News and Sundry
Is there a form of writing that
is bad at? He’s one of the best English-language literary translators working right now—from German at least, if my opinion counts for anything. As it turns out, he does great reporting also, and has a long piece in The Baffler about murder in the Philly drill scene. Drill, for those who don’t know, is a particularly violent rap subculture, which originated in Chicago in the early 2010s and has subsequently spread across the globe. It’s a subject that can get impenetrable real quick, even if you’re reasonably knowledgeable about contemporary music. Luckily, Nate is here to explain, a pleasure to read as always, even if the portrait he paints of Philadelphia is pretty dire. Come for the crime reporting, stick around for a meditation on the fraught and mysterious causality of crime itself.Sam Moss, editor of the fantastic ergot. magazine, has just announced a debut novel, to be published by the promising new outfit Double Negative. From the publisher’s website: “Endless fields of grass. A sky so bright there are barely shadows. At the center of this expanse is The Veldt Institute, an austere structure governed by austere routine. The patients perform their tasks, bathe in the veldtlicht, contemplate silence, all following the prescriptions of the institute’s doctors, seven in all, each with his or her specialization.” You can read an excerpt of Sam’s book here, courtesy of
One More Round On the LLM Treadmill
Last week, I promised an extended response to the translator and publisher Susan Curtis. In a recent editorial, she argued that her peers should embrace so-called “AI” technology. I’ve done a bit of the same, albeit in a much more limited fashion, mostly because internet search engines have degenerated drastically over the past few years, and LLMs have an impressive ability to aggregate and analyze information, provided—and this is a big “provided”—they don’t hallucinate and, for instance, generate characters out of nowhere, like ChatGPT did when analyzing one of my original stories.
Well, I’m not going to deliver on that promise (or threat), at least not yet. Suffice it to say, some claims made by BookTranslate, the company Curtis wrote about, deserve careful scrutiny. I’m not going to reveal anything that a more skeptical reader could have sussed out immediately, but I do want to be evenhanded and provide good examples of how LLMs operate in practice, not in principle, and that takes time
.