Eugene Navakas

@enavakas.bsky.social

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Lit. Ph.D. turned TV writer. Art junkie.

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water lily #Photography #Flowers #LosAngeles

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Eugene Navakas

Remembering the extraordinary evening of the Writers Guild's celebration of the Best 101 Screenplays, during which I had the good fortune to stand next to this Mount Rushmore of screenwriters. Frank gone now, and Robert too; but Larry and George still thankfully with us, standing strong.

portrait of a lady on fire

Doing something right, I guess, if this is what the algorithm is serving me up these days.

a leaf, a leaf, my kingdom for a leaf

two views from the Getty #Photography #Traffic #LosAngeles

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A thing that happens over and over when I'm editing: I'll change a boring word to something more evocative, then find that the new evocative word is already in the very next sentence. Time and time again, all my writing life.

The Cure for Mildness

Make a band less mild Bill Halley and the Dinosaur Killers

iron throne #Photography #Birds #ASongOfIceAndFire

Don Elote #MakeABookGreasy

Are You There God? It's Me, Margarine #makeabookgreasy

A dutch angle for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The Mighty Wurlitzer has been refurbished! #LastRemainingSeats #Orpheum #LosAngeles

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"The Wayfarers emergency highlights the vulnerability of beloved cultural sites in an age of climate extremes."

A glass chapel framed by redwoods is coming down, piece by piece: ‘It’s a crying shame’www.theguardian.com The dismantling of Frank Lloyd Wright Jr’s Wayfarers Chapel after landslides shows the vulnerability of cultural sites in an increasingly volatile climate

So cool to interact with celebrity authors online!

tweety fish, as usual, is clear and insightful about the fundamental failure of large language models to distinguish between the likely and the true. This is a very big problem, and a great reason not confuse AI with human intelligence, which has a hard enough time with this challenge on its own.

I wrote about supervised vs. unsupervised learning, why the latter is so important for LLMs, and how trying to get google's ai thing to not spew nonsense runs head on into deeply thorny complexities of the former. buttondown.email/apperceptive...

Supervision and truthbuttondown.email A diagram I found online about distinguishing facts and value judgments. Seems easy enough! For more than a decade the dominant training methodology in...

Would be hilarious if this means he can't vote.

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Eugene Navakas

My mom’s friend just sent her this picture from Village Hill in Northampton.

point dume-ish #Photography #Landscape #Malibu

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Eugene Navakas

Red-Tailed Hawk nest at the NYAC, just south of Central Park 🪶👀🪶 (There are three babies, but only two were visible from this angle)

dusk #photography #flowers #night

color wheel #Photography #Birds #LosAngeles

open bar #birds #photography #spring

I have a joke about Hades, but it's beneath me.

I have a joke about the Bacchae that will leave you in pieces.

I have a joke about Oedipus, but it's a family show.

I have a joke about Adam but it's a little earthy

I have a joke about MC Escher, but I have a joke about MC Escher.

i have a joke about medusa but its only funny when you’re stoned

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Chicago — Shoji Osato, 1926

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really, if you are going to use the term "AI", even though it's a per se deceptive marketing phrase with a racist backstory, you should distinguish it from ML, which is a collection of mature technologies that are often useful and efficient and embedded in all kinds of technology (e.g. phones, cars)

the Merlin Bird ID app uses a deep-learning algorithm trained exclusively on sound samples from the Macaulay Library of Bird Sounds at Cornell University. This is very different, both in scope & impact, from ChatGPT & other LLMs that have been unleashed to scrape content from the entire internet.

bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art #Birds #Poetry #Keats

Have been reading about the history of organized crime in Los Angeles, and am darkly amused to learn that when in 1950 the home of Mickey Cohen was blown up by rivals, one of the first actions he was forced to take was to issue a statement placating his Brentwood homeowners' association.

tyger tyger burning bright #SilentSunday #Photography #Birds

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blackthorne: I’m an LA based comedian, writer, and podcaster, I mostly freelance and I’m trying to sell a horror feature mariko: the anjin is unemployed