i hate when rich people condescend with the whole 'money can't buy happiness' argument like listen. just because buying your fourth car didn't fill the void in your deluded disconnected-from-reality life doesn't mean not having to worry about food/ bills/medicine wouldn't greatly improve the mental health of literally everyone else on the planet
Fun fact: they've done studies and money DOES buy happiness, but it tops out after a certain amount (nowadays around $500,000)
So yeah, having food / bills / medicine & a fair amount of leisure covered by income DOES buy happiness, but excess wealth depletes the effect exponentially.
Another way of putting this is that money doesn't buy happiness, but relief from financial worries ABSOLUTELY buys happiness, and there is a dollar value on that.
which is so frustrating because we had a good Bahn, but they economised it to death. We rode on the feeling of being good at things and organised - typical German arrogance - but never invested to keep that up and instead are now the laughing stock of everyone else around - rightfully so.
And then you hear about things like Stuttgart 21 - the infamous train station redesign and all the shit surrounding it - was likely just something instigated by people who have ties to the car industry to have something to point to and make everyone shudder if you wanted to do a train related project.
Public transportation should be better. And accessible. And ideally free, but at least cheaper than it is now. It's a service not a business.
>_<
By the way it's like. Really fucked how society's thoughts on epilepsy is just "get over it." Seizures can cause permanent brain damage. Seizures can kill people. Seizures hurt like hell. Allow me to reiterate that seizures can kill people. And you're just gonna casually put flashing lights, a common trigger for seizures in your advertisement, in your animation meme, in your edit, on your billboards, without even thinking about putting a simple disclaimer? That's unbelievable. Your little anime edit could deadass cost a life and you're not gonna put a warning because it's "inconvenient" or "people like that shouldn't be on the internet" (ableist) (the problem exists outside the internet also). Or you'll give insufficient ones like putting it in the captions or only giving like one second before the flashing lights appear, meaning that the trigger's already in motion before anyone who needs the warning can read it and save themselves from literal physical danger.
We need to start commenting under other people's posts about how to properly warn for flashing lights and eyestrain. We need to be emailing and calling companies about their possibly triggering advertisements that could induce seizures. We need to stop tolerating ableism and start speaking up for the more vulnerable.
Also, stop putting epilepsy warnings. That's like saying "warning: schizophrenia" on a post including unreality or "warning: dyslexia" on a post with a typing quirk. First off, the disability mentioned isn't the only group of people that this could trigger. Second, it doesn't truly get the message across and instead makes it worse for those with the disability-- scrolling through the epilepsy tag on Tumblr should get you to view the content of other epileptic people, but no, you just get a bunch of flashing lights and eyestrain, even though you could instead tag for, oh I dunno, flashing lights and eyestrain.
Anyways this Disability Pride, and for every month that comes after, think about epileptic people and others who are triggered by flashing lights/eyestrain. Happy pride to those who experience seizures too frequently due to the unaccommodating and ableist societies we live in!
I don't have epilepsy, but I can get aura migraines from certain lights.
Those new lights on cars are bad enough, but on bikes? that one tiny circle that is burning into my eyes from far away. And the absolute kicker is when the bikes are driven slowly or pushed and those lights start flickering. I often visible cover my eyes with my arms, though I doubt people understand why.
The worst I can get is a 'bad headache', nausea and temporarily losing parts of my field of vision, if it's light it's just some eye strain ... but so often I thought about people who can get seizures from that and wondered how those lights ever got legalised.
Seriously, what the fuck ... just make it so they get dimmer, but don't flicker.
Spin the wheel again. That’s who’s trying to protect you.
(If you have zero idea about a name you got, spin until you see someone you recognize.)
Are you safe?
Absolutely not. I'm dead. 100% dead.
I might stay alive, but it'll be a really close thing.
I'll take some hits, for certain, but I should be okay in the end.
A few attacks might get through, but nothing concerning.
The attacker might be able to get in one lucky hit. If that.
I am the opposite of worried. I'm 100% safe.
…Look. I've tried picturing this. But I honestly don't know how to answer.
Voting ended onJul 14
(I've run this poll twice before, expanding it significantly for the second run. With about a year passed since that second run, I thought it was time to add another couple hundred names to the list and have another go.)
Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss) is trying to kill me while Captain Jack Sparrow is trying to protect me.
um ... uuuuuuum
well, it's certainly a weird way to go. Slapstick and rhymes.
Actually, I'll likely survive by "it's a Disney-movie"-logic, where things that should kill me don't and it'll be hilarious to watch, but survival is certainly despite Jack's efforts, not because of him XD
undiagnosed autistic people will be like "I don't get upset when my routine changes though!!" and it's because they've built a set of if-then loops in their head to pick from one of 6 different strict routines and they do get incredibly upset when they're unable to keep to any of the 6 scripts. I'm john normal
This is called a fault tree. You will always know how to act if your fault tree captures all possible scenarios. In NASA Mission Control during mission critical events like landings there are huge binders with fault tree protocols, kind of like choose your own adventure books except you’re not the one making the choices, the universe is making them for you and you’re just trying to keep up.
