Verizon is buying Yahoo’s core business for $4.8 billion. YAHOO. The company that was the internet’s front door when I first touched a browser; the company that turned down buying Google for peanuts and turned down selling to Microsoft for $45B. Sold for the price of a nice office campus, to become part of a telco’s ad play. The kicker every article notes: Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba is worth VASTLY more than Yahoo itself — the acquisition they got right outperformed the entire operating company. There’s a lesson about portfolios and a meaner one about focus, and Yahoo is somehow the cautionary tale for both. ...

Pokémon GO launched one week ago and reality has not recovered. The park across from our office — normally four pigeons and a guy with a guitar — now hosts HUNDREDS of humans at 10pm, phones aloft, hunting a Snorlax. It’s the fastest app to 10M+ downloads anyone can remember; Nintendo’s market cap grew by tens of billions (for a game they licensed more than made, which the market eventually noticed); and the servers have been DOWN roughly as often as up, because no capacity plan on Earth included “entire human population, simultaneously, outdoors.” ...

ICELAND BEAT ENGLAND. Down 1-0 early in the match — the comeback that has never happened in modern English tournament history happened TO the most expensive squad of underachievers ever. Final whistle: Iceland’s defensive block materializing out of pure discipline, Sigthorsson’s shot sliding under the goalkeeper, and a nation of 330,000 people celebrating one of the greatest upsets in history. The England manager resigning before the press conference. Our London-born designer came in Monday staring at the wall and nobody, NOBODY, invoked the work queue. The qualification streak is officially the asterisk (#080 called it; the universe merged the crueler branch). Records are vanity metrics. Tournaments are revenue. ...

Writing this one with a heavy heart — the Orlando nightclub shooting was yesterday morning and the numbers are unbearable. Tech’s role this time was quiet and human: blood-drive coordination, safety check-ins, families refreshing feeds. Take care of your people. The rest of this entry is the ordinary world continuing, because it does, and that’s both the tragedy and the mercy of it. E3 is on. The consoles blinked first on Moore’s Law: Microsoft announced “Project Scorpio,” a mid-generation MORE POWERFUL Xbox, and Sony’s Neo is the open secret — the console cycle is becoming a phone cycle, incremental hardware with a shared library. Backward compatibility as a covenant, upgrades as a treadmill. Gaming discovered the annual release cadence right as gaming discovered it can’t finish games by launch day (#020 aged well). ...

The Madrid derby clawed back: 1-0 became 1-1, including a Carrasco equalizer that belongs in a museum. The penalty shootout happened last night. The eulogy branch and the comeback branch were both open; one got merged in the 5th round of penalties. Real Madrid won it. The Champions League rematch with Atletico is settled. The universe’s test suite continues. Google I/O delivered as rumored: Google ASSISTANT (their whole company reorganized into a conversation), Google HOME (the kitchen-counter war is official), and two chat apps nobody asked for (Allo and Duo, joining Hangouts and Messenger in the graveyard-to-be — Google ships chat apps the way I shipped “fix” commits in 2013). ...

Sports cliffhanger of the fortnight: Liverpool were DOWN 3-1 to Dortmund in the Europa League quarter-final with 24 minutes left. Lovren and Origi looked apocalyptic; the greatest Anfield night of the decade was one goal from becoming a disaster. The group chat has already drafted both eulogies and comeback narratives, committed to separate branches, waiting to see which merges. (Records without rings, #080. The universe reads this blog and writes cruel integration tests.) ...

Prince died last week and the internet did the thing it does best now: collective, immediate, worldwide grief with a soundtrack. The purple deluge taught a licensing lesson too — his catalog was famously OFF the streaming services (he fought the platforms’ economics loudly and early, and honestly, he saw the creator-economy fight coming a decade out), so a generation went hunting for the music and found scraps. Own your masters. In every industry. That phrase means something different here and also exactly the same thing. ...

Last night was the single greatest night of Champions League football ever played, and I refuse to hear counterarguments. In Madrid: Cristiano Ronaldo, 31 years old, playing his hundredth big game — scored a HATTRICK to overturn a 2-0 first-leg deficit against Wolfsburg. Three goals of pure willpower, because of course, because that’s the whole man in one boxscore. Real Madrid fed him every ball and he carried the entire team to the semi-finals. Absurd. Perfect. ...

The internet broke this week because of ELEVEN LINES OF CODE. A developer, after a naming dispute, unpublished all his npm modules — including “left-pad,” eleven lines that pad a string. Thousands of builds worldwide instantly failed: Babel, React tooling, half the JavaScript ecosystem, all transitively depending on a function a first-year student could write, all discovering it simultaneously at build time. npm un-unpublished it (raising its own governance questions), and the postmortem discourse has been GLORIOUS: dependency trees nobody audits, the left-pad-as-a-service economy, “have we forgotten how to program?” ...

AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol. Four games to one. The Go world’s confidence (#075) lasted exactly zero games. But the score isn’t the story. The story is MOVE 37, game two: AlphaGo played a shoulder hit on the fifth line that every professional commentator initially called a mistake — a move with a 1-in-10,000 chance of being played by a human, per AlphaGo’s own model. It wasn’t a mistake. It was better than what humans knew, and it reorganized the whole board fifty moves later. Lee Sedol left the room. Three thousand years of accumulated human theory, and the machine found a gap in it on live television. ...