We're at the "JK Rowling is personally funding litigation to try and destroy AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL" stage of rabid UK terf brain.
Screenshot via Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net on bluesky
Tldr Amnesty International, global human rights organisation, published a report called 'A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK'. In it is detailed, amongst others, a whole bunch of transphobic groups and organisations, including Beira's Place, JK Rowling's trans exclusionary sexual violence support service. JK Rowling threw a shit fit and got Amnesty to take the report down by threatening libel. This was obviously not enough, because you can't appease a fascist, so now she's going to bankroll a bunch of lawsuits anyway through the JK Rowling Women's Fund.*
You can read an archived version of the report here, please save it and share it.
*Not so friendly reminder there is no way to engage in the wizard books without enabling this shit.
On Saturday I said to my partner, as I have said for months, "A ten thousand dollar a year raise would solve so many of my problems."
As of this morning I was reluctantly looking for jobs because I love my job and don't want to leave it, but see: $10k raise problem solver.
As of noon today this was no longer an issue, because my boss called me with the news that I was getting a $10K merit raise.
I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. This is roughly $200 extra per paycheck. Enough to pay off debt faster, rebuild my savings, and spend a weekend a month in Milwaukee getting obscenely laid. The sex I'm going to have on $200 extra per paycheck. You can't even.
May all of you get the $10K raise your soul has yearned for. And whatever level of sex you can be satisfied with for $200.
yall are so fucking weird about gnc people. a woman wears a suit and she's "conforming to the patriarchy". a man wears a skirt and he's Secretly A Trans Egg. have you considered It's Fabric
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.
Bonded Through Time is a dragalia lost-themed 2025 calendar i've been working on for the past few months! really excited to finally unveil it, happy 6th anniversary dragalia š
my store is now open for pre-orders until october 20th, with my old merch designs and a small addition of some ace attorney stickers. please check it out!
my main twitter's still suspended so i'd really appreciate if you could share this around š„¹ thank you
ājune is over so now itās gay wrath monthā blah blah reminder that july is disability pride month and is often ignored and disregarded!! funnel that wrath into advocating for your disabled peers and amplifying their voices
āWild and Full of Marvelsā Merch Reveal: Journal, Art Print, and Window Hanging
Welcome to our third and final merchandise reveal for our upcoming Kickstarter campaign to fund publishing Wild and Full of Marvels: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Folklore and Fairy Tales. You can also see merch reveal one, featuring two stickers and a bookmark, and merch reveal two, featuring an enamel pendant necklace and a slate coaster!
In this latest update, we introduce our final āflatā merchandise offering (the art print) and our two remaining premium merchandise offerings ā a journal and an acrylic window hanging!
Wild and Full of Marvels Journal: this journal, with 160 lined pages, features cover art drawing motifs from the front cover and supplemented with art by Aceriee (Linktree), who also designed the cover art. It has a navy blue elastic band to hold it shut and a lovely leatherette finish. A great place to make your own lore and tales! A5 size (5.83 in x 8.27 in/148 cm x 210 cm). (Manufactured by Vograce.)
Art Print of the Wild and Full of Marvels Front Cover: this art print of the front cover will be printed matte, 8.5 in x 11 in/21.6 cm x 27.9 cm. It features our gorgeous cover art, by Jinx Inks. (Printed by Printkeg.)
Pygmalion-Inspired Sapphic Acrylic Window Hanging: artist Betta (Instagram | Tumblr) has created this lovely art inspired by Pygmalion, but this time featuring an elegant Renaissance lady gazes with infatuation at a classical sculpture of a beautiful woman. This art will grace an acrylic window hanging, complete with a chain and suction cup to hang it with. 4 in x 6 in/10.2 cm x 15.25 cm. (Manufactured by Alchemy.)
The crowdfunding campaign for Wild and Full of Marvels launches in 9 days! Follow our pre-launch page on Kickstarter to make sure you hear when it goes live.
