begging everyone into sxf to read up on the eastern block history, the situation with just the leaders wives was crazy . sponsored by did first lady exist even as a role? and the answer is: how much time do you have
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 have delivered mail to independent massage parlors, that are bustling with invisible employees, but only a single certified massage therapist, a surprising number of times. One does not ask prying questions, and one certainly does not attempt to book a massage. Because those aren't massage parlors.
One thing that worries me about the use of AI is whether or not it can worsen people's dementia and alzheimer's in the future. When my grandmother was first diagnosed, we got her math activity books. Now, my grandmother never had a formal education, but we did our best to keep her sharp, get her to do math and writing activity books, sudokus, playing board games that required some level of strategizing with her. Her family is prone to alzheimer's and dementia (both her siblings had it and deteriorated very very very quickly, which yeah, scares the shit out of me being her granddaughter) but she was the one whose mind lasted the longest, she only passed away two years ago, at 88, ten whole years after her initial diagnosis and sure, she had forgotten things, recipes and where she put her glasses and appointments, but she never forgot any of us, ten whole years in, she still remembered us. Now, this may have been luck, but doctors always said the constant mental work + companionship + medicine helped her a lot. So I'm thinking, these people who are now relying on AI for everything, from email-writing to thinking what's for dinner to casual conversations, I've even seen people rely on it to calculate what time they should leave their house if they need to be at a place at a specific time and their commute lasts X number of minutes. As if that's not... the simplest math operation possible? You shouldn't even need a calculator for that!!! Idk I don't know how long it'll take us to see the effects of this + exposure to brain-rotting short form content that is completely meaningless + people addicted to right-wing conspiracy style media. Idk I'm very worried. Please, read, read complicated books! Take up a book on philosophy and try to decipher it and make your own opinions on it, please buy a maths activity book and relearn how to do math, please get a hobby that involves lots of thinking and concentrating. PLEASE!!!
As a neurologist, I’ll give you the pretty name for it: cognitive reserve.
The way I explain it to my patients is that our neurons don’t regenerate. They make connections with each other and that’s it. If you don’t use your brain, they make fewer connections and, if one of them dies, you’re gonna miss it, because that was the only one that knew how to do X. Now, if each one of them has many, many connections, you won’t notice the difference when one of them dies. The others pick up the slack.
As of 2024, 45% of dementia risk factors are modifiable. Relevant to this conversation, 5% for less education and 5% for social isolation.
We absolutely are going to see the reflection of this, but it’s gonna take decades and it’ll be too late. So, for the love of your brain, pretend that it’s a muscle and make it work. People complain about “when am I ever gonna use this maths formula in my life?” You’re not. You’re teaching your brain to think logically. Those sinapses will be there for when you need to figure out your week’s schedule. English classes taught me how to interpret data and how to convey it in this text so it’s clear and you understand what I’m saying, not because I needed to justify why the curtain is blue.
Make your brain know how to do different things. Logic games, puzzles, taking care of a garden even if small, planning a church’s event or birthday, learn a new instrument, learn a few words in another language, look at a calendar every day, do some manual labor if possible. Do not, I repeat, do not let your brain get rid of sinapses by letting AI do everything. Your brain uses 20% of your body’s energy — do you really think it’s going to maintain connexions that aren’t in use?
Most cases of Alzheimer’s are sporadic, meaning no family history. Family history of a first-degree relative with Alzheimer’s starting before they were 80yo increases your risk in 2-3x on average.
TLDR: Yes. From the knowledge we have today, AI will increase the number and severity of dementia cases.
For all its faults Tumblr has truly ruined all other social media for me because my friends all have Instagram and are all trying to get me on Instagram more but every time I open Instagram there are like fifteen things screaming for my attention and when I get over myself long enough to start scrolling it's like. Where is my chronological dash. Where is the following-only option. Who are these people. Why are there so many videos. Everyone is screaming at me. And then before I know it I'm thirty minutes into scrolling and I haven't seen a single thing that I actually care about. At least on Tumblr when I see stuff I don't care about I know someone I follow has found a new interest.
