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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A Quick Remark on So-called “hallucinations” in LLMs and Humans
That LLMs “hallucinate” is well-known, though I prefer the term “confabulate.” They just make stuff up. They don’t do it intentionally, or with intent to... Read more
Posted on 21 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Addicted to Disneyland? You Aren't the Only One. [Something's Rotten in the Stat...
Daryl Austin, The scientific reason why you can’t stop going to Disneyland, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 19, 2023. Travel craving: Though research around “travel... Read more
Posted on 21 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
I'm Feeling Like Flowers
Posted on 20 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Notes on ChatGPT’s “memory” for Strings and for Events
Here I take a look at the results reported in three previous posts and begin the job of making sense of them analytically. Here are the posts: What must be the... Read more
Posted on 20 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Live Forever! This is One MoFo of an Anxiety Management Routine [TechBros...
Charlotte Alter, The Man Who Thinks He Can Live Forever, Time, September 20, 2023. Johnson, 46, is a centimillionaire tech entrepreneur who has spent most of th... Read more
Posted on 20 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
9th St. Light Rail Station [Hoboken]
Posted on 19 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Is the Future of Anti-trust in the USA Being Written Now?
Tim Wu, The Google Trial Is Going to Rewrite Our Future, NYTimes, Sept. 18, 2023. The Google antitrust trial, which began last week, is ostensibly focused on th... Read more
Posted on 19 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
School's In, Use of ChatGPT is up
Now that it's September, we can put our June hypothesis to the test. And... it checks out perfectly. ChatGPT in blue, Minecraft in red.Kids are doing homework... Read more
Posted on 19 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Rachmaninoff Meets Tatum Over Paganini
The Art Tatum Variation in Rachmaninoff's Paganini Rhapsody (ft. Jackie Parker) tonebase Piano 426,607 views Jan 8, 2023 0:00 Rachmaninoff's modern sound world... Read more
Posted on 19 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
When Will the Earth's Population Peak, and What Happens Then?
Dean Spears, The World’s Population May Peak in Your Lifetime. What Happens Next?, NYTimes. Most people now live in countries where two or fewer children are... Read more
Posted on 18 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI Pause, Chuck Jones Style: Whoops! [aka AI Winter, We've Been There Before]
Back in August of 2020 I issued a working paper, GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons. On the first page, after the cover, but before the abstract and... Read more
Posted on 18 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Scaling Laws for Sparsely-Connected Foundation Models
Identifies the first scaling law describing the relationship between weight sparsity, number of non zero parameters, and amount of training... Read more
Posted on 18 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Here Come the Sun
Posted on 18 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Cuban Trumpet
I don’t know Cuban trumpeters like I know jazz trumpeters, so commentary will be light to non-existent. Cuban Fantasy (Machito) “Cuban Fantasy” seems to have... Read more
Posted on 17 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cities Are Not Start-ups
Jersey City's Urban Design LaboratoryMolly Turner, They’re Ultrarich Techies, and They Want to Build a City From Scratch. What Could Go Wrong? NYTimes, Sept. 17... Read more
Posted on 17 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
New Savanna Moods: I Was Down, but I’ve Started Back Up.
I have, at various times, written about how my general mood is subject to long-term swings, apparently seasonal. I go down in the fall or winter and come back u... Read more
Posted on 16 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Return to Turning Point
Posted on 16 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Politics Beyond the Personal: Diversity, Identitarian Rhetoric, and Equality
This post originally appeared in The Valve (now defunct) on October 6, 2006. It was part of a "book event," as it was known, in which a number of writers would... Read more
Posted on 16 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Remark How on the Geometry of Photographs Doesn't Echo the Eye's Geometry
This photo exemplifies a phenomenon I've experienced many times. Look at that white statue, a bust that we're observing from the side, in the middle just to... Read more
Posted on 15 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Syntax Acquisition, Phase Transitions, and Simplicity Bias in MLMs
New work w/@ziv_ravid @kchonyc @leavittron @nsaphra: We break the steepest MLM loss drop into *2* phase changes: first in internal grammatical structure, then... Read more
Posted on 15 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
