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 ( 7356 )
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What LLMs Are Good at
To make it super clear, language models are awesome. Otherwise, I wouldn't spend 9 months of my life working hours after my day job on writing a book on them. Read more
Posted on 05 February 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Claude 3.5 Sonata Compares Three Images Showing Visual Chaos and Makes Some...
This is the second time I've set out to have Claude describe two or more images. I've already done that in Claude 3.5 Sonata describes two different photos and... Read more
Posted on 04 February 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Andrej Karpathy: "Vibe Coding"
There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's... Read more
Posted on 03 February 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Whimsical Monday: ChatGPT Draws a Picture of a Silver-Crested Swamp Swizzle
My father used to kid my sister and me about a bird he called a silver-crested swamp swizzle. As far as I know, it's a creature of his own invention. Read more
Posted on 03 February 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Into the Mystery [Indiana Jones Was Here]
Posted on 03 February 2025
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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TNSTASFL, That Goes for Knowledge Too. OR: Why There’s So Much AI Hype. [once...
Why is there so much hype about AI? Sure, it’s new, it’s interesting, and certainly has transformative potential. That’s one thing. Read more
Posted on 03 February 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is Trump Overextending Himself And, in Effect, Exposing His Flank? [Ezra Klein]
Ezra Klein, Don't Believe Him, NYTimes, Feb. 2, 2025. From the end of the article: The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The... Read more
Posted on 02 February 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
DeepSeek's Approach Only Works in Limited Technical Domains
If you look at their excellent paper code, the reward model is a logical function that was handcrafted progammed by engineers. Read more
Posted on 02 February 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Creativity and the Chatbot: GPT-4 Wins, for Now.
In a large representative sample of humans compared to GPT-4: "the creative ideas produced by AI chatbots are rated more creative [by humans ]than those... Read more
Posted on 02 February 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Do We Want from AI Agents? What Are We Likely to Get?
First, I present a Facebook post by Jonathan Mayhew, who teaches at The University of Kansas, about some recent frustrations he’s had using computers. Read more
Posted on 01 February 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Claude 3.5 Sonata Describes a Trio of Brass Musicians [on the 12/8 Path]
Lest you think Claude’s responses are rather concise, yes, they are. There was heavy web traffic during the chat. As always, my words are bold while Claude's ar... Read more
Posted on 01 February 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cory Doctorow: Bluesky and Enshittification
The lede: No one is the enshittifier of their own story. I would like to use Bluesky. They’ve done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on... Read more
Posted on 01 February 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
ChatGPT: Exploring the Digital Wilderness, Findings and Prospects
That is the title of my latest working paper. It summarizes and synthesizes much of the work I have done with ChatGPT to date and contains the abstracts and... Read more
Posted on 31 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
DeepSeek Works Though Distillation [Schmidhuber]
DeepSeek [1] uses elements of the 2015 reinforcement learning prompt engineer [2] and its 2018 refinement [3] which collapses the RL machine and world model of... Read more
Posted on 31 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How Long Can This Go On? A Short Note on American Politics
The Trumpists’ blitzkrieg was not unexpected, though I think it’s been faster and more extensive than anyone had anticipated. What I’m wondering: How long can... Read more
Posted on 31 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Reality Has Aspects Many and Various
Posted on 31 January 2025
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Football • {sports Commentary} • [Media Notes 154]
I confess, football doesn’t interest me very much, never has. But I’m an America and I live in America. So I can’t escape it. When I was in junior high school... Read more
Posted on 31 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sabina Hossenfelder on DeepSeek and Its Implications
4:08: As we discussed previously, some experts including Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus, doubt that Large language models will ever get us to general intelligence,... Read more
Posted on 30 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Three Diverse Gray-scale Shots
Posted on 30 January 2025
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Meeting of Minds: Richard F. Burton, Thor Heyerdahl, Marco Polo, and a Surprise...
Before I give you the conversation I cooked up with the help of Claude 3.5, let me explain roughly how things went. Once Claude learned that I wanted it to... Read more
Posted on 30 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
