He/Him. 90's survivor. You can call me JustAGay or 404, whichever suits your fancy. This is my writing tumblr! Here's my AO3. The header is an excerpt from one of my WIPs. Questions are welcome! I'll mostly be putting my writing on here as well as headcanons.
A lot of what I post here is tiny, often unedited, little scenes that popped into my head. I decided to start posting whatever little snippets come to mind to see if it would help me get back into the writing groove, and surprisingly it's kinda working!
I'm open to advice and if you like something I wrote feel free to scream about it in my inbox. I promise you'll make my day.
Tag list for convenience:
404 Rambles: Me talking into the void, also just rambles about writing, head canons, etc.
404 Writes: writing tag, on all my writing.
Intrusive HuaLian: the tag for the tiny HuaLian snippets that pop in my head at all hours. These may become real fics at some point but no promises. (Also tagged hualian because, well, I do actually want people to find them, lol)
Not Fandom Related: basically what the tag says, my writing that isn't about fandom or characters, might be personal, might just be something that popped unprompted into my head.
''what if my writing isn't good eno--'' what if it's a reflection of your of your soul. what if it has a place in this world. what if you write it anyway
hello fellow artists. google has fallen. pinterest/duckduckgo AI filters don't work. do not despair; here is a list i made of places to find reference images without having to sift through piles of worthless garbage. (for future editing convenience i am just linking my blog post on dreamwidth.)
✨ good places to find art reference that are not full of AI trash 🌈
Thinking about the whole "there is no platonic explanation for this" thing and how it doesn't account for intense platonic situationships and anyways I think we should start saying "there is no casual explanation for this" bc really what we're talking about is the way the characters in question are Obsessed with each other
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.
She wants to learn photography. Do it stupid. Take a million photos. Don't think about why they're not good. Enjoy the process of taking photos.
Pick out tge ones you like the most and figure out why you like them. Is it because the subject is centered? Is it because you caught them doing something cool? Is it because the light made cool shadows?
Do it stupid. If you try to do it smart, youll get stuck. If you think too much you'll never get to doing. Do it stupid.
This is honestly how I started quilting! I had fabric, I had a knowledge of backstitch, I had a quilting magazine. I asked "how hard can it be?" and now here we are. Just have fun and give it a go!
I got another spam comment today on AO3, and I want to share it as a PSA. But before I do, I want you to understand that you SHOULD NOT DO what this comment is asking. Ok? Ok.
See that bit at the bottom? Don't do that. Insert ParamedicGuy.gif going "Don't."
Other malicious spam comments I've gotten seemed designed to make an author question their writing, or outright encourage them to delete their stories from AO3. This one is different, in that it tries to get you to destroy the work on your own computer.
If you ran that command, it basically locates your Documents folder, then deletes everything in it, including all subfolders. It also does it without any prompt, so you have no chance to second guess your actions.
This is just fucking trolling.
Coincidentally, we just did training on a cyberattack similar to this, called a ClickFix attack. You can read about how that works here.
As a general rule, if ANYONE or ANY WEBSITE tells you unsolicited* to do anything in Powershell, CMD RUN, command prompt, shell command, or something similar, DON'T.
*There are legit reasons for running commands in PowerShell or the command prompt, but in those cases you are likely seeking out a solution to a problem you are already experiencing. Don't just run random commands on your computer as recommended by some unlogged-in guest on a fan fiction site.
Always think and consider before taking action, and get a second opinion from a trusted source. When I got this comment I was pretty sure what the command would do, and it took me about three seconds of googling to confirm it.
This isn't just trolling. Nor is it a simple malicious attack to fuck with authors.
All of these things, starting with making people delete their stories from AO3 to now this, are all specifically designed to kill any digital paper trail so people can steal and make money off your fanfictions by just scrubbing the serial numbers off (and probably training AI on them).
These scammers have realized that even if people delete the stories off of AO3, authors can still prove that they are the original owner of the story by having locally stored documents that prove when the story was originally written.
That said: I want to impress on people once again to never EVER run any commands on your PC unless you know EXACTLY what you're doing! ESPECIALLY not if it's just a rando on the internet telling you to.
"If you ran that command, it basically locates your Documents folder, then deletes everything in it, including all subfolders. It also does it without any prompt, so you have no chance to second guess your actions."
Sorry, but that isn´t just trolling. This is a command that could VERY EASILY ruin a person´s life if they don´t second guess it. It is malicious and irreversible unless you have every single thing backed up elsewhere (some people have backups for important stuff but not everything and most people might not even have backups for all of the important things)
so no, this is not just trolling, this is a targeted, malicious attack on ao3 writers, especially younger and less tech savvy ones who might actually run the command.
"This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking."
Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise t
pretty sure I did the chrome//flags thing a while ago, but also i switched to firefox, which is not without the occasional bullshit, but is vastly less bullshitty than chrome.
