you can't come to my birthday party? aw dang, (remembers it's bad to guilt trip people) this doesn't matter to me at all (remembers to demonstrate that i am affected by you to affirm your positive presence in my life) but while you're away i will die (remembers not to guilt trip again) unpreventably. unrelated to you. don't worry about it. (remembers to express care through actions and not just words) you're in the will.
sometimes when I get mad online I have remind myself that the coolest and most reasonable friend I have doesn’t know who dril is and asked me to explain what the acronym “MCU” stands for, because she spends most of her free time watching documentaries about industrial disasters with her girlfriend and going to quarries to collect rocks together. a better world is possible and it’s out there right now
Me (A time traveler visiting 20-year old Mozart): OK, so, this is called an electric guitar, basically instead of the body functioning as a resonance chamber, it produces music by harnessing the power of lightning. Do you have any other questions?
Mozart (Currently shredding Violin Concerto No. 1 on the guitar, having figured it out within 30 seconds): What other music can be made from harnessed lightning?
Me (Loading up some heavy dubstep): Oh, we're just getting started.
practicing self care less out of self love and more for the sheer logical reasoning of it’d be kinda stupid of me to expect myself to be able to function without proper maintenance
“oh i don’t deserve rest and relaxation, i haven’t done enough, i haven’t earned it” and my car’s breaks don’t deserve break fluid because they aren’t breaking well enough to earn it. that’s what you sound like!!!!!
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.
I am so glad that I live in a world with trans women and trans men and nonbinary people and intersex people. Things are hard for all of us right now, but I love you all and I am wishing that things get better and easier for all of us! ❤️
do you have any niche (ish) book recommendations? basically anything that isnt popular with book influencers or part of an established canon. always looking for a way to broaden my horizon
all of these i’ve barely/never seen discussed online or found the old fashioned way (poking around a bookstore) <3
Lives of the Monster Dogs: a recounting of that time a bunch of scientifically enhanced anthropomorphic dogs in 19th century german fashion moved into new york city in 2008. obviously we all remember this but in case you want to relive it, their time in new york is recounted in letters, diaries, articles, and a full operetta!
Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories: a very strange and whimsical collection that feel like the grimm brothers take on a welcome to nightvale <3 nathercott is one of my favorite authors and her folklorist backgrounds really comes through in her writing! this also has beautiful illustrations.
Candelaria: i genuinely cannot even begin to describe this one it is so strange 😭😭 it’s a multigenerational novel except the generations are surviving a very strange apocalypse? theres a wellness cult? and zombies? if thats not your speed Lozada-Olivia also has an equally strange novel in verse called Dreaming of You, in which a woman copes with a break up by resurrecting Selena. yes that Selena.
The Fetishist: in short: a punk rock singer kidnaps the man she blames for her mother’s death. in long: a character driven work following Kyoko, the punk rocker, Daniel, the kidnapped and the fetishist, and Alma, the love of Daniels life and cello prodigy. really poignant book about love, music, and the fetishization of east asian women. This was also an unfinished work that Katherine Min’s daughter Kayla edited and published posthumously. if you pick it up a highly recommended reading Kayla’s afterword.
Meet Me at the Crossroads: this is about two sisters who grew up in a church that worships mysterious doors that open go another world. when one steps through disappears, the other is left with the mystery of where she went, and who she is on her own. Giddings is a very loved author but i think this one didn’t get as much love as her other novels bc its much more of a ghost story than the portal fantasy it seems a lot of people were expecting.
Catalina: a somewhat autobiographical novel about an undocumented girl’s experience at an elite college. Catalina is such a vibrant, ambitious, and complex character it’s impossible not to immediately fall in love with her. If you’re interested in nonfiction Villavicencio’s book The Undocumented Americans is also phenomenal.
if my pitched-down, chopped-up remix of the wii shop channel theme gets stuck in ur head as much as the original gets stuck in mine, then i’ve accomplished my goal. if not then fuck u
This is the character select theme for the chillest arcade cabinet racing game where every level takes place at 2am in the most inexplicably neon-lit city. Any time you crash into another object it just makes a satisfying “ding!” sfx that layers on top of the music.
As a kid you see seahorses in cartoons as actual underwater horses for the fish people to ride on and it makes u never really realize how fucking weird seahorses actually are. Forget the horse part and just look at this fish. It’s a serpentine type fish like an eel, with a tube shaped body, but it’s stuck in a stiff C shape and can mostly only articulate its head and tail. So it swims standing upright. With its weird tiny hummingbird fins. Is this weird to anyone else
it's also kind of hard to get until you see it but they are literally just barely wrapped around their skeletons. there is no extra meat there.
a tiny bony as hell animal with a prehensile tail that is incapable of swimming like other fish (so they cling to seaweed and coral). they can do mpreg. some of them are ambush predators. nobody does this like them
In the photo above, the person on the left is MSP Iris Duane, who is a trans woman and uses she/her pronouns. She is only 23 years old, considers herself a socialist, and had the goal of being the first trans woman of colour in Parliament.
On the right is MSP Q Manivannan, who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns. They are the one who now represents JKR. They are originally from Tamil Nadu, India and is studying for their doctorate!
