Some AAVE speakers pluralize 'child' as 'childrens'. People get racist about this ("It's already plural!"), but 'children' actually comes from Middle English speakers doing the same thing: slapping their plural marker on word already pluralized by an extinct plural marker.
To oversimplify: in Old English, 'childer' ('ċildra') was the plural of 'child' ('ċild'). Middle English developed an '-en' plural marker, which we see in 'oxen'. Instead of updating to 'childen', people slapped their preferred '-en' onto the end of 'childer' - so now we have 'child-er-en'. AAVE carries on this tradition with 'child-er-en-s'.
"Pure" language is just impurity obscured by the passage of time.
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.
good art is when something looks like real life, the more real it looks the more better the art. abstracted figures give my trad children nightmares, one time they were exposed to cubism and couldn't go outside for a week
Huh fascinating, I wonder what the fash have against Eric Carle? I wonder what he might have said about his life, and influences, and early experiences that makes them say he’s part of an ‘insalubrious culture’?
Franz Marc (1880-1916) was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of the German Expressionist movement.
I would love to share this with everyone who may happen to see this post. Please support this wonderful human being. He spent nearly a half century in prison for a crime he never committed. And the only thing that kept him going was his artistic endeavors. He deserves the best life can offer anyone ❤️
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Hot damn. I picked up the Faber-Castell Black Edition colored pencils, because I saw a photo in a comparison review that looked cool as hell (and maybe blacklight reactive?), I love the edgy black wood look, I found some other reviews and comments recommending them as very affordable yet solid quality alternatives to Prismacolors, AND they apparently work super well on black paper (which I have some of, and have a few fun ideas for).
I've only tested them on printer paper so far, to make sure I get a general sense of how they work before I add them to the brand comparison charts I've set up for myself (in part because I'm giving one old set away, so I wanted visuals and notes for posterity). So I don't know how they'll look in person on black paper yet, nor how they'll act on fancier mixed media paper.
But hot fucking damn they have the SMOOTHEST visual texture at maximum pressure/when burnished (with a single color). Like, some of my Prismacolors are also that smooth-looking, but others have that speckled look that colored pencils often do. But the Faber-Castell's texture is nigh-undetectable across all 50 that I have, at least on printer paper.
(Also I need to test more, but I generally agree with the reviews that compared the feel to Prismacolors. They're not quite as creamy/buttery, but they are the smoothest of the handful of other brands I've got, especially with heavy pressure.)
(EDIT: I have finally added the Faber-Castells to my black paper chart, and alas, not a single one of them is blacklight reactive. That photo just had wild lighting and editing to kick up the contrast or something. But they're still SO smooth, gave me some colors I lacked, and are indeed super effective on black paper, so it was still worth it for me. Just the one bonus gimmick they lack, at least in the not-specifically-neon colors.)
Hornet design for @creatingblackcharacters 's DTIYS!
I really wanted to revamp her design since my first attempt I did a while ago, and this was a great opportunity to do so, I'm much more proud with this newer design :)
Some thoughts on the design
The cornrows design at the back of the head was supposed to resemble the body of a gold orb weaver spider (which was the spider I loosely based hornet on). As for the braids sticking out from the side buns, they're like the spider's legs. They have little white streaks at the ends to resemble the streak patterns that gold orb weavers have.
The inspiration for the hair was mainly from @risperihoe on TikTok.
As well as from the person's hairstyle on this image which I unfortunately don't know who it belongs to (if anyone knows whose is it, do tell me and I'll add the credit).
The lower braid was mostly to add a flowing element to her design aside from the cloak.
She has the spider mandibles on the sides of her face. They would open up when she's eating.
In regards to the outfit I wanted to make it more practical. Giving her partial armour in some of the more likely areas for her to get hit such as on the chest, legs and arms.
Another more practical element is the belt with bags where she can store everything she collects through her travels (although it relies on some game logic for it to fit all of the stuff she carries).
And the back holster where she can carry her nail without having to constantly hold it, giving her some more freedom of movement.
The white pattern on the edge of her cloak is embroidery. I imagine it would be a fun detail that when she's resting she embroiders her cloak to make it a bit more personal (I know she's more associated with weaving, and embroidery is a different thing but it was still a cute idea I really wanted to add ;u;).
What to actually do
If you get one of these, the answer is boring and it works every time:
Don't call the number. Don't reply. Don't click links in the email — not even the unsubscribe link. Open a fresh browser tab, type paypal.com yourself, and log into your account. Check your activity. You'll see either nothing, or a tiny incoming payment from a stranger that you can ignore.
