Anil Ananthaswamy in Quanta:

A theory developed by Sanjeev Arora of Princeton University and Anirudh Goyal, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, suggests that the largest of today’s LLMs are not stochastic parrots. The authors argue that as these models get bigger and are trained on more data, they improve on individual language-related abilities and also develop new ones by combining skills in a manner that hints at understanding — combinations that were unlikely to exist in the training data.

This theoretical approach, which provides a mathematically provable argument for how and why an LLM can develop so many abilities, has convinced experts like Hinton, and others. And when Arora and his team tested some of its predictions, they found that these models behaved almost exactly as expected. From all accounts, they’ve made a strong case that the largest LLMs are not just parroting what they’ve seen before.

More here.

Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

One unfortunate feature of American politics is that both Republicans and Democrats tend to work themselves into a frenzy over the other party’s presidential candidate, no matter who it is. To put it bluntly, both sides cry wolf all the time. Yes, I am a Democrat, but Democrats do this too — I’m old enough to remember when people I knew went crazy over poor old Mitt Romney saying that he had “binders full of women”, denouncing him as a sexist when all he meant to say was that he personally knew lots of highly skilled women in the business world.

Anyway, because we cry wolf all the time in American politics, it’s easy to dismiss criticisms of Trump as “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. And indeed there are some people out there who see everything Trump does and says as a harbinger of imminent fascism and atrocity. I know some of them. In 2017 a Google engineer bet me $1000 that Trump would commit genocide by 2020; when I won the bet, I had him send the $1000 to a rabbit rescue. (I just wish I had bet him more.)

But I do not have Trump Derangement Syndrome. As proof, let me list a few important things that Trump got right.

More here.

Kristen Arnett at Literary Hub:

Greetings, gentle readers! Welcome to the very first installment of Am I the (Literary) Assh*le, a series where I get drunk and answer your burning (anonymous) questions about all things literary. 

When it comes to the writing world, it seems that everyone’s got an opinion. And sometimes we like to revisit those opinions online, usually in a highly cyclical manner—every three months or so, give or take—at a frenzied pace designed to drive people wild (see: are blurbs really necessary, come on we need blurbs, why is there so much sex in everything, why isn’t there more sex in everything, why are the classics so bad, why are the classics so good and why can’t anyone read nowadays, audiobooks aren’t reading, of course audiobooks are reading, why do adults read YA, why are you gatekeeping YA, libraries should do more, libraries are doing all they can they are stretched to the limit have you completely lost it, etc, etc, etc, hallelujah, forever, amen).

Before we dig in, it’s important that I point out the obvious here: generally speaking, I don’t ever know what I’m talking about. But much like everyone on the Lord’s internet, I do have some Opinions™! And I definitely have some beers. I think if we combine those two factors, we should get some satisfying results.

More here.

Zack Beauchamp in Vox:

On Monday, tens of millions across India celebrated the opening of the Ram Mandir — a huge new temple to Ram, one of Hinduism’s holiest figures, built in the city of Ayodhya where many Hindus believe he was born. The celebration in Ayodhya, presided over by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, attracted some of India’s richest and most famous citizens. But in the pomp and circumstance, few dwelled explicitly on the grim origins of Ram Mandir: It was built on the site of an ancient mosque torn down by a Hindu mob in 1992.

Many of the rioters belonged to the RSS, a militant Hindu supremacist group to which Modi has belonged since he was 8 years old. Since ascending to power in 2014, Modi has worked tirelessly to replace India’s secular democracy with a Hindu sectarian state.

The construction of a temple in Ayodhya is the exclamation point on an agenda that has also included revoking the autonomy long provided to the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, creating new citizenship and immigration rules biased against Muslims, and rewritten textbooks to whitewash Hindu violence against Muslims from Indian history. Modi has also waged war on the basic institutions of Indian democracy. He and his allies have consolidated control over much of the media, suppressed critical speech on social media, imprisoned protesters, suborned independent government agencies, and even prosecuted Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi on dubious charges.

More here.

David Marchese in The New York Times:

There’s a scene in that modern classic of screwball existentialism, “Being John Malkovich,” from 1999, in which John Malkovich, playing a version of himself, enters a portal that others have been using to climb inside his mind. Suddenly, Malkovich is in a world populated solely by variations on himself: Malkovich as a flirtatious sexpot, a genteel waiter, a jazz chanteuse, a bemused child, everyone speaking only the word “Malkovich.” In a way, that scene is a microcosm of the actor’s decades-long, always-interesting career. He has played a million different parts, but somehow they’re all defined by the unmistakable, enigmatic, magnetic presence of Malkovich. Same goes for his work in the Apple TV+ series “The New Look,” premiering Feb. 14, which is based on the experiences of the fashion icons Christian Dior, Coco Chanel, Cristóbal Balenciaga and others who helped build the French fashion industry while enduring the impossible complexities of World War II. Malkovich, playing the couturier and Dior mentor Lucien Lelong, delivers a softer, warmer performance than the ones for which he is probably best known. But even so, with his off-kilter line readings, his louche manner, his oddly wavering yet commanding voice and his general air of playing a game to which only he knows the rules, the role is, as always, pure Malkovich.

