Reposting this because this motherfucker has the settlement and just won't fucking pay me. I have permanent stress related nerve damage now. I have a broken fucking tooth.
My landlord is going to start the eviction process this week. Next week I owe 500 dollars in other fees. I can't pay it. I'm fucking drowning because of this piece of shit. I've been drowning. Its just now I'm about to lose any ability to get back up.
One of my hands is now almost entirely numb. I have these constant electric nerve spasms because everything is so fucking tightened up. Because I'm so stressed. Because this has been going on for months I keep getting sicker and sicker and sicker and can't fucking recover.
I just want it to be over, you know? One way or another.
I can't even begin paying the stuff I owe. I've been trying and trying and just nothing fucking works.
I don't expect anything. Don't expect to get funds. I've had to ask a lot because of how dire this has been.
I'm just. I'm trying. Last week I had a fever for half the week and couldn't move for most of a day because of the stress nerve spasms.
I need to go to the doctor. I need to get my broken tooth fixed. I've spent weeks in like, constant pain.
And this motherfucker just. Keeps lying to me.
Here's the link for my PayPal thing.
Its really scary and sad, ultimately, the situation im in. Knowing that until this stabilizes im not getting better. It sucks. I need medicine and I can't get it.
My birthday is this weekend and I just wish I weren't here for it. I'm trying really hard. It just isn't enough. I'm not giving up but christ man it hurts so much all the time.
Early concept art from the art book of the character that would eventually become Tempest Shadow.
In the original script, she was a male unicorn named Cosmos, the long-lost brother of Celestia and Luna. He was an extremist trying to summon a monster known as the Storm King. Cosmos was shrouded in intimidating battle armor, and the reveal that he was a pony and a long lost relative to the sisters was meant to be a big spoiler.
Another concept for the character was a wild pony living alone in the wastelands south of Equestria, a neutral party that gets roped into the story thanks to the main six.
A lot changed between the first and final version of Tempest, as you can see. :v
idk guys sometimes you just have to accept a ship dynamic is unhealthy, insane, and sometimes abusive. and its not real people so those factors just make it interesting
please stop unfolding the origami crane and smoothing it out bc you got worried the paper was hurting from the bends
I'm fascinated by how the animators for TADC handle Caine's impossible anatomy so well. There's so much to balance and they've somehow engineered a solution for his expressions to hold during speech.
I also traced Caine answering the phone from episode 4 to demonstrate his phonemes and mouth shapes.
I posted a list of free Hammer Horror films on Horror Media Discussion Group and @human-consentipede said I should make a rebloggable version. Well, your wish is my command, and so y'all now have a bunch of Hammer Horror to watch.
The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) - YouTube
The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964) - YouTube
The Curse of the Werewolf (1961) - Internet Archive
The Devil Rides Out (1968) - Internet Archive
Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) - Internet Archive
Dracula (1958) - Internet Archive
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) - Internet Archive
Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966) - Internet Archive
The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) - Internet Archive
Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) - Internet Archive
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) - YouTube
Kiss of the Vampire (1963) - YouTube
The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974) - YouTube
The Phantom of the Opera (1962) - Internet Archive
The Plague of the Zombies (1966) - YouTube
The Quartermass Experiment (1955) - YouTube
The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1972) - Internet Archive
Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) - Internet Archive
The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960) - Internet Archive
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’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Hippie church moms donating quinoa chips to my local food bank have done more for me materially than any internet idealist ever has.
People get pissed at me for being a pragmatist in my political ideals but I’ve been in the position where I was out of food right now.
And who helped me with that? Not people calling for some nebulous revolution. Not people telling me that the system was useless. Not people preaching at me to grow my own food. It was a church food bank partially funded by the state of Texas that some southern hippies donated a bunch of Whole Foods nonsense to.
And you know what? I’m sick and tired of defeatism. What can we get done right now, huh? Are you gonna accept something a bit better to help people right now or are you waiting for your perfect utopia to come to you?
Yeah, UBI is better than the quinoa chips. Sure. But right now the quinoa chips are stopping people from going hungry and if all we can do is get the food bank quinoa chips to more people, then I say so be it. That’s something. I’ll almost always take baby steps over nothing.
pros of eating your lunch outside on a nice spring day: feeling the sun, getting vitamin d, hearing birds chirping, watching the bees and the lizards and the squirrels
cons of eating your lunch outside on a nice spring day:
Me, tears streaming down my face, sobbing, as I stare at the stars: it’s just so beautiful
The medieval peasant I went back in time to give a bag of Doritos to, concerned: what terrible and powerful sorcerers they must have in your age, to be able to veil the vault of heaven itself from view, as you say
Me, sniffling: I didn’t realize, I can’t, it’s so much, I, I… are the chips good, at least?
Medieval peasant, trying to make me feel better: they’re… magical, strange traveler
