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 ( 7606 )
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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 -
It's the Light
Posted on 29 January 2025
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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About That Funding Freeze – It's Stupid, Careless, and Cruel
Let's be clear, I do not like Donald Trump, and I certainly did not vote for him. Yet not too long ago I posted, The Vibes They Are a-Shiftin', in which I... Read more
Posted on 29 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
I Talk Loony Tunes with John McWhorter @3QD
I’ve got a new piece at 3 Quarks Daily: John McWhorter and I Talk About Cartoons That went up yesterday. Today Brooks Riley followed up with this: There's a... Read more
Posted on 29 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
That's an article in the NYTimes by Ezra Klein in which he interviews James Pogue. I asked Claude 3.5 to summarize it. * * * * * I’d like you to summarize the... Read more
Posted on 28 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The DeepSeek Breakthrough – What’s It Mean? [On the Difference Between...
Frankly, at the moment I’m inclined to think it means that Silicon Valley just got handed its lunch. Strutting around about AGI this, $500 billion that...... Read more
Posted on 28 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Four Versions of "She's Not There"
The fourth version is the one we played in "The Saint Matthew Passion," a band I played in back in 1970-71 or so.* Were were a rock band with horns, trumpet,... Read more
Posted on 27 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Old Neighborhood in Jersey City
Posted on 27 January 2025
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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I Was on the Web Before the New York Times Was, Me and Cuda Brown at Meanderings
Megan DeTrolio tells the story about how The New York Times got its domain name, and from one of its own reporters. On Jan. 22, 1996, in an article tucked away... Read more
Posted on 27 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Have the Chinese Taken the Lead in LLM Sweepstakes? [with Commentary by Dread...
Unbelievable results, feels like a dream—our R1 model is now #1 in the world (with style control)! đđ Beyond... Read more
Posted on 26 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Photos I've Recently Worked on
Posted on 26 January 2025
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
