Silly Little Fandom Blog!!

I’m an adult This is a blog about my OCs and favorite medias!!

[notsoscarystudios]

I feel silly not having a pinned post so here we go !!

I’m Shane, I use he/him pronouns, and I’m living my best life 💪

I run some rp blogs…

Feel free to dm, send me asks, or any other silly things!! I’ll try to respond as much as possible‼️

[guceubcuesu]

hey

Watchu got there

[carry-on-my-wayward-butt]

a skull that connects to my spine hbu

[kanenekono]

Best comment ever

[what-even-is-thiss]

I often think about this time I was talking to a friend while she was smoking (politely downwind of me because I have asthma) and she said “I’m not a smoker. I only smoke when I drink.”

And then I, knowing her, asked her “Okay, how often do you drink?”

And she paused for a moment and then went “almost every day.”

Okay. So you’re a smoker then.

[what-even-is-thiss]

I love my friends they are very smart people but because they are people they sometimes miss things

[what-even-is-thiss]

Being the only person who doesn’t do drugs or regularly drink in a friend group of writers and artists sure is an experience let me tell you

[what-even-is-thiss]

I’ve witnessed a bunch of drunk creative and well read people decide to smoke weed out of a bell pepper and be disappointed that it didn’t taste spicy.

My friends. My stupid beautiful drunk and wonderful friends. There is no capsaicin in bell peppers.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Being around well educated and kind drunks also leads to situations that include sentences like “Hey I have some of that clean heroin leftover from the harm reduction center. Do you wanna try it?”

No thank you but I’m glad that the heroin that you’re doing is from a safe source. I love you.

[redstonedust]

i keep using 'blorbo' to refer to my own OCs to the point i forget its supposed to be a fandom term. yeah i know blorbo from my shows. and those shows? only airing inside my own brain and the dms of a few lucky friends, baby.

[boringkate]

You listen to music regularly? Why? Have you even tried quitting? Could you quit? You get music stuck in your head? Wow. You're so ruined and music brained. I bet you make your partners listen to music with you when you have sex. Music addiction has really ruined a whole generation. You know it's not realistic to expect reverb in real life, right? You're probably so desensitized that you don't even feel anything anymore when you hear a bird singing that it wants some fuck.

[paradigm-adrift]

I don't have a problem with people listening to music per se, but I do have a problem with the music industry exploiting & mistreating artists.

Personally, I abstain from all music in order to keep my hands clean but really music should just be illegal outright to protect musicians from abuse.

[terramythos]

holy shit this person in the notes

[discodyke-dogthing]

[devoidery]

[tarathia]

@entities-of-posts

The Extinction?

[entities-of-posts]

Seconded

[plume]

Remember when you could just close a fucking ad

You didn’t have to wait through the ad trailer for the x to appear, and then when you hit x you didn’t have to wait for the playable ad from the trailer to finish counting down before the x appears and then when you smash in fury that you don’t have to wait for the fucking App Store page for the ad to time out before another fucking x mocks you like oh maybe this time you can fucking get out of the fucking ad

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

You read stories about people being unable to accept ageing and crashing out by buying sports cars or pushing themselves too far athletically or whatever but my Refusal To Accept Ageing sticking point is that I just can't accept that I don't like sugar and junk food very much any more. I ate two chocolate muffins this morning and that was 1.75 muffins too many. I'm like "nooo I love sweet desserts I remember being super into sweet desserts" and the memories are from when I was like twelve. I like chicken salad now. I like carrot sticks. I eat carrot sticks and think "wow I'm really indulging today, carrots are one of the more sugary vegetables" and remind myself to make cucumber sticks next time. I bought a capsicum yesterday so that tonight I can eat plain white rice with charred capsicum and onion as a topping and I am genuinely looking forward to it. I MIGHT, if I am feeling adventurous, add a fresh tomato from the garden.

[thisisneededfmr]

You have orthorexia. Just eat. It’s not dissertation worthy.

