Exaltea

I write things. / Generally Halo / Coming back home.

[banhmigoddess]

My one boring tip to anyone in their 20s is to resist the temptation to rot in your room every time you get a free moment. Dismiss any neuroses you have about going outside and "being perceived". Be a dictator about it, plan your hangouts like they are binding commitments. No excuses! Go to the bar with your friends. Be kinda hungover at work. Socializing is like exercise; even if you don't feel like you want to, you should still do it because it's good for you.

[mihri-the-sasscatte]

Size comparison of Y’gathok, the Ceaseless Hunger and Bjorn, our level 20 Goliath Barbarian.

[professorsparklepants]

Hey quick question: why the FUCK do you have that

[kittyopteryx]

Imagine, from out of nowhere, your dm casually slapping this thing down on the table like any other encounter.

[mooretimetoplay]

“Yeah, the fight will start in a sec, uh…I’ll give inspiration to whomever helps me get this fucking box out of my car.”

[necrowemancer]

https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/7asxci/oc_ygathok_the_ceaseless_hunger_final_boss_of_our/ This is the reveal of this ridiculousness during their game

[jelloapocalypse]

Please watch this reveal video it’s kickass

[creepsandcrawlers]

FUCK ME  the reveal video

[threefeline]

“CHRIS??????”

[tanoraqui]

“Um, I don’t think our plan is gonna work.”

[8bitmickey]

[island-delver-go]

Always reblog Y'gathok

[robot-roadtrip-rants]

always ALWAYS reblog Y'gathok!

[somecutething]

Dolphins doing cartwheels with an aquarium guest.

(via Ant.Giovanni)

[luidilovins]

I'm loving this new trend of people going to zoos and participating in animal enrichment. We use to observe large exotic animals for our entertainment, but the fact is that we are now trying to make ourselves equally as entertaining for them. It's interactive, completely parpicipatory and I would argue that eventually someone's gonna come up with something new enough that it expland ethologists understanding about how some animals think, problem solve, communicate and feel and I think its fantastic.

[urbanfantasyinspiration]

Human: play?

Aquatic creature from an entirely different branch of the animal tree: play!

[urbanfantasyinspiration]

[eliotbaum]

Our Lady of Longing

Curse of Strahd, Lydia Petrovna. sticker design

[bigboysdrinkmilk]

Why is there a diarrhea parasite outbreak in America?

Because Donald Trump and his Republican allies cut funding to disease prevention and control.

Why is measles back in America?

Because Donald Trump and his Republican allies, including RFK Jr, cut vaccine and measles prevention funding and programs.

Why is the New World Screwworm infecting cattle in Texas, when it had previously been eliminated from the area?

Because Donald Trump and his Republican allies, including Elon Musk, cut USAID funding, which in part worked to monitor and prevent screwworm outbreaks.

Why was there a flu outbreak in our armed forces?

Because Donald Trump and his Republican allies, including Pete Hegseth, cut vaccination requirements for our armed forces, putting all of them at risk alongside our military readiness.

What contributed to the Covid outbreak?

Donald Trump and his Republican allies cut funding to a pandemic prevention program in his first term because Barack Obama had created it.

“America first” sends its regards. Trump voters, please learn your lesson. And if you don’t, it’ll be taught to you again with yet another diarrhea outbreak.

[bigboysdrinkmilk]

[vivtanner]

Dimmed 🕯️

[cartoon-thembo]

wanted to draw ez now that my players are gonna be spending more time with her. she's too cool and I DO NOT do her character justice when i play her lmao

[melittosphex]

Strahd style study

[littlestpersimmon]

Free Ornamentation VI. This work is dedicated to the public domain 🐇

[letmeinimafairy]

Continuing with the sea glass paintings, frosty dry reeds on a blue piece. It's so interesting and different from stone paintings in a way that I can't really predict how it will turn out before vanishing it.

Available

[letmeinimafairy]

The red sun. I don't know if there will be wildfires this year, but this is a view we see quite often.

Carved stone window with a painted landscape on mother-of-pearl inlay.

Available

[emp-roar]

"MY ARMY SETTLED IN THE VALLEY of Barovia and took power over the people in the name of a just god, but with none of a god's grace or justice." -- Tome of Strahd

"Raven's Inquisition" is a Curse of Strahd prequel campaign I am currently playing in where we get to explore setting elements and character relations that otherwise could not have been explored in the canon module. The DM @emp-roar (me) is constructing the campaign as an adaptation of the "I, Strahd" novel, where Barovia has yet been established, Strahd is still human, and the players are all inquisitors overtaking the Tsolenka Valley under the von Zarovich crest and the banner of the Morninglord.

Hi all! It has been a while since I've been on the internet, but I have since graduated and pursuing a career in animation! I was gifted the I,Strahd book during the middle of the pandemic and had been itching to run a prequel campaign based on an adapted take of I, Strahd, exploring elements that made Barovia and ultimately, Strahd, the way it became.

Hope you like the Ravenloft cast who the party had met. (Unironically this looks like a dating sim.)

Additionally the breakdown of Sergei's Vestments can be found in my player's @tateringss arsenal.

Impera Brigade insignia credit goes to ChiRHOKin I adored the shape of his alternative Barovia flag.

Strahd Portrait belongs to WOTC and the overall design and style was heavily inspired by Thronebreaker a Witcher's Tale!

And lastly! SOL INVICTUS!

[justalurkr]

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.

[irispurpurea]

This is the paper. It's excellent, highly recommend reading it.

I remember reading about Gebru's firing but I had no idea this was the paper she was fired over.

[alleesaur]

[ ArtFight 2026 ] [5] Chimeric Deity

for woofee66

[astrmastr]

yessE..... YEAAAASSSSSSSSSA

[soundclown]

[teethwreath]

[renumuro]

The mammals inhabiting the lands of the Bird Empire, whose geography consists predominantly of deserts, savannas, and sclerophyll forests.

[monstersovka]

🌱 dragon sword 🗡️