Pansexual, polyamorous, polytheistic, strict omnivore, filthy socialist, PRO FAT
I love videos games, especially cozy games like Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon, as well as games like Skyrim, LoL, Dragon Age, survival games like Valheim and Fall Out, and tabletop games like D&D, Uno, playing cards and even chess.
Fav hobbies are anime, reading the news, learning cool and hidden knowledge, fondling breasts, and petting animals. AMA
Everything is political, don't get me started.
Happily married to my wife @runic-kitchen. Open for poly partners but not looking.
I prefer femmes but I am open to healthy masculinity. I love women, everything about them. Trans women ARE WOMEN. Men are regarded with suspicion until their loyalty is proven.
Whenever America starts a war with a nuclear power everyone starts yelling about WW3 and it's only just occurred to me that when Americans say 'WW3' they are at least partially expressing an anxiety that this time their government's blind aggression might have hit somebody who'll actually hit back.
I was gonna say 'like WW2' but then rapidly remembered that neither of the existing world wars involved like. much of any direct damage to civilian populations either because America's eternal wars haven't touched its own soil since like the 1860s. except for Pearl Harbour, which was literally One Attack in the whole of WW2 (and which was also primarily targeting a military base. and was in a colonized nation far from the mainland USA). I am not kidding if you look up 'attacks on American soil' every single thing since 1900 except individual attacks (Pearl Harbour and 9/11, basically plus a couple of border skirmishes with Mexico) is like 'America was attacked In The Gulf States' or 'America was attacked In Asia'. like mate where is the US? you can't count attacks on military bases as 'attacks on US soil' unless you need to bulk out the list which. look at the history.
Like imo one of the reasons the US is so comfortable being leisurely belligerent against Literally Any Country In The World is that it's been literally well over a century since the fight actually came to them. why WOULD the US government stop being blindly aggressive when the only costs are financial?
and instead of being primarily concerned about like. the actual thousands of people who are actually gonna die in these strikes. every time the US's unprovoked aggression hits a nuclear state of a state with a measure of international heft, the loudest concern from Americans is OH NO WHAT IF THIS ONE'S WW3
because. war is so abstract and foreign. because it's spent 150 years constantly happening Over There and only involving Americans who are in the military. foreign wars don't register as a threat because they're NOT a threat to Americans (the only Real People) and the way in which they're frightening is the abstract possibility that the other party might at some point bring America actually into the war. which has basically never happened so it's this vast unknown threat.
(the UK btw is also not immune to this but it's a wee bit different. our economy was permanently crippled by direct damage in WW2 and the Irish republicans got a lot of hits in so there's still some memory that War Has Consequences. but by and large we still approach war as something that Happens Elsewhere and are scandalised by the idea it might directly affect us at home. this is still a fairly abstracted and fictionalised threat to us which we treat as More Worrying than the actual bombings currently happening, but I just don't think it's as completely abstracted as the American relationship to foreign wars)
The Black Tom explosion in 1916 was a German terrorist attack on US soil and resulted in 7 deaths, hundreds of injuries, about half a billion dollars in adjusted damages, and complete annihilation of an island in New Jersey.
SEVEN. SEVEN DEATHS. A CENTURY AGO. is the 'war has come to US soil' you wanted to pull?
Preliminary figures today (4 March) is 787 Iranians killed since 28 February. so forgive me if I say you're proving my point pretty effectively.
similarly yes you are correct WWII was a nuclear war. so far the only one. a war in which the US made the decision to kill over 200,000 people Over There on a different continent and then spent the next 80 years making sure nobody else would be able to either retaliate or do anything similar. And the American (and Western) relationship to nuclear arms remains primarily not 'Jesus Christ I cannot believe America killed close to a quarter of a million people in a civilian centre with one set of orders' but 'oh noooooo what if this means we have to mitigate our aggression in case they do something like this BACK TO US'.
so. again. my point. war in the American cultural imagination remains an abstract thing that THEY do to OTHER PEOPLE where the concept of any enemy action reaching people in civilian centres is so completely abstracted it just becomes a boogeyman and apparently we should still be talking about the 7 American civilians that were killed in a war that claimed in the region of 6-13 million civilian lives in Europe, Africa and Asia.
Seven. Fuck me. I thought I was being needlessly shitty when I wrote this post but you have really helped clarify that this actually is how warped American perspectives on civilian casualties are.
The Cold War would actually be a great example of this paranoia in action because what Actually Happened in the Cold War was America engaged in a bunch of proxy wars, bombings and coups elsewhere in the world, killing literally millions of people in Asia, South America, Africa and Eastern Europe, largely justified by peddling a paranoid fantasy that they were actually the ones under attack and that they might get nuked.
At least 5 million people were killed in various American proxy wars during the Cold War - in Vietnam, Korea, Laos, Guatemala, Congo, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Libya, Panama, Iraq and Kuwait - not to mention the Cuba blockade.
And like in that, what actual, not imagined or feared, damage did the US take on home soil? As in the World Wars, basically the only Americans killed and injured by the Cold War were military personnel engaged in invasions, and US civilians attacked by the US government.
The US did not get nuked. The US did not get invaded. The US gained rather than lost power and money. What possible lesson could the US government learn from this other than that proxy wars work and justifying proxy wars with an inflated paranoia of What If They Come For Us? works even better?
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.
"bottom" please consider 🫵 whether the word you are looking for is in fact "submissive" ! because if we decide that taking dick means your personality & character r inherently subservient 😃 we might as well just throw in the towel on the most basic premise of feminism & 🔫 kill ourselves 🎉
I think most importantly, it would give us the leverage to say “no”. To walk away from bad jobs and abusive managers. To refuse to work in unsafe environments. To demand better pay.
To demand better, because the options are no longer “suck it up” or “die”.
The counter-argument: Not having UBI is in the interests of those in power who want to do anything to the people they are in power over in order to remain in power.
If the greed of the few should come before the need of the many.