The engineers who develop fault trees, I am told, often imagine new ways for their precious spacecraft to die (new branches on the fault trees) either while in the shower or lying awake at 3am, because human
Was just thinking about this the other day. Yeah I have a favorite seat on the bus (middle of the bus, near the back doors, slightly elevated, facing forward), but I don’t get upset if someone is already sitting there, I just pick one of my other favorite spots. Then I realized that most people probably don’t have a favorite bus seat, let alone a series of backup favorites.
I am actually diagnosed now and I told my therapist I'm doing this to better cope with things.
When you make your plans/routines, also think of contingencies. I don't just make plan A, I make plans B, C, D etc. So, if plan A fails I don't get upset and spiral, because at a time when I was well I made plans which with I will also be fine. A would have been preferable, but B and onward are also okey.
So if you're autistic, or at least suspecting, try it. Don't get lost, but having this safety net can really help.
Also, yes, I totally have a descending list of favourite spots on the bus or train.
as for the screening tests, I wish they'd take things like these into consideration.
Also, that if you can choose between the different gradings from 'very likely' to ' very unlikely', they'd point out that something being true 90+% of the time, but you can distinctly remember two exceptions means you can tick 'very likely'. Or just make it an option itself, because that'll make sorting the results much easier.
something's wrong with my instagram lately ...
amongst the social medias instagram has been the biggest time sink for me. I tried to counter it best as I can with leech block etc. but eventually found what helped a lot was set it to 'following' and not 'for you'. Especially changing the bookmark to instagram to the 'following' feed instead.
But since then, and no idea if that's just coincidence or correlation when I do change to the 'for you' feed I often get right-leaning stuff?!
I'm not sure if I accidentally liked something that triggered the algorithm, but what I do like in general and whom I follow should easily counteract it.
I started trimming that shit more actively the past few days, selecting that I don't want to see more from certain accounts and still it shows them to me the next day or similar blogs.
It's annoying and will make me use insta even less (thankfully, but for the wrong reason) and I'll keep to my curated 'for you' more, but it's also scary because it feels like it gets pushed in the face and it might be a general thing. So what about others who just casually browse without questioning and second-guessing?
one time i told a group of lesbian and bi women that i have never watched wicked and they were shocked, gagged, gooped, “but you’re queer. you like pussy. how have you not seen wicked?” yeah. well. i like pussy, not musicals?
or as Hannah Gadsby said in her show Nanette "where do the quiet gays go?"
is there more info from the person who wrote those tags? Because it would be interesting to get another point of view.
The way all the 2020s have done so far have been making me categorically against every new generation of tech that comes out is insane. Like I'm from a technological boom generation, saw the first portable phones, nokias & blackberries & flipphones etc, and the first smartphones, and the first ipods & ipads & tablets in general while still having cassettes & DVD & MP3 players around so I know how all of it work, I had computer classes in high school, I did the transition between home desktop computers to laptops and back to gaming computers. But then they started to put internet in your printer & microwave, everything has ads & AI now and every update is worst than the last. I literally loved technology and they ruined it
because it used to be about what was possible and pushing what could be done.
Now it's just companies/rich people finding new ways to force us to buy things one way or other. You're not buying it because there's a new innovation, but because they made the old one not work anymore on purpose. etc.
I wish I could still claim that star, but in preparation for a workshop we had to set up some AI stuff on the computers and test it. Ironically enough I wasn't even at the workshop itself for health reasons and it might have been for the better, because I would have been a nuisance all the way.
That aside, I started the Harvard CS50 course and they have duck-AI, sort of an AI teaching assistant and for interactive ruber-duck-debugging. It's not the full package and won't give you solutions, but ask questions to help you solve things etc.
It's also used to do design50, which is kind of a pre-set prompt to give design feedback on the code.
I'm not saying this to absolve myself. I tried twice to get into their discord but it somehow didn't work , so I ended up trying the AI. And I'm using the design50 in hopes to get more points.
I find the results mixed. Sometimes it helps and sometimes it sends you into an endless list of "do you remember how to do X?" until you come full circle. Or suggests things that are in the lessons yet to come or says I should improve something and when I ask for details because I can't find out what it thinks is wrong it tells me on second checking it's not wrong ...
Those are the times that really irk me because now energy is wasted and nothing is gained.
so yeah, I wish my hands were clean, but I did use it. How anyone would use it for something creative or to have it do things for you etc. is beyond me and the moments where it just makes false claims are always a reminder that they're far from good even when it comes to technical things.
do you ever just spend so long chasing perfection in something you're making that you're terrified to continue working on that project, because nothing else you add to it will be on par with that little slice of perfection that you've carved out of it?
I'm scared to even start because it might not be as good as what I imagined in my head.
And I know those slogans like 'make it bad first, you can make it better later', 'done is better than perfect' and all that, but still ... it's hard to start way too often ...
when you see your little kitty walking toward you at a leisurely pace and say "hi baby!" bc you're excited to see her and she starts trotting a little bit faster 'cause she's excited to see you too. that's what life is all about i think
for a few years we lived in a house with a large staircase. So when we'd get home and the cat was upstairs you could hear that one long mmmmmmrrrrrrrrrrrrrwwwwwwwwwwiiiaaaaauauuuuuuuuuu as he came down those stairs up until he pressed himself against your legs
:3
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.
