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 ( 7846 )
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Mechanistic Interpretability is Necessary, but Not Sufficient, for...
A comment I recently posted at LessWrong: ryan_greenblatt – By mech interp I mean "A subfield of interpretability that uses bottom-up or reverse engineering... Read more
Posted on 08 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: On the Light Rail, from Hoboken to Jersey City
Posted on 08 December 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Photoshop AI Magic: Before (top) and After (bottom), One Brush Stroke
Posted on 07 December 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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GOAT Literary Critics: Part 1b, Lit Crit Compared to Economics; Aristotle, No
Tyler Cowen was kind enough to put a link to my GOAT Literary Critics post over at Marginal Revolution. It got a bit of commentary over there as well as... Read more
Posted on 07 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Are LLMs Approaching the Limiting Wall Beyond Which Performance Simply Wanders...
Hot take on Google Gemini and GPT-4:đGoogle Gemini seems to have by many measures matched (or slightly exceeded) GPT-4, but not to have... Read more
Posted on 06 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Blue Giant
With English subtitles: Kevin Nguyen, Jazz anime Blue Giant hits all the high notes, The Verge, Oct. 7, 2023. The setup of Blue Giant is familiar anime... Read more
Posted on 06 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Sun Will Come up Tomorrow
Posted on 06 December 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Big Think: The Chaos Inside OpenAI with Karen Hao [Excellent]
Journalist Karen Hao joins Big Think’s Editor-in-Chief, Robert Chapman-Smith, to discuss the recent events at OpenAI, including the ousting and reinstatement... Read more
Posted on 06 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Animal ( Carved Wood), Metal (smelted Mineral), Vegetable (bush)
Posted on 05 December 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Grounding Neuroscience in Behavioral Changes Using Artificial Neural Networks
New paper "Grounding neuroscience in behavioral changes using artificial neural networks"This opinion piece shows how focusing on changes in brain state that... Read more
Posted on 05 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Open Source LLM-techs Unite!
IBM Meta are launching the AI Alliance to advance *open* reliable AI.The list of over 50 founding members from industry, government, and academia include... Read more
Posted on 05 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Moby Dick Speaks (has Vowels)
Previously it was thought that mostly the number of clicks and their timing matters.We identify two discrete patterns that we call the a-vowel and the i-vowel. Read more
Posted on 05 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cage Match in the Valley 2: Google Suits Up, Others Join the Fray
Karen Weise, Cade Metz, Nico Grant and Mike Isaac, Big Tech Muscles In: The 12 Months That Changed Silicon Valley Forever, NYTimes, Dec. Read more
Posted on 05 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sam Altman's Brain Chips
OpenAI signed $51M deal to buy ‘brain’ chips from Sam Altman portfolio firm Sam Reynolds, Computerworld, Dec, 3, 2023. A story that got left out of the corporat... Read more
Posted on 04 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
GOAT Literary Critics: Part I, What Do You Mean, Literary Critic?
Back in October of this year, the 23rd to be exact, Tyler Cowen posted a link to a book he’d just written and put on the web, along with connections to current... Read more
Posted on 04 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Street: Christmas and Shoe Repair
Posted on 04 December 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Experimental Google LLM for Medical Diagnosis
There has been work applying AI to medical decision-making, but all used other forms of AI, not LLMs. Now Google trained LLM for diagnoses.In a trial, AI... Read more
Posted on 04 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cage Match in the Valley: Many Men Enter, One Man Leaves.
Cade Metz, Karen Weise, Nico Grant and Mike Isaac, Ego, Fear and Money: How the A.I. Fuse Was Lit, December 3, 2023: The question of whether artificial... Read more
Posted on 03 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sunrise Serenade
* * * * * Read more
Posted on 03 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The OpenAI Affair and the Nature of Business in an Era of Intelligent Machines
I’ve been listening to a podcast by Ezra Klein with guests Kevin Roose and Casey Newton. Here’s one bit that I think is important. Ezra Klein Yeah, I first agre... Read more
Posted on 02 December 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
