The fact that the process of getting a job is so, so different from the process of doing that or any job is making the probulator from Futurama sound less dystopian all the time.
Fucking thank you. I literally cannot stand up for more than a few minutes at a time bc of nerve damage from having a tumor removed from inside my spine. The number of shows I've gone to and bought seated tickets and not been able to see...
... yeah.
Not quite as annoying as the bouncer at a comedy show who told me "We don't do that for sold-out shows*" about the ADA request for a booth that I'd been told by email months prior was totally fine and going to happen, but very close.
*I only barely kept myself from saying, "Oh, I didn't realize the Americans With Disabilities Act didn't count for sold out shows," and just went to find the house manager instead. That club fucked up so many times after assuring me I could sit in a booth instead of a wobbly chair that we just stopped going, though.
unfortunately very true. Doing Better does not always mean never being upset or never being triggered or never having trouble. often Doing Better means experiencing those things and being able to keep going/cope healthily/move on. if youâre in a bubble with no sensation, if youâre numbing yourself out, thatâs not what recovering really is. it wonât help you have a happier life itâll just make your world smaller and smaller until you canât fit anywhere anymore. gotta learn to make peace with the hard stuff too, thatâs the only way to keep going
She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.
Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesnât sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.
Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. Sheâll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.
The record label will never put her name on the album.
Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crewâelite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.
The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldnât read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didnât get called for the next session.
Carol could do it on the first try.
She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldnât pay the electric bill. Music wasnât a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a jobâfactory work with better acoustics and lower pay.
But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.
That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boysâ âWouldnât It Be Niceâ? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of âThese Boots Are Made for Walkinââ? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to âLa Bambaâ? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.
She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.
Bassists spent yearsâdecadesâtrying to crack the secret of the Beach Boysâ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.
She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When âYouâve Lost That Lovinâ Feelinââ hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.
The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didnât fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.
For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musiciansâ anonymity betrayed them.
Think about it. Every time you heard âGood Vibrations,â âRiver Deep â Mountain High,â the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generationâs youth.
And yet the records still say nothing. Sheâs now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.
But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the âBeach Boysâ were, in fact, Carol Kayeâs.
Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.
This is an old poll but I do think the technology part is something that is not exactly talked about bc it's something that most likely cannot be fixed. There are many countries where english fan sites are hard to access and/or locations where internet can be spotty. I have had months l where I could only comment if the technology cooperated, because loading a page in advance is different than sending a reply in. But that's not something that anyone can be expected to fix, and many people seem to be unaware of the fact that others do not have the same access that they do so these discussions often end up not addressing the tech part. Probably bc most people with those issues are also not able to access the discussions too, tbh.
Otherwise, I feel that writers often underestimate how hostile spaces can be to those who are not creators themselves. Discussions often end up repeating that commenting is easy and people are lazy/rude/failing to react correctly for not commenting in the right way. Thus the focus to increase comments is placed as a failure of readers, without actually considering readers as actual people. It's a very binary positioning too, because while there are many posts talking about the need to comment, it feels like no one actually wants to respond to said comments. The call for community feels one-sided then - that readers owe writers comments and writers do not have the same obligation. Add in that commenting standards are much more complex than just "don't be an asshole" but the only comments that recieve acknowledgement are the asshole ones - there is no reinforcement on the reader's side for positive interaction.
Finally, I don't understand why a heart comment is seen as better than a kudos and I feel that the disparaging of different built in ways of interaction probably has some tie into this though I can't quite verbalize why.
So overall - technology, only addressing one part of the communication issue, and something something archive isn't a forum something something there are much more people on AO3 now are my hypothesis for why there's less commenting :)
" I miss the sweet-and-sour, multi-layered comments that I used to get... I think one thing that might be going on with hearts being better than kudos is that while we like to read the comments, that number showing how many comments there are is an ego+neurotransmitter boost too. "
>> That makes sense! I guess I am coming at it from the perspective of posting non-fandom art on the internet, where comments are often saying the same thing that the like button does so the separation between those two functions is more blurred in my head. But total count go up and the comment = more effort/care part of it is helpful in understanding why that is specifically targeted!
"I think people need to know that readers in certain countries have a much, much easier time clicking the kudos button than writing even a simple comment and anyone who chooses to educate them will have done the community a service if in fact that is what the person deems a reasonable use of his or her valuable time and energy" >>
Ah I think I misphrased that - at least in my experience any sort of thing that required my computer to ping back (I think, I am not good at computer lingo) didn't always work. So kudos and comments both required checking to make sure it sent, but I knew comments were appreciated so I focused on trying to get the tech to cooperate.
