"This is just so monumentally dumb, though not entirely surprising in a state run by theocrats who’ve already banned the catch-all bogeyman of 'Critical Race Theory,' along with a woman’s right to abortion, while at the same time letting unstable 18-year-olds buy assault rifles." - LitHub
Laura Miller: "At its best, (Spare) reads like one of those popular late-1990s novels about British singletons blundering their way out of solipsistic immaturity into self-awareness and true love: if not quite Bridget Jones's Diary, certainly High Fidelity or About a Boy." - Slate
A makerspace in a small central New York village; a network of food pantries in Canada; recording studios with instruments in the Netherlands; resources carried to remote tribes in Kenya on the backs of camels. These are all libraries, all radically different, but all bound by a common mission. - Publishers Weekly
"It turns out the bots are no better at journalism — and perhaps worse — than their would-be human masters. On Tuesday, CNET began appending lengthy correction notices to some of its AI-generated articles after Futurism, another tech site, called out the stories for containing some 'very dumb errors.'" - MSN (The Washington Post)
A team of researchers led by Pablo Villalobos at Epoch AI recently predicted that programs such as the eerily impressive ChatGPT will run out of high-quality reading material by 2027. Without new text to train on, AI’s recent hot streak could come to a premature end. - The Atlantic
Some smaller independent publishers—mostly outside of New York City—are concerned that the public nature of the strike, with wage demands made public, is raising unrealistic financial expectations. - Publishers Weekly
StoryWeaver can bring more languages into conversation with one another—but the tech is still new, and it depends on data that only speakers of underserved languages can provide. This raises concerns about how the labor of the native speakers powering A.I. tools will be valued. - Slate
The job is not easy. Depending on how you count, there are about a dozen Indigenous languages in our state, and every one of them has its own set of protocols about who can provide materials, and which parts of the languages and culture can be shared. - The Guardian
I’ve loved my publishing experience with HarperCollins. Everyone I’ve worked with has been a smart adviser and a fierce advocate for a slightly weird first novel in a challenging marketplace. And yet, since November, part of me has worried about today, knowing how conflicted I’d feel. - Slate
"The flat, square block of brownish sandstone has carved scribbles, which … are up to 2,000 years old. … Older runes have been found on other items, but not on stone." - AP
Every great national prose, in just about any tongue, reaches its high meridian only by way of a prolonged and constant negotiation of just this tension between beauty and sublimity—between the decorative and the august, or between the splendid and the lucid. And this comes only at the end of long epochs of development. - The Lamp
Public library branches in Boulder and Englewood, a Denver suburb, were closed to the public for several days after tests found methamphetamine on surfaces and in air vents in the restrooms, apparently due to patrons smoking crystal. - The New York Times
Using a technique called “stylometry”, it can be established that James Patterson probably wrote most of The President is Missing. Stylometry uses computers to statistically analyse the frequency of words in a text. It can be applied to a variety of research purposes, most notably, authorship attribution. - The Conversation
