having been derailed by life and all of it's whims, i am relaunching the pasta revolution resolution! you'll be happy to know that altho i've failed you all by not posting pasta since... january???... i have actually kept up with a roughly one (1) pasta shape per week eating habit! so i have a backlog of scoring and notes to post. speaking of scoring...
with the help of my many Pasta EAs (Eating Assistants), i have overhauled the scoring rules, and because of the new Bonus Points opportunities, pasta shapes have ALL YEAR to rack up points, so we might have some late-breaking upsets.
Scoring Rules
First Take Points (0-5): How well did the pasta shape perform in whatever dish I used it in first? Hopefully I'm smart enough to choose a dish that complements the shape, but I have a feeling some of these shapes have some surprises in store.
Remix Bonus Points (no limit! available all year!): These are discretionary points that can be awarded if I like a pasta shape enough to put it in a different dish. This category also accepts "ghost points", because my EAs have already suggested amazing dishes that I really love in theory but in reality might never get around to making.
Amusement Points (0-5): How much fun is the pasta shape? Is the name fun to say? Is it cute? Does it resemble an animal or a replacement k'nex piece? Would it be fun at a party?
Annoyance Deductions (0-5): Does it stick to itself - or the spoon - or the pot - unnecessarily? Does it shatter into pieces that skitter under my oven where they will fossilize because nobody ever cleans under the oven? Does it require more than one utensil to ferry it to my mouth? Does it stick out of the pot because why would I have a pot that is the diameter of spaghetti?
Alternative Uses: Crowd sourced!! It's not just what I can dream up, it's about what YOU can imagine!!! My EAs have already proven to be wonderfully wild dreamers of pasta shape dreams, so I can't wait to see what's to come. There's no official scoring for this category; it will be used as a tie-break if needed.
New shapes will be posted with their temporary scores, but as noted, I (you, we!) have ALL YEAR to uncover the TRUE POTENTIAL of each pasta shape. May the best bizzarely shaped dried extrusion of dough win!
shoutout to my stellar EAs: @sideguitars @cinnis @waytooinvested-main @makicarn
This Pride Month, we’re celebrating the beauty of diversity above and below the surface. The ocean is full of vibrant life in every color imaginable. It reminds us that nature thrives when everyone has space to belong.
Environmental advocacy and the LGBTQ+ rights movement share a common purpose: protecting vulnerable communities, caring for the spaces we all call home, and creating a world where we all can flourish.
Our world is brightest when people can live authentically, love freely, and be embraced for who they are. From rainbow reefs to shimmering tides, diversity makes our blue planet stronger, healthier, and more inspiring.
Here’s to protecting our ocean, uplifting every voice, and honoring the colorful communities that make this world so wonderful.
random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google
I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.
also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo
also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)
i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:
Search Engines
Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy
DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)
WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.
Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.
Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.
Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines.
Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted.
Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy.
Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.
Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden.
MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.
Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching.
Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar.
https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results.
https://www.mojeek.com/
https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites.
https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.
https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.
https://yep.com/ is a crawler
https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx
https://www.dogpile.com/
https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)
https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?
https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?
https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.
Other Searchers
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine
Apparently my stepdad and I are fucking psychically linked because ?? every single time he makes chili for dinner I get a migraine. Without fail. And it became like a ha ha running joke because it happened so many times but now I’m living 3 hours away from my parents and I just texted my mom and
dude just stopping by to say you’re so right about supercorp shippers denial about kara being a shitty friend?? it’s kinda insane?? i still love fanfic kara and supercorp fanfic but i cant look at one of the many scenes where kara was being awful to lena and think ohh kara loves her sm?? also the way they always say it’s just the writers fault guys kara isn’t real ofc everything is the writers ‘fault’ it’s called characterization?? and that’s just kara’s?
anon i have to be honest: i’ve been pretty leery of the supercorp fandom for a while now.
(there’s actually quite a few interesting asks in my inbox that i wanted to write meta for but i’ve let that fall by the wayside; these days i mostly share my thoughts with likeminded mutuals via dm and call it quits.)
i think ultimately you’ve highlighted the crux of the problem in your ask: kara isn’t real. [cwsg] kara is a fictional character written for a tv show by that tv show’s writers room. what the writers wrote is kara.
there is no secret real kara that exists outside of the show except in people’s minds, and - while you are absolutely free to do that! - you cannot force other people to accept that this secret real kara is somehow more real and more valid than what was actually put on people’s screens.
put another way: you can imagine kara however you want, but to me it is troubling that fandom will actively police references to the canon kara - that existed in the show as a character - using a yardstick based on a fanon kara that was made up by a group of likeminded fans.
and to be clear: you can absolutely like that fanon kara - or any other kara you made up in your head - and write stories and make fanart for her as much as you want!!!
