i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like theyâre gone. itâs the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
âąđȘ»đłïžâđ Happy Pride Month!! GAY SALE EXTRAVAGANZA
𧥠This Pride Month, Iâd be really happy if you helped a disabled lesbian stay housed after my job losses! Iâm running a Pride Month discount for all my art commissions and opening my Yuri Skebs up!! Your support is much appreciated!!!
if you'd like to show support, here are some upcoming queer books:
When Life Gives You Corpses is a brilliant YA about a cursed praying mantis who falls for a young witch. Yield Under Great Persuasion is a raunchy, but surprisingly sweet story about two men repairing their relationship. Fabulous Bodies is a horror story about a queer rockstar rising from the dead.
This is Where the Future Bleeds is a fantasy set in a vividly imagined land, where two women (who happen to kiss) are the key to healing the broken sky. You're No Better is a story about a teen struggling in the shadow of his murderous parent. Oil on Canvas is about a woman who finds disturbing paintings in the home of her dead mother.
and then here's a list of 26 queer books by Black authors set to publish this year, and a 10 upcoming books by trans authors. if you want to fight back against queer censorship, use your wallet! or (if that's not an option) you can contact your local library and ask them to stock a copy.
One of the most important things I learned in my Language and the Law class is that law enforcement will intentionally misinterpret every type of statement asking for a lawyer as not asking for a lawyer. Even directly saying it like this âI will not speak to you without a lawyerâ can be taken as a simple statement of fact rather than a request for a lawyer. You literally have to state âI am now invoking my right to a lawyerâ and every time they try to proceed with an interrogation you have to answer every question with âI am invoking my right to have a lawyer presentâ. You canât just tell them you wonât talk without a lawyer or that you want a lawyer. You have to state that you are invoking your rights. Otherwise they could just say âwell they just said they wouldnât speak without a lawyer present. Thatâs not invoking their rights to a lawyer. Itâs just stating a fact.â even just stating your right to a lawyer doesnât count!
PLEASE share this addition. I am a lawyer who works in criminal defense, and this is one of the most avoidable things that people consistently get wrong about the Miranda rights.
Here are some more âambiguousâ phrases which courts have found DO NOT invoke your right to a lawyer:
âMaybe I should speak to my lawyer first.â
âI might like a lawyer.â
âI think I should have a lawyer present for this.â
âCould I speak to my lawyer first?â
âHow long until my lawyer gets here?â
And perhaps most egregiously â âGet me a lawyer, dawg â âcause this is not whatâs up.â
Here are the magic phrases which you need to know if you want to invoke your Miranda rights:
1) âAm I free to leave?â
Itâs worth asking this even if the answer is obvious. Even if the officer does not let you leave, by forcing them to admit that you are not free to leave, you are creating a record which your attorney can use to prove that you were in custody. Miranda rights only apply if the interrogation is custodial, meaning that police officers will frequently claim that their suspects were ânot in custodyâ to get around their Miranda rights.
2)Â âI am invoking my right to remain silent.â
Simply staying silent will not invoke your right to remain silent. As absurd as this is, you must explicitly say that you are invoking your right to remain silent in order to invoke that right.
3)Â âI am invoking my right to an attorney.â
As stated above, you must be not only clear and unambiguous, but clear and legally unambiguous. Donât get cute. Donât get sassy. And on the flip side, donât get intimidated and use verbal ticks to minimize your request. Say the line with those words exactly â say it clearly, and say it once, and then say nothing else.
Because even after youâve done all this, the police can still try to get you to talk. Theyâre not supposed to interrogate you, but theyâre allowed to make casual conversation, and if that conversation just happens to circle back around to the thing they wanted to question you about, well, thatâs really your fault for talking after you said you wouldnât, isnât it? Canât possibly fault the poor officers when you initiated â if you really wanted to have your rights respected, you wouldnât have talked to them in the first place.
The police know this, and they will mercilessly exploit this loophole. So, once youâve successfully invoked your Miranda rights, any and all conversation you have with police officers will put those rights back into jeopardy.Â
Putting it all together:
Ask: âAm I free to leave?â
If they say no, say:Â âI am invoking my right to remain silent and I am invoking my right to an attorney.â
And then shut up and do not say a single thing to them for any reason whatsoever until you have actually spoken to an attorney. Yes, even if it takes hours. Yes, even if they start talking to you about something else.
Finally, a very important disclaimer:
I may be a lawyer, but Iâm not your lawyer, and I cannot guarantee that what Iâve just laid out here will always work for every situation. We didnât get to this bizarre and absurd place overnight â we built this ridiculous system piecemeal, by deciding on a case-by-case basis that certain phrases were âtoo ambiguousâ or certain types of questioning werenât actually questioning at all. The law is still in flux, and is still fundamentally out to get you, and willing to bend plain meaning beyond all recognition to do it. Even if you invoke your rights perfectly, exactly as I have specified above, thereâs a chance that your invocation of rights will be disqualified on some new technicality that no oneâs even thought of yet â and thatâs precisely the problem.
This is even more important than ever, since the Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that cops canât be held accountable for failing to read Miranda rights earlier this year.
âLaw enforcement officers who fail to provide criminal suspects with Miranda warnings prior to questioning cannot be subjected to civil lawsuits for their omissions, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.
Justices determined by a 6-3 vote that receiving Miranda warnings â which notify individuals taken into custody of their rights to remain silent, speak with an attorney and ask for that attorney to be present during interactions with police â is not technically a protected constitutional right. â
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-police-miranda-rights/
I've been finding a lot of job postings that ask me for a photo lately, which is uncool of them.
So I made an image which lets me bypass their demand. I don't care if I get that particular job, I just want to shame the HR goons who thought the photo requirement was a good idea.
Took me a bit to figure out the implications: this image can be downloaded from here and uploaded whenever a job application asks for an image. Clever!
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.
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