On the broader tech scope tho, AO3 and many other popular sites are actually blocked in a fair number of countries. I only have experience with this in China (where Tumblr too is blocked actually). In order to access these sites, you need to have a working VPN and a stable wifi connection. So in my experience I could quickly load a couple fanfics on my phone before I left the house, but until I came back home from school I wouldn't be able to do the whole work of commenting bc that took more time/bandwidth. Not to mention that there were times where my VPN didn't work at all for days bc of government reasons - so there was not even the chance to comment.
Obviously my experience is on the more extreme side bc I could read but not always comment, but I do think it is worthwhile for authors to consider that readers are not as a monolith doing things for no reason. Everyone experiences times where they are in low wifi places and some functions work, but others don't. We all have times where engaging is harder than it should be. The technology part of it can bother me but I didn't know about it till I myself experienced it - so my call to action is more along the lines of just engaging with the reader perspective bc it will reveal things like that.
Also not assuming people are doing things maliciously. This is something that we see fairly often in fandom around translated Chinese works, where a Chinese netizen will come into an English language space and use the etiquette they are used to which clashes with the etiquette of the English language space. Sometimes people are polite and inform the person of the clash, but more frequently people are inflammatory and direct hate towards the Chinese netizen. So an ESL/EFL translation error and/or etiquette breach becomes something that the netizen is attacked over and then they don't reach out again. There are many posts in various translated workd fandoms informing people not to be immediately on the attack bc it is a very common pattern. The responses from readers who limit their comments bc of bad interactions often remind me of this.
On a completely different note - I appreciate you mentioning on other posts that readers are not coming from nowhere and that etiquette is maintained by both parties. It makes me feel hopeful that the issues with commenting can be fixed, because there are people who are looking at everyone involved.
This is an old poll but I do think the technology part is something that is not exactly talked about bc it's something that most likely cannot be fixed. There are many countries where english fan sites are hard to access and/or locations where internet can be spotty. I have had months l where I could only comment if the technology cooperated, because loading a page in advance is different than sending a reply in. But that's not something that anyone can be expected to fix, and many people seem to be unaware of the fact that others do not have the same access that they do so these discussions often end up not addressing the tech part. Probably bc most people with those issues are also not able to access the discussions too, tbh.
Otherwise, I feel that writers often underestimate how hostile spaces can be to those who are not creators themselves. Discussions often end up repeating that commenting is easy and people are lazy/rude/failing to react correctly for not commenting in the right way. Thus the focus to increase comments is placed as a failure of readers, without actually considering readers as actual people. It's a very binary positioning too, because while there are many posts talking about the need to comment, it feels like no one actually wants to respond to said comments. The call for community feels one-sided then - that readers owe writers comments and writers do not have the same obligation. Add in that commenting standards are much more complex than just "don't be an asshole" but the only comments that recieve acknowledgement are the asshole ones - there is no reinforcement on the reader's side for positive interaction.
Finally, I don't understand why a heart comment is seen as better than a kudos and I feel that the disparaging of different built in ways of interaction probably has some tie into this though I can't quite verbalize why.
So overall - technology, only addressing one part of the communication issue, and something something archive isn't a forum something something there are much more people on AO3 now are my hypothesis for why there's less commenting :)
HEeyyyyyyyyeee, it's gonna be JUNE! Guess who's got a primary election coming up! Utah, California, Colorado, Iowa, not one but two Dakotas, Maine, Nevada, Maryland, Oklahoma, Montana, and News Mexico, York, and Jersey!
If you didn't vote for Harris in 2024 because you thought she was too progressive/not progressive or too corporate/not moderate enough, then the PRIMARY ELECTION is your answer. Hit Ballotpedia.org and Vote411.org to find out who your candidates are.
Disgusted with "vote blue no matter who" pragmatists like me? If you vote in the primary, you get to pick who gets my vote. Then you can point at me and laugh.
Do not, do not, wait until November and then complain that you don't like your options. Vote in the primary and DICTATE THE OPTIONS.
You are not powerless.
You are not powerless.
You are not powerless.