…but you cannot bend reality to pretend that kara is the neutral truth, or frankly even real.
ultimately, the common baseline of ‘kara’ that exists for the cw’s supergirl tv show is what the cw network put on the screen and broadcast into people’s homes for six years.
that is the kara that ‘everyone’ watching the show (general audiences, fandom, whatever) has access to and that we all have in common, and it is actually disturbing to me that this is somehow controversial and a ‘hot take’ in this fandom (see: this post).
but also, i have to say that i really truly appreciate you sending this.
on a personal note, i think part of the reason the fandom is visibly dying - even more than ai slop, even more than the natural decay over time since the end of the show - is in fact the complete intolerance for any sort of opinion that doesn’t adhere strictly to the popular conception of fanon kara; if you don’t fall over yourself to disclaim that you don’t believe in canon kara and fanon kara is the one true kara, people get upset.
you’re allowed to find canon kara’s behaviour shitty - but you have to then reassert that you don’t cosign the existence of canon kara, and the real kara would never do that, and also you love supercorp.
the villain of the day is the writers’ room - but without the writers’ room none of these characters would exist at all.
and i think there comes a point where people just start filtering out of the fandom rather than engaging, and - in my admittedly biased view, because i have quite a few really fun and smart mutuals who have stopped posting for supercorp altogether for these reasons - i think you lose a lot of interesting stories and ideas and analysis when that happens.
also unfortunate is that in a lot of cases this sort of policing and intolerance is directed at people who are in fact actually active and sharing and reblogging and writing meta in a fandom that is already waning - and critically, a fandom that is also often actively upset about the lack of engagement. how many events have occurred to try to revive the ship or reenergise the fandom?
but then you’re yelling at the people who are actively engaging with the fandom if they’re not engaging the way you want them to???
…but when i think about it, maybe that’s what this crowd of fanon kara stans ultimately want?
perhaps for many in the fandom that’s ‘winning’: it’s better to have a quieter fandom filled with only takes that people agree with and find palatable, the ones that are strictly in service of fanon kara and the supercorp ship that happens with that fanon kara 🥴
i’ve put some more personal commentary under the cut, including my thoughts about the tags that appear to have caused the most trouble: my beloved mutual @lifemodeldecoy’s assertion that there are parallels between lex and kara, which i do not think is ‘just kara hate’ because honestly i think you can absolutely discuss constructively using the canon. (did i mention: this post?)
personal opinion only, ymmv, etc etc etc
when i first got into this fandom i was constantly told that the place was infested with kara haters, and if i’m honest i kind of thought - well i mean that makes sense, actually??? canon kara… isn’t great and it seems understandable people are frustrated with her, but people shouldn’t be haters, and also that seems counter productive to shipping supercorp?
what i’ve discovered since then is if you are willing to or want to engage with the cwsg canon and canon kara in any way shape or form and you don’t disclaim that it’s ‘all the fault of the writers’ that kara behaved however she did - also in doing so you need as well to explicitly and adamantly excuse or defend her behaviour in favour of supporting the ship - then… welp: you are a kara hater. 🥴
(something something hi it’s me i’m the problem it’s me something something)
what’s more is that the kara defending hivemind part of the fandom will actually swarm to her defense: anons in your inbox, passive aggressive tags and vagueposts, frankly sometimes outright tantrums - any number of claims that god some people just really hate kara.
(it doesn’t even matter how small your little corner of tumblr is, or that the vast majority of the fandom is all about fanon kara; instead of Just Blocking Or Unfollowing people will take umbrage and find a way to let you know about it.)
i think what’s even worse is that a lot of it is policing couched in a sort of particularly toxic faux positivity: let people enjoy themselves; we’re just having fun; well if you don’t like it get out; i can do what i want; i’m just playing with my barbies; we can ignore canon if we want… etc etc etc. but at the end of the day it’s very much a general sense of weaponising the sentiment of you are ruining our fun and harshing my vibe shut up!!
…putting aside that you can do what you want applies to everyone, including people who enjoy working in and with the canon - it also doesn’t actually matter how much of what you discuss is canon or even in how much good faith or actual interest you do your analysis: if you are not on board with the fact that there is a secret real kara that was done dirty by the evil writers’ room, then you, in fact, are the problem.
