the major proplem with filial laws (laws that dictate that the final option of care for an ageing parent is the child) is that it is not a stop gap measure to ensure the health of the parent- but discussion of it often is derailed by the concept of no contact or disownment- which while valid- is not the fucking point. the system is collapseing so much that the media machine is slowly grinding the concept of no contact with big personalities endless being "fascinated" by it and carefully highlighting specific personalities in order to make you feel guilty- when in fact- the fact that you are the final option is absurd. they are priming parents to assume that the system they banked on for decades to fall on when its all over- is no longer a viable option. they are priming children to know that they will not have a future that they can build on their own.
Let's say I really wanted to reduce the number of children who die in car accidents. Car accidents are really bad, right? Nobody disagrees about that. And it would be much better for both the environment and the kids' health if they spent more time walking, or taking the bus. Perfectly reasonable. More cars off the road, safer roads, fewer kids getting hurt, healthier kids. A win-win!
Therefore, let's ban children from traveling by car and require all cars to have a scanner on the door that scans the government ID of everyone who gets in the car to make sure no kids are in there. After all, kids get hurt in car accidents all the time! We need to ban this right away!
The thing we're about to learn in this current wave of social media bans is just how much of the infrastructure of our society we have allowed to be captured by a handful of social media companies. And thus, how much of the world we are shutting a whole demographic out of by banning it for them. If we decide as a society that we want to do this, we can't do it without building the equivalent of a robust public transit network first.
Sure, some kids would start walking to school. But some would just be stuck at home. Forever.
free the nipple has to make a resurgence for a number of reasons but bro look at our upcoming eternity of wet bulb temps youre smoking straight up cock if you think im keeping a shirt on when it hits 105° in new england
everyone tits out with a parasol is such a beautiful world to imagine that the fact it doesnt currently exist fills me with equal parts fire and misery
"Oh yeah, we have an outdoor Corgi, he just gets so bored cooped up inside all day. He knows to stay off the road. Don't worry, he's way too smart for coyotes and the neighbor's know to look out when they drive past."
"Us? Oh, of *course* our Dachshund sleeps inside- we just let him out in the morning and make sure he comes back for dinner. He just does his own thing, no worries."
"Um, you know it's not humane to keep a chihuahua confined to an apartment? They're dogs, they're natural predators. They need to experience hunting behaviors or they get depressed. No we don't leash ours, he absolutely hates it, we just let him come and go whenever."
Yall get how fucking stupid that sounds, right? So stop letting your goddamn cats get eaten and attacked and infected and hit by cars
A toddler would probably love full unattended access to the neighborhood too, but we don't do that either, do we
It's 2026, "keep your damn pet in a house or in your view" should not be controversial
Here is an article from NPR about it (May 22, 2026):
Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click.
"Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said.
Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from.
"If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."
And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):
While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model.
Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.
And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:
When Google first started implementing AI-assisted results, news publishers warned of “catastrophic” impacts on the industry, much of which relies on Google search to drive users to their websites.
Last year, news websites saw significant traffic declines as chatbots increasingly replaced Google search as the primary way to find sites and ask questions.
Small businesses also noted drops in traffic to their sites from Google, which has traditionally delivered customers.
Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy & research at Amsive, a digital marketing agency, warned as early as last year that Google’s planned changes to search are “going to have a devastating impact on the Internet.”
“It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,” she told Technology Magazine.
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.
It is imperative that the customer remain unaware that employees drink water, it frightens and scares them to think of an employee as having human needs
I think it's a common misconception that domesticating animals is somewhat like enslaving them. It really is more of a symbiotic relationship. No wild animal would have willingly put up with early humans if they didn't get something out of it. Wolves wouldn't have stayed with us and become dogs if they weren't getting food and safety out of it. Many large herbivores that are now domesticated could and would have easily trampled their early human captors or broken their enclosures open if they didn't have a reason to stay. Sometimes individual animals still do if we don't give them what they need.
The animals that have stayed with us for thousands of years have evolved to cooperate with us better. Dogs have additional facial muscles around their eyes that wolves lack in order to mimic human facial expressions. Sheep grow their wool perpetually while their wild counterparts don't because a bigger fleece means they're more likely to be allowed to breed and be kept around. Domestic dairy cows produce much more milk than wild bovine species and domestic hens lay more eggs. Do you know how energy costly producing eggs or milk is for an animal? It's pretty intense! They wouldn't be able to do that if we hadn't given them the food and safety from predators and the elements to.
