there is no downside to voting for Count Binface. its not taking away from other candidates bcos they aren't any and the more votes he gets the stupider Farage looks.
Nigel Farage is the leader of Reform UK, a far right party who are currently in the process of a serious bid to become the UK government. they are just straight up evil.
Count Binface is an intergalactic space warrior with a bin on his head. he likes to run as a novelty candidate in general and mayoral elections. a big thing he likes to do is run as a candidate against the incumbent prime minister:
(Also pictured: Boris Johnson, Elmo)
Anyway, in brief:
Nigel Farage is currently in the midst of a big scandal about his finances
He has decided to deal with this by 1) making a show of nobly resigning from parliament and then 2) immediately running in the resulting by-election
He has stated that he is letting 'the people' judge his actions and implied that if he wins that will prove that he has been exonerated in the court of public opinion
His goal was presumably to get a big resounding win over the other parties, proving that The People still love him.
the other parties have thus far decided that this is a 'vanity election' and, well, there is one very easy way to ensure that he will not beat any of them, and that is simply not to play.
and as a result the only person who has so far confirmed they are running against him is Count Binface. no matter the outcome this makes Nigel Farage look like, u know, a fucking clown.
its important to note the "clever" politics behind all of the decisions around this; NF cannot be investigated if he isn't an MP (stupid ruling, yes, but hang on) so his plan was to cause a stir by trying to get someone to take his seat; other politicians see through the plan and don't participate which would fuck NF massively as it means he never stopped being an MP and therefore can still be investigated and imprisoned. Binface shows up because of course he does this is an excellent time to embarrass a tosser. NF is now in a lose-lose.
If NF wins, he won against a joke candidate and thus it only makes him look an idiot (homer beating 8 year olds style) with no legitimacy, AND he will still go through the investigation that most of the HoP wants to put him through.
If Binface wins, NF lost to a joke candidate, and good heavens that's gonna screw him over permanently innit.
if count binface wins it will be the funniest thing thats ever happened in Clacton. i have mates in clacton and i'm buying a pint for everyone who votes binface.
There are a ton of queer Black stories coming out this year, so some of these aren't out yet or recently came out, while others have been around for a bit now. I'm looking forward to The Feywild Job in particular, and I must finish A Master of Djinn! Some of my absolute favorites are Black Leopard, Red Wolf, and The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps.
people will say “they’re only friends” and then show me two people who would crawl through broken glass to hear the other laugh once. two people who have memorized each other’s coffee orders, fears, childhood stories, and emergency contacts. two people who would haunt each other’s houses as ghosts. be serious.
Just an FYI—the original intention of this post was to challenge the way people say only friends, as though friendship is somehow lesser than other forms of love. As if being deeply known, cherished, and chosen by another person could ever be a small thing. Normalize profound platonic love. Some of the most fulfilling, transformative, and enduring relationships we will ever have are friendships. 🫶🏼
TAFCON WAS SO FUN! It was incredible meeting so many amazing people in the space, and finally putting names to faces. Somehow the 13 hour drive home wasn’t even that bad after all the energy we got from the con. Huge shoutout to @starplanes for organizing everything, it was an incredible time!
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.
if you'd like to show support, here are some upcoming queer books:
When Life Gives You Corpses is a brilliant YA about a cursed praying mantis who falls for a young witch. Yield Under Great Persuasion is a raunchy, but surprisingly sweet story about two men repairing their relationship. Fabulous Bodies is a horror story about a queer rockstar rising from the dead.
This is Where the Future Bleeds is a fantasy set in a vividly imagined land, where two women (who happen to kiss) are the key to healing the broken sky. You're No Better is a story about a teen struggling in the shadow of his murderous parent. Oil on Canvas is about a woman who finds disturbing paintings in the home of her dead mother.
and then here's a list of 26 queer books by Black authors set to publish this year, and a 10 upcoming books by trans authors. if you want to fight back against queer censorship, use your wallet! or (if that's not an option) you can contact your local library and ask them to stock a copy.
In addition: looking for indie publishers and queer bookshops is a great way to find and support queer authors and stories of so many infinite varieties! (The following suggestions are based on my UK-centric knowledge)
(Some) Queer Presses:
Lurid Editions are "a publishing project committed to intentional and conscientious acts of archival repair". They are "attentive to how marginalised histories are forgotten and remembered, [and] hungry to rediscover overlooked queer books". They've just received funding from Arts Council England to engage queer readers in a project to contribute to the archive!
Cipher Press "We’re really keen on the idea that queer and minority stories are for everybody, and we want to make our books – and the stories they tell - accessible to all" (what an amazing mission statement!)
Anamot Press "Anamot [Անամոթ] means shameless in Armenian. Anamot Press publishes poetry and prose on intersecting experiences of gender, sexuality, race, migration, class, belonging and loss - with no shame."
(Some) Queer Bookshops
Queer Lit Oh man, I remember when this was just a tiny little shop, and now they're the biggest LGBT+ bookshop in Europe! They do amazing work in donating books about being trans to schools and parliament! They have a pay-it-forward board that will make you sob with its notes of love and support. (You can tell I wish I still lived nearby)
Lighthouse For Scottish friends - "a queer-owned and woman led independent community bookshop. We are an unapologetically activist, intersectional, feminist, antiracist, lgbtq+ community space"
Gay's The Word The OG Queer bookshop in the UK. One day I will make my pilgrimage!!
This really is just a tiny snapshot of all the amazing work of celebration and resistance that's being done for Queer literature at the moment. We live in frightening times, but I promise there is still lots of love and joy and hope out there in spaces like these. Support them in whatever way you can!!
romaincrisis
stormborns
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
ellievsbear
andulkaphoto