Then forward the original email as an attachment to [email protected] and delete it. If you want to go a step further, report the phone number to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov — every report makes it slightly harder for these operations to keep running.
And if you've already called? Don't beat yourself up — these scams are designed by professionals to fool smart people. Hang up, run a malware scan if you installed anything they asked you to install, change your PayPal and bank passwords from a different device, and call your bank's real fraud line (the number on the back of your card) to flag your accounts. Move fast, but you don't need to panic.
from the above linked article. For the UK the email to forward phishing scams to is [email protected], texts can be forwarded on to 7726 (for free!) and as a victim of fraud you can report it here (or here for Scotland)
— If an email recently landed in your inbox with a subject line like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 for account activation. Questions? Call (855) 629-1161" — don't call that number. Don't click anything. And whatever you do, don't panic-dial to "stop the charge."
You're being targeted by one of the cleverest scams going right now, and the reason it works is uncomfortable: the email genuinely came from PayPal.
The trick is in the subject line, not the email
When most people think "phishing email," they picture sketchy senders, broken English, and links to weird domains. This scam is the opposite. The email passes every authenticity check — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, all green. It comes from PayPal's actual mail servers. The fonts are right. The footer is right. The unsubscribe link works. If you forwarded it to a security expert and asked "is this really from PayPal?" they'd have to say yes.
So how is it a scam?
Scammers have figured out that PayPal lets anyone send small amounts of money to anyone else, and that PayPal will dutifully email the recipient a notification. The scammer sends you a payout of, say, one Hungarian forint — about a quarter of a cent. PayPal's system then automatically generates and sends you a real, legitimate, fully-authenticated email confirming the transaction.
Here's the catch: the email's subject line is whatever the scammer typed when they set up the payout. PayPal doesn't sanitize it. So they write something terrifying like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 — call this number with questions" and PayPal's servers cheerfully deliver that subject line straight to your inbox, wrapped in a perfectly legitimate-looking notification.
The actual transaction in the email body is for 1 forint. There is no $987.90 charge. There never was. But by the time most people read carefully enough to notice that, they've already dialed the number. —
I love this creator and just from this pitch alone I'm sold. He describes that he wanted to create a more slice-of-life animated comedy about a Black couple that really hinges on how much they love and respect each other, citing other hit shows like Bob's Burgers as part of the inspiration. This launch trailer shows the theme song (which is beautiful by the way) and the utterly adorable designs <3 The whole team is putting in 110% so PLEASE go check out the launch trailer, leave a nice comment, and maybe send some money to the Kickstarter if you're feeling generous.
We need more Black voices in the indie animation space, especially in the wake of spikes of anti-Blackness and racism cropping up. And again, it's a project made with a lot of love with some real talent behind it- so go check it out for that alone.
HERE <- Is the link to the Kickstarter if you feel like donating or checking it out by the way!
Iiiiiiiiii saw @creatingblackcharacters design challenge and basically bumped my plans to draw these hedgehogs human designs at the top of the list.
Bonus quick edits under the cut cause i was thinkin about like, loading screens in video games and remembered i wanted a new header for my sonic blog 😎👍
Okay so I initially found this youtube channel via the end of this post, which shared this short video about a cute bee, and I have been having an absolutely DELIGHTFUL time watching through all the everything.
Chitin came up in one of the long videos as being not only what makes up bug and crab exoskeletons, but also FUNGI, and this short video brought up that it's ALSO the serrated bits on cephalopod suckers. So I am having a blast thinking about the incidental overlap in various forms the Filth has taken. It wouldn't actually BE chitin, because it's a supernatural substance, but. How cool that there's a real-world link between stuff like the draug and fungal Filth!
(Oh and also there was a long video about the design for the cordyceps in the Last of Us show, which involved identifying what various elements of different zombie designs were, and how much it did or didn't make sense. And how some of the mushrooms look like barnacles, another delightful draug parallel! And details about how cordyceps actually works! It makes me want to go look at the conglomerated fungal Filth critters again, see if I can recognize more minute details about their design now that I have learned some stuff...OH MAN THIS KINDA VALIDATES THE DRAUG AND FUNGAL FILTH PODS LOOKING THE SAME! I mean yes it's all Filth and fabricated so parallels are permitted but JUSTIFICATION VIA CHITIN)
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