A couple scenes from a little gay vampire story I was kicking around a couple years ago! I sometimes do little pencils-only scenes for things and never post them. But I was looking back at these and was like why not? They're cute!
I have a whole story for these two, but just for funsies, something to do every now and then when I need to let loose.
I'm not gonna articulate this well, but there's this phenomenon I keep seeing on the left that I'll call "bean soup rhetoric," wherein someone fails to understand that they are not the target audience for a particular message, or just can't conceptualize why a speaker would craft their message differently to resonate with a target audience that doesn't already completely agree with them.
"The 'God Made Trans People' billboard is stupid! God didn't make me! I'm an atheist!" Okay. The billboard sits along a major highway in Kansas. We can deduce that the target audience is not you—it's the centrist evangelical Christians driving along that road who could probably be persuaded to become allies as long as we choose our words carefully and don't make them feel attacked for not already knowing everything about trans rights issues. Another one I see a lot is, "We shouldn't be talking about how right-wing legislation catches [privileged in-group] in the crossfire when [marginalized out-group] suffers far more!" I know. I agree with you. Which is why you and I are not the intended audience of this argument!
The entire point of rhetoric is to win over someone who doesn't already fully agree with you. In this case, let's say that someone is Jennifer, the moderate center-right mom in your neighborhood who doesn't really know or care about transgender issues but would be absolutely horrified by the idea of her teenage daughter having to submit to an invasive inspection of her body just to be allowed to play soccer. Tell her, "Banning trans students from sports will inevitably subject all student athletes to invasive gender-policing," or "Legal restrictions on gender-affirming care will make it harder for you to access the hormone replacement therapy you take to treat menopause symptoms," and she is more likely to question her existing beliefs and listen to the rest of what you have to say than if you lead with leftist talking points that she already has a calcified opinion about or which she thinks do not personally affect her.
Tailoring the argument to the things she already cares about does not mean we're forgetting that she has more privilege than most—entirely the opposite, in fact. A privileged ally can be extremely valuable. Jennifer votes in every election. And so do all the other ladies at her book club, and church, and in the PTA, and those folks listen to Jennifer. There's a reason both parties were courting suburban women so hard in the last election cycle! If we can find common ground with her on this, if we can get her calling her representatives and talking to her friends and phone-banking and door-knocking and making a stink, that's how the needle starts to move. If I can convince her to take her support away from the candidates who are actively restricting my rights and throw it toward those who want to restore and expand those rights...then I'm sorry, but Jennifer is a more valuable ally to me than the people who agree that the legal boundaries of gender ought to be abolished altogether but refuse to actually do anything except complain online about how both sides are equally bad because the right is trying to force everyone to drink the cyanide kool-aid while the left keeps serving bean soup and they don't like bean soup
i'd like to add that the shadow color isnt necessarily dictated entirely by the primary light source, but the bounce light! so for the example of a sunny environment, the reason the shadows are blue are because of the light from the blue sky reflects across the environment; but, if the character were to be under tree cover, the bounce light would be coming from the leaves and thus the shadow would look greener.
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 thing about being bullied for being weird as a kid is that even if you've always embraced being weird your brain is still always looking for the line where it's too much. you can be as proudly and intentionally weird as you want and you can love being weird but your mind is still convinced there's a point where you get too weird and people start treating you like a weird looking bug again. also it feels like you reach that point 500 times a day even if everyone you've spoken to today found you pleasant and likable and even if you're completely alone in your house with nobody looking at you at all.
On the one hand, I find it kind of concerning and a worrying sign of an uptick in conspiracist thinking that so many people think the various assassination attempts were faked.
I don't believe that they are - it's just not weird to me that in a country that has more guns than people and with an extremely unpopular president who keeps doing evil shit, that there'd be a few one-in-several-million people who make and carry out some half-baked plans.
But it is kind of funny that so many people's response is "🙄 He's obviously just faking for attention"
#i am well aware that it SOUNDS silly but it's SO hard ro look at it all and NOT think it's a big ol con? #like; if it was really real wouldn't SOMEONE have been shot by now if not killed (besides the shooters) (tags via @aniseandspearmint )
I know the last few years have felt like an eternity, but a guy in the audience did die at the 2024 attempt in Butler, PA, and two other people were shot and seriously injured. That's very much a thing that did happen. There were articles about it at the time, even, because Trump was characteristically self-centered about it and didn't really acknowledge anyone but himself.
US presidents have a lot of security, and they keep getting stopped by security.
Doing political assassinations is actually pretty hard? Famously a BUNCH of shit went wrong with the plot to assassinate Franz Ferdinand that kicked off WW1, and they very nearly failed at it.
