may you find lost things

cass | 29 | she/he (and sometimes they) on my d&d bullshit dimension 20, worlds beyond number, candela obscura, etc.

[heckblade]

hi, intrepid heroes!

i'm cass 🗡️ whimsical weirdo and enjoyer of all things ttrpg. bisexual demifemme (she/her is great, but i'll take whatever pronouns you got) in my late 20s, just figuring it out one day at a time. my sweetheart ✨

this is my main blog, where i post mostly about my favorite actual play shows, but also art, games, tv shows, and whatever else strikes my fancy. i tag spoilers for anything currently airing (#d20 spoilers, #cr spoilers, #wbn spoilers, etc.)

i recently returned to the spn fandom after escaping for many years and have fallen in deeper than ever. if that kind of madness is up your alley, join me over on my spn sideblog @fallenangelblade

you can also check out my nsfw blog (@cassiophilia) where i post a surprising amount about the inherent eroticism of knights and armor (but also kink and horny stuff in general)

sometimes i write fic (less often than i'd like, but we're working on that). you can find that on my ao3 or under the #cass writes tag. i occasionally post music, too, which you can find tagged under #cass sings. anything else of mine goes under #cass rambles

feel free to hit me up over dms!!! i'm not always the best at responding promptly but i'm always happy to make new friends and looooove to yap about dnd/writing/any shared interests <3

[userfish]

this pride month we’re all going to be radically pro transgender. or else.

[userfish]

hey so this means radically pro ALL transgender. don’t put limitations on this. all trans people are radically accepted here.

[monster1994]

happy june everybody i hope you get fucked and/or sucked this month

[kazokuhouou]

what if we don't wanna be?

[monster1994]

then i hope for peace

[babyjanedough]

Already know I wanna send this to people on June 1

[sinister-femme]

it’s not said enough. i love trans women and especially, my trans women followers. you’re so welcome here and so loved 💖

[professorfcknmoriarty]

I'm going to meet my future in laws in july at a wedding and I've been practising my eldredge knot...who wants to seeeeee

[professorfcknmoriarty]

both without and with the vest I'll be wearing lol

[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.

[sisterofsylandri]

Have you talked to him for more than a few minutes?

Yes, he has like a... Well, how many minutes is more than a few?

Greater than 12.

No, I don't think hit 12, but it's been three to five, a dozen times.

Yeah, he's solid in the three to five, I get that. Anyone's great in three to five.

Not Ethrand Tachonis, is not.

Campaign 4, Episode 26 - Council of Heroes

[fishmechs]

[tahthetrickster]

me: i have a very specific tumblr accent meme im thinking of that surely i should be able to pull up by searching the text in the meme

the most dogshit useless decimated search engine in the entire world:

[tahthetrickster]

i did find it btw but having a COMPUTER address me like it’s a person sent me into such an incandescent rage i nearly pitched my phone clear across the room

[patricia-taxxon]

i love explaining the etymology of the word "rickroll" because the story starts with "ok, so at one point 4chan applied a filter to everyone's posts that changed the word egg to duck"

[maple-cloak]

[wrenanigans]

[croaksac]

grandfather....

[thehmn]

In Copenhagen you can visit The Round Tower. It used to be an astronomical observatory until light pollution and the vibrations from increased traffic in the streets made it useless for its original purpose.

Today it’s mostly famous for what it looks like on the inside.

It has an equestrian staircase though it’s so smooth it’s really just a gentle slope more than a staircase. It was build like that so our lazy bum king could ride his horse all the way to the top (king not in photo)

And naturally people have also driven cars up the tower

And held a bike race

For a while it was just sort of abandoned by the authorities and became a sloping marketplace

But today it has been restored and become a tourist spot as well as a popular destination for school trips. And yes, you can still watch the cosmos at the top.

[samreich]

preshow rituals can look like anything 🥰

[onegiantmeep]

brennan character bleed creating enmity between vampires and leprechauns but drawing the line at astrology

[ionomycin]

field research

[niacart]

Seekers table old west au that no one asked for but me 😌

I wanted to try and incorporate some of the canon designs into the fits but Occtis ended up looking p similar to canon cus I couldn’t imagine him as a cowboy 😭 (also a full body thaisha piece is coming trust 🙏)

[bebemoon]

crystal mace .