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
-
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 )
-
Tech Utopians and AI Doomers Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
Matt Yglesias pushes back against Andreesen’s Techno-Optimism, The techno-optimist's fallacy. He sets it up: Earlier this year, I kept writing draft versions... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Return to South Philly
Posted on 23 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe as Techno-Optimist of the Future
Well, I’m not proposing that we reanimate him, much less (attempt to) fetch him with a time machine. I suppose what I have in mind is that the ideal... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Let Me Repeat, Scaling Won't Get LLMs to Climb to the Top of Mount AGI
Of course we are good at regurgitating correct-ish answers without any reasoning too (and efficiency often demands it!). One difference is that we are more... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
I'll Say It Again, "predict the Next Token" is a Reductive and Misleading Way...
This is an important point.While all the common *sampling* strategies only choose 1 token at a time,attention-layer training does *not* propagate gradients... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ways Hidden and Not So Hidden
Posted on 22 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
On the Road and Out of Control [It’s the Blues, People!]
The road was generally somewhere in the Capital District of upstate New York. Think of it as a bunch of towns and small cities centered around Albany, the... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Getting Ready for Fall
Posted on 21 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
Marc Andreesen is No Jack Kennedy, nor is There One Waiting in the Wings
As you may know, a couple of days ago venture capitalist Marc Andreesen – who, incidentally, is co-inventor of the MOSAI web browser – issued The Techno-Optimis... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Rough Beast: Yeats on the Middle East and World Politics
The Second Coming W. B. Yeats 1865 – 1939 Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Comparison of How Humans Continue a Pygmalion Prompt Vs. GPT-3.5 and GPT-4
Both human writers and GPT easily followed the typical features of the prompt, demonstrating the pervasiveness of the Pygmalionesque trope in our cultural... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Beyond Memorization
A paper that really illustrates both the unexpected power, and unexpected risks, that come from LLMs.Given text of anonymous posts on Reddit, GPT-4 can infer... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Deconstructive Irony of the Current Situation in Machine Learning: What Do...
It is a truth widely assumed that LLMS are opaque, black boxes, unintelligible – perhaps even inherently so. Think about that for a second. Read more
Posted on 20 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Analyzing the Activity of Population of 1500 Neurons
đđźđ đđź... Read more
Posted on 20 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Yesterday's Walk to and from the Library [Hoboken]
Posted on 20 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
Are (at Least Some) Large Language Models Holographic Memory Stores?
That’s been on my mind for the last week or two, ever since my recent work on ChatGPT’s memory for texts [1]. On the other than, there’s a sense in which it’s... Read more
Posted on 20 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Bye, Bye Prompt Engineering [for LLMs]
I have been saying prompt engineering is going away this paper shows whyIn a preregistered experiment, GPT4 was better able to solicit user preferences by jus... Read more
Posted on 20 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Washington Street Shop Windows at Night [Hoboken]
Posted on 19 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
Ramble on ChatGPT: Coming up on a One Year Anniversary, Time to Reflect on...
ChatGPT was released on November 31, 2022, and I started playing around with it on December 1, 2022. Perhaps early December 2023 would be a good time for me to... Read more
Posted on 19 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Shimmy, Shimmy: Shake. River, River: Light.
Posted on 18 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