(this is why i don’t do ask games or post meta anymore, and honestly if the kara stans feel they’ve won by shutting me up - well, congratulations.)
i really do think this is an unconstructive double edged sword: you’re effectively asking anyone who disagrees with you to shut up, but i think one of the other aspects that people maybe don’t realise is that now people - who maybe did agree with you even! - are now scared to post lest they aren’t showing enough positivity, which is really very counter to a fandom that keeps asking for more engagement.
(i have seen mutuals affected by this who were, in fact, actively shipping supercorp who still got snarked at for the audacity of engaging with the canon. some of those mutuals have left the fandom - it’s just not worth the fuss.)
and i think you’ve actually highlighted this perfectly - kara is a piece of fiction. kara doesn’t actually exist outside of what writers put pen to paper to write and then what they put on screen. that is canon kara whether you like her or not, whether you like her characterisation or not, whether you agree or not with their decisions: that is the most neutral form of kara that exists, because that is the kara that the cw network put on screen in their supergirl show.
you see as well a lot of comments that that’s not kara and often defense from the comics, but i think the truth of the matter is that supergirl is not, in fact, a dc character with the consistency of background of some of the bigger ones: batman, superman, even lois lane have long running comics with through lines of characterisation.
when you look at the comics, supergirl has gone from the silver era girl clark kent to an angry teenager and back again; she doesn’t actually have the volume of material to support consistent characterisation across her franchises, and some of her characterisations are in direct opposition to each other. amalgamating any two comic runs for any character is always an exercise in frankensteining a character, but larger characters with more consistent storylines tend to at least have recognisable through lines.
i don’t think kara has developed that immediate recognisability of personality yet, and i think this is part of her appeal for fanwork - except i think you also see a constant thrum from fandom of no that’s not right either about every rendition of kara that shows up.
‘it’s called characterisation and that’s just kara’s’
(anon i laughed when i read that.)
i think part of the umbrage to any engagement with canon kara is the fact that kara’s characterisation in terms of her personality is in fact pretty consistent through the six seasons of cwsg. her behaviour is inconsistent, but there is consistency in that inconsistency - cwsg kara does have a fairly distinct and consistent characterisation, it’s just not one that people really like because unless you’re fully willing to buy into what she says on screen - and ignore what she does on that same screen - she really doesn’t look very heroic in many ways.
(that’s what made her interesting to me.)
there is also, i think, a fragility to the supercorp bubble, because i think the more you revisit or rewatch how kara behaved towards lena without active shipping goggles to filter her behaviour (it was the trauma!!!) the harder it is to justify the ship at all, especially when you’re watching knowing that a lot of the behaviour doesn’t get better. it really is a ship that was coasting on chemistry and potential, but it also requires a deep suspension of disbelief, a lot of excusing of kara’s behaviour, and a great deal of softening of her character.
personally - even when i was still willing to ship supercorp - i have never vibed with kara’s behaviour; i have found that when i reread my meta from when i first stepped into fandom, my view of how kara behaves has been pretty consistent - but i am less willing to give her grace now, even though i have always found her interesting and deeply human in her flaws.
as the load bearing interpretation of cwsg kara has shifted into a kara that very much did not exist in canon, for me it’s had the effect of emphasising her flaws more than anything else; i find that because of the unrelenting drumbeat of the fanon kara stans i give her less and less grace even though my interpretation of her has been much the same. for me personally, the insistence that things that happened in canon either didn’t happen or didn’t count brings more of my attention to canon.
that’s just me, of course, but honestly i’ve found it really offputting how parts of the fandom will defend kara like she’s a religious icon being persecuted. (there are some disturbing parallels to current events as well that i just can’t unsee.)
the lex and kara thing
i’m not going to link the post because it’s clear op is already upset about the tags that turned up, but it does seem that one of the grievances raised was a tag by one of my very favourite people to talk to, @lifemodeldecoy, highlighting that there is in fact a parallel between lex and kara. (and once again - did i mention: this post?)
i’m going to try to keep this short (AHAHahAHAHAHHAhahaA way too late for that) but this is one of the first things that drew me to writing fic for supercorp: there is, in fact, a parallel, and one of the most damning ones is right there on screen: in season 5, lena tells lex that she has realised non nocere doesn’t work, and lex screams in her face. this is what lex says:
How dare you? I gave you the world. Everything. I supported you. I sabotaged nothing, touched nothing. I set aside my own goals for you. Because you needed to see your little project fail with your own eyes. To know the true depravity of humanity. To know that my way was the only way.
in the next episode - after kara has frozen her out despite the fact that lena was the one who returned to the side of good - in one of the most fascinating references to lena’s trauma, lena says you can scream at me if you like, i know i deserve it.
and then kara does, which is wild enough in and of itself, but in between kara’s reiterations of lena’s wrongs, this is what kara says:
You have never understood what it means share a secret identity with someone. How much danger that puts them in. You… You never even understood that I kept my identity from you because I wanted to protect you.
