Dan Sinykin

300 years from now the last literary critic will spend their lonely life wondering, “why did all the classic literary characters wear dirty diapers?”

I think I finally found a good, ethical use for AI: have it rewrite classic literature but revised so that in each case the protagonist is wearing a dirty diaper.

Frontiers | Computational hermeneutics: evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology Generative AI (GenAI) systems are increasingly recognized as cultural technologies, yet current evaluation frameworks often treat culture as a variable to be...

I'm excited to be a co author on this new paper, "Computational Hermeneutics," with a bunch of other great scholars from the humanities + computer science. In it, we lay out concepts for evaluating gen AI's capacity for interpretation esp ambiguity, context, etc. www.frontiersin.org/journals/art...

Inside the Body of Black Feminism: Science, Race, Culture

Everything is the worst rn. Work keeps on keeping on. Support research in feminist and ethnic studies (not necessarily mine). If you are inclined: PREORDER dukeupress.edu/inside-the-b... Discount code E26PINTO @dukepress.bsky.social

cool!

I've seen versions of your project in a couple different forms over the years and look forward to its completion! If you have links to the CS studies, do share

I've been wondering ever since when we're going to see studies based on Ted's example....

One of the things keeping me afloat is that today I teach one of my favorite essays in recent years, Ted Underwood’s “Why Literary Time is Measured in Minutes” alongside Yauney et al’s “update” from a year later, after teaching Genette last week. The little formalist in me is so happy

😍🙏

My next undergrad researcher came to me with a vague curiosity and I just shoved Post45 at her and said “this is what you should look at and strive to try to contribute to”

The one thing Trump voters I know would say with confidence (to me) to justify their vote in the last election was: Kamala's a hawk; Trump won't start new wars.

If the U.S. had to lapse into personalist rule by a doddering narcissist with a thirst for blood, I’d at least have liked our media institutions not to pick the same time window to hire a slew of people with all the perception of a rotten grapefruit.

The answer to the first two questions below is yes if certain conditions are met: Putting reviews in front of online readers; not expecting/caring that every review do equally "well," traffic-wise; and caring about subscribers' desires/behaviors beyond clicks. Etc.

Building benchmarks is only one way scholars can help steer AI development. We can also measure the effects of AI on students, build better datasets, or tune new open models. Openness itself could be our most important contribution. Universities have huge libraries, and the legal doctrine of fair use should protect models trained on those collections for a nonprofit educational purpose. At the moment, we are not pressing this advantage. Higher education has been so cautious about fair use that the private sector can now train more freely on our libraries (via Google Books) than is possible for academic AI researchers. We need to be bolder: It is our duty to ensure library collections remain open to the public in a form that empowers 21st-century readers. If our intellectual heritage gets enclosed in proprietary tools, we will find ourselves making the same bad bargain we made with scientific publishers, who sell our own research back to us at a steep markup.

We're in a strange situation rn where Google can train freely on books from university libraries—but researchers *at* universities have limited access. I'm optimistic this can be fixed, but if you're in admin or working at a foundation, please know: univs are failing here & resources are needed.

hundreds of posts attacking jamelle bouie for making the soberest and most reasonable point imaginable. some of you people need to find god or at least step back and consider that posting on here accomplishes literally nothing

For CNN, a Change in Ownership Means a Suddenly Uncertain Future

There's nothing "uncertain" about it. Larry Ellison is building an autocrat-friendly propaganda machine and whatever shaky journalism originated from this place will soon be dead.

While not universally true, it is generally true that the tighter the control on production & distribution you place on an intellectual work, the less likely it will survive into posterity.

If you want something to last, make it good, make lots of it, and make it easy for others to make more of it.

So we’re all going to spend that $10-$20 a month on local, niche, &/or independent news subscriptions…right?

Transit Books — Postcard from Liverpool David Hayden “I sit on a rotten bench by the river Wensum in Norwich, at the edge of early old age.”

A 'Postcard from Liverpool' that I wrote some years ago for @transitbooks.bsky.social, courtesy of @lizastjames.bsky.social. www.transitbooks.org/postscript/p...

Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War A statement from our CEO on national security uses of AI

so let's see. anthropic's like: we are SO into the military-industrial complex. like SO SO into it. LOVE the department of war. but, uhh, when trump asked us to do mass domestic surveillance and make fully autonomous weapons, that's a bridge too far www.anthropic.com/news/stateme...

I will vote for whichever nominee vows to break up the media conglomerations.

Book cover of Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction by Amy De'Ath

Behind Our Backs is out!

"In this brilliant study of social forms, De'Ath shows how a surprisingly speculative strain of contemporary poetry explores unseen connections between the domination of value and the process of feminization."
—Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago

https://ow.ly/IJRh50YgW1o

just finished this book the other night. the scene of the miserable antisocial farmer at the farmer's market is gonna stick with me for a while

Does S&S even want a brand identity anymore? I really don’t know what “an S&S book” is these days.

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Please buy/order at your local independent bookstore, @bookshop.org, or @libro.fm

#BookSky 📚 💙

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association. …

Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction.

true, kkr is an accelerant, not a ground cause

ah, private equity!

'Merritt told PW that the list includes several authors who already have a track record of success with evangelical Christian publishers, but wanted the "marketing power and the status" of the flagship S&S imprint.'