I also run the good news blog Reasons for Hope. Here you can find links and info on direction action, organizing, etc. that doesn't necessarily fit on a good news blog. Plus info and awareness posts, as well as my own activism, thoughts, and takes, also about things that don't fit well on a good news blog.
Filter the tag "dafh potentially triggering" if you don't want to see posts that are talking about really fucking up stuff. If my/those posts are making you spiral, I so genuinely encourage you to filter it. Doing what you can to help is more important than being aware of everything.
"We must not let the perfect become the enemy of the good."
There IS hope and I so truly believe that we CAN heal ourselves and the world.
Being anti-death penalty is literally the easiest stance ever. People just say "but should the state kill THIS type of person?" and you just say "no". Not killing people is so fucking easy actually
Failing at critical thinking by dint of being ignorant of the magical Kill Only The Bad People Who Deserve It And Nobody Else button that we have. Apparently
Okay, let's say that these people mentioned *do* deserve to die, just for the sake of argument.
Who gets to decide that they do? Who actually genuinely has the right to make the final decision, specifically?
Is it the judge? Is it the lawmakers? It can't be you. It can't be a case by case basis where you get input, this is being carried out by the state.
Do you trust those people to never ever get it wrong? Do you trust the state?
If you do trust them, you aren't paying attention to literally anything that has ever happened in this or any country.
If you don't trust them, you must shift your stance to oppose the death penalty because a circumstance where an innocent person is killed is unacceptable.
Peeling back the curtain, yeah, my personal feelings are that there *are* people who should stop being alive. I don't think that's a good thought for me to have, but I have it.
And I don't trust the fucking state, or myself, or judge, or a panel of people, or ANYONE to be able to, with ZERO false positives, make that determination. No one, no one, NO ONE has the right to make that call because no one can always get it right.
So I oppose the death penalty even though, yeah, my gut reaction is that certain people who have severely harmed others and will do so again should be killed. But the death penalty is wrong. For even a single innocent person to die is a moral failing, an unacceptable loss. There is not and never will be a way to administer that fairly and perfectly.
You must oppose the death penalty. It is your moral duty.
I become very uncomfortable with "Just kill anyone who's a pedophile" when there are ongoing efforts to have the act of me (a man) kissing my husband where children can see get labeled as pedophilia.
It's not that these people want to make public displays of non-straightcis romantic feelings punishable by death. They just want them labeled as being this other thing that's (under 'kill all pedos' laws) already punishable by death. Completely different.
I think leftists need to refer to the United States as a slave state more often. It has one of the highest prison populations per capita of any nation, slavery is legal as punishment for a crime, and Black people are disproportionately imprisoned and given longer sentences. The prison industrial complex is modern-day slavery
Some people have described the movement against police and white supremacy that emerged into the public eye in May 2020 as a "failure" because it didn't win legislative changes.
But the Twin Cities have been able to stand up to ICE because of networks that developed at that time.
Changing a system that exists to perpetrate oppression is the work of decades. What is needed is not a minor reform that can be implemented politicians, but the kind of structural change that requires long-term grassroots struggle.
One time when I was a kid a group of girls and I had to treat another student for hypothermia by ourselves because she had so many invisible health issues that the adults we asked for help didn't believe us. The student in question was actively hallucinating. When I finally ran for help the people I grabbed were slow as shit to respond, casually joking about how "dramatic" the person in question was.
The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.
Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.
I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so go drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.
Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.
"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."
"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."
"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"
Sincerely, truly, from the bottom of my heart- as someone who isn't physically disabled but hears this shit all the time- fuck off
Big Tech’s Anti-Labor Playbook Has Come for Wikipedia
TLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire…
TLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers. Wikipedia’s editors are now threatening to strike in solidarity. The Foundation is sitting on $296 million in reserves and a freshly profitable AI revenue stream. This is a confrontation with global implications.
It has been suggested elsewhere that if you are a Wiki Foundation donor, it would be a good idea to email and explain that this kind of behaviour will lead to you withholding future donations.
> Hello! I have donated, what I can and when I can over the years, despite being on an extremely limited income. It saddens me greatly to see that Brooke Vibber and the members of the Community Tech team were let go. I know that the public stance is that the Wikimedia leadership supports unionization attempts, but this action seems to prove that those are hollow, meaningless publicity statements that are not backed by actions or policy. I will be withholding future donations until I feel that Wikimedia has shown that they support unionization. I hope employees manage to unionize soon - and that nobody else's position is questionably terminated. In the modern era of AI disinformation, actual humans willing to put in the work - and coordinate and assist the many, many more who do it FOR FREE - are a precious resource that should not be so easily thrown away.
and got back a form letter:
Thank you for your email and for your support of the Wikimedia Foundation and free knowledge.
Thank you also for sharing your concerns. I am happy to provide you with more context and information about the recent events.
The decision to disband the Community Tech team is not in any way connected to recent discussions about unionizing, nor have we terminated any staff for their participation in those discussions. The Foundation respects the right of staff to unionize if they vote to do so.
Earlier this month, the Wikimedia Foundation restructured the way the organization supports the Community Wishlist initiative, a forum for the volunteer editors behind Wikimedia projects to suggest and collaborate on improvements to our product and technology.
The decision to restructure followed internal assessments dating back to September 2025 on ways to make our Community Wishlist work more effective and to improve our support for volunteer editors. We learned from these assessments that it is rarely possible to fulfill community wishes through a single team due to the vast breadth of the software we support and the number of channels through which we receive wishes. The restructuring shifts the management of the Community Wishlist from a single, sometimes siloed team (formerly known as the Community Tech team) to the full Product and Technology Department — ensuring that community wishes can be acted on by teams who are specialists in many different areas.
