sense soon, I've been using Railway to host some things, and I wondered what it would look like to host my analytics there. They have a one-click install for Plausible that you can get going in no time, so I gave that a shot. It was super simple to get going, and within minutes I had 5 sites reporting their analytics to my hosted version of Plausible (shout out to Claude Code for making the changes and pushing the updates for me in no time).
One quick tip for those using this method on Railway in the future, the install will have ghcr.io/plausible/community-edition:v2 as the "source image" which is an older version of Plausible. Just go into the settings of that deployment and change the source to ghcr.io/plausible/community-edition:v3.2, redepoly, and the new version will be there.
For those who don't know, Railway bills based on usage, so the more CPU/memory/bandwidth your deployed apps use, the more they cost. I noticed pretty quickly that the cost was ticking up faster than I expected. Here's what I see after 3 full days running Plausible:
I started mid-month, so the estimated usage only goes to the end of February, but running this for a full month is going to run me about $9-10. That's a bit cheaper than the official version, but it's not that much different. Spinning these up is trivial, so I also wanted to run Umami, which I'd heard was lighter and of similar quality. When I'm paying based on server load, suddenly lighter sounds better!
So I used Railway's one-click Umami install, got it running, and once again used Claude Code to quickly add the tracking code to each of the 5 sites I track. Over the exact same time period, here's what billing has accrued for this deployment.
That's much better! Now we're looking at $2 or so per month, which is pretty darn good. I'm going to let them both run for another couple days to make sure nothing unexpected changes, but if these rates hold, I've got my new analytics platform and it's going to save me about $10 per month (or $27 per month if my grandfathered price ever ended), so that's pretty rad.
In case anyone was unfamiliar with these platforms, here's what the today view for Plausible looks like:
And here's the same page for Umami:
It's a matter of taste, but I think they're both quite good, and a hell of a lot better for my needs that Google Analytics. That said, if there is some other open source analytics tool I could be using, let me know!
2026-02-21 22:07:34
How's this for a hot take to start the weekend: I think Apple is going to discontinue iPadOS. I know, I know, it's a big swing, but put the pitchforks away and hear me out. iPadOS, as it exists now, is being stretched too thin. The idea of having one operating system, with the same features, that spans from a small, 8" tablet up through a 13" laptop-style slab that also connects to a 32" monitor is fundamentally problematic.
This doesn't even take into account that we're likely getting an iPhone that folds out to an 8" tablet soon. What's that software going to look like? What about when the inevitable larger folding iPhone comes and it has a 10" screen?
We're all familiar with the complaints from users on both ends of the iPad spectrum. iPad Pro users love the hardware but are perpetually frustrated by limitations in the software. Meanwhile, users of the smaller and lower-end iPads are frustrated with the added desktop-style features they're getting that complicate their experience. And then there are iPad users who just feel like Apple is abandoning what made them fall in love with the iPad in the first place.
So here's the prediction: Apple will discontinue iPadOS. The regular iPad, iPad mini, and iPad Air will continue to exist, but they will run iOS. These iPads will not have the Mac-style window management they have today, but they will maintain Split View and (probably) Stage Manager. Of course, the iPhone will continue to run iOS, and the iPhone Fold will adopt a more iPad-style layout when the 8" inner screen is exposed.
That leaves the iPad Pro, which I believe will begin shipping with macOS. No, not some fork of macOS or "macOS lite," the real deal. This will live alongside the other Macs in the lineup, and it will be the tablet-style Mac while Apple will keep the clamshell laptop and desktop machines in the lineup. The strongly rumored touch-enabled MacBook Pros on the horizon will come with a new build of macOS that fully supports touch, opening the door to a tablet-style Mac, and why mess with perfection? Put macOS on the iPad Pro and instantly have the best convertible computer on the planet.
