Shard's Random Ranting

Hey there! I'm Shard, and I like doing various things. I wrote for a recent Soulslike game called Immortal Planet, and working on a novel called Dragon Descent. I'm an aspiring Game Developer, writer, and trying to learn how to draw! On here, I mostly reblog funny stuff for my friends, but once in a blue moon I'll post something original.

[quietwingsinthesky]

we’re so lucky that gilgamesh survived and is a banger. can you imagine if we found the oldest written human story ever recorded and it sucked balls.

[mkfshard]

If it sucked, it wouldn’t have been remembered. Which, funnily enough, is basically the thesis statement of gilgamesh

[venovenous]

peace and love on Earth..

[tamamita]

I don't think we're bullying Airy enough tbf

[tamamita]

Unfortunately, most of my mutuals would rather be in the same situation, so to rephrase it, I'M not bullying Airy enough

[dark-hell-princess-tamamolandia]

[tamamita]

THEY KILLED HER FOR THIS

[tamamoland-dark-queen-of-gehenna]

[trickstar-tamamolandia]

[demon-queen-tamamolandia]

[tamamita]

...

[tamamita]

What the fuck is happening??

[tamamolandael]

[magi-magi-tamamoland-chan]

[magia-tamamoland]

[the-tamamoland-of-ill-omen]

[eye0ewe]

7 dead accounts. Zero violations. This is retributive.

[atelier-tamamoland]

10 actually with 12 terminations and 0 appeals granted

[underpaid-tamamoland-employee]

[dark-spirit-tamamoland]

first day of pride month they randomly terminate a transfem's account for literally no reason no email no nothing

[tamamowand]

this is a really good look for your shitass website matt

[tamamoland-with-a-gun]

[novembermorgon]

[powerofpridebundle]

It's here! The Power of Pride Bundle 2026 is now live on Itchio! All in support of 284 queer creators and their 396 creations.

View the bundle on Itchio here (until July 6):

$60 Bundle: https://itch.io/b/3682/the-power-of-pride-bundle-2026-60-edition

$10 Pay-What-You-Can: https://itch.io/b/3684/the-power-of-pride-bundle-2026-10-pwyc-edition

[mkfshard]

My game Deadbeat is part of this bundle! :D Check it out, there's a lot of good stuff! Happy Pride Moth!

[doyoulikethis-videogame-song]

Do you like this Video Game Song? #3105

I like it and I've definitely heard it before

I like it and it sounds familiar

I like it and this is my first time hearing it

I don't feel strongly about it or have a complex opinion

I don't like it and I've definitely heard it before

I don't like it and it sounds familiar

I don't like it and this is my first time hearing it

Remaining time: 1 day 6 hours

[beatricemeganblood]

[beatricemeganblood]

[beatricemeganblood]

[beatricemeganblood]

[beatricemeganblood]

[beatricemeganblood]

[beatricemeganblood]

[beatricemeganblood]

[beatricemeganblood]

[twistcmyk]

no, i do not have cameras in your home (yet)

[strawberry-crocodile]

every now and then i remember that my country is like, run by an apocalypse cult

[strawberry-crocodile]

"large swathes of the populace believe that they are the chosen people of a doomsday cult and that sometime soon in their lifetime the world will end and everyone they hate will be tortured while they get paradise" like okay. i'm living in a bad fantasy novel. like i just want these people to step back and realize that they're acting like villains in a shitty conan wannabe.

[starplanes]

Want to make your first audio drama? Need some help getting started? I wrote a book for you!

Get it here: https://talminear.com/#howtomakeaudiodrama

[coyoteguuurl]

reminder that diy hrt is not only objectively safe, but in a deeply transphobic world, is imperative to the safety and longevity of trans people.

