The US military mistakenly shot down a drone belonging to Customs and Border Protection near the Mexican border in Fort Hancock, Texas, according to reports from Reuters and The New York Times. The Thursday incident reportedly led the Federal Aviation Administration to close the airspace where the military fired the anti-drone laser. This marks the […]

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.

PlayStation shut down Bluepoint Games, the developer behind the Demon's Souls and Shadow of the Colossus remakes, earlier this month. Amongst general sadness at the news amongst players, there was also a feeling that the studio would have been the one to (finally) do something with Bloodborne, ideally a remake, considering Bluepoint's pedigree. 

Now, according to a new Bloomberg report, it turns out Bluepoint did pitch a Bloodborne remake in early 2025, but it was rejected by PlayStation due to FromSoftware's desires. 

Bloomberg says its sources told it that Bluepoint "was told that the numbers made sense [to remake Bloodborne] but FromSoftware didn't want it to happen." As the report notes, former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida theorized during a Kinda Funny interview last year that FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki, who directed Bloodborne, was interested in remaking the 2015 action game himself but was too busy to do so; Yoshida said he "doesn't want anyone else to touch it" and that if that's true, he believes PlayStation would respect Miyazaki's wishes, even though PlayStation owns the Bloodborne IP. 

As previously reported, Bluepoint was working on a live-service spinoff of Santa Monica Studios' God of War series (which recently got the side-scroller treatment in God of War Sons of Sparta). Bloomberg reports that Bluepoint's spinoff was a game in which Kratos' son, Atreus, one of the main protagonists of God of War Ragnarök, fell into Hades (hell). "A loose idea was for players to control different versions or aspects of Atreus as they battled through Greek hell, and to have some sort of cooperative gameplay and ongoing support," the report reads. However, PlayStation canceled this project in January of 2025. Tasked with figuring out its next project, something PlayStation helped with, Bluepoint eventually pitched the aforementioned (rejected) Bloodborne remake. 

After that rejection, Bluepoint reportedly pitched an updated version of Shadow of the Colossus, which the studio already remade for PlayStation 4 in 2018, and it was also turned down. Other pitched projects include a Ghost of Tsushima spinoff, among other games set within pre-existing PlayStation franchises, according to Bloomberg, which also reports that employees at the studio began to fear for the company's existence when the God of War trilogy remake was announced earlier this month, on February 12, without their involvement.  

A week later, on February 19, PlayStation shut down Bluepoint, just five years after it acquired the beloved studio in 2021. 

[Source: Bloomberg]

What are your thoughts on PlayStation's closure of Bluepoint Games? Let us know in the comments below!

A list of all Twitch drops available in Marathon and how to link your Twitch account to your Bungie account.

Axios:
Sam Altman says OpenAI shares Anthropic's red lines with respect to AI use by the military, which are “an issue for the whole industry”  —  OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a memo to staff that he will draw the same red lines that sparked a high-stakes fight between rival Anthropic …