California 6-2-2026
Colorado 6-30-2026
Iowa 6-2-2026
Maine 6-9-2026
Maryland 6-23-2026
Montana 6-2-2026
Nevada 6-9-2026
New Jersey 6-2-2026
New Mexico 6-2-2026
New York 6-23-2026
North Dakota 6-9-2026
Oklahoma 6-16-2026
South Dakota 6-2-2026
Utah 6-23-2026
Ranked-choice voting would solve a lot of our problems, but that's not the system we have right now. Boycotting the ballot box is a de facto vote for the opposite party. Show up. Remind our government that they work for us.
Necessary caveat: Don't neglect any state and local elections that might be going on in your district this year, especially if you prefer any third party. Third parties can actually win at the state and local level.
It's one of many reasons that workers tell Polygon they are eager to unionize.
Employees and developers working on Magic: The Gathering Arena say they were hired with promises of remote flexibility, so they bought homes and built lives around those assurances. But they say they are now being told they may need to relocate to Washington state â or effectively lose their jobs.
Those concerns are a major reason why a supermajority of workers on the Arena team are attempting to unionize with the Communications Workers of America, under the banner United Wizards of the Coast. The group publicly launched its campaign on April 27, calling on Wizards of the Coast and parent company Hasbro to voluntarily recognize the union by May 1.
These employees are doing important and laudable work in response to being forced into a bad situation but Iâm glad they still took the opportunity to call themselves âUnited Wizardsâ
WotC has still refused to recognize the union and has escalated to sending organizers letters directly to their homes about how unionizing is a bad idea. Luckily, our United Wizards are educated, organized, and agitated and the form letter from Hasbro was as laughable as it was threatening.
If you want to help out the United Wizards you can sign this petition
i know it sounds woefully self-centered and ungrateful but i do think a lot of ao3 commenters could benefit from a quick how-to-talk-to-strangers-on-the-internet course
I hope you don't mind my adding onto this, because I totally agree, but one thing I've noticed more often lately is people commenting on a work who just say what the work is.
Examples: (not verbatim quotes because I don't want to put anyone on blast but the gist of real comments I've gotten)
"Wow, A/B smut!"
"This is the first story for this pairing!"
"Huh, never seen this [kink/trope] before."
And like, this isn't rude exactly, but it does always give me a sense of, ok, but why are you telling me this? I know it's A/B smut, I wrote it. I knew it was the first work for this ship, I had to create the tag. I know it's a rare kink - I enjoy it, I can't find enough of it, that's why I wrote this in the first place.
I've taken to replying to these type of comments with "I hope you liked it!" because it feels like the most generous way to interpret them - the person probably did like it, if they read it and left a comment, but they forgot to actually say so. Often they reply with "Yes, it was great!" or similar actual commentary about what they thought of the story. So maybe consider just saying that in the first place!
Better example: "Wow, I've never seen a fic for this ship before. I was really excited to find it, because it's so rare. Thank you very much for writing it, it was awesome!"
I realize this takes slightly longer, but it is much, much nicer to receive than a comment that just tells me that I wrote a fic. I know I wrote a fic. Let me know that you read it.
Because they might not be excited about it, might not think it was awesome, and might not feel like ladling effusive thanks onto the writer but still do want to let the writer know someone is reading and paying attention.
Back in the day, readers who left two-word comments like "Nice story!" were mostly trying to be nice and give the writer that ol' dopamine boost but didn't know what to say. Fanfiction dot net had "review" but did not have "like"/"kudos," so short reviews filled that niche. I wouldn't be surprised if some people are still using them for that purpose today.
In the past few years, though, it's very likely that the readers don't want to get their heads bitten off. I've seen writers and their posses absolutely lose it about not only unsolicited constructive criticism but also praise-only comments that weren't the kind of praise the author happened to want.
What if the reader isn't "really excited" about that rare ship? What if the reader is more "I'm actually not sure about this, but I'm willing to give it a try. Let's see where you take it." I like those kinds of comments, but I left one like it for someone else a while back and KABOOM!!
The people who left these single-sentence, statement-of-fact comments do want to encourage the writers of those 'fics, but at least some of them don't feel the need to lie and don't feel safe telling the truth.
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
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.
Also, you get more ammunition to make fun of the relatives currently stranded in Asia who didnât just vote for the guy but insisted he was âgood for the economyâ.
Even if the Dems win EVERY seat that is up for election in 2026, they still won't have a 2/3 majority. At least some Republicans will have to get on board. VOTE ANYWAY. Even a simple majority will stem some of these outrages.
With all the gerrymandering, we need that turnout more than ever. Gerrymandering can backfire. We have the potential for a massive blue wave, but only if almost no one gives up.
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