Bbenzon
Description
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. Intellectually, I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
MY BLOGS
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New Savanna
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
LATEST ARTICLES ( 7626 )
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Hokusai "Great Wave" Print Sells for $2.8 Million
Christie’s sold Katsushika Hokusai’s “Under the Well of the Great Wave off Kanagawa” for $2.8 million–a record high for the iconic woodblock print https://t. Read more
Posted on 22 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Report from Academia.edu • I’m Back! • Mar 22, 2023
Here’s the stats from 7:30 this morning: I’m definitely down from the peak of March 13, but I seem to be running a bit higher than things were in February. Can ... Read more
Posted on 22 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How to Make a Fart Sound Using Ableton • [Winnebago Trickster Cycle] • {ChatGPT...
I know, it's ridiculous. But it's also very human. Here, for example, is an excerpt from episode 23 in the Winnebago Trickster cycle as collected by Paul... Read more
Posted on 22 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
"Humans Are Not Special, Scale Is" [brain Evolution]
This is the main driving assumption of my research and it is still holding up after 10 years: Humans are not special, scale is. The other main fact (sparsity):... Read more
Posted on 21 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Interactive Story-telling with ChatGPT [What Does ChatGPT Know, and When?]
I’ve asked ChatGPT to tell many stories. Most of the time I’ve given it a simple prompt – often as simple as “Tell me a story” – but I’ve also asked it to... Read more
Posted on 21 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Software of the Future: Everyone Codes!
it seems likely to me that all computer users will soon have ability to 1) develop small software tools from scratch, 2) describe *changes* they'd like made to... Read more
Posted on 20 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Language, LLMs, and Culture: Out of Plato's Cave
Jon Evans, Language is out Latent Space, Gradient Ascendant, March 14, 2023. An analogy for how LLMs work: Another analogy, as two combined can be more... Read more
Posted on 20 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Steve Pinker on AI Doom [My Take: a Rube Goldberg Confabulation of Brobdingnagia...
Richard Hanania has posted an interesting conversation with Steve Pinker, Pinker on Alignment and Intelligence as a "Magical Potion", March 17, 2023. Read more
Posted on 20 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Khan Academy Has a GPT-4 Learning Guide
From the YouTube page: Khan Academy announcing its limited pilot of GPT-4 learning guide. We believe that AI has the potential to transform learning in a... Read more
Posted on 19 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What’s up with Animal House [Media Notes 87]
I never saw it in theaters, though I certainly heard about it. Animal House came out in 1978, just as I was finishing graduate school and about to take my... Read more
Posted on 19 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Top Posts at New Savanna 19 Mar 23 [& Notes About Why]
Every once in a while I make a post about what’s going on here at New Savanna, though I tend to include action at my Academia page under that tag as well. Back... Read more
Posted on 19 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sabine Hossenfelder on the Race for Practical Fusion Power
From YouTube:In this video we survey the biggest and most interesting nuclear fusion startups which want to make nuclear fusion commercially relevant. Read more
Posted on 18 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Duck Soup and The Magnificent Seven [Media Notes 86]
Yes, I know, a strange juxtaposition. There’s a reason for it. Both films end in carnage, which is quite visible in one, but not the other. Duck Soup is a 1933... Read more
Posted on 18 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Vector Semantics and “Kubla Khan,” Part 2
I want to continue the line of thought I opened up on March 14, Vector semantics and the (in-context) construction of meaning in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan. Read more
Posted on 17 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Incredible Shrinking LLM, and Still (almost) as Powerful as the...
Kudos to @zhansheng for the fast LLaMa implementation and @rtaori13, Ishaan Gulrajani, Tianyi Zhang, @lxuechen, @yanndubs for the incredible Alpaca dataset and... Read more
Posted on 17 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
GPT-4 Does Cool Stuff, but It Still Hallucinates
pic.twitter.com/Iz1c26t51W— Bill Benzon, BAM! Bootstrapping Artificial Minds (@bbenzon) March 15, 2023 I think dealing with hallucination is going to prove,... Read more
Posted on 15 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
John Von Neumann, the Greatest Mind of the 20th Century?
0:25 Ananyo’s book, The Man from the Future, about game theory inventor and polymath John von Neumann 6:38 Early life as a mathematical wunderkind 10:16 Von... Read more
Posted on 14 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Vector Semantics and the (in-context) Construction of Meaning in Coleridge’s...
Whatever else I have been interested over a long and varied intellectual career, I have always been interested in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan. Read more
Posted on 14 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Brain of the Fruit Fly Has Been Fully Mapped, 3,016 Neurons and 548,000...
This? This is wild. Full connectome of the larval Drosophila brain. https://t.co/s5KiPZL4xC pic.twitter.com/7jPPRd4mUS— Dr. Stephanie (@punkrockscience) March... Read more
Posted on 14 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Historical Psychology – "many Aspects of Psychology Have Evolved Culturally...
Our new paper (with @JoHenrich) is out in Current Directions in Psych Science. https://t.co/0jRV2i5dZO pic.twitter.com/nkyYwooHis— Mohammad Atari... Read more
Posted on 14 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
