The last time ao3 went down, I was in a reading slump and was still searching for something to read. And then ao3 stopped working and I thought, well I can reread one my favorite fanfics that I have saved in my phone. The problem was that I hadn't saved that many, and wanted more options. So once ao3 was up again I spent half a month finding the fics I had read, downloading them in my phone, making covers for them and making a nice cute dedicated shelf for fanfics on my Moon+ Reader app.
I wanted to share the covers, but didn't feel like doing that on ao3, so I'm doing it here 🥳
Here are the covers for The secret language of plants series by @llendrinall
I first read The Secret Language of Plants and The November Tales years ago and I still think about them so often! I miss your wonderful, whimsy and wry writing style (totally get that real life priorities come first though) and have a question: what books/other media would you say have influenced your stuff? What are your favourites? Thanks again!
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.
Hi ! :) Let me say first that Twenty Nine is my absolute favorite fic ever. It's so good, so funny in a dark way, so beautiful. I go back to reread it all the time. I wanted to ask you if you have any fic recs starring percy? Cheers!
Oh, sorry, no, not really. I follow authos more than fandoms, so I haven't read much HP.
I do know that when the topic is dicussed people often reccomedn "Percy take the wheel". Haven't read it myself, but it might scratch that itch.
Hello! Reading your work has impacted my tastes so much, I keep looking for your vibe, wit and humor in every fic or book i look at. Do you have any recommendations, anything that inspired you or that you loved, that helped you get this spark in your writing? Or just recommendations in general. Pretty please!
I do! Someone asked the same question a while ago and I stand by that list today.
I will add Helen DeWitt's "The Last Samurai", which is not funny per se, but did funny things to my brain. It was very soothing and very relatable if you ever have to interact with academics.
Dear Endrina
I am once again finding myself reading the secret language of plants, and I was wondering.
Are you still writing? Fanfiction,
P. S. (I honestly don't know well how the tumblr works ) Do you have any recommendations for reading detective novels that are a little gloomy but with hope in them? Yes, I understand that this is a silly and abstract question. But I trust your judgment. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer it! I hope your life is good.
I think I understand the core of your question, but I do not have an answer ready. Something with hope despite the grit of the world, isn’t it?
Agatha Christie’s Towards Zero has some of that. For once, I recommend the 2025 TV adaptation rather than the book first. There is something about poor inspector Leach, who is suicidal at a time when suicide was a crime, having to solve a crime and, worst of all, deal with high-class people. That poor man.
Disco Elysium. A computer game, but with so much text that feels like a book with nice voice acting. You start as a detective at your worst, in a place ravaged by war and trauma, ready to let go. But you can also grit your teeth and go on, help people, eventually solve a murder. Just because the world is terrible and we are going to die some day it’s no reason not to show some kindness to a cold little girl outside a bookstore.
Pagination’s Blake’s Corollary. I don’t remember much of the plot of this Batman fanfic, inspired by the Nolan movies. There is sex, of course. Lots, I’m sure. What I remember is that in a city building itself back, John Blake is left caring for the little people and the little things, the ones that slip through the cracks. It’s not the main focus of the story, but it’s nice to see someone caring.
If I can think of anything else, I will reblog this with additions.
Hello, Endrina! I probably have one of the most annoying questions for writers, but I can't help but ask: are you writing anything now? It doesn't matter which fandom (to be honest, if it were the original, I would be absolutely thrilled. Or another Percy story. LORD, I love him), I'm just wondering if we can expect new things from you in the future and if you have any plans.
I have… plans and a word doc with 38K words, but it has been very hard to write for multiple reasons. Some were good (promotion! started a family!) and some were not (family sickness, friend fall out). I am working on a GOT compilation and being able to jump from one story to another helps to keep the momentum going, but, while I enjoy writing and fandom, I simply do not have much time to devote it. Look how long it took me to answer suck a simple ask!
Not an ask, but wanted to share two beautiful commissioned artworks by guine_evere featuring Twenty-Nine!Percy: 1) the first shows Percy in his battle of wits with Auntie Muriel and 2) the second shows him and Oliver at the New Years’ Party when Percy realises why he’s been hearing “blue” from the voices.
Twenty-Nine is my all time favourite fic (up there with my all time favourite reads in general to be honest!) and I am grateful every day you decided to post it (not an exaggeration I swear!)
