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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LLaMA is Confused, Fails to Disambiguate People with Same Name
Complete utter fail at what used to be a core challenge in natural language understanding, disambiguating multiple people with same name. And hallucinations... Read more
Posted on 27 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Rhythmic Brain Activity
đŁđżđśđťđ°đśđ... Read more
Posted on 26 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Notes on How I Practice the Trumpet
Practice tends towards two kinds of things: exercises and real music. One does them for different purposes, that is to say, I have different things in mind... Read more
Posted on 26 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Let Kids Run Free; It's Better for Their Mental Health.
Peter Gray, David F. Lancy, David F. Bjorklund, Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Well-being: Summary of the Evidence,... Read more
Posted on 25 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
More Sunrise in Liberty State Park [9.12.11]
Posted on 25 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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This Just In: Jellyfish Can Learn!
Veronique Greenwood, Brainless Jellyfish Demonstrate Learning Ability, NYTimes, Sept. 22, 2023. From the article: Researchers who were not involved in the... Read more
Posted on 25 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Chipping Away at the "opacity" of ANNs
Are deep neural networks really black-boxes whose inner workings are opaque?Not quite:"... for any feed-forward ReLU network, there exists a global linear... Read more
Posted on 24 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Neel Nanda on That Paper: [LLMs] Have a 1 Way Flow from Inputs to Outputs, and...
This paper's been doing the rounds, so I thought I'd give a mechanistic interpretability take on what's going on here!The core intuition is that "When you see '... Read more
Posted on 24 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sunrise on Nov. 9, 2023 in Liberty State Park
Posted on 24 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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St. George Variations [ChatGPT]
This post is a companion piece to my earlier piece, Can an LLM identify ring-composition in a literary text? [ChatGPT], where I used the story of St. George... Read more
Posted on 24 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hoboken Terminal [to the World]
Posted on 24 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Culturally, GPT is US-centric [WEIRD in WEIRD Out]
GPT falls between Germany and New Zealand...@mmuthukrishna pic.twitter.com/lVkEhgOTO9— Joe Henrich (@JoHenrich) September 23, 2023 Computer scientists seem... Read more
Posted on 24 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What We Can Learn About the Origin of the Vertebrate Brain from the Lamprey
What's the origin of the vertebrate brain?No cerebellum for one!https://t.co/D8xoSdvQER pic.twitter.com/i7qVqHGUhy— Luiz Pessoa (@PessoaBrain) September 23, Read more
Posted on 23 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
There's a Better Way to Teach Music to Kids [who Are Born to Groove]
Sammy Miller, We’re Teaching Music to Kids All Wrong, NYTimes, Sept. 23, 2023. Opening paragraph: Each fall, as school starts up again, music educators witness ... Read more
Posted on 23 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is an AI Chill on the Horizon?
Called it. https://t.co/IZLLKFgxhD— Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) September 22, 2023 Yeah, he called it. I just wish he weren't so damned self-righteous about it. Read more
Posted on 22 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: What the Hey? [Hoboken All the Way]
Posted on 22 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Better at Chess, Still Sucks at Planning [look at the Red Box]
The new GPT3.5 completion version and the claims on its chess prowess caught my students' attention--and they tested to see if it got better at, you know,... Read more
Posted on 22 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI Systems as Infrastructure, Infrastructure as Open Source
AI systems are fast becoming a basic infrastructure.Historically, basic infrastructure always ends up being open source (think of the software infra of the... Read more
Posted on 21 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Are We Feeling Queasy Yet?
Posted on 21 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Chain-of-verification for LLMs Reduces Hallucination
- LLMs like ChatGPT Llama are prone to hallucinate in longform generation- Our method generates short questions that check facts in the full generation. Read more
Posted on 21 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
