jerma: listen... i just really like strawberries and bananas! (suppressed giggle) it's not- it's not weird to like fruit. to enjoy a yummy strawberry on a summer's day! (looks at chat) "strawberries are weird and gross". what?! huh?!? listen to yourself!! what are you even saying?!?
the game he's playing: [grinding corpses to viscera in an abandoned hospital]
northernlion: Do. Do you ever think about those half-time events where they give away free tuition to whichever college student could sink a basketball into the hoop? How fucked up would it be if you were the person who didn't sink in a basketball and your only thought while an entire stadium is applauding your classmate is "If I'd only sunk one more ball in I wouldn't have had crippling debt"? They got college students out here in the damn hunger games and what? (reads chat) "...hey NL it's just for fun you know what fun is right". you're morally bankrupt. and you will never see the light of heaven. motherfucker. (shouting) AT LEAST IF THEY WERE KILLING EACH OTHER FOR SPORT WE COULD BE HONEST ABOUT WHAT IS ACTUALLY GOING ON THERE!!! (adjust headphones) Anyway...
the game he's playing: [pastel emoji matching game]
Everybody needs to listen to Gustav Holst's The Planets, not for hoity-toity nerd reasons, but because literally every epic sci-fi movie soundtrack for the past hundred years has been directly lifting shit from this one specific collection of pieces, and you deserve to hear your favourite motif in its native environment.
this is actually HILARIOUS because both domestic rabbits and domestic cats practice dominance-related social grooming but for wildly different reasons.
if you're a rabbit, the boss rabbit is the one who gets groomed by its subordinate rabbits.
but if you're a cat... the boss cat is the one that grooms the other cats.
BOTH these idiots are going "aw yeah, it's good to be on top >:) "
She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.
Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.
Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.
The record label will never put her name on the album.
Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.
The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.
Carol could do it on the first try.
She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.
But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.
That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.
She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.
Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.
She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.
The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.
For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.
Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.
And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.
But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.
Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.
i stopped giving a shit about "legit" purchases of digital products after i spent $80 on the entire Dark Horse collection of Trigun/Trigun Maximum ebook mangas, learning that I only got access to reading them through a proprietary website ereader function, couldn't download them, and couldn't get a refund, and then literally only a year later, getting an e-mail stating that Dark Horse was shutting down that part of their company and I wouldn't even be able to read them anymore. Fuck that
Pirate shit. Don't feel bad for it. It's not "your fault" that artists, independent or otherwise, can't make a living. You downloading an album or ebook for free isn't the cause of the problem. The cause is capitalism, plain and simple, and pirating is a lucky loophole that companies are still trying to stomp 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.
My wife wanted us to watch Parks & Rec, a show that is a long-time favorite for her but one I have been actively avoiding for years, and despite my many political objections to this show I am making it through by seeing the Leslie/Ann agenda around every corner
Ben Wyatt comes across to me as extremely closeted transfem so I think Leslie might be preordering. Is this cringe of me? Absolutely. Do I give a shit. Not at all. This show is not serious and I will smush my dolls together as I please
casual pokemon player meme: I would like to have sex with this animal
competitive pokemon player meme: Bro thought he could switch his 252 Spe Borgulon into 252 SpAtk Choice Codpiece 2x Funny Dance STAB Mega Booboobus Peerless Tsunami 💀
this is the top post of all time on r/stunfisk (the competitive pokemon subreddit) and is has been a running joke for so long. sometimes i reference it and forget and have to explain it.
oh and one of the absolute ogs.
gonna put a few of my fav stinkposts on here too also.
The crazy thing is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if you asked me on any given day "Would like to see a picture of some genitals?" my answer would be "😰 No, that's... No, thank you. I'm okay, actually." I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who do engage with the penis side of the internet, but personally, I've spent the better part of two decades doing all I can NOT to have pictures of dick and balls or sexy bikini babe buttcheeks blasted onto my retinas constantly. And yet... to be denied the penis? To have a jumped up pile of javascript tell me, a grown adult with an air fryer and an outstanding council tax bill, that I cannot be trusted to withstand the sight of a bare nipple unless I let it scan my drivers' license? I will move heaven and earth to see that fucking nipple, friend. I will walk a thousand miles barefoot on hot coals before I give you big brother bitches my passport number. A thousand miles through the desert with five VPNs just to press my face up against the glass and see the last uncensored picture of two My Little Pony Characters sixty-nining each other, and I don't even want! to look at it! But I will! I must! for the sake of our fucking democracy!
oopsie i tripped and spilled my link to archive dot org's downloadable copy of Microsoft office suite for 2007, which features no AI tools and is a powerful word processor that still holds up just fine on windows 10!
so much fiction is made by fundamentally knowledgeless people. Fantasy whose authress knows nothing of history, biology, or anthropology, only other fantasy. Cyberpunk writress with no understanding of political theory, sociology, or technology.
We increasingly live in a world without primary sources, or even secondary sources as the average creative is increasingly uncultured, only tertiary; ideas laundered until any context is sanded away. The median artist a dog that's never eaten food, only other dogs' vomit, some only their own vomit as franchises stumble through decades of self-referential undeath.
So much vitriol against AI art is that it is the previous norm at its most efficient: a mechanical dog that can imagine other dogs' vomit and conjure her own without first heaving.
Dunsparce day is July 25th! (206th day of the year) (Except on leap years, where it is July 24th) Some places on the Internet celebrate dunsparce day on February 6th. (02/06) And dunsparce in a hat day is always on May 25th in celebration of this wonderful post and all of the hatted dunsparces that were added to it the following day:
