Hades gives Orpheus a trial he knows he himself could never succeed at, but it isnât just that Hades knows he would turn around. Hades has been failing this trial every single year. He shows up too early. He turns too soon. He is so full of doubt that even the natural order of the world, that Persephone will return to him, is not something he can trust. Hades would fail the trial he has given Orpheus, and he already has. All alone, his blood runs thin.
Muppet Frankenstein, where the only human actor is the Monster, and he has no prosthetics. Everyone just reacts to the one human in their world as a horrific monster. The body parts before the animation are even visibly felt Muppet limbs, but the creature rises as a human.
@wellthatschaotic the Muppets are canonically actors. Muppet Frankenstein is its own story and world via the Muppets performing as actors. Same as Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island.
So ignoring Kung Fu Panda 4 (except as an example of what not to do), how would you do another KFP movie after the excellent first three? Unlike Toy Story 3, KFP 3 didnât end on a strong note of final closure, but the three first films are very thematically complete.
First film Po accepts and masters his Body
Second film Po accepts and masters his Mind
Third film Po accepts and masters his Spirit
First film the villain cannot accept that âYesterday is Historyâ
Second film the villain cannot accept that âTomorrow is a Mysteryâ
Third film the villain cannot accept that âToday is a Giftâ (this is less obvious than the first two, but Kai isnât obsessed with the past or future he just wants mastery and power in the moment, but he doesnât understand that truly existing in the moment means letting go and accepting others and the world, hence Po defeating him by letting go of the chi that Kai was seizing)
Iâd honestly be tempted to do a spin-off where Po plays a secondary role rather than try to make a fourth chapter for him (again not counting the failed attempt at a fourth movie, just like I donât count Shrek the Third and consider 4everafter the final chapter of the Shrek trilogy). Ending with him becoming a teacher of everything heâs learned and thus showing real power is extending your gifts to others, is a great end note.
So the spin-off (making up for their absence in the failed 4th movie) should be a Furious Five movie (though i wouldnât be surprised if that means a Tigress movie with the other 4 as strong supporting cast) where Po is featured as a wise guru back at the temple.
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.
"Lord of the silver bow, now hear my prayer!
Great guardian of Tenedos and Chryse
and sandy Cilla! Mouse Lord! If I ever
built temples to your liking, ever burned
fat thighs of oxen or of goats for you,
fulfill this prayer for me, and let the Greeks
suffer your arrows to avenge my tears!"
(Homer. Iliad, trans. wilson)
Apollo sends a plague to the Greeks, my piece for the 2026 edition, Sing! O Muse Zine.
Gay people from 1950-2010: we are human just like you, weâre not another species or a subculture, the only difference is that we are attracted to the same gender.
Gay people in 2018: straight people are stinky, WIG!
1) Literally nothing in the clearly joking absurdist post youâre responding to actually insults straight people.
2) The gay community has never claimed not to have a subculture. In fact celebrating gay culture has been a central part of the gay rights movement for the entire time frame youâre referring to.
Muppet Frankenstein, where the only human actor is the Monster, and he has no prosthetics. Everyone just reacts to the one human in their world as a horrific monster. The body parts before the animation are even visibly felt Muppet limbs, but the creature rises as a human.
Well lets remember how these movies work and the Muppet lore around them. The Monster would not meet âGonzoâ, if he encountered that Muppet it would be a character from the novel BEING PLAYED BY GONZO.
But Gonzo could play someone like Alphonse and never actually meet the Monster directly.
He could also play De Lacey and actually befriend the Monster briefly before his kids (Rizzo and Yolanda?) ruin it.
Okay thatâs a fair point. Gonzo would have to be a significant character because thatâs his thing. But maybe he never gets a chance to befriend the monster
you want a significant character that never befriends the monster?
Have Gonzo play Victor Frankenstein. You want unhinged? Gonzo's got ya covered. You want obsessive and weirdly charismatic? Gonzo's got you covered. You want willing to violate every taboo of humanity to get something he wants? Yeah that'll be him too I think.
Never encounters the monster. If itâs Gonzo as Victor the mistreatment and abandonment doesnât fit. Beaker is a better fit as someone driven by panic in the face of the unknown. Gonzo is a terrible fit for Victor - heâd have been a great dad to the monster.
Muppet Frankenstein, where the only human actor is the Monster, and he has no prosthetics. Everyone just reacts to the one human in their world as a horrific monster. The body parts before the animation are even visibly felt Muppet limbs, but the creature rises as a human.
Well lets remember how these movies work and the Muppet lore around them. The Monster would not meet âGonzoâ, if he encountered that Muppet it would be a character from the novel BEING PLAYED BY GONZO.
But Gonzo could play someone like Alphonse and never actually meet the Monster directly.
He could also play De Lacey and actually befriend the Monster briefly before his kids (Rizzo and Yolanda?) ruin it.