What an unexpected and delightful surprise! Thank you so much for sharing these with me. I am very fond of Twenty-Nine, it is the roundest story I have gotten out, and I am delighted to see such love both in the words and the illustrations.
The details! Muriel is holding the Maltesers' box. She has got the family portraits around her. Percy's posture is tense and focused on the fight. I also love how they included the voices in the second image. It's difficult to give shape to sound and this is a nice way to turn it inot images.
Resisting the urge to Um Actually this dragon novel because it has the dragon eggs be like three or four feet wide but there is simply a limit to how large hard-shelled terrestrial eggs can be. No matter how large the animal is, the embryo needs oxygen, and oxygen needs surface area. The larger an object is, the lower its surface area relative to volume, and the less oxygen the embryo can receive. We think of large animals as having porportionately large young because mammalian pregnancy has the unique benefit of allowing for the size of the young to scale with the adult because their oxygen is provided directly through the placenta, and almost all the megafauna remaining on Earth are mammals. But this is not the case for species which lay eggs! For fuck's sake even the sauropods hatched out of eggs barely larger than basketballs! Your hatchling dragon would be impressively enormous if it were the size of a house cat. Stop trying to make me believe that this (ROUND!) dragon egg somehow supplied enough oxygen to develop an infant the size of a large dog or even bigger. If it were possible the dinosaurs woulda been doing it!!!!
I love you /lh. Experts going off on their particular fascinating cool topics and adding unexpected context to things we take for granted is like my favorite thing this was delightful. Talk to me more about eggs and geometry and biology all you want :D
Nan, mais il ne faut pas dire ça. Bien sûr qu'une femme est sage ☝️ - c'est comme préciser que l'eau est mouillé. En plus, tu ne veux pas laisser penser aux gens que l'existence d'une sage-femme implique existence d'une femme bête...
Une ourse ça marche bien en plus parce que les ourses réabsorbent le foetus (via le placenta ?) si elles ont pas assez de ressources pour mener la grossesse à terme
"Comment ça les utérus humains ont pas de bouton 'annuler', prends ma patte, allons ensemble dans le monde merveilleux de l'avortement"
Today is a big day on the Spanish internet. Valentine's day in Spanish is "día de San Valentín", which sounds almost the same as "Sam va lentín", which is how, in some parts of Spain , you would say "Sam goes slowly".
Hence, since a few years ago, every February 14th, the Spanish internet is full of "wait for me mr. Frodo" style memes. One of our holiest days of the year.
hey if this storm ends up being as it looks, you need to take it seriously, particularly if you're in a southern state and not used to storms like this. i'm not a professional but my new england experience for losing power/etc is:
fill your bathtub with water before the power goes out. in an emergency where the pipes freeze, you'll have semi-clean water. you can use this water for your pets, to wash dishes, flush your toilet, and other small important stuff. if you have no bathtub, fill as large a bin/pot/etc as you can find.
air is the best insulator. if you can tape plastic over your windows and major drafts, it will genuinely help. (they have kits for it, but i've used trash bags and duct tape). blankets/tarps/etc also work. leave space between the covering and the window - the layer of air protects you. shove towels under your doors.
in a true emergency, you can ball up newspapers and shove them into your coats/pants/etc between your base layer and your coat. it won't be comfortable but it does insulate a little better.
have an emergency plan for your pets, particularly animals like reptiles that need constant heat to survive.
the weight of the snow and ice will be an issue. plan accordingly.
black ice is a bitch. if it looks "wet", assume it is frozen. actually just assume everything is frozen for a little while.
if you do not have a generator or other emergency power source, DO NOT bring outside-use heat sources (like propane stoves) inside. you can gas yourself and die.
instead, if you truly have no heat source: focus on insulating a small amount of space in your house - a few rooms - and bring as many bodies and supplies in there as possible. do not break insulation if you can avoid it. you are a ~100-degree object. make your safe space into a blanket fort. you may go stircrazy but it is better than freezing.
if you have a fireplace you never use, check the flue and the chimney before the storm holy shit. i am not kidding about this. do not just start a fire willy nilly. you will burn your house down.
relatedly, if you start a fire and notice smoke is billowing back into the house: stop the fire immediately. your flue is closed or your chimney is backed up. you will burn your house down.
keep the fridge closed as long as possible; it lets the air out. but honestly like, my family has used snow as a fridge a lot. stuff that needs to stay cool will be less of an issue than things that need to get warm. plan accordingly.
