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 ( 7597 )
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Friday Fotos: Vertical Intrusions [Hoboken]
Posted on 20 March 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Shock and the Narrowing: How ChatGPT's Success May Have Compromised AI's...
This post was composed by Claude (Anthropic) after an interaction which I initiated with a prompt consisting of 1) a capsule summary about the history of... Read more
Posted on 20 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mystery Sequence in Hoboken
Posted on 19 March 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Brave New World: Notes on the Next 30 Years in AI [Work in Progress]
You may or may not be wondering why so many tweets have recently been showing up on New Savanna. There’s a good reason: I’ve been thinking. Read more
Posted on 19 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
This is What Happens When an Open-ended Research Project is Mis-perceived as...
Nadella paid $650 million to acquihire Mustafa Suleyman and 70 Inflection employees in March 2024. The job: make Copilot the AI product that justifies... Read more
Posted on 19 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
World Models, Some Notes
World Models: The old, the new and the wishful #SundayHarangueThere is a lot of chatter about world models of late--even more than can be explained by Yann... Read more
Posted on 18 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Taking Notes by Hand is More Effective Than by Laptop (?)
This is a 12-year-old study that has failed replication three times. And the underlying claim is still probably right.The paper is Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014... Read more
Posted on 18 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Psychological Well-Being for Introverts (like Me)
Dana G. Smith, Social Ties Help You Live Longer. What Does That Mean for Introverts? NYTimes, Oct. 9, 2025. Considering all the research around socializing and... Read more
Posted on 18 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Getting Your Bearings
Posted on 17 March 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Now You Can Run a 100B Parameter LLM on Your Laptop
Holy shit... Microsoft open sourced an inference framework that runs a 100B parameter LLM on a single CPU.It's called BitNet. And it does what was supposed to b... Read more
Posted on 17 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Brain's Dopamine Response to Music Peaks in the Mid-teens
Your brain peaked musically somewhere around age 16. Everything since then has been a dopamine echo.Between the ages of 12 and 22, the mesolimbic dopamine... Read more
Posted on 17 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Relevance of Intellectual History for Understanding Present Events (AI)
Jim Olds, The Chronology Problem, Mar. 12, 2026. We are surprisingly bad at knowing when things began. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, partly... Read more
Posted on 15 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Electrochemical Machine Has 100 Trillion Connections in a Volume the Size o...
That one neuron connects to about 7,000 others. Your brain has 86 billion of them. Do the math and you get somewhere around 100 trillion connections inside... Read more
Posted on 15 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Not So Long Ago During the Winter
Posted on 14 March 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Three for 3QD: Man-Machine Collaboration, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, American...
Generally when I post an article to 3 Quarks Daily I will follow up with a post here at New Savanna linking to the 3QD piece and extending or commenting on... Read more
Posted on 14 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: What’s a Tablescape?
Just what the name suggests, like a landscape only on a table top. I’ve been taking photos of my meals and posting them here since September of 2018. Read more
Posted on 13 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI as Coder, Reports from the Trenches
Clive Thompson, Coders Coded Their Job Away. Why Are So Many of Them Happy About It? NYTimes, Mar. 12, 2026. He and Brennan-Burke, who is 32, are still... Read more
Posted on 12 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Maybe the AI Industry is Waking Up, at Long Last
Two Turing-class AI researchers just raised $2B in three weeks to bet against every LLM company on the planet.Fei-Fei Li closed $1B for World Labs on February... Read more
Posted on 11 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Which One Doesn't Belong? [Hint: Yum]
Posted on 11 March 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Why Trump's Corruption is the Single Most Disturbing Thing About His Presidency...
A friend recently asked me for critiques of Trump’s performance. The first thing that came to mind was his corruption and, though I went on to say some other... Read more
Posted on 11 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
