unfortunately very true. Doing Better does not always mean never being upset or never being triggered or never having trouble. often Doing Better means experiencing those things and being able to keep going/cope healthily/move on. if youâre in a bubble with no sensation, if youâre numbing yourself out, thatâs not what recovering really is. it wonât help you have a happier life itâll just make your world smaller and smaller until you canât fit anywhere anymore. gotta learn to make peace with the hard stuff too, thatâs the only way to keep going
Yesterday, Disney asked users on Threads to use Disney quotes to show how they are currently feeling. To say that this did not go according to Disney's plan would be an understatement đ
They deleted the thread, but they should know that this doesn't help because now the videos are making their rounds đ¤Łđ
The Germans really cooked making "Hobbyless behaviour" an insult. It is both devastating, applicable to a wide range of people and behaviours, and doesn't resort to swearing.
Man ranting on the internet about the Superbowl halftime show or complaining that something is "woke"? Hobbyless Behaviour. Girls mocking another girl for not looking right? Hobbyless Behaviour. Mindless vandalism? Hobbyless Behaviour.
It is more powerful than "get a life" or the English "You're Sad" because it gets to the central point of the matter, and that is wonderful. Danke, Deutsch.
The day I started testosterone, my wife found him on Tiktok. He was starting the same day I did. I felt like I was holding hands with him, going on this journey together.
Seeing him again, happy with himself, loving himself, flourishing even though he had to wait so long, fills me with incredible joy and pride.
It's never too late to be yourself. <3
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 don't want my cellphone to have AI I want it to have 3 days of battery time. I don't want my computer to have AI preinstalled I want it to have seven usb ports and high ram at affordable price. I don't want my games to have AI built levels I want them to be so optimized I could run them on a nokia.
When the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising happened, the Polish resistance didn't join or assist, they waited for uprising to be crushed and the ghetto to be "liquidated" because their ideal Poland didn't have Jews. When the Warsaw Uprising happened, the Soviets waited for the uprising to be crushed by the Nazis because they had no room for any organised Polish national identity in their Communist utopia.
When the concentration camps were liberated (which to be absolutely clear was a side effect of a European war, nobody on any continent waged war to end the holocaust except for Jewish Partizans), and survivors attempted to return home they were met with pogroms because the neighbours who enthusiastically sold them out to the Nazis and packed them into cattle cars didn't expect to see any of them back and were hostile to the reality.
Antisemitic violence faded through the establishment by holocaust survivors of Jewish advocacy organisations and concerted efforts lobbying politicians and having legal protections passed by elected representatives.
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So maybe support the organisations that were established by your radical forebears that made these legal changes happen... And don't trust a link that suggests that not voting in preference for accelerationist violence is a real strategy.
How did the supreme courts justices get in that got rid of the interment camps?
They were appointed by elected officials who were voted in.
What could have ended slavery? Voting. What could have prevented the holocaust? Voting. However, demagogues that liked to convince people not to vote kind of both kept slavery ongoing, as well as the holocaust.
Why did the south revolt? Because a voted in president made them think they would lose their slaves.
Open a bank account or get a credit card without signed permission from her father or hr husband.
Serve on a jury - because it might inconvenience the family not to have the woman at home being her husbandâs helpmate.
Obtain any form of birth control without her husbandâs permission. You had to be married, and your hub and had to agree to postpone having children.
Get an Ivy League education. Ivy League schools were menâs colleges ntil the 70â˛s and 80â˛s. When they opened their doors to women it was agree that women went there for their MRS. Degee.
Experience equality in the workplace: Kennedyâs Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative professional positions.
Keep her job if she was pregnant.Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women were regularly fired from their workplace for being pregnant.
Refuse to have sex with her husband.The mid 70s saw most states recognize marital rape and in 1993 it became criminalized in all 50 states. Nevertheless, marital rape is still often treated differently to other forms of rape in some states even today.
Get a divorce with some degree of ease.Before the No Fault Divorce law in 1969, spouses had to show the faults of the other party, such as adultery, and could easily be overturned by recrimination.
Have a legal abortion in most states.The Roe v. Wade case in 1973 protected a womanâs right to abortion until viability.
Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment. According to The Week, the first time a court recognized office sexual harassment as grounds for legal action was in 1977.
