The Sunday Papers

Sunday! What more do you need to know?

“AI is here to stay” is a common refrain. Mike Cook tackles the meaning and limits of that phrase, with apt comparisons to asbestos.

While you don’t need special protective gear to remove ChatGPT-written blog posts, the major advantage asbestos has is that we know what it looks like and can identify it with confidence once it has been detected. AI content detection is an incredibly hard problem, and one that we are nowhere near close to solving. What makes it harder is that content detection depends on us having a good understanding of how many generative models there are out there (which we don’t), and having access to them (which we also don’t), as well as being able to act fast enough to keep up in the arms race against new models (which we can’t).

Simon Parkin did the hard work of trying to explain Death Stranding 2 to the readership of The Atlantic.

This sequel emerges in a different moment, when anxieties around our simultaneous reliance on, and unease with, digital connectivity and computing power are at a crescendo. These are Kojima and his team’s chosen themes. Now that remote working has become normalized and loneliness rates surge despite constant digital interaction, most question whether our social apps and productivity tools genuinely bring us closer, or merely accelerate a hollowing-out of communities. Simultaneously, advances in AI and automation invite uncomfortable questions about who will be displaced by these new technologies.

Longer suspensions curb bad behaviour without driving players away, according to a new study in Roblox. I wonder how long they’d have to suspend the paedophiles for.

Misbehavior on digital platforms can be tricky to manage. Issue warnings, and you risk not deterring bad behavior. Block too readily, and you might drive away your user base and open yourself to accusations of censorship. But a new study, presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, suggests a more effective path forward.

Jessica Curry, composer of the soundtracks for Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, is releasing a new album. This marks a return to making music after a truly terrible few years, which Keith Stuart spoke to Curry about for The Guardian.

“Like many people I had an extraordinarily painful and difficult pandemic,” she says. “I watched my dad die on Zoom, and then my auntie and more family members. Then they found a tumour in my ovary, and I had major abdominal surgery, but the operation had gone wrong, so I nearly died in 2022. While I was recovering from the third operation, the roof of our house fell in.”

I do not envy anyone trying to make an accessible primer to the current state of the video game industry in under 1000 words. I think Joshua Rivera gets some of the important facts across, at least, in an article for Slate titled: The Nintendo Switch 2 may be the last of its kind. Although when zoomed out this far you can kind of make the narrative look however you want.

The casual observer has no way of knowing this, but the video game industry as we know it is effectively over. This might sound confusing—after all, don’t games still make huge amounts of money? Yes, they do. But the nature of that money, or how it’s made, has never been more different. The old model—the sort exemplified by the Nintendo Switch 2, where someone purchases a console with the expectation that they’ll be able to buy and play a steady cadence of interesting and varied games for it over the better part of a decade—is evaporating. Instead, something more amorphous and extractive has taken its place.

The old model of the video game industry is over. The just-released Switch 2, which operates under that old model, and which is already enormously successful, is, well, uh, well, it might be the last, see, uh.

The New York Times published a list of the 100 best films of the 21st century.

My favourite living jazz pianist, Hiromi, appeared on KEXP with her current project, so go listen to Yes! Ramen!! and see what true joy looks like. If you’re enjoying the explosive big band sound of the Mario Kart World score – and how could you not – you should try Sheena Ringo’s latest song, the title of which Google translates for me as “Awake In The Moon”. Although this week’s true musical revelation was Tiberius b, whose debut album Neverything is perhaps ten songs of perfection. I think the title track is my favourite, but Immaculate is top three, and it’s on YouTube, so have that.