bookwyrms like shiny things

genre, tech, science, feminism, literature, and the world.

[gretchensinister]

Consider this (based on a conversation I had with some friends a while ago): Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for people who actually like Pride and Prejudice. Look–I tried to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and I got about 20 pages in before I came to the conclusion that the person who wrote it did so out of the belief that the original Pride and Prejudice was stuffy and boring. There were out of character vulgar puns. And the trailer for the movie did not convince me that I had missed anything by cutting short my reading experience. So, what I’m talking about here is this premise: the world of Pride and Prejudice, but if you die, it’s highly likely, almost certain that your corpse will get up and try to eat people. But no one dies in Pride and Prejudice, you might say. In fact, few or no people die in any Jane Austen novel. This is true. But people do get sick with some regularity. Imagine the tension added to Jane getting sick after going to visit Bingley if there was the chance that she would become a zombie after she died. Becoming a zombie in an eligible bachelor’s house probably would have seriously wrecked any chances of any of the living sisters ending up with him. Imagine Mr. Collins, as a minister, having the duty upon someone’s death of severing their head with a ceremonial plate or something that would prevent the corpse from rising. Obviously important, but this only makes him more self-important and obnoxious. And dangerous. For you see, in this version, Mr. Bennett, who stays in his office all the time, whose life is the only thing allowing Mrs. Bennett and her daughters to stay in the house–Mr. Bennett is definitely a zombie. He died at home, and Mrs. Bennett decided that, no way were they dealing with this, and so…just started faking it. Jane and Elizabeth know. The younger sisters don’t. In this universe, I think we have to go with zombies that are not any faster or stronger than the humans they were, and in fact tend to get weaker as time passes because their flesh is rotting. And…hmm, okay, how about they are pretty violent upon rising, and for about a week afterward, trying to bite people and spread the infection (even though most people are carriers anyway, but getting a nasty bite from a corpse will give you other stuff that will have you die while carrying the virus). But then they calm down and basically just start sort of attempting to act like they did in life, that is, taking habitual actions with no consciousness, in a depressing and desiccated way. So Mr. Bennett is a zombie, and Mrs. Bennett’s number one goal is to get her daughters married before anyone finds that out. And this, actually, makes Elizabeth’s refusal of Mr. Collins more frustrating for Mrs. Bennett–obviously Mr. Bennett didn’t tell Elizabeth that she could refuse Mr. Collins, because Mr. Bennett is dead, but Mrs. Bennett can’t say anything or the game would be up. Another question in this version–does Mr. Darcy find out about Mr. Bennett being a zombie somehow? Does Elizabeth find out that he knows and didn’t say anything and this is something that helps repair his earlier actions? Anyway, this is the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that I was looking for.

[exigencelost]

Okay also: in the original, when Elizabeth walks through the rain all the way to bingley’s to care for Jane while she’s sick, it’s a very dramatic expression of both Elizabeth’s love for her sister and her penchant for flamboyant rebellion, but consider, if there is a chance Jane will wake up a zombie and Elizabeth knows it, how does that change the dynamic? Elizabeth might be going to help take care of Jane, or to *take care* of Jane should things take a more morbid turn…by killing her zombie sister.

This works especially well if zombieism is communicable prior to death; if mr. Bennett is a zombie and only the elder Bennetts know, that means Jane has been pre-exposed and is almost certain to wake up as a zombie should she die in the Bingleys’ care— which the Bingleys do not know. Elizabeth has to forge through the rain to be there in case things get ugly, because she knows that the Bingleys aren’t prepared.

[shenzuul]

And I think you pretty much HAVE to make Mr. Bennett’s zombie status play a role in how and why Darcy separates Bingley from Jane—the heavy implication behind Darcy’s line about the want of propriety shown even by her father hits Elizabeth like a ton of bricks as she realizes he knows—he knows, and he thought Jane lying to Bingley about it was evidence that Jane didn’t love Bingley—but—but Darcy must not have told Bingley that part of it. Bingley couldn’t keep a secret on his life; if he knew, his sister would know, and word would already be out and they’d have been ruined by now—

And of course, not only does the fact that Darcy, who owes their family nothing, has kept and continues to keep this secret for them even after Elizabeth’s refusal deepen the gratitude she begins to feel for him after the letter of explanation, but it also liberates Elizabeth to fall in love with him. Because Elizabeth-who-wants-to-marry-for-love would never be happy marrying someone who didn’t know the family secret in advance. She had resigned herself to spinsterhood because she couldn’t be satisfied with having to hoodwink someone to have their hand, but also couldn’t put her family at risk by trusting someone who wasn’t bound to them by more than an engagement. (Maybe she was even tempted to confide in Wickham at one point, and hasn’t Darcy’s letter proven she was absolutely right not to yield to that passing thought.) But Darcy figured it out himself, and he’s kept her trust, and she could fall in love with him without guilt—if she hadn’t already turned him down.