This is why I treat genai "features" like the invasive blackberry bushes they are: cut, root, burn, and vigilantly watch for new shoots to uproot. I'm 54 years old and the world got by fine without genai for most of my lifetime.
tags via@KKglinka #psa#having read the article#it's not clickbait#chrome is reaching#across all chromium browsers#to link a prepatory structure#this malware packet#will therefore occur#with all chromium browsers#it has nothing to do#with the actual ai interface#instead chrome is either#using your personal computer#as part of a cloud server#the way bitcoin malware works#or it's recording your own#actions on the computer#with a continuously active#background module#either way#that's malware#a 4gig trojan virus
The only ways to make the deletion stick are to disable Chrome's Al features through chrome://flags or enterprise policy tooling that home users do not generally have, or to uninstall Chrome entirely
...
Adding the file took zero clicks. Removing it requires (a) discovering the file exists, (b) understanding what it is, (c) navigating into a hidden user profile path, (d) deleting it (and on Windows, also clearing the read-only attribute first), and (e) accepting that Chrome will silently re-download it on next eligible window unless the user also navigates chrome://flags, enterprise policy, or platform-specific configuration tooling to disable the underlying Chrome Al feature. None of those steps is documented in the place a normal user looks - none of them is even hinted at in default Chrome.
A lot of us learned certain theory terms--intersectionality, compulsory heterosexuality, Death of the Author--on social media. It's great to be able to discuss them! But it's important to know what you're discussing.
Kimberlé Crenshaw was the Black feminist scholar who coined the term "intersectionality." You can read her initial article coining and describing the theory "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" (1989), her follow-up article expanding on it "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color" (1991), and a (shorter and easier to read) interview with her about what she meant and what she thinks about it "Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later" (2017).
Adrienne Rich was the lesbian feminist scholar and poet who coined the term "compulsory heterosexuality" in her article "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1980).
Roland Barthes was a French literary critic who coined the term "death of the author" in his essay "La mort de l'auteur" (The Death of the Author") (1967). This one is 6 pages long.
These are available on the internet - I highly recommend reading them and going straight to the source of what the authors said, and decide how much you agree with them and the uses they get put to!
What to actually do
If you get one of these, the answer is boring and it works every time:
Don't call the number. Don't reply. Don't click links in the email — not even the unsubscribe link. Open a fresh browser tab, type paypal.com yourself, and log into your account. Check your activity. You'll see either nothing, or a tiny incoming payment from a stranger that you can ignore.
Then forward the original email as an attachment to [email protected] and delete it. If you want to go a step further, report the phone number to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov — every report makes it slightly harder for these operations to keep running.
And if you've already called? Don't beat yourself up — these scams are designed by professionals to fool smart people. Hang up, run a malware scan if you installed anything they asked you to install, change your PayPal and bank passwords from a different device, and call your bank's real fraud line (the number on the back of your card) to flag your accounts. Move fast, but you don't need to panic.
from the above linked article. For the UK the email to forward phishing scams to is [email protected], texts can be forwarded on to 7726 (for free!) and as a victim of fraud you can report it here (or here for Scotland)
— If an email recently landed in your inbox with a subject line like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 for account activation. Questions? Call (855) 629-1161" — don't call that number. Don't click anything. And whatever you do, don't panic-dial to "stop the charge."
You're being targeted by one of the cleverest scams going right now, and the reason it works is uncomfortable: the email genuinely came from PayPal.
The trick is in the subject line, not the email
When most people think "phishing email," they picture sketchy senders, broken English, and links to weird domains. This scam is the opposite. The email passes every authenticity check — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, all green. It comes from PayPal's actual mail servers. The fonts are right. The footer is right. The unsubscribe link works. If you forwarded it to a security expert and asked "is this really from PayPal?" they'd have to say yes.
So how is it a scam?
Scammers have figured out that PayPal lets anyone send small amounts of money to anyone else, and that PayPal will dutifully email the recipient a notification. The scammer sends you a payout of, say, one Hungarian forint — about a quarter of a cent. PayPal's system then automatically generates and sends you a real, legitimate, fully-authenticated email confirming the transaction.
Here's the catch: the email's subject line is whatever the scammer typed when they set up the payout. PayPal doesn't sanitize it. So they write something terrifying like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 — call this number with questions" and PayPal's servers cheerfully deliver that subject line straight to your inbox, wrapped in a perfectly legitimate-looking notification.
The actual transaction in the email body is for 1 forint. There is no $987.90 charge. There never was. But by the time most people read carefully enough to notice that, they've already dialed the number. —
Hellboy in hell + fallen angel. Totally forgot I drew this like… 2 years ago. Added some final touches this afternoon. Every tortured character has to have a redrawing of them as “fallen angel” it’s a requirement.