[coyoteguuurl]

Second time I've heard about diy being safer, so, in what way (s) is non-diy dangerous?

a few things:

pedantic, but the claim wasnt that diy is safe, wasnt that it is "safer", but in many ways it is.

doctors are often (read: almost always) uneducated on transgender health. from Continuing Gaps in Transgender Medicine Education Among Health Care Providers "few of [the endocrinologists] (11%) rated themselves as very compotent in transgender care. Consistent with their self report, only 5% correctly answered knowledge questions. Further, only 36% reported training in transgender care during endocrinology fellowship."

because of this, trans women are often prescribed doses of estrogen so low as to have very little feminizing effect. for example, the common dosing of 2mg daily estradiol tablets with 50mg daily spironolactone is generally not enough estrogen to dominate a woman's endocrine system, but is enough to strongly weaken her testosterone, which is likely to cause harm (your body needs a dominant hormone, it doesn't care if it's estrogen or testosterone, but not having either is directly dangerous). these doses also fail to meaningfully decrease risk of depression and its symptoms (self harm, suicide, etc).

in a deeply transphobic world, where trans rights are constantly under massive threat, anything which can give care to trans women is imperative to their safety.

[mkfshard]

for example, the common dosing of 2mg daily estradiol tablets with 50mg daily spironolactone is generally not enough

It annoys me that I was started out with 1mg daily doses, 0.5 in the morning and 0.5 in the evening... definitely gonna insist on an increase.

[justalurkr]

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.

[irispurpurea]

This is the paper. It's excellent, highly recommend reading it.

I remember reading about Gebru's firing but I had no idea this was the paper she was fired over.

[creatingblackcharacters]

""I'm going to kill myself because that's exactly what you want and will make you happy and I will teach you a lesson when the whole world learns about it."

The email continued, describing how he was going to kill himself (with a Glock that he kept at home) and reiterating that it would be my fault. He then ended with a racist tirade, calling me a "worthless monkey bitch."

...A few weeks later I received another email from a different sender. The message, with slight wording differences, was essentially the same. This white man was going to kill himself and I was to blame. A few days later I got a similar message via Twitter messenger. A few days after that, another email.

As the threats of suicide piled up, I began to see a coordinated campaign to harass me, and is disturbing as he was, it was also sadly fascinating and what it revealed. These men were trying to terrorize me with what they saw as the only logical conclusion to my anti-racist, feminist work: the mass suicide of white men. They wanted me to know that they saw my work to end violent misogyny and white supremacy, and they saw that it was as a threat, not only to their norms and their status but to their very lives.

These men wanted me to know that they were miserable, they felt screwed over, and they felt demonized. They wanted me to know that the only option available to address white male patriarchy was either to maintain the status quo that was making us all miserable, or death. They wanted me to know that they were not capable of growth or change in that any attempts to bring about that growth or change would end them."

Conclusion- Mediocre, Ijeoma Oluo

[fuzzy-oooze]

There's this really obscure forgotten DC hero named the Heckler, who's basically buggs bunny as a superhero, not having any powers or physically strong, but just really good at pissing people off until they accidentally deal with themselves.

Now they're interesting, but the REAL star of the show is one of his villains, John Doe the Generic Man, who's this guy in a stark white suit with flat pink unshaded, untextured skin with no features or anything who talks like chatGPT and has black text over his face that explains what he's feeling at the moment. That guy is fucking fascinating.

[depsidase]

[maddiesharafian]

A Blacksmith’s Dream

[slitherpunk]

but do you play shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less 🤨

[slitherpunk]

the thing about "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding" is that these games exist and are out there and you have to make the conscious choice to seek them out instead of just expecting the big companies to deliver this, because they will not

[slitherpunk]

addendum

[mkfshard]

(...psssssst) (I made a game that fits every single criteria)

(it's gonna be part of this itch bundle when it releases)

(so buy it please!)

The Power of Pride Bundle 2026 — $10 PWYC Edition: 395 items for $10.00

(it's even on the front page, which I am :0c! about!!)

(If you buy it in this bundle, lemme know and I'll also throw a Steam key your way!)

(seriously, I am low-key desperate for more people to give me their honest thoughts on the game :y)