Okay thatâs a fair point. Gonzo would have to be a significant character because thatâs his thing. But maybe he never gets a chance to befriend the monster
I think that would be redundant with Christmas Carol. The novel is epistolary, so its best narration can be delivered by the characters rather than needing a separate narrator.
Victor: Beaker
Captain Walton: Kermit (does the narration over the Meeps when we have to understand Victor for a scene to work)
Ingolstadt Professors: Bunson
De Lacey: Uncle Deadly
DeLaceyâs âkidsâ (replaced with âfriendsâ): Statler and Waldorf (rather than attacking the monster, they read him to filth)
Elizabeth: Miss Piggy
Henry: Fozzy
Alphonse: Gonzo
Caroline: Camilla
William: Rizzo
Justine: Yolanda
The Bride: assembled from unanimated muppet pieces but the head is Janice
Muppet Frankenstein, where the only human actor is the Monster, and he has no prosthetics. Everyone just reacts to the one human in their world as a horrific monster. The body parts before the animation are even visibly felt Muppet limbs, but the creature rises as a human.
Well lets remember how these movies work and the Muppet lore around them. The Monster would not meet âGonzoâ, if he encountered that Muppet it would be a character from the novel BEING PLAYED BY GONZO.
But Gonzo could play someone like Alphonse and never actually meet the Monster directly.
He could also play De Lacey and actually befriend the Monster briefly before his kids (Rizzo and Yolanda?) ruin it.
Current twitter drama is Europeans confidently declaring that they don't need to drive or use overpriced public transport to get to the MetLife stadium for the World Cup; they will simply walk down the highway to get there. Girl it's New Jersey. They're gonna splatter you for fun.
If you manage to get on the turnpike before the cops stop you, a soccer mom is gonna do the Jersey slide in a RAV4 and turn your entire group into a wet speedbump
Image me gently taking your hand as I tell you the following:
This is ABSOLUTELY a perfectly fine footpath.
In fact, with how much space Iâm seeing here, it is entirely plausible, that the European hordes will just create a temporary little Wanderweg right next to the highway. With that much space they might not even have to interfere with traffic.
But also have you seen the space between your highways? Iâd say the gaps each easily fit another whole stream of European walking hordes. Or maybe even two going opposite directions :D
tightly grips your hand with both of my sweaty hands.
the grass is not a permanent feature. there just happens to be a chunk of it there. the side of the road can vary from grass to swampwater ditches to steep embankments to absolutely nothing within a very short distance.
they will call in every highway enforcer in the state and mass incarcerate the lot of you before they allow you to Darwin Award yourselves across 6 lanes of traffic into an international incident or, (their real concern) impede the progress of the single most important north-south interstate corridor in america, ball kicky game be damned.
(I'm starting to believe that a fair number of you in the notes have We're Better Than Stupid Americans embedded so deeply into your cultural identity that you will Just Not Listen to anything we say to you about the material circumstances about the place we live in, rather than taking us at our word that there is a reason that most Americans travel the way we do and it's a good reason.)
You are a US American motorist driving along i-95 during rush hour. You see a pedestrian dart in front of you. You have 2 seconds to make a decision:
Attempt to stop (cause multi-car pile up and kill pedestrian anyway)
Attempt to swerve #1 (cause semi truck next to you to jackknife, cause pileup, kill pedestrian anyway)
Attempt to swerve #2 (into ditch/swamp/retaining wall, 85 mph/137 km per hour, killing yourself, your passengers, and a bunch of other people on the road when your car inevitably sends pieces shooting off into traffic. Also, the pedestrian gets run over by the person behind you, who was NOT expecting a pedestrian and didn't even see them)
Run over the pedestrian and hope you can at least stay in your lane and not cause a worse accident while you slow down
Also...the US is usually hotter than Europe...how many miles are y'all planning on walking? Bcs the heat, lack of shade as well as places you can easily stop to rest or buy a drink is gonna be a huge issue. And it's in June!! When the weather can quite easily hit 90F/32C or higher, which will be worsened by walking on hot asphalt surrounded by cars putting out even more heat in direct, unrelenting sunlight while your body also heats up from the exercise as you walk for what surely will be several hours. And that's IF the temp stays at low. We're expecting a massive heat wave this summer with record shattering highs. Wouldn't be surprised if it hits 100F/40C just from the asphalt and cars, and then clears 110F/43C due to the weather.
If you try this you will die, if not from traffic then from the heat. Just pay for the fucking uber. Or, even better, don't fucking come here oh my god?? You're not safe bcs you're white and European ICE has been kidnapping white travelers too. Football can not be more important than your life. Stay home and safe and watch it on TV.
I need European to understand - the reason we donât walk more isnât because we just culturally donât do that - itâs because the material conditions in this country are designed around forcing motor vehicle usage and punishing anything else. You cannot safely walk an American Freeway. Long stretch of interstate in a rural or desert area, sure if youâre well supplied, but not a busy major commute freeway. You will die.