If we take style to mean a manner of doing something, could you articulate the John Malkovich style? Not really, because it’s not something I think about much — what I am or what I do. But I’ve always felt style is the only constant in life. By style I mean, simply, the way you move through life. If you get sad news, how do you respond? What do you do if you’re angry, if you’re amused, if you’re moved? That’s what style is. It’s not really up to me to say what mine is.

More here.

Dance Russe

If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely,
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

by William Carlos Williams

Neil Larsen in Jacobin:

t’s now been a number of years since the term “decolonial,” together with its more activated verbal inflection, “decolonize,” have become familiar across popular and media culture, especially in connection with identity politics. Still another variant, “decoloniality,” joins these, though it is restricted to a narrower and more arcane academic lexicon. “Decolonization,” located at a middlebrow point of discursive insertion, has by now followed. Here, however, those with sufficient awareness, if not a residual memory of its historical context, will recognize in “decolonization” an older term with a distinct political resonance that can be traced considerably further back to the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, if not earlier, to the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland and the 1919 Amritsar massacre in British-ruled India. Certainly, by the time of the historic 1955 Bandung Conference of relatively newly independent and henceforth (for a time) nonaligned former colonies in Asia and Africa, a term such as “decolonial” would have been indissolubly linked to contemporary anti-colonial national liberation movements and to the actual historical process of decolonization then roughly at its apogee, particularly in what remained of formal European colonialism in many parts of Asia and much of Africa.

More here.

Joelle M. Abi-Rached in Boston Review:

The face of the ongoing onslaught on Gaza has no doubt been Dr. Hammam Alloh, the thirty-six-year-old Palestinian nephrologist at northern Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital who refused to evacuate it when it was invaded by Israeli troops. “And if I go, who treats my patients?” he said in an October 31 interview. “We are not animals. We have the right to receive proper healthcare,” he added. Two weeks later, Alloh was killed by an Israeli airstrike, along with his father, brother-in-law, and father-in-law.

Alloh’s use of the word “animals” was certainly not lost on viewers. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had used that same language on October 9 when he announced a “complete siege” on Gaza, labeling its residents as “human animals.” Hamas’s attacks on October 7 would predictably generate a violent military reaction from Israel. But this Israeli campaign in Gaza, a strip of land where more than 80 percent of its population lived in poverty even before October 7, has been of a different character entirely than any previous ones. This onslaught has featured direct attacks on hospitals and the intentional undermining of the entire health care system: shelling, the killing and arresting of health care personnel, the direct and indirect killing of hundreds of patients, underprovision or complete lack of proper medical care, and unwarranted suffering for thousands of patients due to shortages in basic medications, water, food, and fuel. The attacks have made clear that the repression of Palestinian rights now has a new feature: the systematic destruction of the very institutions that sustain life.

More here.

Dylan Riley in Sidecar:

Du Bois’s relationship to Marxism has become a focus of considerable debate in US sociology; the stakes are at once intellectual and crypto-political. Some want to enroll Du Bois into the ranks of ‘intersectional theory’, a notion which holds that everything has exactly three causes (race, class, and gender), somewhat analogous to the way certain Weberians are dogmatically attached to a fixed set of ‘factors’ (ideological, economic, military, political). Others want to incorporate him into the tradition of Western Marxism and its signature problem of failed revolution. Broadly speaking, the first group tends to emphasize Du Bois’s earlier writings, thereby downplaying the influence of Marxism, while the second focuses on his later work, with its critiques of capitalism and imperialism and its reflections on the Soviet experiment.

But Du Bois’s masterwork, Black Reconstruction (1935), doesn’t fit either of these interpretations. The concept of ‘intersectionality’ appears nowhere, and there is no evidence that DuBois thought in these terms. Nor is Du Bois’s proletariat, or at least its most politically important part, the industrial working class; it is rather the family farmer, both in the West and the South, both black and white. Accordingly, his political ideal was ‘agrarian democracy’. He sometimes refers to those supporting this programme rather misleadingly as ‘peasant farmers’ or ‘peasant proprietors’, which might lead one to think that he is closer to ‘Populism’ in the Russian sense than to Marxism. But that too would be a misreading, for in his understanding the social foundation of democracy does not consist in a pre-capitalist village structure with collective ownership of land, but in a stratum of independent small holders (one that failed fully to appear in the South after the Civil War because of ferocious resistance by the plantocracy, which produced the amphibious figure of the share-cropper).

More here.

