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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Bring Back Home Ec and Shop
Pamela Paul, To Prepare Kids for the Future, Bring Back Shop and Home Ec, NYTimes, 11.12.23. Alas: The kind of classes that used to cut into desk time have... Read more
Posted on 12 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Use of RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) is Just Another (freakin'!)...
I find it hard to buy the claims on the supposed hallucination improvements for LLMs by RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation).Seems to me that when RAG is claime... Read more
Posted on 11 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
LeCun Sees a World Where All Interaction with the Digital World Will Be Though...
A panel on AI at the Paris Peace Forum today.Starting at 42'00, I plot the future of AI: all of our interactions with the digital world will be mediated by AI... Read more
Posted on 11 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Blues Revival in Mississippi Delta Brings "Kingfish" to Music Scene | 60 Minutes
Thanks to my friend, Ken Drumm, who tipped me to this program. You can find out more about Ken in my current 3QD piece, On the Road with the Out of Control... Read more
Posted on 10 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Once More, Ginkgoes [Hoboken]
Posted on 10 November 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Whaling, Andreesen, Investment, and the Risk Premium
Whale's tooth scrimshawed by my uncle, Rune Ronnberg. In yesterday’s ramble I noted that my 3 Quarks Daily column for December would be about the current state... Read more
Posted on 10 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
I Love a Parade
Posted on 09 November 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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November Ramble: AI, Yevick, of AI, Much Ado, Photos
There’s a mixed bag of tricks on my plate these days. Let’s run through them. LLMs and holography This is a major chunk of work. I’ve written a bunch of materia... Read more
Posted on 09 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Japanese Kindergarten with a Totoro Theme
View this post on Instagram A post shared by ç°ĺ˘ć´ťĺ厜/Climate... Read more
Posted on 09 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Interview with Lee Morgan [+ The Gigolo]
The interview starts at about 03:31. Lee Morgan's one of my top three or four jazz trumpet players. The interview is interlaced with several tracks of Morgan's... Read more
Posted on 08 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What’s Going On? LLMs and IS-A Sentences
For the moment I have decided that Waddington’s classic diagram of the epigenetic landscape is a useful way of thinking about when happens when an LLM responds... Read more
Posted on 08 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hoboken at Night
Posted on 08 November 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Playing the Blues @ 3 Quarks Daily with Out of Control
I’ve got a new post at 3 Quarks Daily: On the Road with The Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band,... Read more
Posted on 07 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) – World-spanning Thoughts [Media Notes 99]
I’ve just watched Godzilla: King of the Monsters – in three sessions over two days (is there any movie capable of fully holding my attention for two hours... Read more
Posted on 07 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Been Reading Too Much About AI (& Watching Too Much Scifi)
Posted on 07 November 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Bye Bye AGI: “Most Knowledge Necessary to Make Scientific Progress is Not...
I spent months working on domain-specific search engines and knowledge discovery apps for biomedicine and eventually figured that synthesizing "insights" or... Read more
Posted on 07 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
ChatGPT of the 17th Century
I officially release MonadGPT, a chatGPT of the 17th century. MonadGPT is a finetune of @NousResearch excellent chat model, Mistral-Hermes on 10,000 excerpts... Read more
Posted on 06 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Something Simple, Easy to Understand
Posted on 06 November 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Once More Around the Block: LLMs Are Trapped by Their Training Data, Which...
Part of the confusion is that in a space as rich as natural language, in-distribution, out-of-distribution, generalization aren't well-defined terms. Read more
Posted on 06 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Qualifies a Person as an AI Expert?
They know a lot about their computer systems. But they don't know much more, if any, about the mind, intelligence, consciousness, perception, and language than... Read more
Posted on 06 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