Play college sports Title IX of the  Education Amendments of protects people from discrimination  based on sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal financial  assistance It was nt until this statute that colleges had teams for womenâs sports
Apply for menâs Jobs  The EEOC rules that sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal.  This ruling is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men.
This is why we needed feminism - this is why we know that feminism works
I just want to reiterate this stuff, because I legit get the feeling there are a lot of younger women for whom it hasnât really sunk in what it is todayâs GOP is actively trying to return to.
Did you go to a good college? Shame on you, you took a college placement that could have gone to a man who deserves and needs it to support or prepare for his wife & children. But if you really must attend college, well, some men like that, you can still get married if you focus on finding the right man.
Got a job? Why? A man could be doing that job. You should be at home caring for a family. You shouldnât be taking that job away from a man who needs it (see college, above). You definitely donât have a career â youâll be pregnant and raising children soon, so no need to worry about promoting you.
This shit was within living memory. IâM A MILLENIAL and my mother was in the second class that allowed women at an Ivy League school. Men who are alive today either personally remember shit like this or have parents/family who have raised them into thinking this was the way America functioned back in the blissful Good Old Days. There are literally dudes in the GOP old enough to remember when it was like this and yearn for those days to return.
When people talk about resisting conservativism and the GOP, weâre not just talking about whether the wage gap is a myth or not. Weâre talking about whether women even have the fundamental right to exist as individuals, to run their own households and compete for jobs and be considered on an equal footing with men in any arena at all in the first place.
I was a child in the 1960s, a teenager in the 1970s, a young adult in the 1980s.
This is what it was like:
When I was growing up, it was considered unfortunate if a girl was good at sports. Girls were not allowed in Little League. Girlsâ teams didnât exist in high school, except at all-girlsâ high schools. Boys played sports, and girls were the cheerleaders.
People used to ask me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone told me it was impossibleâthose just werenât realistic goals for a girlâthe latter, especially, because you couldnât trust women to judge fairly and rationally, after all.
In the 1960s and 1970s, all women were identified by their marital status, even in arrest reports and obituaries. In elementary school, my science teacher referred to Pierre Curie as DOCTOR Curie and Marie Curie as MRS. CurieâŚbecause, as he put it, âshe was just his wife.â (Both had doctorates and both were Nobel prize winners, so you would think that both would be accorded respect.)
Companies could and did require women to wear dresses and skirts. Failure to do could and did get women fired. And it was legal. It was also legal to fire women for getting married or getting pregnant. The rationale was that a woman who was married or who had a child had no business working; that was what her husband was for. Aetna Insurance, the biggest insurance company in America, fired women for all of the above.
A man could rape his wife. Legally. I can remember being twelve years old and reading about legal experts actually debating whether or not a man could actually be said to coerce his wife into having sex. This was a serious debate in 1974.
The debate about marital rape came up in my law school, too, in 1984. Could a woman be raped by her husband? The guys all said noâa woman got married, so she was consenting to sex at all times. So I turned it around. I asked them if, since a man had gotten married, that meant that his wife could shove a dildo or a stick or something up his ass any time she wanted to for HER sexual pleasure.
(Hey, I thought it was reasonable. If one gender was legally entitled to force sex on the other, then obviously the reverse should also be true.)
The male law students didnât like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman.
My reaction was, âThank you for proving my pointâŚâ
The concept of date rape, when first proposed, was considered laughable. If a woman went out on a date, the argument of legal experts ran, sexual consent was implied. Even more sickening was the fact that in some statesâeven in the early 1980sâa man could rape his daughterâŚand it was no worse than a misdemeanor.
Women taking self-defense classes in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently described in books and on TV as âcute.â The implication was that it was absurd for a woman to attempt to defend herself, but wasnât it just adorable for her to try?
I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high schoolâ1978-79 and 1979-80âbecause, as the principal told me, âOnly boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you wonât use it.â
When I was in collegeâfrom 1980 to 1984âthere were no womensâ studies. The idea hadnât occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professorâa man who had a doctorate in historyâinformed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist becauseâŚwait for itâŚwomensâ brains were too small.
(He was very surprised when I came up with a list of fifty women gifted in the arts and science, most of whom he had never heard of before.)
When Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate in 1984, the press hailed it as a disaster. What would happen, they asked fearfully, if Mondale died and Ferraro became president? What if an international crisis arose and she was menstruating? She could push the nuclear button in a fit of PMS! It would be the end of the WORLD!!
