uhh I kinda forgot that I had an account here, but hi anyone looking here 👋 20 (everytime i see a "have an exact age on bio or blocked i take mental damage what happened to internet safety), she/her, please do not send asks asking for donations I am a poor college student and all those asks do is mess up my mental health more than it already is
Hey for anyone who's gotten multiple notifications of me following or liking their stuff (idk if it sends those more than once actually but still) when I'm scrolling and see a posts that looks cool I'll just boop the like button before my brain can fully process if its been liked before or not and for follows It just shows me accounts I've already followed in the "check out these blogs" section(why does it do this I'm already following them i have checked them out???) and I go "Oh shit" when I realize I un followed someone and immediately follow them again, so if that happened to you, my bad
i am kinda peeved out that I can't enjoy most student art films from high profile art schools because of the statistics around black artists being in the low percentage often due to systemic barriers. it's another form of oppression I see rarely discussed. I do see a lot of black animators and the like but they are either indie or had to put in the work to even get in these schools and industry as a whole.
it makes sense as to why there lacks many stories with black protagonists that exists outside of stereotypes because they are often shelved or have lack of interests. or just, don't have the opportunities to be created.
it especially hurts as a black artist myself that aspires to create stories with black characters outside of misery porn or stereotypes. rather the full experience but then I do remember how racist the art industry here is considering how minstrelsy was a core part of early cartoons.
growing up there weren't much black characters to latch onto, and when they did exist, they did fall under stereotypes or were side characters to the often (white) main characters. even as a kid I picked up the scraps cuz it's all I wanted, but scraps shouldn't be good enough for black creatives, especially black children.
it sucks that even in the present day with progressive rhetoric everywhere, there feels like there isn't much progress art education wise for black folks.
Every one of you that isn't a trans woman, listen for just a sec.
Have you seen The Matrix? Do you remember the film? Keanu Reeves, leather trenchcoats, bullet time, all that jazz? If you haven't or if you need a refresher, go watch it. It's 2hr16min long, I'll wait. I'll be here when you get back.
Done? Great flick, right? Enjoy your popcorn? Cool. Alright. Now hear me out.
Y'know how the Agents could turn over anyone who isn't Unplugged™️? How every faceless person in the movie could become someone intent on hunting down and killing trans women Neo and the rest of the unplugged humans? You are that person. Society will use you and your blind spots to harm trans women.
Y'know how towards the end of the movie, Cypher betrayed everyone so he could plug back in and enjoy the relative comfort of a life without knowing about the Matrix? You can do that. You always have that option. Society will always reward you for turning on trans women.
You can also just be an Agent, full stop. You can make it your life's work to ruin the lives of trans women, and Society will reward you for it.
I can't be any of these things. I can't plug back in. I can't go back in the closet. I can't unsee the way me and my sisters are treated. My only two options are live and fight, or die.
I feel like I have to treat everyone around me like one of the three things you can be. I cannot and will not feel safe around you until you prove to me that you are Unplugged™️. And to be unplugged is to fight.
You have to make your own life more uncomfortable by actively fighting transmisogyny even when there are no trans women around you. If you can't do that, you are not safe for me.
Living outisde of The Matrix is hard. It's uncomfortable. You need to be ready, willing, and able to deal with that discomfort. Otherwise, you're just an agent of the system waiting to happen.
There is no way to be passive and to be safe for trans women. You have to be a traitor to the system.
Woman who hasn't been held in a decade: oh I'm pretty low maintenance, yeah honestly I think I'd find that overwhelming or something, can I just hold your hand instead? If that's okay of course?
Woman who feels ill at the notion of taking up space: yeah I can stand. Yeah honestly it's no biggie I like standing. Do you mind if I lean here? It's okay to say no.
Woman who would rather die than be considered selfish: I'm really sorry to ask I'm probably just being annoying but could I ask for another pillow? Yeah there isn't one in the room. Yeah no worries I can just bunch up some towels if needed.
Woman who's most outlandish and fantastical fantasies are a coffee date and seeing a movie with someone: oh I don't get out much. Yeah I don't really like being around people. I'm pretty much an introvert. Or something like that yeah.
