So...how much of the bad discourse surrounding Steven Universe is just because people were really hoping that the Gems would beat up Andy DeMayo in "Gem Harvest"?
I was astonished to learn that there was controversy around this episode, because I felt like it was just kind of a normal children's cartoon about getting along with difficult relatives; and then I looked it up and learned that it had the extremely inauspicious timing of airing right after Trump's 2016 victory, and, yeah, okay, I can understand why a children's fantasy about reconciling with your obnoxious conservative relatives and getting them to accept your alternate family structure would play rather poorly at the time.
I think that Rebecca Sugar probably assumed, like most of the world that wasn't my specific flavour of extremely online in 2016, that Clinton would crush Trump and that this episode would maybe help to smooth over divisions; but of course what ended up happening is that an episode about how you should be empathetic towards your bigoted relatives ended up airing just as your bigoted relatives were going around victoriously hate-criming people in the street.
Watching it now, though, it ends up feeling wistful more than anything. Like, yeah, sure, it doesn't work like that, and we all know that now...But wouldn't it be nice if it did? It feels like a pleasant dream.
Steven Universe is fundamentally a power fantasy—but the fantasy is being able to get through to people and heal things. The power is love instead of strength.
Digital circus' biggest problem is that it was written to be a niche show aimed at weird analytical queers with actual media literacy and it accidentally blew tf up and hit the mainstream and a bunch of people who have never had a second thought about anything got into it
Digital circus: hey let's discuss existentialism, what makes someone human, how to cope with loss and regret, and the hedgehog's dilemma. you've all read I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, right?
i know the end of i have no mouth and i must scream is iconic and everything but on some level I really think it should have ended with the bit where they realize they don't have a can opener
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.
oh my god i just saw her get onto an airship with a woman whose tophat has at least twice as many sprockets as mine. i will be killing myself with an elaborate pneumatic pistol tonight
thinking about that time my friend and i were browsing random discord servers and we found one that was a bunch of people that believed in the rapture so we joined to see what was going on and they had a bot that sent auto generated images with your nickname for every new person so when my friend joined this image immediately sent
magical girl transformation but theres no pretty lights or sparkles just grotesque and blood curling body mutation layered by the sounds of joints cracking bones snapping and muscles twisting unnaturally and she looks like a normal magical girl at the end
looked up russians vs japanese piracy twt beef and its worse than i thought😭 it all started with japanese users being mad at discovering there's all those unofficial russian manga reading sites. russians tell them that there's not much licensed manga in russia to consume legally in the first place. japanese say its your problem, you should then go to japan and buy it legally. russians obviously go ??? it's crazy expensive to fly to japan plus we're sanctioned and often can't purchase foreign things with our money. japanese go full russophobia and say ahhh you evil aggressors deserve it for war. russians answer that even before the war this wouldn't be a solution. then brazilians join russians to fight on the side of piracy and started gotcha japanese with their war crimes and xenophobia. then other japanese users joined on the side of piracy and said anti-piracy japanese are hypocrites because its common in japan to listen to pirated western music. i guess this made japanese anti-piracy people even madder and they went all in saying crazy stuff like comparing piracy to rape. the more hilarious example was one japanese user trying to gotcha russians by threatening to pirate and read... dostoevsky🤣 sums up their level of ignorance regarding this whole topic.
casual pokemon player meme: I would like to have sex with this animal
competitive pokemon player meme: Bro thought he could switch his 252 Spe Borgulon into 252 SpAtk Choice Codpiece 2x Funny Dance STAB Mega Booboobus Peerless Tsunami 💀
this is the top post of all time on r/stunfisk (the competitive pokemon subreddit) and is has been a running joke for so long. sometimes i reference it and forget and have to explain it.
oh and one of the absolute ogs.
gonna put a few of my fav stinkposts on here too also.
blakekathryn
gummygunk
tangentwithtanner
snowghoul
jbbartram-illu
ellievsbear
discoholicmusic
andulkaphoto
pixelskylines
prguitarman
