There was a massive shift in how our culture understood morality when, after World War II, the general public realized âjust following ordersâ was not an excuse for crimes against humanity. Now we need another moral shift in which we decide, as a culture, that âfor the benefit of the stockholdersâ is not an excuse for anything.
Late last year in the US, a Senator with a military background released a video reminding military personnel that they have the legal right to refuse unlawful orders, and the President of the United States tried to have him tried for treason. [x]
Grace being aroace is so important to me. Especially during that scene where itâs stated that Grace is not married, doesnât have kids and doesnât even own a dog. It goes to show how incredibly excluded and expendable we as aroace people are seen in the eyes of society. Grace is a teacher, heâs actively assisting the future generation but yet that isnât seen as nearly as important as conforming to societal norms.
Aro and ace activism is housing reform, is well-funded public housing, is an expansion of affordable housing, is allowing single people to get affordable and public housing, is rent controls to make it possible for single people to be able to afford to live alone on a single salary.
Aro and ace activism is healthcare reform, so that no one needs to rely on a spouse for health insurance, so that healthcare is available to everybody regardless of income, so that no oneâs lived experiences or basic dignity are dismissed or overridden by doctors
Aro and ace activism is well-funded and expansive public transit, so that you donât need to have someone on hand to drive you places if you are incapacitated, so that you donât have to pay for an ambulance if you need to get to the hospital quickly
Aro and ace activism is disability and elder care services, so that no one needs a spouse to care for them, so that no one needs children to care for them, so that marriage is not a bind for disabled people, so that people on disability who want to and can live alone can
Aro and ace activism is community-building, itâs public events, itâs free social activities, itâs mutual aid, itâs activities that bring community members together without socializing relying on just a romantic partner
Aro and ace activism is developing a culture of believing when people tell you who they are and what they want rather than assuming you know them better than they know themselves
Aro and ace activism means a better world for people without ânormativeâ desires or ânormativeâ social support, which means a better world for everybody
#isn't this just aro activism? like op is right but this is like. about relationships
Quick question do you think ace people donât have a complicated relationship to relationships. Do you think ace people donât have a significant incentive to not tie basic quality of life things to having a partner and children. Do you think ace people are respected by doctors or society.
When my mother forgets a wordïżŒ, she is the queen of coming up with new words. Words that would take a third National Treasure movie to fully decipher.ïżŒ I was talking to her yesterday, and she said this: âYou know the time for los jibbities is coming upïżŒ. You must be so excited!âïżŒ Oh, is it time for los jibbities already?ïżŒ I must have missed it on my calendar. ïżŒAre we celebrating something? âOf courseïżŒ! We should all be celebrating, shouldnât we?â ïżŒOK, so los jibbities is a happy thing.ïżŒ Itâs not like something is giving you the heebie-jeebies, which would have been my one and only guess.ïżŒ âLos heebie-jeebies? Now youâre making things up.ïżŒ..and this is my show.â Youâre right. The time for los jibbities is coming upïżŒ. Is this a season? âYes, the season for love. The season for pride.âïżŒ OK, los jibbities. âYeah, sound it out.â LosâŠjibbities. LGBTs! âSĂ, mira cuz youâre gay!â âYou couldnât just say pride season? You couldnât just⊠*laughs*
(project hail mary spoilers) ENOUGH with the "found family disbands at the end of the story" trope. I'm coming back to your alien planet with you and living in a biosphere your mate designed for me and teaching a bunch of baby rock crabs about relativity.
You listen to music regularly? Why? Have you even tried quitting? Could you quit? You get music stuck in your head? Wow. You're so ruined and music brained. I bet you make your partners listen to music with you when you have sex. Music addiction has really ruined a whole generation. You know it's not realistic to expect reverb in real life, right? You're probably so desensitized that you don't even feel anything anymore when you hear a bird singing that it wants some fuck.
im asking you to stay here. i cannot tell you why, i dont have any other reason except i want to see you here. i want to see you as happy as you can be. please, do what you can to stay. to find happiness wherever you can. i know that it is selfish of my to ask this. but iâm asking you anyway. take care of yourself. if not for yourself, then for me
the âsexy lamp testâ but for disabled folks: if you can replace your disabled character with a beloved pet dog that needs an expensive surgery to survive then you have to throw out your manuscriptÂ
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.
if I ever tell you âlmk what you think if you read/play/watch it!â I am firmly inviting you to send me a play by play minute by minute cataloguing of your thoughts about The Thing
I love the fics where Rocky is described as an asocial outcast who's only got his job (and Adrian) going for him because it puts into perspective that no, not all Eridians are that rude, it's just Rocky being Rocky.
And then it's really funny to think of like Eridian scientists getting mad and embarrassed as hellll that it was ROCKY of all people to make first contact.
In contrast to everyone saying how perfect it is that Grace, a teacher, is the one to make first contact. Meanwhile the people who knew Rocky are doing damage control for how badly he may have fucked up Erid's representation đ
[ ID: Two tweets by Jay Hulme @ JayHulmePoet that read as follows,
People go off about transphobes not knowing any better because they're 'old' and today my 90 year old Grandad gifted me one of his fancy suit jackets, complimented my terrible beard, and continued his extremely wholesome habit of calling me "sonny me lad".
So. Yeah.
I spent years terrified of coming out to him because he was in his 80's at the time so I wrote him a letter like "I'm a man, Gramps" and he was so proud he showed the letter to his neighbors and phoned me and opened with "So how's my Grandson?" and has never got a pronoun wrong.
I was kicked out of my home by my abusive parents shortly after I turned 18. Out of my parents, the most actively antagonistic was my mother, who refused to even acknowledge that I was trans. A year after I was kicked out, I moved across the country nearer to the area where my mother's extended family was. A few days after I arrived, I received the news that my grandmother, my mother's mother, had passed. Too worried about addressing the issue to my relatives in their grief, I stayed away.
Eventually I worked up the nerve to visit them, mainly to see and console my grandfather, but also because I couldn't bear the thought of losing all of my family because of who I was. I hadn't intended to come out, but when my grandfather asked me about the rift between my parents and me I ended up sitting down and crying as I came out to my grandfather, my great aunt and two of my second cousins.
My grandfather is definitely very neurodivergent and didn't seem to entirely grasp the concept of me being transgender, but he still told me encouragingly that it was not his job to tell me what I should do with my body, and that he was proud of me. My cousins both held me and told me they thought I was brave and would support me no matter what.
But I will never forget what my 92 year old, very southern, very religious great aunt said to me that day. She took my hand and called me by name, as I wept, before she leaned over to me knowledgeably and went, "There were some people I knew as a girl who were- they were born girls, but in their hearts they were really boys. And you could tell from the way they moved and acted⊠but their families wanted them to be girls. But I have always known people like you, and they were made that way because God wanted them to be that way and be true to themselves.
"I have loved you since the moment I saw you and I will still love you! You are becoming who you are, and that's good, because God made you that way! You are happy and I am happy! I am glad to have a nephew! I love you!"
Anyone who says older people get a pass to be transphobic just because they're old is full of shit.
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