âŚNo, they WERENâT kidding.
On the surface, things are very different now than they were when I was a child, a teen and a young adult. But Iâm afraid that people now do not realize what it was like then. Iâve read a lot of posts from young women who say that they are not feminists. If the only exposure to feminism they have is the work of extremists, I cannot blame them overmuch.
I wish that I could tell them what feminism was like when it was newâwhen the dream of legal equality was just a dream, and hadnât even begun to come true. When âwomanâs workâ was a sneerâand an overt putdown. When people tut-tutted over bright and athletic girls with the words, âReally, itâs a shame sheâs not a boy.â That lack of feminism wasnât all men opening doors and picking up checks. A lot of it was an attitude of patronizing contempt that hasnât entirely died out, but which has become less publicly acceptable.
I wish I could make them feel what it was likeâŚwhen grown men were called âmenâ and grown women were âgirls.â
I am 70. I remember all those things. I was a student nurse from 64 to 67 and we were not permitted to âfinishâ a bed bath on a male or insert a catheter in a male. Seeing male genitals might cause us âharmâ or upset our delicate sensibilities. Imagine when we graduated and were âthrownâ to the wolves. Imagine if you were a male patient who had to be the first to be âpracticedâ on by a graduate nurse. (Ha!) At the school I attended no student nurse could be married. Only one school in my city (Atlanta) would even admit married women and Male Nurses werenât even thought of. What man would want to be a nurse when he could be a Doctor. In all my training I only remember 3 or 4 Women who were Doctorâs and a very few, (less than 5 or 6) female interns or residents (and this was a teaching hospital) and most of those were OB/Gyns and one was a pediatrician.
When I graduated and was going to get married I wanted to go on birth control pills. You needed to be on them for a least one cycle before they were effective. I wonât go into what hoops I had to jump through to get a prescription from my Dr. (a man, natch) but when i went to the drug store to get the prescription filled I ended up having to get my future husband to âaccompanyâ me so the pharmacist âinterviewâ him and see if it was okay with him for me to be on the pill.
Even when we went to get a marriage license I had to get my Fatherâs signature and we had to go before a Judge because I was not yet 21 (I was 20 and 9 months).
I could go on and on, getting a credit card in MY name, etc., but I will tell you that WE MUST RESIST.
The number of people I know who romanticize gender inequality is frankly terrifying. A world never existed in which the lives of women were simplified by benevolent men who saw to her every want and need. That was not a thing. A world never existed in which women were all ladies, men were all gentlemen, & everything was some great big cishet fairytale. Feminists arenât a bunch of upstarts who want to destroy a perfectly wholesome and non-harmful system. JustâŚlook at history. Look at the posts above. We. Must. Resist..
This is what they mean, when they say âOld-fashioned valuesâ
When conservatives start waxing lyrical about the âgood old daysâ, this is what they mean. They are fully aware how much things blew for women, and they would like to return to that.Â
At first I re-blogged this with no commentary added because itâs already so thorough and good.
But then I realized I actually do want to add something. This was written nine years ago. In the 9 years that have come to pass the white nationalist Christian fascism ultra right agenda of misogyny has had many victories.
In the United States just off the top of my head a very few examples: thereâs no longer a legally protected right to abortion. Countless laws across our country police, how woman you must look or be to enter a public bathroom. We know with certainty the president and countless people around him are pedophiles and rapists. Womenâs participation in the workforce has been rolled back to 1980s levels. The pressure to be thin is higher now than 10 years ago.
Another voice here: if you went to high school in the 70s, Type class was required; Home Economics expected, and and (and all) Shop classes were (implicitly) forbidden to girls. IF I had made a Big Stink, I MIGHT have been allowed to take a shop class (Iâm still angry that I donât know how to use most tools), but it would have been something of a scandal. However, Iâm still proud of the fact I got through with ZERO Home Ec creditsânot that everyone needs to know the basics, but I already knew how to cook, sew, and run a house.
The only career options that were ever presented to us were teacher, secretary, and airline stewardess.
âVoting for the lesser of two evils doesnât work.â
How would you know? Itâs never been tried for long enough.
Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris all lost.
Biden won, but most people spent his entire presidency shitting on him and giving him absolutely no credit for his successes, which were MANY. (If you need a refresher: RFMA, PACT Act, Chips and Science, Inflation Reduction Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson etc.)