AND THEN LYDIA HAPPENS. And Darcy realizes immediately that Mr. Bennett can’t do anything to recover her—and if Mr. Bennett doesn’t do anything about Lydia, Mr. Collins might become suspicious, or even just officously involve himself, so find out the while thing. When Darcy blames himself for not revealing Wickham’s character, it’s with a much more immediate sense of urgency. It’s not that the other sisters’ marriage prospects being ruined may impoverish them down the road—it might immediately drag them all into destitution. That’s why he rushes off to go look for Lydia himself.

[thedreadvampy]

Everywhere I go I'm reminded how much the desire to punish homelessness and migration and other Undesirablenesses make society markedly worse for everyone

like why is the park locked after 5pm so I can't go and sit under a tree after work? to punish rough sleepers for the terrible crime of being homeless and alive

why do I have to buy a drink, beg for a code and fuck around with an awkward keypad for 5 minutes in order to take a piss? because fuck homeless people

why do I need to provide proof of address and photo ID to do everything? because we had to create a really hostile environment for migrants

why can't you sit anywhere? well because god forbid people sleep when they're pushed out of shelter. can't risk that.

every day governments, councils and businesses make your life worse as a side effect of making vulnerable people's lives WAY worse. if you're ok with that you're a fucking idiot and if you're in favour of it you're a vindictive cunt cause again literally the ONLY payoff for your life getting worse is other people's lives getting worser.

[depsidase]

how quaint.

[cherryjams]

‘Hands weaving magnetic-core memory, IBM, Poughkeepsie, New York,’ 1956. Photograph by Ansel Adams.

[bladespark]

My mother used to make computer cores as a "work from home" side business. As a child I got spending money via un-winding the ones that failed testing so that the magnetic center could be re-used. I got between $0.05 and $0.25 per core depending. Mom got more for the finished ones, of course, though I don't know how much. Her sister was an expert, and did the more complicated kind, some of which ended up in satellites and/or were used by NASA!

They were all done by hand using a kind of treadle-operated frame with a little (crochet!) hook to pull the wires around the cores. The people making them were mostly housewives who did this as a side-job in the 80s and 90s. I don't know if it's still done that way anywhere in the USA today, but the history of computing and space exploration is littered with "women's work" like this.

[reginaldqueribundus]

the Federation itself as a concept is so funny because the founding members are

the Vulcans, who have been friends with humanity for years but don't seem to actually like them all that much, instead regarding them with a sort of perverse fascination usually reserved for virology labs

the Andorians, who were fighting the Vulcans for like a hundred years

the Tellarites, who don't like any of these people and whose cultural trait is arguing, and

humans, whom nobody knew existed until last century when they shot themselves into space on a heavily modified nuke, invented world peace and won a fight with the nearest imperial superpower

like imagine you're the Romulan Empire and these weird monkeys who've barely figured out interstellar travel show up on your doorstep in the equivalent of a shipping container with missiles strapped to it, kick your ass in front of everybody, and then start a friendship club with 3 of your neighbours who all hated each others' guts until like a year ago. now I understand why every Romulan on the show is so angry

[proxima-bee]

can you imagine how good shows would be if writers thought of women as human beings

[infestuous]

Wally Dion, Green Star Quilt, 2019 circuit boards, brass wire, copper tube

[chekhovs-raygun]

I SAW THIS IN THE PORTLAND ART MUSEUM! ITS HUGE!

it shimmers like no gemstones i've ever seen: green as malachite and emerald but shot through with opal, gold, copper. photographs can't do it justice because of how it shines, as well as the way the actual material elements have their own dimensions. you can lean in and study all the fine lines of the circuits or step back and admire how the rearranged whole forms new patterns. it's one of the most beautiful creations i've ever seen.

[pmamtraveller]

"An Empire Built on Waste" by artist Emanuele (Jane) Morelli

[mamawasatesttube]

the thing about media literacy is that understanding why the author chose to specify that the curtains are blue is the same skill set as understanding that the way the author characterizes all black characters as angry or all chinese characters as meek and silent is racist. it is the same skill set as being able to identify when a news source is biased or when someone is feeding you propaganda. the ability to ask "why did this person choose to present this premise in this specific way?" is a critical skill in a world full of misinformation. why are the curtains blue? maybe it's a characterization detail. maybe it's extraneous worldbuilding. why is this character written as being right all the time? maybe you're intended to disagree with them. maybe it doesn't matter. maybe you should still ask why.

