The adorable, wonderful, and EMINENTLY collectable Chthonic Companions from "Hades" by Supergiant Games are the newest patterns available on my Etsy store!
I am SUPER proud of how these patterns worked out, and I'm so excited to share them with all of you - which one is your favourite?
You can find the pattern bundle here!
If you only want one or two, it might be cheaper to buy them separately - you can find the single patterns on my store :)
And hey - not a fan of crocheting your own? Keep an eye out, once work quiets down I'll be adding the finished toys to the store as well ;)
The adorable, wonderful, and EMINENTLY collectable Chthonic Companions from "Hades" by Supergiant Games are the newest patterns available on my Etsy store!
I am SUPER proud of how these patterns worked out, and I'm so excited to share them with all of you - which one is your favourite?
You can find the pattern bundle here!
If you only want one or two, it might be cheaper to buy them separately - you can find the single patterns on my store :)
And hey - not a fan of crocheting your own? Keep an eye out, once work quiets down I'll be adding the finished toys to the store as well ;)
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.
“I shouldn’t like to punish anyone, even if they’d done me wrong.” —George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
“A person can’t help their birth.” —William Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)
“But to expose the former faults of any person, without knowing what their present feelings were, seemed unjustifiable.” —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
“Every Fool can do as they’re bid.” —Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation (1738)
“So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.” —King James Bible, Matthew 18:35 (transl. 1611)
“God send every one their heart’s desire!” —William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (~1600)
“Now this king did keepe a great house, that euerie body might come and take their meat freely.” —Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia (1580)
“If … a psalme scape any person, or a lesson, or els yt they omyt one verse or twayne…” —William Bonde, The Pylgrimage of Perfection (1526)
“And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame, / They wol come up and offre a Goddés name” —Geoffrey Chaucer, The Pardoner’s Tale (~1380)
“þan hastely hiȝed eche wiȝt on hors & on fote, / huntyng wiȝt houndes alle heie wodes, / til þei neyȝþed so neiȝh to nymphe þe soþe [Then hastily hied each person on horse and on foot / hunting with hounds all the high woods / ‘til they came so near, to tell the truth]” —William and the Werwolf (transl. ~1350-1375)
“Bath ware made sun and mon, / Aiþer wit þer ouen light [Both were made sun and moon / Either with their own light]” —Cursor Mundi (~1325)
We’ve been using they/them/their pronouns to indicate a person with unspecified gender for a long ass fucking time. The only reason it’s become a big issue lately is because it can be used as a semi-respectful term for trans and non-binary folks and we can’t have that can we
These fucks are literally trying to change our language to hurt trans/nb folks, and claiming that’s just the way its always been
Me, holding my crochet project (that I have been working on basically 24/7) in an absolute death grip, knuckles turning white: "look at my baby. I created this creature. Look at it" (there are circles under my eyes)
My latest (and greatest?) designs - the absolutely adorable Chthonic Companions from Hades! These little critters are about 6" (15 cm) tall, and are an original Mimicry Crafts design, adapted from the game by Supergiant Games.
Which is your favourite? Let me know below!
And hey, do you want to make them yourself? Well good news - I'm writing up the patterns right now, with the first one (Battie) available at the link below!
Hi it's me, nightmare DM from the worst pits of ttrpg forums. So I'm running D&D 5E and I banned rolling a d20, because it seemed overpowered. I'm running an original campaign set in my own world, where the elemental firmament oscillates in a way determined by the motion of the outer planets, and my question is this: how do I prevent my fiancée from hitting on the other players in real life, purely through in-game methods?
Hi it's me, nightmare player from the above DM's campaign. since the DM has banned classes, just in general, do you have any advice on building a completely overpowered character who breaks the game? My backstory is that I am literally Batman. Not like a guy who's inspired by Batman, but the DC comics character Batman, who's decided to show up in the DM's setting. His fiancée is really into it.
Hi it's me. The fiancée. Since my useless partner still hasn't realized I'm angling for a threesome, I have some questions: There's a weird continuity issue where the lore of the Ancient Orzoks seems to be unclear on whether it happened a hundred years ago, or ten thousand. This makes it really hard to figure out if my character, who's an orc, should have been born yet. Also, any advice on building an orc when the DM has banned orcs?
Hi it's me. Pathfinder 2nd edition Remastered, personified. I'm currently having a severe mental health crisis because some of you keep suggesting that I fix these people and their horrible, horrible problems, in particular that none of them seem to have any interest in reading a single piece of rules text. The DM's lore has a bizarrely thorough and politically concerning exposition dump about the gnomes' secret influence on all major historical events, and I have to ask: Do you know about any good couples' therapists?
Hi it's me, your favorite indie ttrpg. I would be perfectly okay with these people buying a copy because I can't afford to be selective, but they're not going to, so... have you considered that games like me only really get played by people who actually like ttrpgs? That's something to consider if you want to avoid these people.
areudirty
romaincrisis
vaporwave
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titsay
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prguitarman
theartofmadeline