As part of this restructuring, the Community Tech team was disbanded, and six roles were impacted. The Foundation has been committed to supporting the affected team members during this transition in various ways. The team members are currently still working at the Foundation and are receiving internal support to identify and apply for open roles at the organization.
Regarding Brooke Vibber’s departure, as a general practice, and out of respect for individual privacy, the Foundation does not share details about personnel matters. This applies consistently in all cases. We recognize that this can be frustrating, but maintaining this standard is important for everyone. However, we do want to reiterate that the Wikimedia Foundation does not take employment actions in response to union activity. We respect employees’ rights to organize and engage in protected activities.
You may also wish to read our CEO Bernadette Meehan’s update to the community here.
I hope that information assuages some of your concerns. Please don’t hesitate to get back in touch if I can be of any further assistance, and thank you again for your support.
"it's just growing pains" -> "you're too young for that to hurt that bad" -> "you just need to get in better shape" -> "welcome to being old, everyone is in pain"
Interesting that a criticism like "you are always trying to find a way to justify the value of disabled people through labor extraction because your worldview worships labor. this is a weakness of the communist as much as the capitalist" is met with "shut up bitch, get back in the kitchen, wash a plate."
a lot of people will specfically insinuate that you are trying to get out of doing work, because you are a bad person. "Me when i don't want to do chores." Confronting how they will be treated if and when they cant do any chores is too terrifying to think about, so everyone who asks that question is just trying to justify their own laziness.
Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don't want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for the 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago. Nobody who wants to play something for the purpose of retro gaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we're certainly not going to let the original dissappear. They're crying about opportunity cost for a product they're not even selling.
op i know you're probably talking about like, video games, etc, but this is also critical for research science - my lab has so much abandonware, either because the company's out of business, or the company decided to not maintain it, and it's a fucking nightmare. we have two windows 95 computers that are CRITICAL for performing experiments/data analysis because the software needed is abandonware. one of the main roles for a guy in my lab is to maintain these little dinosaurs because if they go out, we lose access to ~20 years of raw data for research. part of why is that these companies also make their own file types, and make it difficult-to-impossible to convert those file types without their specific software. by habit, i convert all research files to more generic versions (txt, pdf, tif, etc) so that i minimize risk of losing my shit, but some stuff can't be converted.
for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.
so like, i know a lot of people look at the original post here and go "well op just wants old video games to play" (which is valid! games companies should not be able to push shit to abandonware and then close it off) but also this is critical for like. biomedical research. if y'all had any idea how much basic infrastructure built on science relies on shit that is technically abandonware, you would probably be horrified.
If you can't handle a queer person of color telling you when you do accidentally do something racist, you are not going to be able to protect your queer siblings
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.
Can unfortunately confirm this is 100% real. Sources and more info below.
EFF's Threat Lab used static code analysis to confirm Meta deployed facial recognition to millions of Ray-Ban smart glasses. The "Name Tag"
TL;DR: On June 4, 2026, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published “Move Fast, Surveil Things,” confirming through static code analysis that Meta has already deployed facial recognition code to millions of Ray-Ban smart glasses. The internal “Name Tag” feature converts every face in view into a 2,048-number faceprint array and matches it against a stored database. An EFF researcher activated the feature in debug mode and watched the glasses detect a known face in real time. Meta’s spokesperson says this is just “evidence of exploration.” Exploration doesn’t ship to millions of devices. This is staging for launch, and internal documents show Meta planned to flip the switch while privacy groups were too busy to fight back.
...You don’t need a central database when every user builds their own local faceprint collection. The faces still get scanned. The biometric data still gets created. Meta just outsources the storage to your phone, and the legal liability to you.
-via State of Surveillance, June 7, 2026. Emphasis mine.
But good news! There are things you can do to protect yourself and your community. As quoted from the article:
What You Can Do
Assume You’re Being Scanned
If someone near you is wearing Ray-Ban Meta glasses, treat it like a running camera, because it is. The small LED indicator that’s supposed to signal recording can be covered with tape, and Meta’s “always enabled” mode processes video without activating it [6]. The Nearby Glasses app can detect Meta Ray-Bans via Bluetooth.
Lock Down Your Meta Profiles
Name Tag matches faces against Meta platform data. If you have Facebook or Instagram accounts, set your profile photo to something that isn’t your face. Make your accounts private. Better yet, consider whether you need them at all. Every photo of your face on Meta’s platforms is training data for identifying you later.
Support the Legal Pushback
The EFF, ACLU, and EPIC are fighting this on legal, legislative, and technical fronts. Texas’s investigation proves state-level enforcement works: Meta paid $1.4 billion last time Texas came knocking over biometrics. Push for biometric privacy laws in your state. Illinois and Texas showed the way.
Don’t Buy the Glasses
Every pair sold expands the surveillance network. Meta has shipped millions already. Each one is a camera pointed at everyone else. If you own a pair, understand that the facial recognition code is on your device right now, and Meta can activate it with a software update whenever they decide the political moment is right.
-via State of Surveillance, June 7, 2026. Emphasis mine. And remember that for an undocumented person in the US right now, facial recognition spyware identifying them could be the difference between life and death.
stormborns
andulkaphoto
izzy806
2087
dededos
jbbartram-illu
