CNBC:

Block said Thursday it’s laying off more than 4,000 employees, or about half of its head count. The stock skyrocketed as much as 24% in extended trading.

“Today we shared a difficult decision with our team,” Jack Dorsey, Block’s co-founder and CEO, wrote in a letter to shareholders. “We’re reducing Block by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000, which means that over 4,000 people are being asked to leave or entering into consultation.” [...]

Other companies like Pinterest, CrowdStrike and Chegg have recently announced job cuts and directly attributed the layoffs to AI reshaping their workforces.

In an X post, Dorsey said he was faced with the choice of laying off staffers over several months or years “as this shift plays out,” or to “act on it now.”

Dorsey’s letter to shareholders was properly upper-and-lowercased; his memo to employees, which he posted on Twitter/X, was entirely lowercase. That’s a telling sign about who he respects. Dorsey, in that memo to employees:

we’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.

i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i’d rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome.

AI is going to obviate a lot of jobs, in a lot of industries. So it goes. But in the case of these tech companies — exemplified by Block — it’s just a convenient cover story to excuse absurd over-hiring in the last 5–10 years. Say what you want about Elon Musk, but he was absolutely correct that Twitter was carrying a ton of needless employees. This reckoning was coming, and “AI” is just a convenient scapegoat.

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

Perhaps the most surprising announcement on Thursday was that Apple and Netflix, which have had a rather stand-offish relationship when it comes to video programming, have struck a deal to swap some Formula One-related content. Formula One’s growing popularity in the United States is due, perhaps in large part, to the high-profile success of the Netflix docuseries “Drive to Survive.” The latest season of that series, debuting Friday, will premiere simultaneously on both Netflix and Apple TV. Presumably, in exchange for that non-exclusive, Apple will also non-exclusively allow Netflix to broadcast the Canadian Grand Prix in May. (Insert obligatory wish that Apple and Netflix would bury the hatchet and enable Watch Now support in the TV app for Netflix content.)

What a crazy cool partnership.

“An interview from 2036 with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman.” This is what AI video generation was meant for.

The New York Times:

Netflix said on Thursday that it had backed away from its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, a stunning development that paves the way for the storied Hollywood media giant to end up under the control of a rival bidder, the technology heir David Ellison.

Netflix said that it would not raise its offer to counter a higher bid made earlier this week by Mr. Ellison’s company, Paramount Skydance, adding in a statement that “the deal is no longer financially attractive.”

“This transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price,” the Netflix co-chief executives, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, said in a statement.

Netflix’s stock is up 9 percent in after-hours trading. This is like when you have a friend (Netflix) dating a good-looking-but-crazy person (Warner Bros.), and the good-looking-but-crazy person does something to give your friend second thoughts. You tell your friend to run away.

Brent Simmons: I led the effort to port our remaining Objective-C to Swift. When I started that project, Objective-C was about 25% of the code; when I retired it was in the low single digits (and has gone even lower since, I’ve heard). […] Objective-C code was where a lot of our crashing bugs and […]