Wanna' come back to my place? I was thinking you might pierce my heart and spill its blood in a frenzy of barbarous delight.
Father Ardelian has been summoned to a distant, secluded island to perform an exorcism. What will happen when he begins to suspect his host β the mysterious, nocturnal lord of the manor β of wanting him for another reason entirely? Will the piously celibate priest be able to resist the monsterβs diabolically seductive charms?
What Manner of Man is a queer gothic romance novel about a priest and a vampire, inspired by Dracula Daily.
The magic of childhood is that you were constantly encountering new things. The best way to feel that way again is to fill your life with new experiences.
The magic of childhood is that you were constantly encountering new things. The best way to feel that way again is to fill your life with new experiences.
There was an actual bracket, but reylo got obliterated in round one, and after the poll was done, someone suggested it would be funny to do a "bonus round" where every tournament contestant is pitted against reylo to see how many ships, if any, reylo can beat
hold on a fucking second. delaware is a state?? i thought it was a river? or is the river more important than the state? why don't i know this? (i should mention i don't like in america, i'm just confused)
there is delaware (state) and delaware (river)Β
both are equally strange
the state is a tiny little cryptid thing
the rive is a monster that spans new york, pennsylvania, new jersey and delaware. also washington crossed it once and that was like kinda a big deal i guess. like crossing the rubicon in rome.
the state tries to me more important with itsΒ βim the first state!!!β bs (seriously its even on the fucking license plates) but we all know. its the river.
I know home depot, but dude I don't know anything about America mad have never been there. Are you sure there is not a some sort of store called something close to Delaware!?!
Pausing here to point out that op isΒ βdear-AO3β³ and now Iβm wondering if Delaware fanfic would be categorized as RSF (real state fic) or AU (alternate unitedstates)
This is fantastic because it goes great with my theory that Delaware only exists for tax purposes. Like, all the states really only exists for Tax Purposes, but Delaware is particularly fake because back in 2012 I got lost in the Alleged Delaware Area looking trying to get to a family reunion, but every time I pulled over for directions, I would ask what the hell state I was in now, and I went through Mayland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey AND Virginia and I never fucking found Delaware but I did eventually find the Family Reunion and earned the repsepct of my then-prospective- Great-Grandmother-In-Law by saving her favorite grandchildren from a furious oceangoing horse so Iβm convinced that not only is the state a purely legal construct, they didnβt even dedicate any landmass to it, or itβs a govβt blackzone where the carnivorous horses live.
[Image ID: A userbox with a sky blue border and a light sky blue background. In the left side box is an image of the classic information symbol, a circle with the letter 'i' in the middle. In a dark sky blue font, it reads "Antisemitism is always bad." /End ID.]
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.
So I've now been on tumblr for 5 months. First there were The Ides, which I think I took in my stride. But then there came Neil banging out the tunes, which I, in my innocence, thought meant you all shared my passion for Neil Sedaka. Alas no. And now you're asking me to eat ramen, simply because it's going to be May? Where am I? What is this place?
Hundreds of thousands of people had gathered peacefully in the German capital for the annual Christopher Street Day celebrations, one of Europe's largest LGBTQ βevents, before the apparent attack brought it to an abrupt end.
"There are many injured, among whom multiple people have βlife-threatening injuries," police said on X, adding that an urgent manhunt was underway for β one or more possible perpetrators.
Itβs pretty likely that itβs a four digit number, and as there are four digits chosen there, that means that there cannot be any repetition. This mean that there are:
n!/(n-4)! possible orders. As βnβ is 4 (number of digits available).Β 4!/0! which becomes 4x3x2x1/1 which simplifies to 24. That means that there are 24 possible combinations of codes. This would take you about two or three minutes to input all possible codes.
well βtechnicallyβ the code is most likley 1970. statistically, a majority of people, when told to choose a 4 digit code will choose their birth year. and this key pad is obviously a few years old to put it nicely, thats most likley it.Β
No, no, no. Donβt base your deductions of psychology. Letβs talk chemistry. When you first press a button, thereβs more of the natural oils on your skin, and therefore it wears down the numbers on the keys faster. Obviously 0 is the first one, then. Try 0791 first.
Close, but not quite, I think. People will almostΒ alwaysΒ choose a number they can remember. Whatβs memorable about 0791? Try 0719 - a birthday, 19th of July. That is more likely.
fucked that you canβt fix other people especially when you really care about them. Oh so im just supposed to be there for you while you suffer. like a useless cunt gargoyle
The rest of you can (and really ought to!) reblog, but it's not your turn to talk. Just listen and reflect!
What DOES a good apology for antiblackness look like, to you?
Not a shitty twitter apology that dodges accountability. Not a genuine apology made to white fans to soothe their embarrassment and egos and maintain white solidarity.
What does an ACTUAL apology for antiblackness consist of, to you?
What actions do you need to see from people who claim to be better, to deserve your support despite a history of being unsafe?
Why do you think nonblack people feel they're entitled to grace, and what would actually EARN them your grace? What makes you not want to offer it at all?
I think there's a disconnect between what the group being harmed needs, and what people think the group being harmed should settle for. We've been forced to know the latter. How do Y'ALL feel?
No, you don't want that otter. No, that is not a pet. No, that up close encounter where you can pay to cuddle with an otter is probably not ethical. No, I'm pretty sure that channel with a guy and his pet otters is not a legitimate "animal rescue", stop recommending it to me.
Yes, the otter is cute. Please admire them either from a distance, or behind a barrier at an accredited facility. Thank you.
.....no I'm not going insane seeing how flooded social media is with unethical otter content.
If you want a pet, you want a domesticated species. If you want a domesticated mustelid (the family otters belongs to), we have one: it's called a "ferret"
Yes, they do require specific care you need to learn about (like any animal, wild or domestic), no they don't look exactly like otters (it's the closest you'll get in domestic animals though)
But they're a lot more adapted to live in human houses, and they're not at risk of being poached in the wild. Mostly because like dogs or domestic cats, they don't exist in the wild