[justalurkr]

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.

[iamjaynaemarie]

Dangers of working on a set.

That’s what I said.

[seawitchkaraoke]

Okay but you forgot the best part! During the scene where Aragorn, Gandalf and the other Main CharaktersTM ride ahead to go shout at the gate (and talk to the mouth of sauron in the extended edition) they were very firmly told only to ride up  ahead “this far” because that area was cleared and beyond that it wasn’t.

But. Viggo Mortensen is absolutely mad and lead them just…. a bit farther than that. Everyone else was very scared they might blow up any second. Viggo said it “added a little extra tension”.

[mikkeneko]

[ithinkitsdashing]

#they just don’t make behind the scenes stories like lotr anymore

[ophidahlia]

Viggo was just Like That™ for the whole trilogy, taking method acting to extreme levels:

he would spend multiple days walking overland to locations in full pack, sword, & armour when everyone else was travelling in trucks

refused to use any prop swords that weren’t actual steel

basically lived in the forest in-costume, sleeping rough under the sky, even fishing & foraging for his food when possible

often spent hours in the barn just bonding with the horses. He adopted the horse he rode, Uranus, after filming ended

repaired all his own gear by hand, which was often since he never took it off

had a tooth knocked out during filming but had the crew simply glue it back in place so they could keep filming

the instructor who taught everyone swordplay said Viggo was the best swordsman he had ever trained

carried his sword literally everywhere & practiced non-stop, resulting in the cops being called when locals reported “a wild man swinging a sword around his head" outside a gym in Wellington

an orc actor fucked up & accidentally threw a dagger directly into Viggo’s face, but Viggo just deflected it with his sword. They kept that shot

infamously broke 3 toes kicking that helmet but stayed in-character & sold his very real scream as part of the scene. They also kept that shot

Viggo insists on doing his own stunts; in The Two Towers where Aragorn is unconscious & floating down the river, the strong current pulled him underwater for so long that a rescue team had to go in to save him. Viggo survived by grabbing a boulder on the riverbed and pulling himself to the surface

It’s probably more accurate to say that Aragorn played Viggo Mortensen in the off season, so I’m 100% unsurprised to hear he put a whole crowd of fellow actors in genuine mortal peril for a 12% increase in authenticity

[twiststreet]

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Edited down a long tweet. (x)

[jimhenson-themuppetmaster]

[knivesandteeth]

If im ever having a breakdown, guaranteed Garak is having a worse one. My prettiest war criminal. My beautiful queen. My perfect meow meow.

[barlo-b-theorizing]

This is one of my favorite characters to identify when asked about what I mean when I say DS9 had the Dream Team of writers. Because as the original poster pointed out, he was a certified War Criminal. But the writers made his journey so compelling that at some point you realize, "wait when did I forgive him personally and accept he is trying to be a good man?" You don't even realize you've grown attached to Garak until you're already rooting for him to prove himself. A good writer knows how to guide you to the epiphany they are aiming for without strong arming you to the conclusion.

[indigobluerose]

when you learn that he was raised from birth to do War Crimes, by the War Crimer in Chief of the Elite War Crimes Division of Planet War Crimes, and still somehow managed to get exiled for Not Criming Hard Enough and Not Enjoying It, he becomes pretty damn forgivable

[shap3shifter-witch]

Just wanna say how much I LOVE being asexual. Theres so much joy and whimsy to find in life when not worrying about the confines of relationship expectations.I literally cannot imagine myself any other way. I would not be the same person at all if I were not asexual. I understand that a lot of people accept and acknowledge their queerness while not considering it be a core part of their personality, but for me it is So Integral to how I operate as a human being that i consider it a huge part of my personality. Which is a good thing for me!! Just thinking about my asexuality and being confident in who I am brings me such euphoria. I love love love being asexual. I love that this is the way I am. I love existing sometimes it is so great 10/10 would recommend. Asexuals of the world, you are loved.

[oganneb]

Emil is my "yup this is real wool" detector. It's only real wool that he goes this nuts over

[unicornery]

[viralfrog]

[notsafeforbinary]

[lillylikescats]

I'm an electrical engineer and for the longest time I was saying that electricity and electronics isn't magic, but think about it.

You literally have to collect rare stones from remote locations, put them into specific formations to work. All of this gets written down in symbols which don't make sense to the uninformed. It gets powered by energy which can not be seen in most cases.

Like what else do you want. What's your standard for calling something magic.

[transcribepaige]

"It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works."

Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men (Discworld #30)