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.
these panels haunt me after reading the First Job Arc bc wdym Jabber called it-
↓ wdym he called it
i'm not surprised he can sniff out battle potential, obviously, and I already half-expected that Follo would become a Giver at some point in the story [just based off vibes and general story telling habits]
-> n in the dub specifically he says: "you, i can work with"
this single line opens up a huge insight into Jabber's character
Jabber likes fighting strong people, and he cultivates that. he literally drags it out of them, through his taunts- through adding and removing obstacles
↓ after all, he had no genuine reason to try and kill Gris, when he could've just knicked him and been done with it, other than to create motive and give Follo a reason to improve and fight him
in a way, he's honestly a lot like Enjin
-> The attempted murder of Gris is, through this lens, a parallel to Enjin throwing Rudo to traffickers
[though Enjin's had more layers, as it was both a lesson in how far he'll get by himself as a blatant Sphereite AND a manufactured situation to draw out his Giver abilities]
Just wanted to add that Zodyll says this to Rudo when they're in the trash beast. He says that Jabber is very perceptive and that when people face him they either experience a shock (like Rudo) and grow stronger or are overwhelmed. These seem to be actual talents of Jabber's that Zodyll is putting to use.
makes me sad that most YouTube art videos are about "how to make your ocs interesting", "how to grow your account in social media", "how to not make mary sues" like what happened to just drawing for fun and sharing it- oh wait I forgot this is the result of lolcowing people for their technical art skills and or clout related things.
we are in an era where people openly and harshly judge people's creative output because of the normalization of having a "freak" of the week. it makes me sad cuz as artists we should be having fun, not treating social media like an art competition or forcing our art to be "perfect" and digestible.
another thing is the constant need to market yourself and assimilate into a squeaky clean brand via treating social media like full time job rather than hobby you put your art on and occasionally get paid for. it's not a moral failing but I swear it's another form of art being controlled and governed by capitalism.
Happy pride to those fighting for the rights of our community. The fight is still not over for our trans and gender-diverse siblings, our two-spirit and Indigenous siblings, queer people across the globe fighting for their rights to both live and love, and all others whose human rights are being actively infringed upon.
Once again, the discourse around policing identity and what is allowed at pride is simply a psyop to distract us from the real fights around us. Complacency when there are so many in our community still fighting to survive is a disservice to the queer elders who came before us.
wish literally any gay papers would talk about lil nas x cause every article is either written with contempt OR makes sweeping assumptions by only quoting the cops and blatantly lies about things they contradict in their own article. like how is there no coverage of support or efforts to keep an eye on his location?
shortest possible story is that he he got arrested and hospitalized after walking around outside at night, MAYBE having 'an episode', MAYBE he was drunk, maybe he was high, maybe he was just being loud, who knows. Dude was outside at night in boxers and cowboy boots and that's all he did to "invite" police interaction.
But cops claimed he assaulted them so he gets arrested. Then goes to the hospital. Then goes back into custody.
And then he's not heard of for a while, then days later says he's out and okay. But facing FELONY charges!
WHERE IS EVERYONE? Pinknews cunts? Them? OutMag? Hello??
Almost a year later, Lil Nas X is out of a mental health rehab program, looking good, saying he feels really good, and seems to be on the way up after all of this. I'm really happy for him. I hope he has good genuine support in his life through family, friends, and folks rooting on him that he can count on.
I am really disappointed but not surprised how quickly a lot of media support for him disappeared, especially queer papers. An interview from before the police incident really highlighted how many people wanted him to fail and wanted to see him fall, including certain pockets within communities that should have has his back.
Happy Happy Pride to Lil Nas X. I hope nothing but good things come his way.
i hate the "we should only have queer actors playing queer characters" argument for several reasons. but what annoys me the most is that people who argue this straight up don't realize that it's illegal to ask someone about their sexuality in relation to a job interview. like an audition. i don't think breaking anti-discrimination laws to screen people's sexualities to determine their employment is the woke take you think it is.
and just. setting that aside. if you're saying "we should only have queer actors playing queer characters" you're saying that queer people must be publicly out to play a queer character. even if that actor and that character have the same sexuality. that actor has to disclose that to the whole world. again. i don't think demanding queer people to out themselves in order to engage with a queer acting role is doing anyone any good.
head in hands. it's acting. it's playing make believe. i don't care if the actress playing a lesbian character has kissed a woman before. i care if she's good at pretending she has.
Look at this from the opposite point of view. Would you insist that only straight actors play straight roles? Was Jonathan Bailey any less effective in Bridgerton or Wicked because his love interests were women and not men? Should Nathan Lane have never been allowed to play Willy Loman, or Fiona Shaw Medea? Of course not. Because they're actors and their personal lives don't necessarily need to correlate with what they do on stage.
since there is such an "english speakers who don't even try to pronounce a foreign mame correctly" epidemic, native english speakers often try to overcorrect and end up thinking they have a moral imperative to pronounce every foreign name correctly at all times. so i'm gonna hold your hand and look into your eyss as i say this: you can't. you can't pronounce every sound in a language you don't speak. and that's fine. it happens to the rest of us too. we won't be mad so long as you try your best.
“I did some research to pronounce this name correctly” = 👍 great! even if the pronunciation was still off (and learning to pronounce a foreign language correctly takes a lot of practice) people generally appreciate it when someone goes the extra mile for accuracy, and honestly, languages are cool
“I’m probably not saying that correctly”/“sorry for my pronunciation” = 👍 understandable! foreign languages often have sounds that aren’t used in English and learning to correctly pronounce unfamiliar phonemes is genuinely difficult even with help
“lol I’m not even gonna TRY to pronounce that 😂” = 👎 THIS is the problem, if treats languages other than English like they are inherently ‘weird’ or ‘overly complicated’ just because you aren’t familiar with them
“One thousand apologies for my butchering of this beautiful effervescent tongue, I will now flagellate myself as punishment for my crimes” = 👎 chill
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
