Weekend Reads (March 15): Internet Archive, Math Rock, X Attack, Volkswagen, Nebula Awards
Recommended weekend reading material for March 15, 2025.
Every week, I compile a list of articles in order to give subscribers like you something interesting and thought-provoking to read over the weekend.
Record labels are currently suing the Internet Archive, claiming that its Great 78 Project — which aims to digitize millions of 78rpm recordings released between 1898 and the 1950s — is mass copyright infringement. But archivists and historians disagree.
To Seubert and IA fans, there seems to be little evidence that the Great 78 Project is meaningfully diverting streams from labels’ preferred platforms. Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” is perhaps the most heavily streamed song in the case, with nearly 550 million streams on Spotify compared to about 15,000 views on the Great 78 Project. Most of the other songs at issue were viewed at most “hundreds of times” on IA, music labels’ complaint said.
“The Internet Archive is not hurting the revenue of the recording industry at all,” Seubert suggested, while noting that his opinions don’t “mean squat” since he’s not a lawyer. “It has no impact on their revenue.” Instead, he suspects that labels’ lawsuit is “somehow vindictive,” because the labels perhaps “don’t like the Internet Archive’s way of pushing the envelope on copyright and fair use.”
Erick Bradshaw’s guide to math rock draws connections between hardcore, Black Sabbath, King Crimson, Bad Brains, and Black Flag, and highlights such seminal artists as Breadwinner, Don Caballero, June of 44, and A Minor Forest.
Netflix used AI to create an HD version of A Different World, a sitcom that originally aired on NBC from 1987 to 1993. Not surprisingly, the results are pretty dodgy, with “mangled hands, misaligned facial features, bungled logos, and overall smeary lines that don’t meet up.”
Did we really need a smeared reimaging of a beloved 90s sitcom? A Different World is now besmirched by its association with Bill Cosby, but it was culturally important when it came out, confronting social issues like the HIV crisis in a mainstream way. It’s clearly important enough to put on Netflix; why isn’t it important enough to present viewers with a good viewing experience?
The Tow Center for Digital Journalism reviewed eight AI tools, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok, to see how good they are at retrieving and citing news content. Spoiler alert: They aren’t.
Most of the tools we tested presented inaccurate answers with alarming confidence, rarely using qualifying phrases such as “it appears,” “it’s possible,” “might,” etc., or acknowledging knowledge gaps with statements like “I couldn’t locate the exact article.” ChatGPT, for instance, incorrectly identified 134 articles, but signaled a lack of confidence just fifteen times out of its two hundred responses, and never declined to provide an answer. With the exception of Copilot — which declined more questions than it answered — all of the tools were consistently more likely to provide an incorrect answer than to acknowledge limitations.
Elon Musk blamed Ukraine for the recent cyberattacks that took X offline, but cybersecurity experts explain why that’s not necessarily the case.
Web traffic analysis experts who tracked the incident on Monday were quick to emphasize that the type of attacks X seemed to face — distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks — are launched by a coordinated army of computers, or a “botnet,” pummeling a target with junk traffic in an attempt to overwhelm and take down its systems. Botnets are typically dispersed around the world, generating traffic with geographically diverse IP addresses, and they can include mechanisms that make it harder to determine where they are controlled from.
“It’s important to recognize that IP attribution alone is not conclusive. Attackers frequently use compromised devices, VPNs, or proxy networks to obfuscate their true origin,” says Shawn Edwards, chief security officer of the network connectivity firm Zayo.
File this under “More evidence that you shouldn’t believe a single word that comes out of Elon Musk’s mouth.” As the article points out, several of X’s own servers weren’t properly secured, making it easier for attackers to target them. It’s also highly convenient that this attack came from a country that Musk has routinely criticized.
Related: So far in 2025, Musk’s net worth has dropped by more than $100 billion. “The decline is largely tied to Tesla’s struggling stock price, broader investor concerns about the increased competition in the electric vehicle (EV) market, and the knock-on impacts of Musk’s political activities on his business ventures.” Don’t feel too bad for Musk, though: he’s still got $330 billion.
Following consumer criticism as well as increasing regulations, Volkswagen is bringing back physical buttons in their vehicles.
Volkswagen is planning a return to physical buttons in its future vehicles over haptic sliders and touchscreen toggles for vital functions such as climate controls. The automaker’s design head Andreas Mindt told Autocar that the company “will never, ever make this mistake again” and promises to bring together physical controls for volume, heating controls, fan speed, and hazard light activation below the touchscreen for all cars starting with next year’s ID 2all.
Via TLDR Design.
Touchscreens might look cool on the bridge of the Enterprise-D, but nothing beats an honest-to-goodness button when you’re just trying to control your car’s temperature.
The nominees for the 2024 Nebula Awards have been announced. The awards include “Best Novel” and “Best Novella” as well as “Outstanding Dramatic Presentation” and “Best Game Writing.” The winners will be announced on June 7 during the 60th annual Nebula Awards Conference.
Video game actors are pushing to get more recognition and protection given their medium’s economic and cultural importance.
“There was a time when working in television — before the rise of prestige TV — was seen as a step down from film,” Steve Kniebihly, a prominent cinematic and performance-capture director (Resident Evil 3, Resident Evil Village), tells EW over email. “Video games have suffered from a similar perception for a long time. But now? We’re in the era of prestige video games. Actors like Neil, who understood early on the potential of this medium and fully committed to it, are an absolute delight to work with. They don’t treat it as just a job — they see it as an opportunity to craft deep, nuanced characters that resonate with players in a way that no other medium can achieve.”
Related: Ashly Burch was the lead actress in Horizon Zero Dawn, one of the most acclaimed Playstation games of the last ten years. But even with all of the praise and acclaim that Burch received for her performance, Sony still saw fit to experiment with an AI-generated version of her character.
Writing for Mere Orthodoxy, Ana Siljak finds John Le Carré’s classic spy novels to be surprisingly relevant to our modern conspiracy-filled era.
Conspiracy mindedness is the sense of a terrible burden to reveal the entire truth to an unbelieving mass, to turn humanity away from its unwitting path to destruction. Turning away from this, a person can notice the “particular” and pay attention to the human being next door, on the street, or sharing your prison cell. Trust can never be rebuilt by governments or political parties. It must be painstakingly constructed out of interpersonal relations with spouses, neighbors, and bowling leagues.
Related: Back in 2020, I wrote about the appeal of conspiracy theories like those spread during the COVID pandemic. “Conspiracy theories offer simple explanations for complex situations. These explanations offer their adherents a sense of agency where they have none and a sense of control over essentially uncontrollable events.”
From the Blog
It’s been awhile since I’ve written about a favorite Star Trek episode, so I wrote about the one where a godlike entity puts the Enterprise crew to the test. (Which really narrows it down, I know.)
Be it Q, Trelane, or V’ger, these entities occupy an interesting spot within Star Trek’s officially secular universe. Even Star Trek, it seems, has a “God-shaped hole,” and such entities are used to explore the conflict between faith and science, examine weighty philosophical themes, test our beloved characters’ mettle (and by extension, all of humanity), and see how well Starfleet’s utopian humanism fares against the universe’s indifference.
Which brings us to Nagilum from season two’s “Where Silence Has Lease.” Arguably the most enigmatic and disturbing “god” in the Star Trek universe, this strange entity is a fine representation of the cosmicism expressed in Stephen Crane’s famous poem, “A Man Said to the Universe.”
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