bog

blog real

[manuciruja]

awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?

[manuciruja]

i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users

[achingmarshking]

@staff

Cuck

[thelensart]

Make my day

[barikonen]

when ozymandias king of kings tells u to look upon his works and despair but, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away

[frierenburger]

she's not moving to earth for you.

[sophiesalacia]

martian tgirl who thinks she has to move to earth and be a dom because that's all anyone seems to want from her but you tell her you're happy to go to her instead and you hold her gently and give her space to be vulnerable and soft and tired and something in her breaks, some wall she's built up inside and she cries for the first time in years. and you tell her it's okay and you stroke her hair softly and you reassure her that you're not going to leave just because she showed weakness in front of you, that you genuinely care for her as a person and you're going to be by her side to support her no matter what. and you mean it.

[wobblydev]

Organizing DON'Ts #2

I should be working, but I don’t want to. Here is the second in this series. Drawing these really makes me happy 😻

If you would like to support the creation of these comics, as well as syndicalist computer games, I welcome you to consider joining the patreon.

-dev

square version

— transcript —

Organizing Don'ts #2 [a little black cat says: It’s best to never say the “U” word too soon..]

In one-on-ones with your coworkers, saying the “U” word too early can lead to confusion and/or fear. [a coworker sweats and looks anxious, saying “What are you even TALKING about? Oy! No way! We’ll all get FIRED for sure!]

Decades of anti-union laws and propaganda have made the work environment for organizing very difficult. [the little black cat listens to the coworker say, “what’s a UNION? Isn’t that ILLEGAL? Why bother?]

Ask questions that help coworkers recognize their power as workers. In due time, you’ll all be ready to say the “U” word together. [5 coworkers  are all confronting the boss, saying, “UNION!”]

[justalurkr]

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.

Her name is Timnit Gebru.

She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.

The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.

The paper had not even been published yet.

Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.

The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.

This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.

The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.

The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.

Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.

Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.

The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.

In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.

The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.

In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.

The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.

Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.

This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.

The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.

The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.

Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.

She was making that argument from inside Google.

Then Google proved her right by removing her.

The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.

Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.

Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.

Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.

The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.

The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.

And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.

[adobe-outdesign]

If you're bored, Reddit user Top-Weakness-1311 built a free Pokemon guessing game where you get a silhouette and have to enter the 'mons name:

WhosThatMon — Daily Pokemon Guessing Game

Can you guess the Pokemon from its silhouette? Play the free daily challenge, track your streak, and share your results.

There's also a timed version where you can guess as many as you can in 60 seconds, and one where you can guess a Pokemon based entirely off its cries.

[achingmarshking]

Got 19 correct in the 60 second version!!

[homunculus-argument]

me: So then we take the liquified wood pulp, and dry it again, into these thin sheets. caveman: [confused, but trying to keep up] uh huh. me: And we take the graphite stick - it doesn't need to be wrapped in wood like this, but we like making them this way so you don't get graphite on your hands. And that's what we draw with. caveman: [eyes lighting up] Oohhh so you use the wood pulp sheets to paint on them, like hides? me: Exactly! And now, you could use this method to draw anything you can visualise with your mind's eye, but for the sake of this demonstration, let's draw a vision of a woman with features of an animal whose powers and traits she represents, and a figure that is stylised and exaggerated beyond what nature really allows. caveman: As wide as she is tall, with tits to match? me: Exactly. caveman: This is the only sensible use of this technology.

[wifegideonnav]

“bits to use in everyday conversations”

[fishing-princess]

I Defeated the Demon Lord but it Turns Out the Demon Army was Largely Unaffected and I Fell Victim to a Flawed Belief in Great Man Theory

[wobblydev]

The 1-on-1

The first in a short series about organizing.

If you enjoy these little comics, organize. Everyone has a crucial part to play in this work. Yes, it can be difficult, awkward, emotional and draining. It can also be empowering, exciting and elating! You will never have to organize alone.

Visit https://iww.org/ and scroll to the “Organize” banner to get in touch with us. Virtual organizer training will give you the tools you need to begin. We don’t have a lot of time. Join the One Big Union and ORGANIZE!

Poster Size

[elbiotipo]

Something I'm thinking about with the current situation in the Strait of Hormuz is how economic reality and actual, real life industrial capacity clashes against economic fiction and gambling. 20% of the world's oil and gas supply is currently stuck, with other goods heavily affected (fertilizer most prominently), actual oil infrastructure has been blown up to hell with years of reconstruction ahead, there are already shortages in major countries... and "the markets" keep going up and down like nothing is happening, a total disconnection from reality

And in a way, they are reality, aren't they? Somehow the financial class of the imperial core is able to do whatever they want with numbers and ignore the actual reality that affects millions of people. You cannot make oil barrels in a computer, you cannot speculate on the price of a crop that underperforms because of fertilizer. But they try anyways.

