"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, and species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?
This bug. This bug that, to most humans, is utterly useless, relatively gross, and completely foreign. Humans saved it because humans do not want to cause another extinction ever again if they can avoid it.
I love the “captain’s log” mechanism in Star Trek as a method for time skips and exposition.
I am, however, devastated that we never got an episode where any captain’s voiceover is strained and slow. very precise about the events they’re describing. While the screen itself is showing the most batshit insane events and making it clear that the captain is trying VERY HARD to keep everyone involved out of a court martial.
Chat, is it considered “abusive roommate behavior” to release a raccoon into the living space after you have asked your roommate for months to please clean up their messes (they do not pay any of the mortgage)
For context, when I used to live alone I would do something called “Princess Time” where I would do an initial sweep (to remove any significant hazards) and then I would release a raccoon into the living area and clean. This helped because I would 1) feel like a princess and 2) the raccoon would bring attention to things my ADHD brain had decided to ignore and I’d quickly clean that stuff up.
So like, if I’m expected to clean the house now, I will be doing it in the way that is most effective for me. And anything that has not been cleaned up after months of having sit-down talks and sending reminders and being promised things will change, might be deemed “trash” by the trash panda and thrown away.
We haven’t done since we moved into the house, because I didn’t want to cause my roommate or their cats destress or have their things destroyed by a raccoon
I am a raccoon biologist and one of the few people in the state allowed to take in captive bred raccoons that had been possessed illegally. The raccoon in the photos is Moonshine, but she is currently at the animal sanctuary where I work as I had been quarantining multiple new intakes from an abuse case. I still have two males (Rum Tum Tugger and Electra) left in my home enclosure as we are getting them neutered and then hopefully sending them to an AZA accredited zoo.
I wanna make things very clear that underneath all the whimsy, I am a trained professional.
this fuck ass kitten somehow got behind the kitchen cabinet built into the wall and INTO THE WALL . i got him out with funny toy on stick and shredded chicken but i got so scared i almost threw up and now the entire house must be babyproofed
I had to take him into the utility room with me while i was finding duct tape to close off the bottom of the fireplace as well, so he wouldnt despawn when i was gone, and WHEN I PUT HIM DOWN TO GET THE DUCT TAPE, HE MANAGED TO NUTTY PUTTY CAVE HIMSELF IN ANOTHER CRANNY I DIDNT KNOW EXISTED. AND AS I PULLED HIM OUT BY THE ASS HE CRIED LIKE A HUMAN BABY. do NOT make me feel bad for saving your dust bunny spelunking ass you SICKO
This reminds me of my wife and I coming home from a trip where my mom had been watching the dog, and we got into the house and could not find her. Our puppy Lina had stuffed herself behind the couch and could not get herself out.
She was also in the habit while young of slipping between some wooden bars diving our dining room and living room, and got very offended when she grew big enough that her hips wouldn't fit anymore.
i don't know if folks outside these mountains understand what a state these communities are left in after being ravaged by the coal and steel industries. they endured well over 100 years of paternalistic brutality to provide the resources that built america with nothing in return and that very much informs the culture and collective psyche. force fed opiates to undermine labor movements and hard-won unions after decades of horrific abuse at isolated company towns. living there you can feel how we're all just one giant open wound that can't heal.
if bringing in corporations to mine raw materials from the appalachian mountains was good for the community, appalachia would be known for how happy, healthy, and wealthy the people are.
anyway sound off. at what stage do ppl think Han figured out the Force was real. the boring answer is after seeing Obi-wan vanish but i think he could rationalise that away as his eyes playing tricks on him. what do we think.
that's so funny. that means he accepted Vader deflecting a blaster bolt with his hand as just something freaky government cyborgs can do, and stuck by Luke for multiple years as he tried to figure this Force stuff out, and just treated it like your friend getting really really into neopaganism to cope with a loss.
like yeah kid good job with the witching. i'm certain it will be more useful against your enemies than your sharpshooting. no i do not think your witchcraft is supplementing your aim but i'm not gonna argue about it.
yeah Luke was like 'I heard Ben Kenobi's voice in my head telling me how to blow up the Death Star :)' and Han was like 'kind of an unusual coping mechanism but I'm not gonna argue with him'
thanks to carbonite han not only misses learning about luke's training montage on dagobah, he's also half-blind during their whole escape on tatooine. luke's out there force-kicking henchmen with his gucci boots and doing flips and shit and han can't see a goddamn thing. now on endor luke's yeeting threepio with the power of his mind and han's just like 'the last time we hung out i had to stuff him in a tauntaun sleeping bag'.
at some point in your life you will be boiling fruit, water, sugar, and lemon juice in a pot to make a syrup or jam. the instructions will tell you to simmer for a certain amt of time. your timer will go off and you will look at the pot and go, "hm, this doesn't look thick enough. maybe i'll let it go for another 10 minutes." this is the devil speaking. it's only so liquid right now because it is at boiling point. it will thicken when it cools down. learn from the follies of my youth and do not let this happen to you
at some point in your life you will be making a sauce or a stew in which you need to add cornstarch to thicken it. and you will prepare a slurry of starch in cold water and think "this looks like way too little starch to thicken this amount of liquid." this is the devil speaking. cornstarch instantly polymerizes at 95°C and if you add too much it will turn into an impossibly thick goop.
