Remember when Lil Nas X beautifully explored his sexuality, seduced and killed the devil to the banger of all time, and instead of cheering on this openly gay and proud Black artist for his artistry and fighting back against respectability politics, suddenly said respectability politics was all the Queerest Place on the Internet cared about? Hm. Wonder what happened there.
Anyway I miss him and hope he's doing better with his mental health 🙏🏾
Like say what you want about "bad queer representation", but this was the song that made me openly and happily accept that I was bisexual. To see him up there Black and beautiful, making music that I love, absolutely killing it? Yeah. You couldn't tell me shit. This man made me proud to be out. "This will make them think we're evil for being gay" hey newsflash dawg-
what if Grace’s earnest desire to learn all he can about his new home Erid runs into a serious snag, when he finds out that almost all levels of existing Eridian formal academic institutions are intertwined with the cultural practice of thrumming — which Grace is not biologically capable of participating in
and so Grace ends up implementing an “Opposite Day” routine with his first classes of young Eridian students, where he periodically assigns a group of his kids to create and deliver to him an in-class presentation, human-style, on any topic of “Eridian common knowledge” of their choosing
imagine how hyped the little pebbles would be to bunch up in front of the classroom’s clear Xenonite barrier and chatter about, like, the differences in local postal services across Erid, while their cool alien teacher — who’s teaching them the basics of super advanced new concepts that even the really old and smart Eridians don’t fully understand yet!! — sits utterly rapt and LOCKED IN, taking copious notes and peppering them with questions
HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY
A funny implication of Project Hail Mary is they landed on Erid in Grace's tiny ass weird (to them) Nasa spaceship. They'd recognize that its clearly technologically advanced. But it's also like a fifth of the size that their ship was and its not made of any materials they'd use. Plus its got all this tech with interfaces they cant perceive and now there's a weird guy with Rocky who they can't understand but he understands them.
Imagine sending a guy to space and he comes back with a creature you can't fathom but it fathoms you bc it's hung out with the guy you sent for a few years
I know “bi Sokka” is a popular hc, and so is bi Hakoda (bc of Bato) but just let me suggest this: Kya and Katara are bi too. Maybe even Kanna. The whole fuckin family is just filled with bisexuals. Aang, who is pansexual and was raised by monks who taught him that love comes in all shapes and forms, doesn’t even know what homophobia is. Tenzin has to come out to his family as heterosexual
Seonghwa talked about his bleached hair, working out for his health, shared mental health advice his counselor gave him 4 years ago, & more | 260530 TokToq Live [Translation & subtitles by nobodylikehwa]
Other stuff he mentioned:
He really likes his Jeju vlog (the Guerrilla Log with his mom) since it's very honest and shows his real, unfiltered self and how he behaves around his family.
It made him wonder if he should film a vlog with his hometown friends too.
His sister-in-law hit him up after watching the Jeju vlog and told him his breast stroke has gotten a lot better (she used to be a professional swimmer).
To him, doing these lives is a way to organize his thoughts, self-reflect, and communicate with Atiny.
He believes you should never blame yourself for not getting angry in a situation where you feel wronged.
Shoutouts to the time I had a severe fever and took benedryl and wanted to listen to feel good inc but couldn’t remember the name. I think I was crying over this
SURE, I CAN LEGALLY MARRY MY WIFE RIGHT NOW, BUT IN DOING SO BOTH OF US WILL HAVE OUR DISABILITY BENEFITS CUT AND WE WILL THEN BE STRUGGLING FINANCIALLY.
THAT IS MARRIAGE INEQUALITY
WE, AS DISABLED PEOPLE, ARE PREVENTED FROM BEING MARRIED OR WE WILL BE FUCKED FINANCIALLY
and yeah as i add to all of these kinds of posts because a lot of people on this site assume it's an american problem - it's not! it exists in every country i've talked to someone from on here, which is quite a few
(and personally as someone from aotearoa nz it's not even just marriage, the second you admit to being in a relationship you get less money on the assumption your partner will support you, if you and your partner are both on disability benefits you get to have one benefit between you)
i'm already only paid half the national minimum wage as someone who cannot work at all, not even part time
if i am suspected to be dating someone my situation goes from 'just about floating along with my head above water as long as i don't buy many luxuries' to 'calculator out in the grocery store trying to eat'
disabled people do not have anything close to marriage equality
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.
Far worse, in my opinion, than the famous “he wouldn’t fucking say that” is “he WOULD fucking say that, as part of his facade, but you seem to think he would mean it genuinely”
O wise oracle of Thirst: As a babytiny just dipping my feet in the fic writing space, I have a pressing question that I need answered so I don’t make a fool of myself when writing. Do the guys each have a standard coffee order, or a just a way they like it, or even just a stated preference for coffee/tea/energy drinks/etc? I figured if you didn’t personally have the answers (unlikely) maybe one of your beloved mutuals or followers would?
I can confidently answer that Wooyoung's coffee order is an iced americano...
Hongjoong said when he orders coffee for himself, he'll also order coffee for Wooyoung, since he always steals from Hongjoong.
I have to think that Hongjoong is consuming some kind of caffeinated substance to maintain those long working hours. In one post, he mentioned drinking iced americanos but recently he's switched to tea as part of his "wellness" journey...
Seonghwa doesn't like bitter drinks, but he's drawn to them...
Seongwha said he mostly drinks coffee but he's trying to wean himself from the habit of drinking too much. He doctors his iced americano with a lot of milk.
San seems committed to iced coffee for all seasons. As a New Englander, I approve.
Yunho does not appear to deviate from the other members. He's up all night gaming, so I imagine caffeine is essential.
Yeosang appears to be an equal-opportunity caffeinated beverage drinker. Iced, as usual.
Jongho is a coffee drinker!
Mingi? His body is tea, but I think he also prefers coffee
does dr captain ryland grace have the urge to chase things like the persistence predator we evolved from
It's kind of cool because Eridians don't have the same stamina as humans do. They overheat and fall asleep if they run around too much, so they've evolved to be ambush predators instead of us persistence predators.
I can chase that freak through the ship for hours until he becomes overheated and paralyzed. If early humans lived on Erid, Eridians would easily get hunted to extinction.