And for those who haven't read all of my work (reasonable, tbh), I really have to reiterate what I've said before, which is that macOS UI elements are not as small as you think, and in most cases, are literally exactly the same as those on the iPad. To illustrate my point, here's a comparison of toolbar buttons used all across the OS at the default UI zoom on a 14" MacBook Pro and an 11" iPad Pro. My god, the size difference, touch would never work there! It's not like SwiftUI builds literally the same UI for basically everything between iPadOS and macOS builds already. 😉
And let's look at the iPadOS updates in recent years. I think it's fair to say that 90% of the big things people got really excited about were features that made the iPad more like the Mac. Even things that they did in a special iPad-centric way (window management, mouse support, etc.) were soon redone in a way that made them more carbon copies of the Mac and most people celebrated those changes.
And hey, this would let Apple stay true to their word. Are they merging iPadOS and macOS? No. They're just getting rid of iPadOS.
I recognize this is a big swing, and I don't think it's happening this year. It may not happen next year either, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me. The impending introduction of an iPhone that turns into a tablet-sized device itself, really just makes me wonder what the hell we're doing here. What the right OS for an 8" tablet? Apple will be selling two devices like that and as it stands now, the answer is different for each one. That's silly.
I think making a more clear software split in the lineup makes a ton of sense. Let the more casual iPads (and the iPhones that will soon be the size of iPads) run a clean, but powerful touch-centric OS. Then let the Mac be what it always has been, the best platform for giving Apple customers tons of options.
2026-02-21 04:00:56
There will be a Quick Subtitles update out soon that adds OpenAI's Whisper model to the app as an optional transcription model. Why, you might ask? Well, I think each model has its own advantages.
Personally, I think Apple's model is a really good balance and I really like that I'm able to bundle it into the app without requiring any third party dependencies or external downloads. That said, I did start to feel like I was losing a competitive advantage by only using this model, and I think giving users more options is a good thing in this case.
As a quick side note on Parakeet, if you are using that model today and you notice that sometimes the app sits at 0% for a little bit before rocketing through the rest, that's because Parakeet needs to "warm up" before processing sometimes. So if you just launched the app for the first time in a while, that first file may have a bit of a delay. I'm working on finding a clever way to get this warm-up to happen before you actually provide a file, but no timeline on that yet.
Let's start by looking at the performance difference between the models, which as a reminder, all run 100% locally on your device. Your audio files never ever ever get uploaded to any cloud service.
Below is how long it took to transcribe a 38-minute podcast episode across each model on an M4 Pro MacBook Pro.
In terms of performance, honestly, all three of these are remarkable compared to what was available to folks five years ago, but obviously the Apple and NVIDIA models are in a whole other class than OpenAI's Whisper when it comes to speed. So why the hell would I add a model that takes 12x more time to process the same file? In a word: accuracy.
Here's what each model delivered for the intro in the most recent episode of Comfort Zone:
Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts. Well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lolly, and as always, I am joined by Matt Barcheler. Matt, how are you doing? I'm doing good. I have a little coffee with me today and I am exhausted because I used a manual grinder for the 1st time ever on this, would not advise. It takes forever. That doesn't sound like fun. But we are also joined by the triumphant return of Neelion. Leon, how are you? Hello. I've done better.
Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley and as always I am joined by Matt Barchler. Matt, how are you doing? I'm doing good. I have a uh a little coffee with me today and I am exhausted because I used a manual grinder for the first time ever on this. Would not advise. It takes forever. That doesn't sound like fun. But we are also joined by the triumphant return of Neilion. Neilion, how are you? Hello, I've done better.
Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and as always, I am joined by Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? I'm doing good. I have a little coffee with me today, and I am exhausted because I used a manual grinder for the first time ever on this. Would not advise. It takes forever. That doesn't sound like fun. But we are also joined by the triumphant return of Nileon. Nileon, how are you? Hello. I've done better.
