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 ( 7623 )
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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 -
KH1: Kosher Howie is Jewish, and Proud of It, All Over Jersey City
It's a bit difficult to make out, but over to the right of the dreidle, just above his tag, KH1 has noted: "I'm a Jewish Toy." That's a pun. A dreidle, of... Read more
Posted on 06 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A New Universal Law of Complex Evolving Systems?
đĄđ˛đ... Read more
Posted on 05 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why It Was Just yesterday...Halloween
Posted on 05 November 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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ChatGPT on Predicting the Weather [what Are the Limits of Prediction for...
I’m interested in things we can predict and how we go about it. Newtonian mechanics gave us the means to predict the motion of the planets, so that’s now a... Read more
Posted on 05 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
ELIZA Outscores GPT-3.5 in Turing Test
A nuanced experiment on whether GPT-4 passes the Turing Test. With the prompts used in the paper, the answer is not really. But, as the paper discusses, other... Read more
Posted on 05 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A.I. in Africa (Rokhaya Diagne)
Dionne Searcey, As a Teen, She Loved Video Games. Now She’s Using A.I. to Try to Quash Malaria. NYTimes, Nov. 3, 2023. From the article: While some of her... Read more
Posted on 05 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
ChatGPT Plans Meals for a Week
In the early days of personal computing, people were wondering what you could use these things for. One answer that came up frequently: Store your recipes! Now... Read more
Posted on 04 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Super AGI on the Loose in Hoboken, NJ
Posted on 03 November 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Miyazaki's "The Boy and The Heron" to Be Released in the USA in December
Debbie Diamond Sarto, GKIDS Drops Miyazaki’s ‘The Boy and The Heron’ English Trailer, Anime World Network, Thursday, November 2, 2023: GKIDS has just released... Read more
Posted on 03 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Hoboken's Stand of Ginkgos in Now Gloriously Yellow
Posted on 03 November 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Quickie 2: Spider-Man, on to the Next Film in the Trilogy [Media Notes 98b]...
In yesterday’s post about Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, I said I’d finish watching the film. I have, though it took a bit of will for me to push through... Read more
Posted on 03 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Band from Area 51 [Hoboken]
Posted on 02 November 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Quickie: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse [Media Notes 98]
I don’t know what to say. I saw Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in a theater and liked it. Maya Phillips has a positive review of Spider-Man: Across the... Read more
Posted on 02 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