Woman who would break down screaming and crying if someone showed even a hint of affection in person, who would fall apart at the seams if you held her still and asked her if she was okay, woman who if allowed too would wrap herself around you and sob and weep until she became severely dehydrated: oh yeah sorry I spaced out for a second there. Yeah I'm doing alright.
TRANS PEOPLE CONSIDERING SURGERY- READ THIS PLEASE GENUINELY I AM BEGGING YOU IT COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE
If you are getting gender affirming surgery, especially if it’s your first major surgery, PLEASE be aware that you can become SEVERELY depressed afterwards ESPECIALLY if you have a history of depression or suicidal ideation.
Post op depression is a natural reaction to the crazy mix of hormones your body goes through after major surgery as well as the stress and anxiety of recovery. Think of it like an adrenaline crash, but dragged out longer.
For me it kicked in about 6 weeks after top surgery and the worst of it lasted until about 10 weeks post op. EVERYTHING felt IMPOSSIBLE. None of the skills I’d been practicing worked. I thought everything was going to be bad forever. I didn’t attempt, but I was in the hospital. If it wasn’t for my support system I probably would have attempted.
This is not regret, but it can feel like it. I remain happy about my results to this day (going on six years later).
This is not you failing to maintain your mental health, but it can make you feel like a failure.
Things are not hopeless, but through the haze of this depression they can feel hopeless.
It can be terrifyingly sudden or it can sneak up on you. I didn’t even realize what was going on until after the depression finally passed and my mental health went back to normal.
I am writing this post because nobody told me about this before my top surgery. I was caught completely off guard. For my subsequent surgeries being aware has made all the difference. Being able to treat those symptoms as an expected and normal part of the healing journey has made them far easier to deal with. Because even when my emotions go to dark places I *know* they will pass. I have been able to tell the bad thoughts to take a bad seat and focus on healing.
PLEASE have a plan in place for if this happens. I know that this topic is taboo because of how often our mental health is weaponized against us, but I desperately want every single person getting gender affirming surgery to be aware of, and have a plan for post operative depression.
They are owned by the same corporation as bittorrent and are practically identical in all but name these days. They are proprietary, closed source, have built-in ads, and use telemetry to track usage. They are a privacy nightmare and a scourge on the torrent ecosystem.
qBittorrent is open source, full of features, modern, has a wonderful community, easier to use, has less cruft, natively cross platform, and tends to be more secure in their usage of up-to-date dependencies.
Bonus: if you need to use a VPN for any reason go to settings -> advanced -> and select the VPN as the only available adapter, this makes it so it can ONLY download or upload (seed) via your VPN. This stops the need to make sure you have your VPN on or accidentally leave it off when using P2P networks to help preserve your privacy.
Dysphoric? Tired of being seen as the wrong gender? Tired of feeling lost and depressed? Perhaps it’s finally time for a change. Be who you want to be.
The DIY HRT Directory offers transgender individuals comprehensive guidance on safely performing DIY hormone replacement therapy, including
for a transgender woman your 20s are for struggling and suffering and clinging to the tiny scraps of joy you've foraged. they're for watching your life burn down and then rebuilding it and watching it burn down again and wondering if it will ever stop burning down. it doesn't feel like it will ever end, but after lying in your despair enough times you will start to notice that the scraps you've been collecting are forming a modest little pile. and, though you're left again with nothing but those little gold flecks, they are what will form into your halo when you turn 30
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.
repeat after me. humans are not inherently evil humans are not like a virus on this earth humans do not “deserve” to go extinct or anything like that. we are living breathing animals that deserve space just like every other creature on this planet. there’s just a tiny amount of us that have a fuck ton of money and power and they really suck
Omg "humans are a virus" pisses me off specifically sooooo much. If humans on earth were like anything in a body they would be bacteria. There are many bacteria in a person! We evolved to have bacteria in us!!! The bacteria NEED to be there to keep the body functioning. It's when bacteria behave in ways that disregard the health of the host that we have problems
Humans are animals like any other animal. We have the ABILITY to exist in harmony with our ecosystem. The current issue is like if 0.001% of the bacteria that help break down your food suddenly started forcing other bacteria to start eating your tissue instead
Or: Humans are not a virus infecting a body. Humans are symbiotic bacteria. The mindless hoarding of wealth is a bacteriophage
Why do I have to put a title here uhhhhhh @malikriku - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
