Make your own era-accurate Star Trek episode title cards in seconds. Boldly go!
The sitemaker (Josh Mayfield at https://bsky.app/profile/bean525.bsky.social) has asked for people to come in and kick its tires so he can work out any bugs they turn up. So do give him a hand, if you feel inclined. :)
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's one of many reasons that workers tell Polygon they are eager to unionize.
Employees and developers working on Magic: The Gathering Arena say they were hired with promises of remote flexibility, so they bought homes and built lives around those assurances. But they say they are now being told they may need to relocate to Washington state â or effectively lose their jobs.
Those concerns are a major reason why a supermajority of workers on the Arena team are attempting to unionize with the Communications Workers of America, under the banner United Wizards of the Coast. The group publicly launched its campaign on April 27, calling on Wizards of the Coast and parent company Hasbro to voluntarily recognize the union by May 1.
These employees are doing important and laudable work in response to being forced into a bad situation but Iâm glad they still took the opportunity to call themselves âUnited Wizardsâ
WotC has still refused to recognize the union and has escalated to sending organizers letters directly to their homes about how unionizing is a bad idea. Luckily, our United Wizards are educated, organized, and agitated and the form letter from Hasbro was as laughable as it was threatening.
If you want to help out the United Wizards you can sign this petition
random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google
I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.
also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo
also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)
i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:
Search Engines
Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy
DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)
WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to âcompute expert-level answers using Wolframâs breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.â A data search engine.
Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.
Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that wonât record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses â&â as a bang search.
Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that usersâ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines.Â
Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted.Â
Gibiruâs tagline is âUnfiltered private searchâ and thatâs exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy.Â
Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.
Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden.Â
MetaGer offers âPrivacy Protected Search & Findâ through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.
Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching.Â
Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar.Â
https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results.Â
https://www.mojeek.com/Â
https://wiby.me/ - Itâs goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites.Â
https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesnât have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think itâs the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.
https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.
https://yep.com/ is a crawler
https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx
https://www.dogpile.com/Â
https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)
https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?
https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?
https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.
Other Searchers
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine
Just mentioned this over at Bluesky: so why not here?
The lady who's the star of this video has won multiple competitions for baking the Schwarzwälder kirschtorteâthe Black Forest cherry(-booze) cakeâin recent years. She is plainly the queen of this art. Turn on the subtitles (the SWF Handwerkskunst subtitles are very good) and soak up the calm expertise.
...I have to go hunting for the associated links, but you can go to her family's place and do a course in baking this cake. (And don't think I haven't been tempted.) These folks are very serious about the quality of their product. Her husband is a distiller, and they distill their own damn kirschwasser for the cake.
BTW, I did a fair bit of research on the basic recipe back when I was preparing to post it on the old European Cuisines site... and ran into the fascinating info that it is illegal in Germany to call the cake Schwarzwälder kirschtorte if it does not contain the requisite/necessary booze. So if you're ever offered one without kirsch in it, you have an excuse to tease the local baker about that, if you feel so inclined. đ
*takes the hand of a period drama writer gently* A queen consort is not a queen regnant. A dowager queen is not a queen regnant either.
There is very little intrinsic institutional power in queenship. The power a consort, dowager, or queen mother has depends mostly on how much the reigning sovereign (usually a man) is willing to grant her. Needing a queen to serve as regent is exceptionally rare, and the regent is more often a male relative.
Queen regnant: woman who rules in her own right, not on behalf of someone else.
Regent: Someone who temporarily assumes the powers of the monarch on account of the monarch being too young or too incapacitated to govern.
Queen consort: Woman who is married to the monarch.
Dowager queen: Woman who was married to the monarch. The monarch is dead, and she is owed support as his widow.
Queen mother: Woman who is the mother of the monarch. Usually the dowager queen, though there are exceptions if there isn't a straight line of succession.
Longtime readers may be aware of how much I relish an excuse to bully a company, so I'm sharing the wealth;
Clothing company Patagonia is currently sueing drag queen Pattie Gonia for "irreparableâ harm to their brand.
To be clear; Pattie named herself after the region in South America.
So Pattie is asking people to politely ask Patagonia to drop the lawsuit.
I'm extending the invitation to all of you, because sueing a drag queen for 'infringement' in the current political cultural landscape is vile.
Especially a drag queen who has raised millions of dollars for non-profits, uses her platform to raise awareness for climate activism, and fully aligns with Patagonia's apparent climate-conscious mission statement.
They're claiming they're sueing for $1. They're actually asking her to stop using her name, and pay over $1 million in legal fees. They're straight up harassing her.
In contrast, drag queen Jan Sport has a Jansport bag line. It's that easy to just... work with a queen.
Anyway. Be respectful(ish), but feel free to be annoying on Patagnoia's socials, asking them to 'DROP THE LAWSUIT'
As a transsexual woman đŠ who has had multiple experiences âźď¸ I have found đ that the biggest block of cheese đ§ is usually the one âď¸ that has the largest size đ
red can mean whatever the heck you want it to mean, that is never going to change that this straight up looks like they DRAGGED A BLOODY BODY ACROSS THE FUCKING FLOOR đ
Hi fun fact, colors do have meaning and there is a legit thing called color theory. Red does has more positive connotations than negative like the @mintymaiden said. Red is associated with more love, lust, passion than blood and death just like the chart shows you but If you want, hereâs a link for you to check it out yourself. Also, check out âThe Designerâs Dictionary of Colorâ by Sean Adams. Have fun learning something
Xoxo
-Designer
What isColor Theory? Color theory is a term used to describe the collection of rules and guidelines regarding the use of color in art and de
I like that the presumption here is that âNo One On Tumblr Has Heard of Color Theory, Let Me Explain in Depthâ rather than simply acknowledging that the VISUAL EFFECTS of this particular color choice, applied in the manner it was, can still amount to âthis is a hospital and that looks like bloodâ
like, color theory doesnât exist in a vacuum. If your design of choice for Blood Red Paint is asymmetric splatters and sploches against the wall, or in this case, a snail trail on the hallwayâs floor, an infographic wonât override the viewersâ instinct.
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