funniest convo ever with a guy who said 2 me "nobody uses journalism degrees" and i said "my mom has a bachelors in journalism" and he smiled like knowingly and said "yeah, but what does she do?" and i said "she runs a newspaper and publishes romance novels on the side." and he literally said "oh" and nothing else. like he ended the whole conversation there.
i've just been informed he has a trombone degree. like the study of playing trombone. which is all well and good, i genuinely think we should all have the opportunity to chase our academic bliss but i do think the trombone studies guy should hesitate to judge the economic value of other people's degrees no
āthe millenium falcon would wipe out the enterprise in secondsā lmao the enterprise is just an innocent science class floating thru spaceā¦. all they wanna do is look at some rocksā¦ kiss an alienā¦. find some space plantsā¦.. why would you fight that its not a battleship theyre just nerdsā¦ā¦ leave them oloneĀ
So while itās true that the Enterprise is not as big as people think, that goes double for the Falcon!
A good way of thinking about the relative size is by using a bridge comparison:
The Enterprise bridge has space for 11 people to work, as well as a significant amount of space between stations to move around comfortably:
[Bridge illustration by Tobias Weinmann viaĀ here]
And the whole thing fits in the nipple thing up on top of the saucer:
Meanwhile the Falcon (beloved weed bus) has a cockpit that seats 4, with only 2 main operational stations, and zero floor space:
And since Serenity was mentioned tooā¦
Serenity has a bridge more comparable to La Sirena - with 2 stations at the front and quite a bit of floor space.
And for those interested in a visual comparison:
(Boeing 747 for scale as well as the Delta Flyer because Why Not)
TLDR: The Millennium Falcon is pretty dinky, so I propose *true weed bus status*Ā goes to the excellent smuggling ships of Serenity and La Sirena. The Falcon is herby demoted toĀ man on his weed bicycle with his pet monkey and a gun
(to be clear the monkey is Solo)
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.
wow dude jts so awesome that your car is loud as fuck and smells worse when it drives past. thags fucking epic man. i really like how it hurts to listen to you drive past and it scares people. thats awesome man. i really like your car that makes a loud as fuck fart sound. fucking epic dude
seems like tumblr finally realized the bad optics of not having the trans colors represented anywhere in their little performative pride like animation.
anyways transfems are still being banned en masse from this website for āany reason or no reason at allā and having their accounts taken down again and again when they attempt to remake. this includes accounts that had originally been around for over a decade, after they did nothing but get a bit too loud about being transfem. donāt shut up about it.
Maybe Iām just built different but if Sigourney Weaver put rattlesnake venom-laced nail polish on and stroked my face like that Iād ask her to shove her fingers in my mouth
I love you disabled girls. I love you scared girls. I love you dysfunctional girls. I love you sad girls. I love you hurt girls. I love you trans girls. I love you racialised girls. I love you lonely girls. I hope you find people who love you and care for you like you deserve. I hope you find people who will hold you and let you hold them. I love you.
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