they/them masc terms okay :), still trying to figure this tumblr thing out (shhh i know i’ve been here for years) dont be weird :] always feel free to talk to me i love to yap!
i’m applepixls, call me apple or pixl (think of it like when someone has two middle names and goes by either? or i guess thats a first name and a middle name…) i really don’t care (and there’s the rare handful of you who know my real name :0)
always feel free to send an ask or a message!
i love to chat and i might be slow to respond but i prommie i see the notif and get a big smile :)
other stuff you should know
- they/them (transmasc, non-binary, agender, genderfuck, i usually cycle through those labels)
- aro/ace (whoo!)
- lots of undiagnosed brain things…
current interests: shoot from the hip, roll from the hip, hermitcraft (and friends)
don’t be surprised if i reblog: stuff i know nothing about but my moots love, sherlock holmes (acd, sherlock and co, maybe even bbc), stranger things, pokemon, avatar the last airbender, voltron…
stuff i do: drawing, watercolour painting, textile arts (primarily embroidery/visible mending and bracelet making), sometimes if i’m very lucky writing, OH AND IMPROV. yep. my love <3
also catch me yapping about: stuff i’m learning in classes, technical theatre, my friends, quality of representation in media, character/acting analysis, shakespeare?
tags for stuff i do!:
#laugh colours (i probably have synaesthesia and sfth and guests’ laughs were very colourful to me)
#sfth as poc (drawing sfth characters as poc! it’s been a really fun way to exercise drawing different demographics. i don’t think the original canon should be interpreted as sfth [yknow those four white boys?] portraying poc because that’s.. not.. its weird to me. but i do think there are plenty of places in our extra-canon interpretations of them where the characters can be poc. sometimes it’s thematically relevant [like titch being a transracial adoptee], other times it’s relevant to the setting/time period/etc [butch being black!] and other times it is just fun as hell [gemma, esmerelda…]
#historical au (i started a little historical au for the plagueround, it hasn’t gone much of anywhere just yet but i like it :) i’ve linked the first post but theres a handful and you can search the tag on my blog for them)
#kevincreeleycrashout2026 (my pride and joy, my pièce de résistance. my agenda for why kevin should be emotionally demolished, why he should fight with edgar, and a prescriptive description of how i think it should go down /silly. i genuinely love some of the analysis work i did for this stuff so check it out if you like!)
if you’ve made it this far you’ve probably figured out that i’m a scatterbrained rambler and this is a theme here so strap in!
Uhhh I’m in the Agender spectrum (mainly using they/them!) and also a lesbian and in the aromantic spectrum! (I think greyromantic for now but idk bro).
I am arguably cis (she/they), biromantic and some type of asexual! Don't question me further on these points because my logic is flimsy and I will cry!
No pressure Tags!! @mrecury42 @attheendhello, @lyraisnotonfire, @yairqq, @lexi-effedup, @threepigeonsinasuitcase, @tomasischasingdaylight, @do-not-be-lasagne, @pixelguy47, @very-confused-alpaca, @applepixls aaaand open tags :>>
i’m vaguely transmasc currently favouring calling myself “nothing, in a boy way” (they/them but i won’t object the occasional he/him thrown in for spice) aromantic and asexual!
no pressure tags :)) @badgebadge314 @questionableaardvark @bushy-tailed-menace @athenam @dykeblazer and open tags!!
“I held you when you were a baby” - Cheeky to Carlos, probably.
Okok so basically there’s big age gap between Cheeky and Carlos because during the flashback scene, Carlos often getting called “young Carlos” and Cheeky was already an elder. And with Cheeky being part of the Mobgoblins, I’m guessing, for most of his life and Carlos was raised by a Mobgoblin family that was already well known. I think Cheeky would swing by the Huispas to greet the newest member, the recently adopted Carlos.
Also sorry for the messy sketch, I’m working on something else but this wouldn’t leave my brain.
genuinely the ending of pmh fucked me up so bad like. earth hated grace. he was ousted from the scientific community, he's "just" a middle school teacher, stratt chooses him specifically because he is expendable, he doesn't even have a dog. by all traditional earth measures, he's disposable. earth literally throws him away. in a plan that they are almost entirely sure won't work. a last-ditch effort, the bottom of the barrel. but the very first frame we see erid it is clear as day how much eridians LOVE him!!!!!! they built him an entire human terrarium with temperature control defined enough to make fog! there's a whole group of little guys losing their shit excited to learn from him! they fix his ship and give him the option to leave! an atmosphere that would easily kill him and a people that care SO MUCH about keeping him safe and comfortable and independent. on purpose! I am going to love you on purpose!
one of the biggest tragedies of early 2010s tumblr is that the devil (bbc sherlock) took root as the face of johnlock when the guy ritchie films were RIGHT there
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 case you just skimmed the post above and missed it, I want to reiterate and highlight Gebru's current position as Executive Director of Distributed AI Research Institute. If you're curious about what AI technology might look like when not applied in the horrifically unethical and damaging way it's currently applied, please check them out.
If we want to have nice things, decentralization is essential, and if we want to decentralize, we need to have our eyes on things that are beyond the scope of the current Big Tech narrative.
The Distributed AI Research Institute is a globally distributed organization of academics, activists, and engineers conducting community-roo
You're the secondary character in this type of media. (horror, comedy, apocalypse, cartoon, rom-com, documentary, reality TV show, etc) Are you surviving?
you are the secondary character in THIS media genre!!
Are you surviving?
yup!!!! I love it here!
yeah!!
Yeah but I'm not happy
I'd rather not but I will
I'm arospec and got romance save me
I am DEAD
results
Voting ended onJun 2
op note: all the submissions I get are really cool ideas!! Thank you!! Keep them coming!!
I am looking at you catboy. I don't know how you do it.