You canât say âvote blue no matter whoâ and âvote for the lesser of two evilsâ doesnât work if you refuse to ever give it a chance of working.
Also I hate that phrase âlesser of two evilsâ when weâre talking about someone who supports unions and immigrants and healthcare and food assistance and queer rights and voting rights over someone who is literally trying to end us all.
And the lesser of two evils is, by definition, BETTER.
Itâs like the difference between a wound with a bit of an infection, and literal death. Those arenât comparable.
Democrats are not perfect and no one has ever claimed otherwise, but they are making lasting change. Itâs slow and itâs not linear , but it is happening.
Pro forced birth Democrats have been all but forced out the party. Same with anti-gay Democrats AND anti-trans Democrats. You donât see many Dems supported by the NRA at all anymore. And all Dems believe in the climate crisis.
This was NOT a given even 10 years ago.
Democrats are not becoming more conservative. Theyâre becoming less. Across the board. Progressive policies have become a deal breaker.
This is what youâre saying is one of âtwo evilsâ?
Give me a break.
Do you want things to get better or do you want to scream âperfection only!â and watch it get worse?
Cause thatâs what weâre living right now.
Weâre living in a refusal to vote for and celebrate the successful harm reduction, or âlesser of two evils,â as you say.
There are rarely examples where we actually get to see what happens if the âlesser of two evilsâ wins.
And the thing is, when they win, theyâre shit on so successfully that we lose next time. Again, Biden.
They do something, or many many things right and the goal post gets moved, again and again.
In the end, the only knowledge anyone has of their actions is that they canât do anything right.
Thatâs a dangerous way of seeing the world.
I know this cause we are living it.
What is happening right now is a product of that way of thinking.
I donât need to find statistics or read a report cause this is our reality.
This is what happens when people refuse to vote for and celebrate the wins of âthe lesser of two evils.â
When people choose a candidate in the primary who has no chance of a snowball in hell of winning and then complain and donât vote when a candidate they REALLY didnât like becomes the party nominee.
This is our life.
We donât have to imagine it.
And yet, the mantra hasnât changed. The goalpost keeps being moved. Dems donât get any credit for doing ANYTHING right. People spread demands that are literally impossible and convince other people that they are not only possible, but easy. And enough people refuse to vote for harm reduction that the harm is constantly increased.
Perfection is the enemy of progress. Thatâs not just a catchy phrase, itâs a fact.
If Al Gore had won, we would be A LOT further along on climate than we are now, and we would not have gone into Iraq.
If Hillary Clinton had won, we wouldnât have lost the Supreme Court. We would still have Roe and affirmative action and the VRA and the Chevron Doctrine.
If Kamala Harris had won, we wouldnât be at war with Venezuela and Iran and possibly Cuba and maybe Greenland? Trans people would not be attacked at the federal level. Immigrants would not be kidnapped off the streets. We would still have the Department of Education and labor and a DoJ that doesnât do the presidentâs bidding.
THIS is the result of refusing to vote for and support the lesser of two evils, WE ARE LIVING IT!
So maybe going forward we stop. We give a chance for the lesser of two evils to actually work. To scream from the rooftops every time they do right thing. We donât just vote for it once, but do so over at least a decade.
Cause weâve tried your way. It hasnât worked. This exact moment that you are reading this post is proof of that.
So letâs try this way, for once. Letâs give this country a fighting chance at actual progress.
Look, I donât do this ever, but my buddy Beth Andres-Beck (any/all) is running for Congress (MA-06) and we could really use some help getting a trans queer into the halls of power.
They decided to run because Seth Moulton was being a dick about trans kids in sports. As a trans person who did sports as a kid, this offended them.
He fucking understands that shit is fucked up up and we cannot act as if just voting in the midterm elections will save us.
Beth is a senior software engineer and actually knows how the internet works. You want a reliable vote against KOSA and AI fuckery? Sheâs it.
She signs ASL and uses a cane.
They once bought me two (2) beers in 2016.
Beth does not go in for aggressive needy donation asks. Youâre not going to get spammed with emails or texts begging for votes.
Beth is a genuinely cool person and I am so goddamn tired of politics as usual.
Weâre in the lead!
A new poll found that after voters are read bios of each candidate, Beth leads the field.
This include as a 5-point lea
