free 🇸🇩 advanced age i know “sit” and “speak” but i’m not very good at “stay” and i’m always trying not to shake url is the sound of being hit by a train according to Corey Feldman in Stand by Me. “he/him but like in the way where you see a dog across the street and ur like ‘look at him go’ not he/him like a man”; i.e. genderqueer but “they” doesn’t fit me (Penny dragon by iguanamouth.tumblr.com, used with permission).
Whatever man, Western religion sucks. The majority of Christians in the US are fake as fuck. I don’t even have the energy anymore to argue the Bible at people who can’t read it even in English or convince the people alienated by their hatred that the Bible is still ancient literature worth studying even if it isn’t fucking magic. It contains fossilized tropes from as early as the second millennium BCE that still influence our culture today, but fuck it. Most of its fans in the US are toxic about it. Worst fanbase of any media, anywhere, ever. I get that. It’s fucking off-putting and I don’t blame you for just avoiding it. But “Christianity” in America is going to face a reckoning even if there is no God.
Anyone else like completely soured on the movie Coco (2017) because of the way they apparently interpret Frida Kahlo’s style of self portraits to be evidence of self obsession?
American mythology about the Revolution focuses on the tyranny of George III because acknowledging that the policies the colonists chafed under were all from the British Parliament would mean acknowledging that democracy is as capable as monarchy of tyranny and empire.
The Roman Republic was an empire before it had an emperor. The Athenians before them, whose democracy is often contrasted with both Spartan kings and the Persian king of kings, ran the Delian League like an empire and had rendered certain neighbors into provinces before that—to say nothing of their slave trade, the most extensive of the Greeks.
The ideas that democracy and empire are mutually exclusive and that empires are defined by having emperors are the foundational misconceptions of American history as it is taught, or rather, when they can be bothered to teach it at all.
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.
Weird how so many countries elected extreme far right leaders and simultaneously all of those countries with said far right leaders are experiencing historic economic collapse.
If the economy is hurting you need to save money and conservatives have an entirely undeserved reputation for doing that.
I don’t think failing to pay your bills because you spent more money than your bills would even cost donating it to your rich friend with a gambling problem, I don’t think you actually deserve to be called a “conservative.”
I fail to see how the Monsters of Inc. were persuaded to care about the welfare of children who to them were no more than an anonymous, alien resource necessary for the convenience of their lives. They weren't even the same species of them. Yet they overhauled their whole energy economy to be more humane toward this hated other, which had no legal rights in their society, and which most of them had never even seen. It really makes no sense, if anything it's sort of a perversion, like if you actually lived with that level of concern and empathy you wouldn't be able to function at all. You would be, just, fucking debilitated. Just psychologically crushed. Idk it's just not that plausible to me. And Randall, the lizard. He isn't that fuckable either.
Greatest hits of FIFA cultural exchanges thus far:
Learning about flyovers and pyrotechnics at American games being a thing
Non-americans discovering the size of American football stadiums....for high schools in texas. Also the size of our stadiums in general.
Going to baseball games as a side treat! Lmao.
Non-americans losing their minds over "like, 100 petrol pumps," at buc-ees.
Related: Americans often forget how huge target and Walmart is.
People discovering American BBQ
Non-americans being obsessed with mid American restaurant chains like Golden Corral and Taco Bell
A lot of them really did feel god in this chile's apparently
The rightful obsession with waffle house
New understanding of American Big Drink With Ice supremacy as summer creeps in
Begrudging acceptance of mandatory water breaks during games
Americans realizing we have a Team USA and we are not, in fact, just "hosting our friends" from around the world — mostly because we won our first match and our team is decent??? Not amazing but not the worst.
Side rant: us women's football team is legendary good and we should care about that more like. Hello???
Admitting Americans are right about air conditioning
Related: the english team did warm ups in Florida RIP, and also the there's a video of the French team just being like fuck the heat, fuck the sun, this is so hot...
Americans who do not normally care about international football but fucking love a sport and cheering so we're just hyping whatever team is nearby, like we see a party and just show up and learn the chant. Like sorry many of us don't know shit about soccer but if we see a bunch of people in viking helmets or kilts or holding a bunch of flags and cheering we're game.
TAILGATING!!!!
I already said this but American yellow school bus is an international celebrity
The Scottish drank Boston dry of beer apparently, like they quadrupled what Boston normally sells for fourth of July weekend. SAM ADAMS HAD TO GET AN EMERGENCY BEER DELIVERY.
Also the English team fans got kicked out of The Londoner pub in Dallas after drinking 5,000 beers and going over max capacity lmao
Free refill drinks, tortilla chips & salsa.
So many non-americans are going to be here for the 4th of July for our 250th anniversary which is going to be great and hilarious
Non-americans discovering ranch as a beloved condiment
Non-americans understanding American obsession with hamburger now
Japan's homebase is in Texas and the cultural differences are frankly great and also the Japanese fans are SO NICE and helped clean up the stadium after a match???
All the short videos with the eagle screech (which I think is actually a hawk but whatever)
Like yeah America's government is literally the Legion of Doom, but we generally aren't that bad. I'm glad the world is seeing the little things that there are to love in America.
