Just my own quiet little corner to be me and share my interests. ID: black, biromantic, demisexual, dfab genderfluid, pronouns: she/her/hers/herself, they/them/their/themself, mental illnesses: depression and anxiety.
yeah the guy who invented them made incredibly precise infusion pumps (as opposed to gravity fed ivs) which not only meant they could give medications to teeny tiny babies safely, it's also used for insulin pumps and portable dialysis machines. the key element is that it's a peristaltic pump so the liquid stays in sterile tubing for safety
(unholy drink cloaca uses it to dispense precise amounts of flavored sugar syrup)
and not to sound like a conspiracy theorist but another reason I hate the return of 2000’s th*nspo shit is bc starving does make women frail and has longer term consequences like early osteoporosis, brittle bones/teeth, insomnia, ect. Your muscles will start eating themselves. It also makes you extremely emotional and severely lowers your capacity for critical thinking not bc you’re a girl but because your brain isn’t getting any fucking nutrients so idk I just feel like its very convenient that every time there’s an uptick in fascist rhetoric and women’s rights are being stripped suddenly it’s peak fashion for women to be starving, weak, and exhausted
Racism in fandom spaces is actually insanely bad and if you ever try to downplay or avoid conversations about it because "fandom is supposed to be fun" then I'm not sorry to say this: You're adding on to the problem.
If POC speaking up about a fandom's racism issue offends you more than the racism itself, you need to think about that. You need to think about how POC fighting racism offends you more than the racism.
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
there's something about how people talk about ableism online that feels somewhat divorced from the reality that ableism is a form of violent oppression that gets disabled people killed, assaulted, and brutalised in real life. that it causes medical neglect, abuse, and structural inequality. that disabled people are, on the whole disenfranchised. and it's not like verbal interpersonal ableism "doesn't matter" in the face of the "real stuff" because all forms of ableism contribute towards dehumanising and isolating disabled people, which in turn makes them more vulnerable to the violence i mentioned. but it's like, do you guys remember the violence exists? that it's not just people being upset over words "for no reason"? there's a glaring reason right in front of us if you bother to look
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.
Solange Knowles Announces Saint Heron Digital Archive Library
"The Saint Heron Library is home to our archival collection of primarily rare, out of print, and 1st edition titles by Black & brown authors, poets, & artists," she captioned on Instagram.
The library will not only serve as a place of significant works but also act as a catalyst for more conversations around artists, scholars and enthusiasts. "As the as the market and demand for these books, zines, and catalogues rises, we would like to play a small part in creating free access to the expansive range of critical thought and expression by these great mindsss," Knowles said."
Read the full piece here: https://www.ebony.com/solange-saint-heron-digital-archive-library/
The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.
So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.
This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.
That’s not sad, that’s awesome.
*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing
i just can't convey the frustration and sorrow that it's been to grow up at first without the internet and then watching it bloom into this useful, fun, connecting force you sometimes spent time on, only for it to degrade into this constant oppressive waste of time and energy where people are constantly pumping out algorithmically designed content for max algorithmic appeal and even the most simple search generates either no results or an infinite abyss of ai generated slop none of which is usable or correct. we briefly had a library of alexandria and then fed it into a paper shredder so advertisers could sell a random mash of pulp back to us at a premium.
A small piece of good news. Andry Hernandez Romero, one of the many people who was sent to CECOT by the regime, has been sent back to Venezuela after 125 days. If the name sounds familiar, he is a 31 year old gay make up artist who was disappeared with the excuse of him having tattoos.
Im watching a livestream. Don’t have a link to a story
They are filing lawsuits as fast as they can to try to force the regime to provide due process. Anytime you hear that a horrible policy is being challenged, it’s probably the ACLU. They’re non partisan. They will defend everyone’s civil rights. Even people you hate. That’s why I love them.
The only reporting from Venezuela - and this is from Andry’s lawyer(?) - is that they got there, and that while in Cecot they got regularly beaten
My friend pointed it out first, and then I started noticing too. Why would books that multiple libraries definitely, 100% had digital access to a couple of months/weeks/days ago disappear?
Amazon is getting exclusive rights to them.
Ebooks that the public library once had digital copies of are now only available through Amazon. Audible boasts on their covers about Audible-exclusive audiobooks that did not used to be Audible-exclusive. Entire series and collections are disappearing overnight.
Keep your eyes on the privatization of media and your libraries.
According to this article on The Verge, it's been happening since at least 2021, but if I were to make a guess, Amazon has doubled down recently in response to the boycotts: if there are specific books people want, particularly ones only available digitally available, they now have the monopoly, and you are forced to scab, which often also means remaking your account and breaking your boycott altogether.
Now more than ever, support your local libraries, support authors directly when possible, and support your local used bookstores!
dragon: AS OF NOW YOU ARE THE LEGAL PROPERTY OF THE EMPIRE. YOU WILL SPEND EIGHT HOURS A DAY AS A SLAVE TO THE CROWN, AND IN ORDER TO KEEP YOUR BODY IN GOOD WORKING CONDITION YOU WILL BE PROVIDED WITH NECESSARY FOOD, SHELTER, AND MEDICAL CARE. YOU MAY ALSO EARN ENRICHMENT ITEMS FROM GOOD PERFORMANCE.
dragon: YOU DO UNDERSTAND THAT YOU ARE IN SLAVERY, YES?
human: hey you're providing me with a house, food, healthcare, comfort items, and the ability to change jobs if i need to, with a guaranteed retirement plan and systems in place to keep my life stable. this shit is cool as fuck
dragon: IT IS NOTHING FANCY. I'M SURE YOU'RE USED TO MORE
I know it's a joke post but these are the exact arguments people make to excuse American chattel slavery. How about we don't imply that slavery is a good alternative as long as the slaves are housed and fed and clothed and taken care of. Working minimum wage sucks but you're still your own person.
phones love to go "do you want to clear up .3 GB by deleting these cherished pictures that you havent looked at in more than 30 days?" while also installing random apps and AI bullshit you didnt ask for. and you cant even uninstall half the apps
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