Brian Dillon at The Guardian:

“Exploded essays”, the poet, novelist and memoirist Lavinia Greenlaw calls the 17 pieces of almost-art-critical prose in this bright, mournful book. The phrase suggests a bristling diagram or enlarged view, an annotated arc of thought or feeling. But also something violently botched or ruined – don’t all essays worth the name aspire, more or less secretly, to blowing up their own form? In revisiting a lifetime of looking – at art, landscapes, weather, heavenly bodies, human faces and sometimes nothing at all – Greenlaw puts certain stark questions to herself and the things she looks at: “How do we make sense of what we see? How do we describe what we have never seen before?”

Her title comes from John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1689. But the wealth and vagrancy of Greenlaw’s interests seem to connect her to the earlier part of that busy century, and further back into the 16th: the time of the cabinet of curiosities.

more here.

Erica Ackerberg at the NYT:

For six months between 1965 and 1966, the German-born photographer Evelyn Hofer worked in Dublin, creating beautifully crafted portraits of the city and its people. Hofer took her time composing each shot, whether it captured a pair of housekeepers in brief repose or James Joyce’s death mask. The results were published in book form in 1967, to accompany an extended essay by V.S. Pritchett. Now, in DUBLIN (Steidl, $58), those images stand on their own to tell a thoughtful story of the city both in black-and-white and in quiet color.

Hofer, who died in Mexico City in 2009, was raised in Switzerland and Spain before settling in New York in 1946, where she contributed photo essays to Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. In 1959, she began crafting literary portraits of cities, collaborating with Pritchett as well as Mary McCarthy and Jan (then James) Morris.

more here.

Isabella Cho in Harvard Magazine:

DURING A HISTORY seminar in my sophomore year, we opened class with a question derived from an assigned reading: What civic and political ills had made certain regions of Chicago sites of gang violence? We mulled the question for a few directionless minutes before a student raised her hand. Though I don’t remember what she said, I do remember that she prefaced the thought with, “As someone from the Chicago area….” She had lived there for 18 years. This phenomenon is common. It marks the moment in a classroom discussion, often a difficult or complex one, in which a student broaches a feature of her identity or lived experience that pertains to the topic at hand.

The Chicagoan’s viewpoint changed the dynamic of the conversation. Because she was the only person who identified as a long-time resident of the area, her perspective took on an air of heightened authority. I had wanted to advance a counterpoint, but now felt disinclined to do so. For one, it seemed that it would go against the authority of someone who had a deeper personal stake in the issue. Second, I thought that raising a counterpoint to the student’s perspective might be interpreted by my classmates not only as a challenge on intellectual grounds, but also as callous.

Neither are legitimate reasons to have withheld my comment. But I couldn’t help but feel both at that moment.

More here.

From Phys.Org:

Recording the activity of large populations of single neurons in the brain over long periods of time is crucial to further our understanding of neural circuits, to enable novel medical device-based therapies and, in the future, for brain–computer interfaces requiring high-resolution electrophysiological information. But today there is a tradeoff between how much high-resolution information an implanted device can measure and how long it can maintain recording or stimulation performances. Rigid, silicon implants with many sensors, can collect a lot of information but can’t stay in the body for very long. Flexible, smaller devices are less intrusive and can last longer in the brain but only provide a fraction of the available neural information.

Recently, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), in collaboration with The University of Texas at Austin, MIT and Axoft, Inc., developed a soft implantable device with dozens of sensors that can record single-neuron activity in the brain stably for months. The research was published in Nature Nanotechnology.

“We have developed brain–electronics interfaces with single-cell resolution that are more biologically compliant than traditional materials,” said Paul Le Floch, first author of the paper and former graduate student in the lab of Jia Liu, Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at SEAS. “This work has the potential to revolutionize the design of bioelectronics for neural recording and stimulation, and for brain–computer interfaces.”

More here.

A Star is Born

There was a pretty girl,
with a pretty voice
and true words
singing.

Please understand,
there was a pretty song
and pretty words,
a young girl’s voice.

To be plain,
I’m pretty sure
there was a girl
and a song
and ancient truth.

In case you wondered,
everything
beautiful and horrid
is contained
in this

and, no surprise,
I have always
been old.

Happy or sad, there is no
such thing
as time.

Only pretty girls
singing pretty songs
with all the pretty words

by Jeff Weddle
from Poetry Feast

Christopher Harding at Aeon Magazine:

For anyone who has seen or heard Watts at his best – courtesy, perhaps, of his podcast talks – ‘immeasurably alive’ is quite a good description of the man himself. It is easy to see how a basic understanding of God in these terms might have resonated with him. Watts also had moments when the sheer wonder of life around him made it feel as though it was not merely ‘there’, as brute fact, but was being poured out with extraordinary generosity. It seemed ‘given’, convincing Watts that there must be a giver and filling him with the desire to say ‘thank you’. He found backing for all of this in the writings of the 14th-century German theologian Meister Eckhart and the 6th-century Greek author Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. It was there, too, in the ‘I-Thou’ thought of the modern Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.

more here.