anyway i think pride month is a good time to think about how lesbophobia and biphobia faced by women are not actually different types of bigotry in any concrete way, it's all just slightly different manifestations of the overlap between misogyny and homophobia that causes people to treat women like they are not a reliable authority on their own sexuality. its not that one type of queer sexuality is meaningfully more accepted its that asserting your own sexual identity as a woman is pretty much just seen as a threat to general society and will receive whatever pushback is easiest to reach for. unfortunately sometimes as a reaction to this we have a tendency to place the blame on each other for this treatment instead of realizing we're all crabs in the same bucket.
there are essentially zero experiences that a bi woman has had that a lesbian hasn't also, and vice versa. we don't gain anything from acting like we're two distinct groups with any real power imbalance or competing interests between them.
affirmations they will not kill me at work today. it is not in my job description to get killed. if they did kill me at work that would be weird and probably not worth it for them
people will describe their incredibly nebulous sexuality to you that theyâve never been able to define and the whole time youâre thinking that sounds like bisexuality brother
itâs like, on one hand I get that people have a lot of opinions about bisexuals (usually just biphobic attitudes imo) and why someone wouldnât want to associate with that baggage. But like itâs okay , you can be bisexual. No one cares, and if they do, fuck them they arenât you and they donât have to live your life. And you can change your mind â in fact other bisexuals are usually pretty chill about that. You actually arenât going to be hurting other people by trying on a label despite what some people might try to tell you
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.
it fucking sucks being a disabled person who can't work and having to see these fuckass posts where someone's like "ahaha jobless people have no life and that's why everyone shitty online has No Job" and everyone and their mother reblogs it joyfully onto my dash for me to see. yes unemployed and unemployable people are truly without exception dogshit people with no hobbies and no redeeming qualities. you're so right. anyway if you'll excuse me i have to start my shift at the I'll Never Be Employed Because Of Permanent Disability And I Love Knowing How You Really See Me store
btw this isn't solely a disability rights issue or an issue about people who are entirely unable to work. you should also be thinking about the people who are regarded as unhireable. transfems are hugely discriminated against in this way, people of color are passed over for less qualified white people, anyone who has any difficulty playing the interview game is less hireable... frankly anyone who made the mistake of pursuing the things they love and now has a degree for a niche field. if you still joke about Jobless People it's because you've fundamentally connected the worth of people to their labor, and specific labor, work that you see as valuable. and while i'm at it stop making fun of people who still live with their parents. asshole.
bunny is still there and apparently hasn't been adopted because she's very skittish and shy but so AM I
i assume they don't put cats on layaway but i might go this weekend to see if i can say hi, at least. and then bring her home on, like, june 5th when i'm all moved and settled if she's still there.
i would have been more specific if i knew this would blow up but i went to see bunny that weekend and she immediately reached her head out for me to pet her even though she never let strangers touch her and i ended up rushing to petsmart to buy a carrier and immediately take her back to my parents' house until i moved
she now waits in the shadows to run and jump into my lap every single time i sit down and says thank you for all your kind words in the tags
here are some more pictures just from the last month of her being the most cute
the thing is, stephen king is generally pretty good at creating complex, well-rounded characters, which makes it all the more jarring when one of those characters abruptly comes out with what i'll term a "kingism". i don't know how best to define a kingism other than "you'll know it when you see it". it's the voice of the author intruding on the voice of the character, and in this case the voice of the author has a bad sense of humour and is ravenously, inexplicably horny
one of the hallmarks of a kingism is that when a character is being Horny On Main (or In Maine), they can never do it in a normal way. they have to come up with a sequence of words that nobody has ever said before in the history of the english language. here's another example:
I do often think about how the origin of âhe would not fucking say thatâ was in reference to a post which depicted Cartman SouthPark responding politely when asked for his pronouns
meme phrases are so mobile and versatile and that's really really beautiful but i'm always thinking about the first "she x on my y til i z" being "she ebbin on my neezer til i scrooge" and the first "fork found in kitchen" coming from a tweet about sehun from exo being spotted at a gay bar. like sometimes you just utterly nail it the very first time and no variation of the joke is going to be better.
extremely annoying strain of latent ableism that takes the form of persistent "it's bad when people do things that are easy and don't do things that are hard" rhetoric made only more annoying by the fact that if you point this out people will immediately rush to tell you that obviously op was only talking about people who can do the hard thing and simply choose to do the obviously inferior soul-rotting easy thing instead, so you see it totally isn't ableist
so many common negative reactions to restorative justice seem to boil down to
strawman argument about how supporting restorative justice means you are promoting that every single individual abuse victim needs to love their abuser until they become a good person
thinking "restorative justice" is just "when bad people don't face consequences" with 0 further theoretical depth
thinking that restorative justice is just "when people get forgiven for doing a bad thing" with 0 further theoretical depth (and so if you think about it, restorative justice already exists! no need for any systemic or cultural changes actually!)