You're all falling for literal american propaganda and that is not hard to recognise if you consider for 0.1 seconds whether maybe us backwater europeans already knew what a fucking hamburger is.
Any european acting excited over the existence of the humble börgar is trying to sell you something
Growing up it was like “How did anyone fall for Nazi propaganda when Germany hosted the Olympics?” and now I’m seeing Europeans gush over free refills and giant corporate stadiums.
Even leaving out the regime’s international and domestic crimes, do y’all realize the level of austerity you are signaling to your governments that you will accept for a piddling amount of bread and circuses?
Let’s see. Iran’s government is conservative. The United States’ government is conservative.
And the US is also bombing Iran unprovoked and funding a genocide and instigating regime changes and starving people with blockades and embargoes and profiting from slavery and war and is single-handedly keeping the world hurtling toward climate disaster because its entire economy and domestic infrastructure and economic preeminence depends on oil.
marjane satrapi is jr rowling for pretentious art lovers. why are you refusing to acknowledge that french woman used the clout she got (also why do you think she got propped up in the first place if not for aligning with western interests to destroy anti imperialist government in iran) to spread imperialist zionist propaganda and lend her support to islamophobic policies in france just because you liked her works (which is also reactionary propaganda at closer inspection) as a teen? grow tf up and stop supporting imperialist running dogs posing as intellectuals.
i cannot overstate how good it feels to watch older movies where the actors were still allowed to look kinda weird and not be conventionally attractive. like it is genuinely healing
It is a myth that the US ever planned on invading Japan in any scenario, they really just wanted to use their new toy and keep the USSR from entering the Pacific Theater.
But conservatives and liberals alike generally believe that myth wholeheartedly.
And for all the talk about this war ending Iran’s nuclear program, they do not have, and lack the capability to develop, a nuclear weapon.
So if the US military is in fact stocking up on potassium iodide and Prussian blue, it is because they are seriously considering reifying the nuclear trolley problem in Iran.
Idk dude maybe it’s because I’m not on SSRIs anymore but the gore of Invincible was too much for me.
And something about it within the context of the show is bothering me in a way I’m having trouble articulating.
Like have I not seen enough of the show (2 episodes) or is it basically a kids show (in emotional depth, dialogue, humor, complexity) with adult language and gore? I mean, that’s these new darker comics in a nutshell, right? Children could easily digest the show if not for the gore and even then if they play video games at all it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary.
And, okay, I don’t want to sound like a puritan or anything, I just think maybe something might be wrong with a media environment where a child-level cartoon (I know it’s an “adult cartoon” but it is also American, so) can more easily show a woman having her neck snapped and vomiting blood down her own back than that same woman’s bare chest.
Like I’m not treading new ground here by saying that we are extremely permissible toward extreme violence on bodies but very restrictive toward neutrally showing what those bodies look like, much less showing them in pleasure!
No limits on violence but harsh limits on pleasure is such an incredibly Evangelical Protestant ethic for media to have, it’s weird that hyper-violence is seen as somehow transgressive.
Spent seven years completely unstable from really hardcore meds (that didn’t work) that made me gain at one point 100 pounds but I had the capacity to create and be spiritual. Now I’m working full time (for the equivalent of part time pay for someone my age) on no meds with no creativity or spiritual life. I spend most of my time awake at a job that isn’t even paying me overtime to work a federal holiday tomorrow. I no longer have health insurance so I can’t be poorly treated again even if I wanted to be. I’ve alienated away most of my friends with erratic and abrasive behavior and have no community where I currently live, or on this or any site. What few friendly people I know where I live I cannot freely be myself around. I rarely feel anything besides fucking tired. I don’t even know what I’m doing here. Venting I guess.
Spent seven years completely unstable from really hardcore meds (that didn’t work) that made me gain at one point 100 pounds but I had the capacity to create and be spiritual. Now I’m working full time (for the equivalent of part time pay for someone my age) on no meds with no creativity or spiritual life. I spend most of my time awake at a job that isn’t even paying me overtime to work a federal holiday tomorrow. I no longer have health insurance so I can’t be poorly treated again even if I wanted to be. I’ve alienated away most of my friends with erratic and abrasive behavior and have no community where I currently live, or on this or any site. What few friendly people I know where I live I cannot freely be myself around. I rarely feel anything besides fucking tired. I don’t even know what I’m doing here. Venting I guess.
......suddenly struck by the idea for a piece of worldbuilding of "fae don't like iron bc it is the most stable element*"
*as in elements higher you can extract energy via fission and lower you can extract energy via fusion but iron itself there is no excess binding energy to extract at all
everyone's talking about the ibs/autism haha funny comparison thing while I'm still stuck on the concept that hamsters exist in the wild. like naturally
tf do you mean they're a wild creature. you find those ankle-biters at the pet store
Not a biologist, but the evolution of mammals is way more granular than you might expect. Humans are the sole surviving species of the genus Homo, which was a real party before the other ones went extinct. You're in for a fun time.
Domestic cats are believed to be domesticated not from tigers, but from the African wildcat:
Which evolved to be small just because it's sometimes more useful to be small.
And no, hamsters are not off-brand rats. They're part of the rodent order, which includes beavers, moles, capybaras, guinea pigs (yes, also wild) and lots of other fun things:
