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The year of social media soul-searching: Twitter dies, X and Threads are born and AI gets personal

We lost Twitter and got X. We tried out Bluesky and Mastodon (well, some of us did). We fretted about AI bots and teen mental health. We cocooned in private chats and scrolled endlessly as we did in years past. For social media users, 2023 was a year of beginnings and endings, with some soul-searching in between.

AI pioneer says public discourse on intelligent machines must give ‘proper respect to human agency’

She’s an important figure behind today’s artificial intelligence boom, but not all computer scientists thought Fei-Fei Li was on the right track when she came up with the idea for a giant visual database called ImageNet that took years to build.

Cocoon is Eurogamer’s game of 2023

Cocoon. Of course it’s our game of the year. Cocoon is ingenious, elegant, and thought-provoking. It’s precise, expressive, and generous. It takes game design forward even as it seems to emerge from its deep history. But more than anything, Cocoon is playful. Its puzzles, its tricks, all yield to playfulness. Hopefully you’ve played it yourself by now, but if you haven’t, know this: Cocoon is a game about traversing strange landscapes, and discovering that these landscapes actually live inside a series of orbs. These orbs can in turn be picked up and carried around and taken with you as you explore other landscapes – landscapes which are themselves contained in their own orbs. You can be inside something that is inside something else that is inside the thing you are carrying. Cue much design brilliance. Here is the thing, though. I’ve been playing Cocoon and thinking about it for a good chunk of this year. And more recently I’ve been talking to colleagues about it and reading through reader comments on it as part of our end-of-the-year articles. (Look for the reader list on December 31st: it’s luminous.) And what’s interesting to me, and almost disconcerting, is that there’s this great, ingenious, singular game out there, and we all seem to agree on it. Read more