There was a guy who had a plan to assassinate Biden during the 2024 debate but he showed up at the wrong place, fucked around for a few hours, realized he had the wrong place and was too late, and went back to his hotel room - and then got arrested. It just wasn't as big of a news story.
A lot of people who try to commit assassinations or acts of terrorism are pretty bad at it, and most of them are not the most stable or hinged of individuals. People whose lives are going great don't GENERALLY decide to do something that will most likely get them murdered by law enforcement.
#I also feel like maybe people don't understand how difficult shooting a target actually is #people on TV and movies give a false impression of how hard it actually is to hit something that moves #a lot of would be assassins IRL don't have experience w guns #just because America has a reputation doesn't mean people can actually shoot #so the old 'but if it isn't a conspiracy why do they keep missing' thing is out (tags via @zetabrarian)
Yes. Thank you. Also trying to do that in a stressful situation where you have very limited time.
Let us remember that people tried to unsuccessfully assassinate Hitler at least twelve times AFTER the invasion of Poland (there were also people who tried to assassinate him prior). Each time something happened to either prevent him from being in the spot they planned to kill him or something else went wrong. It happens! It happens a lot!
I am far more willing to accept the idea of Trump bumbling around dodging bullets like Mr. Magoo than I am the idea of this administration successfully pulling off a conspiracy without a single person leaking it accidentally on a Signal chat with a journalist or something.
you identify with the mighty wolf because you crave the power and dignity of an apex predator. I identify with the mighty wolf because I too have wandered alone aimlessly around los angeles and Sequoia national park and failed to find a mate. We are not the same.
The bipartisan push to remove anonymity from the internet is ushering in an era of unprecedented mass surveillance and censorship.
"The problem is that there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are. A platform cannot magically discern that a user is 16 without collecting identifying information, whether through government documents such as a passport, payment information like a credit card, or other identity-disclosing data. Whether that data is stored by the platform itself or outsourced to a vendor, the result is always the same: A user’s offline identity is forever linked with their online behavior.
Stripping anonymity from the internet would constitute one of the most sweeping rollbacks of civil rights in recent history. It would allow for unprecedented levels of mass surveillance and censorship, endangering the most marginalized members of society. Whistleblowers exposing corporate wrongdoing could be tracked and fired, government employees speaking out about illegal behavior or bad policies could face prosecution, and activists organizing protests could be identified and surveilled before ever setting foot on the street."
And this is exactly the kind of thing US lawmakers will decide for US citizens, and it will effect everyone who uses the internet globally. Already any kind of age verification amounts to "hand over your government identification to a private US corporation".
I dont know what solutions might be on a broader scale, but its absurd for one country to have this much power and for their private corporations to be handed this amount of authority from literally world governments demanding "safety for children". This power structure is absurd.
Yall USians have got to shut down all this bullshit, youre the ones who vote these people in and out. Theyre not gonna give a shit what foreigners have to say.
This kind of legislation is in the interests both of massive corporations, who think they can squeeze a little more money out of you by monitoring every moment of your life, and the political interests who think vulnerable groups need to be taught their place in a white supremacist, eugenic vision of the world, by being made even more vulnerable to deportation, mass incarceration (and I'm including in this list the concentration camps already being built to incarcerate people living unhoused and people deemed "mentally ill"), as well as outright lynching.
As facism grows more ascendant globally, fighting for privacy is increasingly urgent and crucial in every single other important cause.
If you want to protect any vulnerable people at all, clawing back privacy however and whenever we can is going to have to be part of that protection.
Funny that the stereotypical cynic is an idealist who aged out of it. In my experience, the reverse is true. I was an extreme cynic as a teenager and then I noticed how profoundly limiting it was, and also that "cynics are cool and smart" was a message that was being constantly reinforced by corporate media for some reason.
#yes! cynicism reads as very juvenile to me#and yes prev often stemming from teen pain
Yeah, like I see black-pilled people on here and my default reaction isn't "oh, these must be world-weary old warriors who've lost their faith in humanity", it's "these people are in their 20s and need a hobby"
I also think that the present era has proven that authoritarian leaders don't actually want a population of wide-eyed idealists, they want a population of jaded assholes who are convinced that everyone is lying, any resistance is either a scam or doomed to failure, and nothing can ever get better.
You also see a lot of cynics fall into paranoid conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are "misempowering"; making people feel smarter that the rest of the "sheep", while simultaneously obscuring the realities and possibilities that might fix the issues they actually care about.
Last time I posted an attractive women doing some absolutely dope shit the lesbians claimed her and you know what? Fair... but this... this is for the bisexuals
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