at some point in your life you will be making some sort of cream based dessert that requires gelatin to thicken it. and you will soak some gelatin sheets in water and think "this is too few gelatin sheets for this amount of cream." this is the devil speaking. it will thicken in the fridge and if you add too much you will end up with milk jelly
at some point in your life you will be baking cookies. you will take the sheet out after twelve minutes as the recipe instructs and the cookies will still be glistening and soft. "these don't seem cooked enough," you will think to yourself, "i should place them back into the oven until their edges are nice and golden." this is the devil talking. this is how you get dry, overdone cookies. the cookies will continue to bake on the warm sheet for several more minutes and then harden up after sitting on a rack for a while. trust the process. trust the process.
at some point in your life you will be adding a small pasta to a soup and you will think "that is not enough small pasta." this is the devil talking. the pasta will absorb the stock and expand. this is how you end up with a soup that is a solid mass of soggy ditalini.
At some point in your life you will be adding garlic to a dish and you will think "that is not enough garlic." These are angels speaking. They are correct. Add more garlic.
“But it gets worse, because that same executive order about mail-in voting also directs the Department of Homeland Security to build its own state-by-state lists of who’s eligible to vote, exactly the kind of national database you’d assemble if your real plan was to pressure states into purging their rolls. If that sounds like paranoia, it’s only because we’ve already forgotten that we lived through it. In 2000, Jeb Bush’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, who also happened to be co-chair of his brother George’s Florida campaign, hired a private firm to scrub the voter rolls using a list of supposed felons that included eight thousand names shipped in from Texas. The matching was deliberately loose, flagging anyone whose last name was an 80 percent match to a felon’s, and the Brennan Center later found that at least 12,000 eligible voters were wrongly purged, 22 times George W. Bush’s 537-vote margin. Black Floridians were 11 percent of the electorate and 41 percent of the people thrown off the rolls. Bush took the presidency by that sliver, and the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount that would have caught the theft was shut down by a Supreme Court whose deciding majority included a justice his own father had put on the bench, Clarence Thomas, whose wife was at that very moment collecting résumés for a Bush administration, and Antonin Scalia, whose sons worked for firms representing Bush, neither of whom saw any reason to step aside. That’s the voter merge-and-purge playbook, and they’re dusting it off on a national scale for this November with new, borrowed-from-Putin tweaks. Or at least they’re trying their hardest to.”
— This confession proves Trump’s terrified cronies know what’s coming for them
““Fundamentally the problem here with this whole thing is: How is it that you had Karen Bass was in first place, Spencer Pratt was in second place, and then this other woman was in third place. You would expect these mail-in ballots to kind of meet that same basic pattern,” Vance said. “But somehow we find ourselves in a situation where number one—they’re still receiving ballots, not just counting ballots. And number two—the way they’re coming in just so happens to work out such that the Republican is getting kicked out of the final two, so it’s a Democrat-versus-Democrat runoff.”
—
JD Vance Isn’t Handling Republicans’ Defeat in Los Angeles Very Well
Hey, stupid, just wanted to remind you that – hey, look at me when I’m talking to you, Jeffrey Dahmer Vance – I just want to remind you that Los Angeles has nearly 3 times more registered Democrats than Republicans, we have not elected a Republican this century, and votes are counted from different precincts, as well as mail-in ballots, starting when the polls close. A lot of stupid people voted for Pratt, sure, but vastly more people who aren’t complete idiot mouth breathers did not, because he is an idiot, just like you.
You know that, you dumb fuck – I swear to god, Jorts Dingus Vance, take your hand out of your pants, stop staring at that couch, and listen to me – you know that this is how elections have been decided for two centuries in America.
And, yes, the loser in this mayoral contest is the incompetent, unqualified, Republican scumbag who everyone in Los Angeles hates as much as we hate you and that rapist piece of shit you work for. Because he is a loser, and no amount of billionaire money or whining about his loss changes that.
You and your toadies don’t lose elections because they are rigged, Jackhole Dipshit Vance; they lose because voters hate you and your party, and everything you represent.
Run along now, and find some other losers to hang out with while the clock ticks down, ever closer to the moment you are a footnote in a history book, a punchline to a joke that wasn’t ever funny to begin with.
…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment
likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post
the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like.
Everywhere I go I'm reminded how much the desire to punish homelessness and migration and other Undesirablenesses make society markedly worse for everyone
like why is the park locked after 5pm so I can't go and sit under a tree after work? to punish rough sleepers for the terrible crime of being homeless and alive
why do I have to buy a drink, beg for a code and fuck around with an awkward keypad for 5 minutes in order to take a piss? because fuck homeless people
why do I need to provide proof of address and photo ID to do everything? because we had to create a really hostile environment for migrants
why can't you sit anywhere? well because god forbid people sleep when they're pushed out of shelter. can't risk that.
every day governments, councils and businesses make your life worse as a side effect of making vulnerable people's lives WAY worse. if you're ok with that you're a fucking idiot and if you're in favour of it you're a vindictive cunt cause again literally the ONLY payoff for your life getting worse is other people's lives getting worser.
Return to the raucous world of New York Times bestselling novel, The Devils, in this bloody, action-packed sequel!
The Heretics hardcover edition will feature four-color illustrated endpapers, an illustrated family tree, foil case stamp, and full-page interior illustrations.
The Heretics by Joe Abercrombie is out on May 11, 2027!
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.
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.
