iirc it was like this terf who was absolutely fuming because her brother was dating a trans woman and she started claiming that she was clearly male socialized because the terf made quesadillas for dinner and the trans woman was like "wow :) this is really good, what is it?" and if she was a REAL woman she would instinctively KNOW what a quesadilla is
anyway it turns out the reason the poor woman didn't know what it was was because the terf had used hummus instead of cheese for some fucking reason so it wasn't even a quesadilla
He is absolutely copying you, and cuddling, and doing the slow close of eyes that is a cat kiss! #this is one very happy cat #i hope the two of you have many years of harmony and happiness
So I thought y'all would like this too
This great white comes to the jersey shore every year and this year they named her and have been tracking her hella so this is Mary Lee and she decided to show herself under this rainbow for pride month
A true gay icon
"But it's not FOR them!!!" The biggest military power in the world belongs to a christofascist nation overseen by a felon found guilty of 34 federal crimes and has greenlit a gestapo with more direct funding than the entire military of Canada for the purpose of ethnic cleansing. Let Hetero Jessica throw some biodegradable glitter at a municipal parade
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.
it's so wild when your parent changes when you become an adult. my dad is very cordial and non confrontational - he regularly helps me with adult stuff like changing the oil or providing insurance tips. he's always smiling when i call him on video and providing jokes when i complain about college
when i was a kid, i would have to tiptoe around his anger issues often, sometimes running quietly past his work table until he got his own place completely separate from our family, locked away for days. every so often he would start screaming in the car and trying to hit me or my brother for talking too loud while my mom attempted to calm him down as he swerved on the road. and now he, smiling, helps me with car insurance.
like oh, this is just who you are when you have power over someone, and this is who you are when you dont have power over someone. no wonder you can have a normal life, friends, work while scaring the shit out of your kids and wife. i see it now. i see why no one would have believed me. that, i think, is one of the core fears of trauma - seeing the outside of it from the perspective of other adults that brushed you aside, and understanding. of course, that understanding gives the opposite of solace; it just gives you more grief with nowhere for it to go
"only 90s kids remember-" wrong, if you're poor and/or rural enough, old tech and fashion doesn't just disappear when it stops being trendy. We had dial-up until 2012
if your animal is lying on the floor, furniture etc, itâs important to take a picture of them. then, if they move or shift in any way, itâs important to take another picture. with this technique, you can take many pictures of your animal
âWhile bats can only sense the outer shapes and textures of their targets, dolphins can peer inside theirs. If a dolphin echolocates on you, it will perceive your lungs and your skeleton. It can likely sense shrapnel in war veterans and fetuses in pregnant women. It can pick out the air-filled swim bladders that allow fish, their main prey, to control their buoyancy.
It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and âtheyâll know where the hook is inside that fish,â Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. âThey can âseeâ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.â
This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outsideâbut on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.
Pavel Golâdin has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlersâshowy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but thatâs unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.â
Cetacean echolocation is one of those things that boggles your mind once you really start to think about the implications. They can see each others' hearts beating fast with fear or excitement. They can see if another dolphin is healthy, or pregnant; how the fetus is doing; if they have ingested debris. Their echolocation is also incredibly precise: a bottlenose dolphin could discriminate between cilinders differing in wall thickness by just 0.23 mm (0.009 inch) from 8 meters away!! And they certainly notice when something is off.
I'm not sure if I ever shared this story before here, but in Curacao, when I was allowed to assist in a guest interaction programme, there was suddenly consternation in the pool behind us. A guest had entered the water and the dolphins were going crazy, paying no heed to the trainers anymore. The lead trainer that was with me gave the dolphins to me to watch over while she went to help. When she came back she told me what had happened. The guest that had caused so much uproar had left the water again and was asked if he had done anything to upset the dolphins. He hadn't, and he couldn't imagine what was wrong... until he mentioned he had a pacemaker. The younger dolphins in the pool had never seen someone with a pacemaker before and apparently it rocked their world.
It was such a wild experience, and offered such a cool insight into how dolphins experience their world. I'll never forget it.
Pathologizing: Hey sorry I yelled at you. I have this ADHD symptom called RSD that makes me really sensitive.
Humanizing: Hey, Iâm sorry that I blew up like that earlier. In the moment I felt really attacked and overwhelmed and I reacted badly, but I know you didnât mean to offend me with what you said, so that behavior is on me.
Because I just saw a post bitching about this one, I want to add: this post is saying that you need to take accountability for the way you hurt other people, even if it happens because of a symptom of your disability/illness. It's also saying that using terms (especially acronyms) that aren't common knowledge isn't a helpful way to explain yourself. It is NOT saying that you need to let people walk all over you because "your disability isn't an excuse."
If you're diabetic, you don't have to eat the honey glazed ham that will send you into a coma (their example). But you also can't yell at the person offering it and accuse them of trying to kill you. You can just say "thanks, but my body can't handle that kind of sugar intake, so I'll pass"
"erm! actually! I'm not comfortable calling people it/its! it just makes me uncomfortable I feel dirty and icky and mean! why not just use they/them? sending love!" doesn't feel good reading once. reading it 12000 times on 4 different posts? fucking explode. leave it/it's users alone. you really don't have to share that someones chosen pronouns makes you uncomfortable. you sound like a transphobe.
If youre a closeted person somewhere out there thinking "I want to transition but it would be less progressive/unique/countercultural for me to be that gender instead of this one" please know that you are a real person not a character in a narrative and cant live your life based on what is good media representation. You are real you can only be yourself and theres no moral weight to any identity over another
Liberal transphobes enjoy positioning trans identities as regressive compared to cis queerness or like non-transitioning transness or anything else they can leverage to make transphobia look progressive and I think its easy to absorb that message subconciously. But in real life we just are what we are and no ranking of validity can change the fact that you have an identity that is NOT chosen and is just your unchangeable truth. Not only should you not have to live a life dictated by what is most countercultural to identify as or whatever but also: being trans is extremely countercultural and feminist and leftist to begin with and theyre only trying to convince you otherwise bc theyre bigots
"Why cant you be a feminine man society hates feminine men đ„ș" and "all the butch lesbians are becoming men we need u đ„ș" = stay in the closet for the noble purpose of being an abstract representation point in my new york times opinion column. You wont actually be a gnc cis person youll be a closeted trans person who uses the wrong words but I need you to do that because i hate you
What about the final version of the flag by the original creator?
Gilbert Baker added a 9th stripe shortly before his death, with the new stripe representing diversity. He added this stripe in reaction to the 2016 US election. Itâs unfortunately not as well known as the 8 and 6 striped versions.
Hereâs an image of him sewing together the 9 striped rainbow flag.
FLY is a story about a boy who gets a second chance. Help his story take flight June 9th 11am EST on Kickstarter. Thank you for being the wind beneath my wings I hope this story lifts the world to a brighter place.
A coming of age story about Black kids who finally have power to fight back against systems designed against them.