And we really need to show these animals respect and gratitude for what they give us by taking excellent care of them. They gave up a lot to be with us, often including the means to take care of themselves in the wild. That's a huge reason why I'm not against using animal products, but I hate factory farming. They are still living, breathing creatures with needs and feelings. They deserve a comfortable life and, when the time comes, a humane death.
Fun fact! Not only is everything here correct, it's the reason we haven't domesticated bears!
This is a bit to the left of my area of expertise, so bear with me (heh), but there had been attempts to domesticate brown bears several times in human history! Vikings were the first ones we have records of (that I know of) and also in the Roman empire, India and even the Victorians. There were absolutely a few generations of tame brown bears, from pets to zoo performers to hunters and war bears. They did have a chance of being domesticated like the wolves had been.
And all of that effort? Resulted in jack shit. Level of domestication remained zero. The bears got out of that domestication experiment with zero genes altered. There is several reasons for that, one of which being that they live too long and don't breed as fast, and also they are very individual animals as opposed to wolves, so they don't play well in groups, which is kinda necessary.
But the biggest reason? BEARS DON'T NEED HUMANS. There is absolutely no point in a bear's life cycle where it's survival would be immensely impacted for the better by human intervention. They can hunt and forage on their own, no help necessary. They have no trouble surviving harsh climates, so human houses weren't a temptation. They're solitary, so they didn't seek out companionship when alone. They occupy a similar dietary niche as humans so were more competition for resources that an opportunity for mutualism. They certainly didn't need protection.
So even though humans (being human) tried to domesticate bears, bears weren't really playing ball with that. They were just fine on their own, and saw no sufficient incentive to change themselves to fit into a relationship with humans. Sure there are some weirdoes who got fairy-napped as cubs and are happy living with humans, but their genes aren't useful enough to bring into the pool. They saw what happened to the wolves who got too close to the human fire and missionaries are mauled on sight.
@mediterranean-ground-cuckoo you have activated a sleeper agent I didn't know I had in my brain.
Because it's kinda already happened, but not really? The thing about cheetahs is that they are very, very endangered, part of the reason being that cheetah cub mortality rate is something like 80%, which is abnormally high even for wild animals. Cheetahs don't make dens where they can stash their cubs, so they have to sort of drag them around with them and hope predators mistake them for a badger and don't attack them (cheetah cubs have very fluffy fur on top of them as camouflage).
Add in the fact that tjey're basically horse software running on cat hardware? These guys are an anxious wreck, every single one of them. And if left on their own they will absolutely form a positive feedback loop of scaring each other half to death and be too stressed to breed.
Enter wildlife conservation scientists.
These guys really want cheetahs to stay around, and stay wild animals. They are very fucking careful to let cheetahs be wild animals while making sure they don't perish entirely to enviroment, starvation and predation, and that they preferably breed.
Cheetahs see humans staying back and keeping a respectful distance but helping whenever they need it. Everyone who knows cats knows this is basically a marriage proposal done right.
So humans want cheetahs to be proper wild animals. Cheetahs have tried being wild animals and said 'Fuck that shit! That's hard! Come pet me and keep me safe!'
Add in the fact that cheetah gene pool is so fucking limited they can basically all be each other's organ donors, you also gotta bolster their diversity, preferably with healthy cheetahs from zoos, and those are so used to humans some of them will just come up to you and demand to be petted. If it's one of those that was raised with helper dogs? That's basically an oversized housecat, or at least it really wants you to think it is.
And there is also a historical precedent for this! Fucking pharaos kept cheetahs as pets, and if taken young they can be tamed in, like, a year. Tame cheetahs were noble gifts in the Ming dynasty. The Mughals used them as hunting animals (though it might have been carcals or leopards).
Quite frankly, the only reason cheetahs HADN'T been domesticated so far is because getting them to breed in captivity is real fucking hard, and consistent sucesses were achieved only in the seventies. The males need to have their bromance packs (pardon, coalitions) and females need to have a large area to roam. Kinda hard to arrange without a whole lot of land.
alright i got this reply so fast i think i need to address this explicitly. tax brackets do not mean you will make less than before when you get a raise! say your income is taxed at 20% but have a 30% tax bracket starting at $10k, this means all the money you make up to 10k is taxed at 20%! anything above that, minus 10k, is taxed at 30%. the $10k you made remains at 20%, unaffected by the higher tax bracket. if you made exactly $10k you’ll have $8k after taxes; if you made $11k that’s 10k at 20% and 1k at 30%, so $8700! you should never turn down a raise because of tax brackets!
it surprised me when i learned this! but it also surprised me that i didn’t already know it because it seems so obvious in retrospect! it’s almost as if…some people…profit from us not knowing it
