good day!
30+, white, cis (she/her), bi.
I reblog a lot about fandoms/fanfic/fanart, rp, and writing. I do not care what people ship, write, or draw. Fiction is fiction, please touch grass.
Far more importantly, if you don't agree with the following, I know "DNI orders" are stupid, but like-- how about you don't waste your time and mine, okay?
Black lives matter, fuck ICE, no one is illegal on stolen land, pro-Palestine, anti-Genocide, proChoice, anti-TERF.
californians, consider calling your state assemblymembers in order to object to the current budget proposal stripping Medi-Cal (our Medicaid) from asylees and refugee applicants except in emergencies. also, they’re agreeing to reduce the asset limit for many Medi-Cal recipients back to $2000. That number means that the maximum amount a Medi-Cal recipient who is aged, blind, or disabled can have in the bank at any time is $2000. That figure is obscenely low, and it’s actually lower by about fifty bucks than the amount they’re allowed to get each month in income.* if enacted this policy change will vastly hurt thousands of seniors and disabled people and i’m not kidding. please speak up if you can.
“Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.”
After this post about Google automatically enrolling everyone into their AI program (including reading Google docs), I realised that many people may not be aware that there are actually very, very good alternatives to using Google docs – although what they can do for you varies.
So, since I’ve over the years tested quite a lot of different applications for usefulness in writing fanfic, I thought I’d share some of my experiences here. The link list below will be expanded as I continue writing more pieces, so keep checking here.
Part 1: LibreOffice Writer
Part 2: Zettelkasten
Part 3: LaTeχ
Part 4: Markdown
Part 5: Obsidian
Note: I updated some of the posts with screenshots of the interfaces for illustration purposes. You might want to reblog those again.
its probably a normal sign for the economy that all of my adulthood fantasies are like "imagine having your own kitchen living room and bathroom to decorate" "what if i could get on a train" "maybe one day i could purchase a sturdy pair of shoes" "i should save and invest in a single bicycle"
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.
in the beginning, the trump assassination attempts were spaced by twenty four weeks. then twelve, then six, then every two weeks. the last one, at the white house, was a week. in four days we could be seeing a trump assassination attempt every eight hours until they are coming every four minutes. we should witness a double event within seven days,
Replied to a recent comment on a fic that I wrote years ago and then took the time to revisit previous comments and I say this with complete sincerity:
Leaving a comment on a fic provides compounding delight. Authors will love initially receiving a comment, will love later recalling this and that particular aspect of a comment, and they will love rereading comments and being reminded how readers enjoyed the work.
Comments are not a one-time act of kindness and consideration. They keep giving.
Thank you to those who take the time to give a nice word, describe an excited reaction, point out favorite parts, and generally let it be known that not only has the work been read but it had some effect. :)
The recent flotilla of volunteers trying to bring aid supplies to the Gaza Strip consisted of 50 boats and hundreds of people from different countries. On Tuesday, Israelis arrested 430 people, and forced them onto ships converted into makeshift prisons. The protesters abducted onto these ships report surviving a number of violent tortures including:
Denied water, blankets, and most of their clothing.
Forced to kneel for hours and kicked if they moved or spoke.
Moved from room to room periodically to deprive them of sleep.
Locked in a darkened container.
Serious injured in their eyes, ears, and rib-cages with tasers.
Beaten by multiple soldiers, breaking ribs, fracturing vertebrae.
Stripped, sexually harassed, and groped.
Sexually violated, anally raped, and forcibly penetrated with a handgun.
This is what Israel did to people who were only under their control from Tuesday to Friday, less than a week. This is what Israel did to people from Germany, Italy, Spain, France, and others of the global north. This is what they did to protesters showing solidarity on a global stage who have lawyers and news attention.
Imagine what they do to Palestinians every day.
Please help my friend Mahmoud to support his family in Gaza. His family's campaign is vetted by @90-ghost, shared by fairuzfan, and hosted by my wife @cannilyuncanny. She transfers donations directly to Mahmoud's sister Mahrah (@mahrahpalestine), who lives in Gaza with her elderly parents.
Their survival depends on your support and donations for food, clean water, supplies, medicine, and all the essentials of life. Please support them.
Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???
An incomplete list of things that employers commonly threaten that are 100% illegal in the United States
"We'll fire you if you tell others how much you're making" The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 specifically protects employees who discuss their own wages with each other (you can't reveal someone else's wages if you were given that information in the course of work, but you can always discuss your own or any that were revealed to you outside of work duties)
"If we can't fire you for [discussing wages/seeking reasonable accommodation/filing a discrimination complaint/etc], we'll just fire you for something else the next day." This is called pretextual termination, and it offers your employer almost no protection; if you are terminated shortly after taking a protected action such as wage discussion, complaints to regulatory agencies, or seeking a reasonable accommodation, you can force the burden onto your employer to prove that the termination wasn't retaliatory.
"Disparaging the company on social media is grounds for termination" Your right to discuss workplace conditions, compensation, and collective action carries over to online spaces, even public ones. If your employer says you aren't allowed to disparage the company online or discuss it at all, their social media policy is illegal. However, they can forbid releasing information that they're obligated to keep confidential such as personnel records, business plans, and customer information, so exercise care.
"If you unionize, we'll just shut this branch down and lay everyone off" Threatening to take action against a group that unionizes is illegal, full stop. If a company were to actually shut down a branch for unionizing, they would be fined very heavily by the NLRB and be opening themselves up to a class-action lawsuit by the former employees.
"We can have any rule we want, it's only illegal if we actually enforce it" Any workplace policy or rule that has a "chilling effect" on employees' willingness to exercise their rights is illegal, even if the employer never follows through on any of their threats.
"If you [protected action], we'll make sure you never work in this industry/city/etc again." Blacklisting of any kind is illegal in half the states in the US, and deliberately sabotaging someone's job search in retaliation for a protected action is illegal everywhere in the US.
"Step out of line and you can kiss your retirement fund/last paycheck goodbye." Your employer can never refuse to give you your paycheck, even if you've been fired. Nor can they keep money that you invested in a retirement savings account, and they can only claw back the money they invested in the retirement account under very specific circumstances.
"We'll deny that you ever worked here" not actually possible unless they haven't been paying their share of employment taxes or forwarding your withheld tax to the government (in which case they're guilty of far more serious crimes, and you might stand to gain something by turning them in to the IRS.) The records of your employment exist in state and federal tax data, and short of a heist that would put Oceans 11 to shame, there's nothing they can do about that.
