Any pronouns are fine. Tired of having a body.
Mostly political reblogs, some nattering about my life and/or mental health (#addie talks, also applies to comments on things reblogged), some bits that make me happy, some responding to writing prompts for #humans are space orcs/fae/australians (#addie writes).
I mostly don't queue; if I'm gone for a while there'll be nothing and then a million reblogs all at once.
pfp is a strawberry pie for no reason.
Mostly a writing master post. Should all be tagged #addie writes but if you're looking for something specific:
The Big Guide to Humans, ongoing, except I've been working on other things lately so it's been a while since there was one of these.
Introduction (Basic physical description and set-up for the series)
On "Most Humans" (Followup to intro, explaining all humans are different)
Home Planet
Language
Lifespan and Development
Mating — Reproduction, Sexuality, Genitalia, and Sexual Contact
Religion
Sex and Gender
Aliens/HASO:
Xaarc learns where human babies come from
Humans and migraines
Humans are weird about first aid
AI falling in love with quiet shipmate, parts 1, 2, 3, 4
Human accidentally adopts abandoned alien, Kiddo, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
My uncle works at Nintendo with humans
A disaster, a human, and two species that don't pack bond at all
Other stuff:
An ode to meeting normal people in real life
Getting one's name back from faeries
Wishes as weeds
Asteroids and Politics, Part one and Part two
the Seasonal Affective Disorder post (non-fiction life advice)
Guide to interacting with media re: your protest
My rambles/comments are #addie talks. Stories about my brother are #my brother has always been like this.
For about a year now this news has been officially [redacted], but now it's free. My debut YA novel, BORDERLINE, was acquired by Union Square Kids, an imprint of Hatchette Book Group, and is scheduled to hit shelves next summer 2027. Also they mentioned my blog in the official announcement, as you can see, which is hilarious. Anyway.
I'm really excited to have a book out in the world soon! BORDERLINE was actually kind of built by the blog, considering my beta readers were all followers who volunteered. (Beta readers: expect a separate email). So many people have been so kind about my work here, my future work, and this whole process, so THANK YOU, first and foremost.
If you've liked what I do here, it would mean the world to me to have your continued support! Tell your online friends, tell your real life friends, tell your library, etc etc! My instagram will shortly be transforming into an author page, so if the mood strikes you, please give me a follow @lilia.vc ! This alone would be an enormous, enormous help.
Finally, if you have any questions please send them my way! Thanks again, keep writing, and as always, stay weird.
and not to sound like a conspiracy theorist but another reason I hate the return of 2000’s th*nspo shit is bc starving does make women frail and has longer term consequences like early osteoporosis, brittle bones/teeth, insomnia, ect. Your muscles will start eating themselves. It also makes you extremely emotional and severely lowers your capacity for critical thinking not bc you’re a girl but because your brain isn’t getting any fucking nutrients so idk I just feel like its very convenient that every time there’s an uptick in fascist rhetoric and women’s rights are being stripped suddenly it’s peak fashion for women to be starving, weak, and exhausted
we're moving to an internet where children would be banned from reaching out for help and friendship online but abusive parents can post their children's every second online to humiliate and expose them for money with no pushback
I don't even know whose job it was to teach people this, but did they just stop teaching people what a bicycle bell means?
One would think that hearing a very distinct, clearly audible, reasonably loud and rapidly approaching sound of any kind would make any reasonable mammal turn to look at the direction of the sound, just purely by instinct?? If a deer heard something nearby go DING DING DING DING DING DING at its general direction, it would at least look up to see whether the source of the sound is a threat or not? Just a quick "is that something I need to be concerned about?" type of glance.
The enshittification of pedestrians has reached the point where they have less traffic survival skills than deer.
There are 3 groups of people with my last name, in 3 states. The 3 groups are not related to eachother.
I found this out when I met someone from another group, and she told me about having once been invited to (my group? 3rd group?)'s family reunion and having to call them up and figure it out.
"being a human is so boring why can't I be one of the COOL animals" okay hey. I hear you. but I actually really super love being an omnivorous persistence hunting primate with a stomach capable of dissolving many literal poisons and the ability to smell geosmin (released in the soil after it rains) at five parts per trillion. I super enjoy being a bipedal terrifyingly agile mammal with some of the most efficient sweat glands in the animal kingdom. I find a lot of joy in being an endotherm with mimicry abilities that rival most other animals with vocal chords. it's sick as hell I'm having a lot of fun
text: [ “Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5000 years.” ]
I wear long pants tucked into socks because of ticks and often long sleeves because of the ultraviolet rays of the sun, but I do sometimes wish I could go nude in the woods. I walked one of the trails barefoot the other day while it was raining and muddy and that was a great sensory experience.
Just gotta find the right woods and a cloudy day. Being naked actually makes it way easy to find any ticks. Less so if you're really hairy, maybe, but no clothes means you know when something's crawling on you.
(Source: I am not really hairy and I used to live half a mile from the nearest occupied house)
one time I told my therapist "I tend to have issues with people who think of themselves as authority figures" and she burst out laughing and then said "I think we need to pause and reflect on how you phrased that"
Today the American Robins that hatched under my deck all left the nest. Two of them needed a little help.
The first one landed in a fenced-in plant near the nest, so I pulled it out, it flew about 20 feet, I picked it up again and lifted it so it could fly over the backyard fence and be safe from my dogs. (It's a nature-y area back there, lotsa frogs in the spring. And it's where Momma Robin was screeching from.)
I went back inside but left the door ajar so I could hear if Momma Robin started screeching again.
I didn't see the second robin leave, but since there was no screeching I assume it was fine.
But then all the birds started freaking out. I went out and it wasn't just Momma Robin -- there were at least 4 robins, a couple grackles, and a bunch of red-winged blackbirds on the fence losing their minds.
The third one had left the nest and was on the ground, and a snake was trying to eat it. That's why its head is kinda wet.
All the birds except Momma Robin flew off once it was freed, and I took this one to the fence too.
I thought it was cool that the whole avian neighborhood, not just the robins, sounded the alarm about it. Not sure what purpose the alarm served, maybe hopes to summon an aggressive blue jay for a rescue? but summoning the human also works.
Sorry snake, I know you gotta eat, but I don't think you could have fit it down your gullet anyway.
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.
Does the fact that we've normalized every piece of media we consume potentially being an ad in disguise not make you want to scream and jump off a cliff
Like I still remember when youtube was a thing people supposedly did for fun as a hobby, and the first time I saw a video devolve into an ad out of nowhere, I remember feeling insulted and honestly betrayed.
Now it's just assumed that everything is going to be sponsored content and whole videos will be created for the sole purpose of selling something. Girl that's not a "sponsored video" that is a commercial. You just made a commercial. And we're ok with it because creators have to get paid for something that used to be a hobby? Not to be a boomer on main but if everyone went back to making funny sketches when they felt like it instead of every day because they've made it their sole source of income then maybe it wouldn't rot your soul and we'd all be better off.
