computers
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: I Died of Dysentery
The glorious ways we fifth graders died in Mr. Mosher’s computer class. We strove to die in the most imaginable permutations possible.
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Weekly Geekery
Our intimate lives feed the meat grinder of big data. The first casualty of climate change: this adorable rodent. Racial bias in healthcare research, and why it’s dangerous. An exoplanet could soon go the way of Alderaan. The next great…
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Weekly Geekery
There is a looming rift in science journalism. Also, a looming rift in journalism journalism. Letting the robots take over. Brains are not computers. Death, plutonium, and our nuclear history.
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From Pen to Pentium
For many writers, after all, a word processor was as much an appliance as it was a deeply individualized instrument—more fax machine than fountain pen. … Still, the plastic, glass, and silicon devices had stories to tell, just as did…
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When Computers Choose Which Novels to Publish
We’re used to Amazon producing recommendations alongside books we buy, but are we prepared for a world where computerized data also picks what gets published? Inkitt, an electronic publishing platform, has announced that they will be utilizing algorithms to pick…
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Authors and the Automated
The Believer Logger contributes more insights into the never-ending conversation on the role of technology in our writing. Does it mean demise? Or can authors persist on in the face of an ever more autogenerated world?
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The Page Is Mightier than the Screen
For Lit Hub, David Denby reflects on the danger of losing young readers because of the influence of cell phone and computer screens: Electronic utopians say, “Calm down, nothing has been lost. If anything, the opportunities for reading have become much…
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Weekly Geekery
Computers know images better than you. Is virtual reality better than books? Stop calling it science fiction. Raising the minimum age of social media. Star Wars and predictable stories.
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Rise of the Poetic Machines
For Motherboard at VICE, Elizabeth Preston profiles the work of Sarah Harmon, a programmer in the field of computational creativity. Harmon has taken significant steps in designing programs that can learn the rules of language and literature to create their…
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The Rumpus Interview with Louisa Hall
Author Louisa Hall discusses her latest novel, Speak, the future of artificial intelligence, and how playing squash taught her a love of literary technique.
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The Rumpus Interview with William Gibson
Legendary technomodernist William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, talks about his latest book, The Peripheral, predicting the future, and how writing about Silicon Valley today feels like his early work.
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How Gone Is My Valley?
It does us all a disservice to separate the Valley’s current industrial action from that of its natural environment, human history and broader political context.