thinking "restorative justice" is means "no person or community is ever allowed to engage in self-defense ever"
thinking restorative justice, rather than being an overarching term for frameworks of justice that focus on restoration of wellbeing rather than punishment, is actually One Single Thing + if that One Single Thing has ever been done or ever could be done in a harmful way, then the entire concept of restorative justice can be said to "not work"
going "but what about the victims?????????????" as if victims of harm are currently thriving under the punitive justice model.
^ related to that: assuming everyone who advocates for restorative justice is a privileged white person who has never been abused or faced any serious form of harm or injustice (+ also assuming that every single victim of harm universally hates everyone who hurt them and wants them to suffer and feels they benefit from this system because fuck victims who don't have the "right" emotional response, + also assuming that the emotional response of victims of harm should be the ultimate deciding factor for how our entire system of justice works)
"this system doesn't intuitively make sense to me, a person born and raised entirely within the confines of a national and international society where punitive justice is heavily normalized and naturalized as the only way of managing a society, and in which morality is constantly framed as a black-and-white issue of Bad Person vs Good Person, and in which capitalism heavily incentivizes hyperindividualism, conflict, quick solutions, and emotional catharsis over long-term solutions that require a strong sense of community. all i'm asking for is that you give me a quick simple answer to my question fundamentally shaped by my current worldview that satisfies me right now without changing that worldview at all, and if you can't it means the entire framework of restorative justice is bad. that's all i'm asking!!!!!"
actually another one i've seen quite a bit is a person pointing at a social problem clearly caused by the western cultural status quo (which is heavily punitive) & somehow blaming that on restorative justice.
like. i've had multiple people in my notes doing some mental gymnastics to blame the current rise in fascism on restorative justice. they are scared and upset that society is being taken over by cruel selfish vindictive people and that is somehow the fault of people who think society would be better if we adopted an approach to society that didn't incentivize cruel selfish and vindictive behavior.
i think restorative justice is an interesting lens to hear people's implicit worldviews because of stuff like that. people clearly dislike the fruits of the dominant civilizational model, yet do not realize the extent to which they still believe in everything it says, they still think with the tools it created, their feelings are still shaped by that model.
like to go back to the justice of it all, a lot of people also seem to be very attached to the implicit idea that doing good or bad things is purely about individual willpower, and do not recognize that by pure accident of birth or circumstance any of us could've ended up believing and doing some truly terrible things. any of us could've been born in a deeply conservative family and community and been the type of person who trusts our community implicitly and never ended up finding any in person or online groups that challenged how we were taught to think and had experiences that we interpreted through that conservative lens that only entrenched our thinking. it is through many personal choices, yes, but but before any of that, pure dumb luck, that i am a leftist and that i started becoming one at a young age!
none of that means people aren't responsible for the harm their actions have done ofc. but i also have to make that disclaimer on every single post about restorative justice because the dominant civilizational model relies so much on black and white thinking and hyperindividual morality. hence my point. its so fucking hard to convince people of these things and meet their concerns when everyone has also such low awareness of belief systems & how they work that they can't see how extremely limited we can be by them.
i know that âdonât harass people for being weird, they might be autistic!â is a fairly popular take on here. but as a Certified Autist, iâd like to add that harassing allistic and/or neurotypical people for being weird is also bad, and should not be done
and before you come in with âyeah, you never know who is and isnât autistic, and you shouldnât force people to out themselves!â i want to say two things: one, i agree. and two, even if you could magically avoid ever harassing a single autistic person, it still wouldnât be okay to go after NTs for being weird. theyâre people, janice. theyâre allowed to be really invested in naruto
#stop playing the game of âwho is it okay for me to hurt?â #the answer is no one #the answer is ALWAYS going to be no one #none people is the correct number of people to hurt [X]
My anthro professor has three forbidden words for his essays: problematic, interesting, and large. Point being theyâre all filler words, he wants you to just skip straight to why itâs interesting or why itâs problematic. But anyway, any time I disagree with him in class I say to him âmm, interesting, but largely problematic.â
kianamaiart
andulkaphoto
gummygunk
titsay
germansingergirl
ellievsbear
origamiaround