I made one mistake. One mistake that was only ever meant to protect you. And in return, all you did was hurt me in every way imaginable.
even if you are fully on kara’s side and willing to take all of this at face value, at the very least there is a clear parallel in these appeals to lena: can’t you see what i’ve been doing for you?
you might be able to argue how much and to what extent the damage was, and you can argue as well about their motivations for doing so, but there are very distinct parallels in how lex and kara ‘handle’ lena. in both cases this is someone that they both care deeply about - in whatever fashion - but expect some amount of leniency from and also control over (a more softer phrasing might be to have buy-in from), in the sense that lena is expected to fall in line with what they want.
the degree to which they do this, the intent with which it’s done, and the hurt it causes may not be equal, but the similarities exist even if you wholeheartedly believe kara to have been motivated by trauma and a desire to do good, and lex to have been motivated by his own selfish desires and a penchant for evil.
in its most charitable interpretation kara and lex are flip sides of personality, kara’s flaws on the side of good and lex’s flaws a warped mirror on the side of evil; in an uncharitable interpretation there’s something interesting about lena in terms of survivors of abuse and returning to the dynamics they’re accustomed to.
but a few examples from the canon:
s4 eve is a long con by lex, but she’s installed in proximity to lena to ultimately betray her and provide information on lena back to lex; s3 james isn’t a plant and may have opted not to follow through with the kryptonite check, but kara actively instigated the ask and pressured james when he showed reluctance to do a secret kryptonite check on lena’s lab.
the kryptonite is arguably a fascinating juxtaposition: lex is afraid of the godlike powers of kryptonians and has multiple kryptonite plots in his scheming to maintain control to save humanity; conversely throughout s2 and s3, kara maintains she must be the only person in control of kryptonite because ‘the weight of the world rests on her shoulders.’
if you want another analogy to lex’s screaming, the tirade when lena offers up her superpowered kryptonite - later key in making sure no one got killed by reign when alex inadvertently exposes reign’s hiding place - by kara is a trip.
the continuation of the kryptonite issue in the harunel is even more interesting: lex needs it for his godlike powers; kara needs it to save argo. very different positions to be sure, but still a parallel - both need it from lena and both lose their temper with her in its development (kara because lena has it at all and it’s too dangerous for her to have - a mindwiped alex defends her to point out that she saved james with it - and lex because lena is being too safe and following the wikipedia article for lab safety protocol).
and more generally: that specific dynamic of praise and animosity. for supergirl this is most evident in the kryptonite spat in s3; for lex this appears throughout lena’s history that he was, once, her supportive older brother; even if you see it as a contrast in dynamics, a manipulative lex is willing to tell her she will always fall into the light (you’re good, lena, i believe in you!). both are telling her the same thing: you’re not like the other luthors.
regardless of whether your interpretation of this parallel is juxtaposition in the positive (a redemption: this time lena has someone who actually believes in her in kara, instead of the manipulative brother who told her he believed in her in the past) or whether you see something more disturbing in it (lena keeps falling into validation-seeking dynamics where she’s praised when she falls in line and punished when she doesn’t), this parallel does in fact exist in canon.
anyway, that was very long winded - but thank you anon, i really do appreciate you reaching out.
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.
"The Montana court separately declared that transgender people constitute a suspect class under the state's equal protection clause. In legal terms, a suspect class is a group that has historically faced such severe discrimination that any law targeting them must meet the highest level of judicial scrutiny to survive—the same standard applied to laws that discriminate on the basis of race. [...] The practical effect is sweeping: any Montana law that singles out transgender people will now face strict scrutiny, meaning the state must prove the law serves a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve it—a standard that laws almost never survive.
"Because the decision rests entirely on the Montana Constitution, it is insulated from the U.S. Supreme Court. Under the principle of adequate and independent state grounds, the federal Supreme Court cannot review a state court's interpretation of its own constitution, so long as that constitution provides more protection than the federal one. [...] What this means in practice is that Montana's transgender residents now have a constitutional shield completely independent of the Supreme Court of the United State’s decisions."
Protect Internet Freedom from now until forever. It's important existentially! Americans stand with UK citizens in our struggle against government censorship
You guys have my whole heart for sharing this I had no idea will be filling this out and encourage all my fellow brits to do soo too. If you’re not from the UK please keep sharing this around we have till the 26th May to submit these in.
This whole thing was set up without our say we all need to make sure we’re heard.