I'm already used to this in Argentina. Liberal economists who say that inflation is a "purely monetary phenomenon" who believe everything can be summed up to numbers and gambling with exchange rates and debt while the actual factories, farms, schools and daily budgets of people suffer and decay. The "real economy" they say, as far as I'm concerned the "real" economy is the only one that exists. However, somehow they manage to impose their strange, nonsense gambling idea of the world upon us, with real effects, like a religion.

I'm just rambling, don't mind me.

[elbiotipo]

And this is of course to say nothing about the actual deaths and suffering in Iran, and so many other nations. It's all completely disconnected from reality from them. Just one look at a grieving mother with a child dead from a missile should stop everything on its tracks, force resignations, make these people fall one by one. Yet the world turns as always, and they double down, against the disgust and repudiation of the world (and no matter how bad things might seem, the world realizes), they triple down, preaching cruelty and genocide.

Someday there will be a reckoning. Not out of cosmic justice or anything, but because they cannot simply keep ignoring reality and getting away from it.

[theconcealedweapon]

[maarvarq]

Always bear in mind that there is absolutely no legitimate evidence that Luigi was actually the one who killed the insurance company guy.

[theconcealedweapon]

Of course he wasn't. He was at a party with me that day.

[tiny-space-whale]

No but like literally, actually. All bits aside.

He didn't do it.

The cops very clearly planted evidence on him because they had to make an arrest because all eyes were on them and whoever actually did the deed was making them look stupid.

Why would the real killer hero have kept the weapon on his person and traveled two states over while carrying it and a manifesto in his bag, conveniently turning the crime into a federal matter? The same guy whose bag they found in a park, filled with monopoly money? Why did the police turn off their bodycams, take Luigi's stuff, drive a block away, turn their bodycams back on, go back into the restaurant, and then arrest him?

From the moment of his arrest, even left-of-center media has been presuming his guilt without examining anything (e.g. calling him "the killer" instead of "alleged" or "accused") and then when I say he didn't do it, the nearest person chimes in with some quip that tells me they think he did do it but should go free anyway. Don't get me wrong, I would have the same attitude if he had done it. But he didn't. It makes me feel like the only sane person in the world, even among my staunchly leftist friends.

[achingmarshking]

FUCKING THANK YOU

[welcome-to-green-hills]

Passing this along because I, unfortunately, got spoiled.

The last episode of TADC has leaked. It’s all over Twitter and Telegram. If you don’t want to be spoiled, mute anything and EVERYTHING associated with TADC.

[achingmarshking]

THANK you i might genuinely hop off the internet for this

[bugthingsdaily]

Today's bug thing is these pretzel butterflies!

[achingmarshking]

Woaw so pretty!!

[rabbitkinglune777]

Moon prince Salem

(he/him) 🐇🌙

[stupidlittlespirit]

This is so silly but I'm watching a short video essay on sincerity in cinema and the creator is talking about how he watched Lord of the Rings for the first time at 17. He explains that he'd grown so used to the 'ironic' meta style commentary in the movies of the 2010's that as he was watching the opening narration of LotR, he spent the entire time waiting for the joke to come. For someone to take it all back with a zinger line. He listened to Blanchett describe and explain the backstory, and he waited for the other comedic shoe to drop.

And he kept doing it. Scene after scene.

He spent the film expecting someone to make a joke about how unserious things were or to break the fourth wall or do some other self referential type thing.

Now, maybe I'm just at that point in my cycle or maybe I'm too delicate in general, but I literally teared up hearing that. Straight up cried a bit. It is so fucking sad that sincerity and genuineness is being bred out of people.

People say all the time 'this generation can't take anything seriously!' and really, is it any wonder? Younger people have been trained out of it. You are no longer encouraged to be genuine or show emotion or be honest. You are actively punished for it. In fact, you are almost guaranteed to suffer for it.

That is so fucked up. I'm sorry to go on a bit of a random ramble rant but it's so fucking gut wrenching to see younger people lose that element of themselves. You can't express your passion without being told you're 'crashing out' or 'cringe'. You have to live in this neutral state of fear of perception, and god forbid anybody step outside of it!

You're told you should only consume and succumb and be ironic and emotionless and cool.

Listen, if you're following me and you're like.... 25 or under, let's say. Please. I beg of you. Do not fall for this rhetoric. Please, for the love of all things, feel. Feel and create and be honest with yourself. Indulge in things that make you happy. Be sincere. Wear your heart on your sleeve. Do not let this hyper-capitalistic, hyper-consumerist, self-centred, individualist culture take that from you.

Bleed yourself into the work you create. Live. Don't fucking let anyone tell you different.