most canned things can be eaten cold, but check the label. if you have a little sterno fire, it can go a long way.
if you develop a headache and feel weirdly sleepy, you may be forced to open a window. you might have carbon monoxide poisoning.
every year people die while shoveling snow. it is actually not very safe as a chore tbh. you need to go slow and take lots of breaks. you should also 100% wait until the snow has actually passed, only because when it starts shifting and undoes all your work, it will piss you the hell off.
have drinking water somewhere easily accessible. a lot more of it than you think completely necessary tbh.
fill your gas tank. it will help prevent your lines from freezing.
if you have a battery-powered light that's not very strong, put it under a water jug, it'll throw more light. idk why it works but it works.
just because you know how to drive in the snow doesn't mean other people know how to drive in the snow. better to just not.
your device probably has a "low power mode". probably best to just keep it on asap rather than be taken by surprise tbh. the battery will last longer.
great news to fanfiction writers: it really is better if y'all take one bed and huddle together for warmth. do not strip out of your clothes, though, i have no idea who the hell decided that was the smart thing to do. you want to keep at least a layer of leggings and a tight shirt on. the goal is to find the fine line between "warm" and "sweating" - you want to stay as dry as possible for as long as possible.
your hair, eyelashes, and nosehairs can freeze. just from personal experience: try not to rub or touch them, it can snap your hair off and then you'll be very sad.
hypothermia is a lot faster and more evil than most people expect. watch for shivering, confusion, and unexplained exhaustion. if someone stops shivering, that is not always a good sign. if you think you/someone you love has hypothermia, warm them up slowly. often this is through rubbing/friction (or a heat source if available). keep them awake and try to feed them something.
same for frostbite: don't just shove your hands into a fire. warm any affected area slowly. fair warning, as the blood recirculates, it will hurt :(
those blue rubber examination gloves under other gloves can help even very-cold hands stay warm.
liquor is not a good idea to drink right now, sorry beloved. but vodka/rubbing alcohol does work as an excellent de-icer if you need something small done quickly (like a lock/door handle). it's just, like, expensive in comparison to other things lol
"i don't eat that much anyway i'll be fine" that's the devil talking. you will not be. you will also probably be burning way more calories than normal. let the soft animal of your body eat a bunch of delicious snacks.
99% agree with this, all very useful info people should read now and save for later
The current recommendation regarding snow removal is not to wait until it's all done. Especially if it's wet snow, not powdery (AKA good snowball snow vs good sledding snow). If it's wet snow and you can safely go in and out for shoveling, every 2-3 inches is recommended to reduce the risk of a heart attack. Also, do some light stretches and warm ups beforehand, dress in layers that can be removed as you get warm, pause to wipe down/dry off if you start sweating, and drink lots of water.
And a few additions from personal experience:
If you have a radio, find out now what channel(s) you have that update on the weather in case your phone does die (here's the National Weather Service list of radio stations: https://www.weather.gov/nwr/station_listing )
If you have direct sunlight on your place you can open the curtains to get some warmth if your window won't let in more cold (see OP's points on towels and plastic to reduce drafts). Any window that isn't getting direct sunlight should have the curtains fully closed to trap heat.
Bubble wrap over windows is also very insulating - my family just taped them to the glass, not even fully covering the window, and it's noticeably warmer
Masks are awesome for going outside. I layer a KN94 under a scarf when I go to shovel, then pull off the scarf as i get too hot. The mask prevents your nose from getting super cold, both in a frost bite way and in a messing up the inside of your nose way.
If you have any nonperishables/ things that are safe at room temp, take them out of your fridge before the storm hits so you don't have to open it. Especially if it's medication you desperately need.
Subnote to that is if your power goes out, do not open your fridge unless it's dire!! You will lose anything that cannot be frozen and add cold to your already cold home.
If you do have power, using the oven to prepare food means you can then leave the oven partially open as it cools to add ambient warmth to the house (even with power it can be hard for your heating to keep up when it's bad).
If you can get one or more space blankets AKA emergency thermal blankets, do it now! They trap heat better than regular blankets. Something like this: https://www.amazon.com/ANMEILU-Emergency-Blankets-Survival-%EF%BC%8CMarathons/dp/B07GLCYR5S/
Make sure your carbon monoxide and fire detectors are working and have good batteries. If you don't have one or both, try to get a carbon monoxide one at the very least, so you don't have to use symptoms to figure it out