One of the big features I added in Quick Subtitles 2.0 was a Gemini feature to clean up the transcript to try to account for the issues that Apple's model had. I actually really love that feature myself, and even if no one else ever uses it, I'll still really value it. But the ideal state, of course, is that you never have to make any corrections at all because it just gets it right out of the box. The Whisper model gets us closer than the other two in my testing at being right from the start.
I will say that after nearly a year of using these incredibly fast on-device models, it's a little tough to go back to something this slow, but I am really encouraged by the improved accuracy.
Going forward, I think Whisper is going to be my default model, but I'll use Parakeet when I need to batch converts and "pretty good" is good enough. The good news is that I've got the app in a really good place with good options for folks. The bad news, is that despite coming into existence because of Apple's on-device model, it's actually Apple's model that is neither the fastest nor the most accurate, so it's been wedged out for my use of the app.
I currently have two hopes for WWDC in regards to Apple's speech analyzer. First, I hope that they ship an updated version of the model that is improved over what we have now. That's a pretty basic request, so that feels like the baseline. I would also like it if Apple had a more advanced option that developers could use, even if it meant we had to prompt the user to download something extra like we have to do with these other models. Think of it like how they have the enhanced voices that you have to download if you want to use for Siri.
This is fully implemented in my personal dev branch, and I have it working great on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It's just a matter of doing some more testing, but if all goes well, I would expect this available next week!
Not to make this a pitch for the More Birchtree sub, but they do get TestFlight access to this app and the beta should be out in the next day or two.
2026-02-21 02:00:00
I watch the occasional Kyle Hill video, and his latest about data centers in space being a bad idea got my attention, so I watched it. Early in the video, he says:
Obviously something is going to have to give if we want to continue to build out this infrastructure that no one actually wants.
Listen, I'm happy to debate the values of AI, and I don't think I'm blinded to their downsides that we need to mitigate. But I constantly see people throw around this general phrase about how "nobody actually wants this" as though it's common knowledge that no one could possibly disagree with. Believe me, Mastodon is my main social network, a day doesn't go by where I don't see someone saying something like this.
But is that actually the case? I opened the App Store on my phone this morning and took a screenshot of the top 8 free apps right now. ChatGPT is number 1 (as it has been for several years in a row), Gemini is number 4, and Claude is number 8. For a thing "nobody wants", people sure are going out of their way to get these apps. And anecdotally, I know a ton of people who aren't "tech bros" who use these tools all the time, even if they do have misgivings about them.
Side note: I see a very common thing where people find AI video and images absolutely cringe, but they find ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude the greatest thing they've ever used. Not just tech folks, regular people. I don't know if this will hold long-term, but it is interesting that AI chatbots and AI "art" are treated very differently by a lot of people (including myself, for what it's worth).
Another way I could interpret this phrasing I hear from people is that people weren't asking specifically for AI chatbots, and therefore it's tech companies giving them something they didn't ask for. If that's the case, then I fundamentally disagree that that's a problem. It's especially rich if it's coming from Apple fans who for decades have complimented Apple for creating products that people didn't even know they wanted until they had them. The only difference this time is that a subset of people don't like these solutions.
So this blog post is genuinely a question. If you're someone who has said that AI chatbots are a thing nobody asks for, what do you mean when you say that? Right now, it feels like a bare assertion meant to shut down debate. Help me understand if I've got it wrong!
2026-02-20 10:07:38
Claudio Nastruzzi: Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation
When an author uses AI for "polishing" a draft, they are not seeing improvement; they are witnessing semantic ablation. The AI identifies high-entropy clusters – the precise points where unique insights and "blood" reside – and systematically replaces them with the most probable, generic token sequences. What began as a jagged, precise Romanesque structure of stone is eroded into a polished, Baroque plastic shell: it looks "clean" to the casual eye, but its structural integrity – its "ciccia" – has been ablated to favor a hollow, frictionless aesthetic.
I generally agree here. I sometimes use AI as an advanced spell and grammar check, but offloading your writing to it never really works out for creative writing.