the other day I read a compelling point that many instances described as illiteracy would actually be more aptly described as aliteracy, meaning an individual has the ability to read but simply chooses not to. great example here, awesome work.
No one ever gave a shit when my blog dissapeared bc I was never "nuked." But I was stalked and catfished and chased off this platform so much that I felt the need to deactivate TWICE. But bc it was my choice who cares.
And now im too uncomfortable to use my old username bc twerfs would harass me for it.
I am a trans musician and this is one of the only platforms I was ever taken seriously on. And I had lost my only platform.
A lot of us are nuked, its an extreme problem. But there's so many others who are harassed and stalked until they just cant take it anymore.
God you all need to be nicer to trans women. Fuck me.
it is truly the ppl who fight tooth and nail that the thing they love isnt for children that actually seem to operate with the belief that fiction made for kids is bad and worthless art that u r stupid for liking. that is not the case and once u finally stop being insecure about it and confront that u dont have to ignore or deny the reality of what the thing u like is is when u will stop saying stupid shit that annoys and embarrasses everybody
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.
A terrifying reality is unfolding in Gaza. Many wounded children are being forced to rely on expired medicine because proper treatment is scarce, unavailable, or far beyond what their families can afford today.
Sadly, I never imagined my own child would become part of this tragedy. Even today, baby Qais still takes expired medicine because the treatment he truly needs is expensive and extremely difficult to obtain.
As a mother in Gaza, I have exhausted every ounce of strength and dignity trying to save my child. I beg you, please donate now and help me replace expired medicine with proper treatment. Your donation could protect Qais from even greater suffering.
Jedi as serial scammers though. Every mission includes a sidequest to sabacc table for extra cash. Padawans on their first outing be like ‘but I thought the senate was funding this mission’ yes little one but they will ride our arses for every cent so let’s go fleece some rich asshole. He won’t even notice. You know how cops were invented to protect private property? Well jedi are here to protect your everything except your private property. *force tricks an atm into printing free money* that, my very young padawan, is something we call a victimless crime.
[Image ID: Screenshot of Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi from The Phantom Menace. A speech bubble has been edited onto it to appear as if Qui-Gon is saying the original post. /End ID]
it really is gleeblor to try and explain to a lot of people that no the GM did not covertly orchestrate every single element of my PC's victory, and when you try to say that, they get all like "oh you sweet summer child" at you like you still believe in Santa Claus
It completely robs you and your PC of absolutely any accomplishments.
I promise you this isn't Critical Role, plot armor does not have to be the default, and the alternative is not just adversarial GMing
You all know the real reason I don't railroad? (And yes, fudging things so the players always succeed is a form of railroading.)
It's not because my players would notice and be disappointed (railroading can be done very subtly, sometimes so subtly even the GM doesn't know they're doing it). It's not out of a mystical respect for player agency, either, though said agency is crucial to the part I actually like.
The reason I don't do it is I want to be surprised, too.
That's my big anti-railroading, anti-dice fudging plea. Let yourself be surprised, too! I promise you, that surprise, that excitement is going to be so much more fun for you than watching your friends play through whatever you already had planned. I feel comfortable making that promise because this is something I had to learn the hard way, and I am having so much more fun as a GM these days now that I've fully internalized it.
For me, this is the heart of "prepare, don't plan" or "respect player agency." It's not immaterial. It's the joy of the unexpected being shared by everyone at the table.
[Image ID: A screenshot of a tweet by Mohammed El-Kurd (@/m7mdkurd) that reads: "What Israel is doing in Lebanon is unambiguously genocidal against Shias. And it is unambiguously an attempt to reoccupy and even annex a huge part of the country. It's infuriating that we're pretending that there's a ceasefire. And even more infuriating that Western media continues to turn a blind eye to Israel's endless colonial expansion and insatiable hunger for Arab land." /End ID.]
From the Nashville Zoo’s fb page! Here’s the petition, please please please take a moment to add your name (even if you’re not from Nashville!). If you are from Tennessee, contact your representatives and make it clear that the people do not want this data center. This is an AZA accredited zoo which is home to several species of critically endangered animals, we NEED to protect it. Make your voice heard!
ellievsbear
gummygunk
baratheonpilled
titsay
andulkaphoto
germansingergirl
kaledo-art
turnnoffyourmind
