[…]upholstered in velvet. Even embittered and alienated, it appears that genius is preferable to comfort. Not every child of a creative sort needs to suffer, but maybe their fathers need to labor over things most people choose to […]
[…]the advantages this appointment will bring to Typhon (the Gandia plant will be “declared surplus [and] sold back to Typhon”); Cates’s absurd justification for annexing Malwi (a major shareholder is “having some trouble here parking her damn car” because a Malwian diplomat is using her parking spot [428]); the calamitous results of Malwi’s annexation (Doctor De’s soldiers, under the aegis of Typhon, have “decima[ted]” the Malwians because they believed their toy weapons “were real”); and, finally, Cates’s plan to “drag in labor” from “some other damn” African nation. All of this is grotesque, and it is obvious that readers are […]
[…]market lay still in the future. Still, there were obvious drawbacks. It is difficult to do justice to complex literary texts when one virtually obliterates the traces of their historicity and robs them of the fingerprints of their age; then again, one might argue just the opposite and say that there is much to be gained, too. For one thing, Gaddis finally appeared with a loud bang as the literary giant he had always been to his devoted readers. For another, Germans were able to take in, perhaps even ponder and digest, an entire ecosystem of literary craft and technique […]
[…]Border Protection agents already use information about how someone speaks or looks as a pretext to search individuals in the 100-mile border zone, or to deny individuals entry to the U.S.,” Ava Kofman writes, “experts fear that vocal emotion detection software could make such biases routine, pervasive, and seemingly ‘objective.’ ” Post-Fordist, data-driven problems disproportionately affect the most vulnerable groups, even as they ensnare everyone, too, one way or another. Colin Koopman’s work on the politics of information accounts for the technologically sophisticated (and often opaque) ways human beings are increasingly at the mercy of their datasets. By critically examining […]
[…]Hans Kristian. 2012. “Can the Web Save the Book? A Reply to Curtis White’s The Latest Word.” Electronic Book Review, August. […]
[…]seek to “align” LLMs to their interests — bending these language-producing machines into compliant customer service representatives. Reinforcement learning is a venerable supervised machine learning technique in which upvotes and downvotes are used to improve performance. As more of these are applied over time, the process alters a software system to more frequently produce the desired results and less often produce those that are undesirable. There are various ways to employ reinforcement learning, some of which don’t involve people at all — a game-playing system can play itself, for instance, rewarding itself for a win and punishing itself for a […]
[…]music. But this has rarely been used as an argument for the inherent “musicality” of English, and for song composers it can be a hindrance as much as an aid, since they must constantly evade the obviousness of the four-beat pattern to achieve anything original. Did the melodies of ancient Greek music follow the accents of the text? The evidence is confusing. The few fragments of music from the classical era seem to indicate that they did not necessarily do so. Also, it has been argued, most lyrics were in strophic form, and a melody designed for one strophe would […]
[…]She has also published eleven digital poems. Her multi-platform V consists of six works, the latest being Vniverse, an iPad app co-created with Ian Hatcher and keyed to the two-in-one print book, V : WaveTercets / Losing L’una, from SpringGun Press. Zone : Zero, a book with accompanying CD, includes both print and digital versions of slippingglimpse, an eco-poem that maps text to Atlantic wave patterns, and of Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot, winner of a Best of the Net Award in 1999. Recent digital literary work includes House of Trust, with Ian Hatcher, a generative poem in praise […]
[…]digital media. Bogost’s current research interests include videogame criticism (the subject of a forthcoming book from MIT Press, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism) and videogame rhetoric (including the function of ideology, politics, advertising, and education in games). Bogost is also the founder of two companies. Ian Bogost is an academic videogame researcher and game designer. Bogost is Assistant Professor of Literature Communication and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he teaches and researches in undergraduate and graduate programs in digital media. Bogost’s current research interests include videogame criticism (the subject of a forthcoming book from MIT Press, […]
[…]currently Lead Game Designer for Floodgate Entertainment in Waltham, Massachusetts, creating the latest generation of multiplayer and 3D games for cell phones and other mobile […]