There is one very important thing I need people without major dietary restrictions to understand: the distress caused by allergies, celiac disease, and other food restrictions is largely not about the food.
Do I miss some foods I can't eat anymore without getting sick? Sure, but that's not what really bothers me. What bothers me is being excluded from a huge portion of human social life of which food is a crucial component. What bothers me is the stress and social stigma of trying to figure out what I can safely eat. What bothers me is the amount of extra work and cost that is required of me to identify, obtain, and prepare safe foods. What bothers me is people treating my needs like a nuisance, as though I chose to be like this - as though their brief inconvenience to check an ingredients list is unreasonable, when I deal with this every day of my life forever.
I don't miss the food that much. I miss not having to worry about what I eat. I miss freedom. I miss when trying new foods and new restaurants was fun instead of a minefield. I miss not having to plan my entire life around the need for safe foods.
Food is such a basic human need, and a lot of people don't really need to think about it. When your danger foods can be anywhere and everywhere, suddenly your entire life revolves around avoiding them, and it massively sucks. You get used to it and it's not a big deal most of the time, but then you go to a new restaurant, or your office has a potluck, or you've been invited to a party and suddenly it feels just as miserable and exhausting as it ever has.
in firefox, history, clear recent history, set the time back and..if you've never done it before might as well do all history. You will have to relogin to all your websites and lose any websites in your history, but bookmarks and such will remain
you should be able to manually delete everything in cache2 with firefox shut off and that'll be safe
I also was looking into something else and remembered a file/folder from earlier called CapabilityAccessManager, and it should only be a few mb in size.
If you're feeling a little brave you can follow the steps outlined in the accepted answer here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5815087/capabilityaccessmanager-is-devouring-my-hard-drive
random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google
I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.
also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo
also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)
i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:
Search Engines
Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy
DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)
WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.
Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.
Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.
Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines.
Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted.
Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy.
Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.
Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden.
MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.
Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching.
Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar.
https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results.
https://www.mojeek.com/
https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites.
https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.
https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.
https://yep.com/ is a crawler
https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx
https://www.dogpile.com/
https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)
https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?
https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?
https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.
Other Searchers
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine
For those of you with android devices, you can use the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) standalone app control program to get rid of all the bloatware, data mining, and AI crap - no coding needed!
There are also Android-based alternatives like GrapheneOS and LineageOS, which are pretty easy to install. These are unfortunately available for a more limited range of devices (Graphene is ironically Pixel only, while Lineage supports more), but it's very worth checking out whether one of them might work for your phone.
GrapheneOS is a security and privacy focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility.
LineageOS Android Distribution
Typing this from Graphene now, in fact. But, both of those take the Android Open Source Project, without all the bloatware--and largely de-Google the whole thing. They give you much more control over privacy and what the apps you choose to install can do and access on your phone.
I know Graphene sandboxes everything, including the optionally installed Google Play Services which a lot of apps unfortunately require to run. (Lineage uses an alternative to Play Services instead.) So, you can install what would normally be unacceptably intrusive apps and just lock them away from pulling any funny shit with your data, or phoning home. Including the couple of Google things I do still keep around.
I also prefer running much more transparent, privacy-respecting open source apps where possible. Besides the transparency, I'd rather avoid the shitty tech corps entirely where I can. There are pretty good alternatives available for a lot of the usual suspects.
AlternativeTo lets you find apps and software for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android, Android Tablets, Web Apps, Online, Windows Tab
An alternative app store:
F-Droid is an installable catalogue of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications for the Android platform. The client makes it easy
Saw some people on reddit talking about Yor's money and it's crazy to me how many people dont realise that Yor probably has a fat bank account. Do they think being an assassin doesn't pay well??
Yep. It may be the quasi-60's but european women in general, including soviet, had hella more civil rights than their american counterparts. That included independent bank accounts, property rental and ownership, not being fired or expected to quit over pregnancy, etc. The soviet states also provided generous maternity leave, in large part because obligatory employment (and guaranteed jobs) resulted in too many laborers in the workforce. (This also meant shorter working hours).
Anyway. Yor probably has two bank accounts, likely at separate institutions. Twilight really was sloppy in that background check.
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.