So I was scrolling and saw this image in an article about the European heat wave,
And was like, uh, are you missing something there, buddy? Like all that red in northern Africa? Because that's a lot of red.
And I was going to give them the benefit of doubt, since I don't know much about the climate in Northern Africa, aside from Morroco and Egypt, which seem like really hot places, so you know, maybe it's normal there?
But nope, that's not the case:
Africa is struggling with heat waves and many countries on the continent lack the resources rich economies have to deal with rising temperat
Some selections from the article:
"The region has been experiencing some of the most intense heat waves in recent years, but in many cases theyāve been under-reported due to misconceptions about Africansā ability to withstand them.
āAfrica is seen as a sunny and hot continent,ā said Amadou Thierno Gaye, a research scientist and professor at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. āPeople think we are used to heat, but we are having high temperatures for a longer duration. Nobody is used to this.ā
"The Sahel, for instance, has been heating at a faster pace than the global average despite being hot already. Burkina Faso and Mali, both in West Africaās Sahel, are among countries that are set to become almost uninhabitable by 2080, if the world continues on its current trajectory, a UK university study found. Its people are especially vulnerable due to shrinking resources, such as water, and poor amenities, and a dearth of trees and parks means there are few options for places to cool off."
One of the most fucked up parts of Americaās for-profit medical system and insurance often being tied to your work is that you cannot work if you are sick and if you are not working, you have no insurance. People are fired in the middle of cancer treatment or a severe mental health episode and suddenly there is no way to pay the hospital and buy the medicine you need. Republicans will outright say āYou donāt deserve free healthcare if youāre lazy and unemployed.ā anytime someone mentions this, actively ignoring the fact that you often cannot work when you are sick and shouldnāt be forced to work when youāre sick to be able to afford to get better.
And you will notice that they always refer to it as āfree healthcareā, not taxpayer funded healthcare, not socialized medicine, not single-payer healthcare, always āfree healthcareā, like it is an fantastical idea, like healthcare for all is as absurd as a 5 bedroom mansion with a pool for all. They need to make it sound like it is logistically impossible, like they could not take a fraction of the money in the DODās $2.5 trillion budget and make sure no one in America dies of an easily treatable illness just because they canāt work. It is very intentional.
yeahhhhh. neither of those things should exist. hospitals and healthcare should not behave like a for-profit corporation and biting each otherās dicks off actually does nothing for the patient. my doctorās office should not be spending time they could be treating patients arguing with insurance and their hospital system shouldnāt be forcing them to argue with insurance to get these tests. this is the least efficient way to do medicine
We are beyond thrilled to share the cover art that artist Jinx Inks has done for our next anthology, Wild and Full of Marvels: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Folklore and Fairy Tales.
This all-new collection, fourth in our Queer Fanworks Inspired Byā¦ series, features 23 stories, 23 art pieces, and a 10-page comic, all inspired by folklore, fairy tales, myths, and legends with personal significance to the creator. Teasers, excerpts, and trims of the art pieces will be shared throughout our Kickstarter campaign. Check out the contributor list and read their biographies!
Weāre also offering some awesome merchandise, all featuring art by the anthology contributors. Weāll be sharing reveals for these pieces over the next couple weeks as we lead up to our upcoming campaign launch.
Follow our pre-launch page on Kickstarter to be among the first to hear when our campaign goes live on July 8th 2026!
Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.
At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and itās not to watch the shoppers. See, we canāt actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.
At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didnāt exist in my household. Itās normal now. Here is something that is not for me.
āWhat the hell, Iāll take another,ā says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.
The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.
I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. Heās not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. Heās not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadnāt spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldnāt have spent any. I go home. I donāt own a watch.
I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.
I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht.Ā
i wrote this while i was working at orlandoās walt disney world parks.
i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.
as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.
disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (ācast membersā) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even āfaceā characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.
at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.
i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.
i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.
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