When the lizard part of your brain remembers that sugar exists, nothing bad will happen if you have a treat.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

It must be great to have the psychic ability to armchair diagnose random strangers with serious eating disorders based on a single silly tumblr post, but I assure you that I do not have orthorexia, I have a changing taste palate, which is a perfectly normal thing to happen to somebody approaching middle age. Not that it's any of your fucking business but I have treats regularly, and just finished a tasty homemade mini pizza in fact. I'm sure it's difficult to see the details of other people's lives from up on your high horse, especially when they're people you don't know anything about, but someone approaching their forties finding that they now enjoy a ceasar salad more than a mars bar is not a symptom of an eating disorder. Sometimes people's tastes change and those tastes are different to yours. But thanks for the actively harmful and dangerous unsolicited advice, the way it was delivered with such confident condescension was so very helpful, and is also definitely how you should speak to a stranger with an actual eating disorder, should your random armchair diagnosing actually land accurately someday.

[werewolf-transgenderism]

I literally CANNOT read the words "supine" or "prone" in anything without thinking about that post that's like "supine is when you lay on your s(u)pine and prone is when you lay on your pronis"

[segamascott]

[unconventiononthelawofthesea]

atheist quarterback throws a hail darwin

[akindlyowl]

agnostic quarterback throws a hail maybe

[yanmagotchi]

christian pitcher throws a christian baby

[qqchurch]

[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.

[shi1498912]

Here is Gebru's paper if anyone wants to read it (X)

[lillie-garden]

the potion seller discourse is insane. cop walks into a chemist's lab and demands pure undiluted morphine. chemist says hey i don't make this for human consumption. cop insists repeatedly, crying, shitting himself. in no way is the potion seller in the wrong here.

[lillie-garden]

"the potion seller is an asshole who should have just given the knight the potion!"

you would not last 1 day in customer service

[redwaltz]

No, see, he's an asshole for not giving the cop the potion to kill himself with.

[lillie-garden]

See i would absolutely agree with this take but being directly responsible for killing the Knight would tarnish the Potion Seller's name across the kingdom. + the Knight is insisting he's going to die in battle anyways.

[lillie-garden]

clearly this is why your url is pretend-wizard 🙄 we don't know that the potion seller can't make potions that let knights handle stronger potions, all we know is that the potions that the potion seller does have are too strong. if he is effectively a pharmaceutical supplier, he probably would be supplying to other potion sellers lower down on the chain to sell distilled & diluted versions of his potions. but this, like everything, is simply an inference. with our limited facts at hand, i choose to side with the worker rather than the landed gentry.

[helpeverythingiscats]

I once made a potion that kills you but the undying one drank it and lived and it ruined my reptutation so now i'm forced to weave small coats for beetle grubs. i cant complain the beetles have good money but now whenever im spotted on the street the peasants mock me and call me beetleboy

[lillie-garden]

hi beetleboy LOL hows your beetles. loser

[helpeverythingiscats]

[i-like-reblog-maps]

What month were you born in?

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Voting ended onMay 28

Doing a final project in my stats class, we have to pick a subject and collect data on it. We need at least 100 data points, and I figured this blog is big enough that a poll on here could get to that pretty easily!

Doing my project on if it’s more likely to be born in certain months :]

I have gotten the OK from my teacher to collect data using a Tumblr poll, btw. I’m also going to have to send her this post as proof of where I got the data from / proof I didn’t just make up the numbers. So. Behave

[edgar-allan-possum]

[agendermetalbender]

[what-even-is-thiss]

The way I’ve figured out how to frame my urbanist arguments to people irl who are scared of being forced to give up their cars or something is talking about the lack of choice.

The way that a lot of car centric cities are designed leaves no freedom of choice for how to get around. Isn’t that unfair?

In mostly pedestrian or transit centric cities like New York or Tokyo or something there are still people who own cars. It’s perfectly possible to get around with a car.

In fucking Houston or whatever though there isn’t much of a choice. If you don’t want to get around without a car you suffer. The environment is actively hostile and dangerous for you.

Shouldn’t people have choice in how they live their lives? Right now where I live public transit is something for the desperate. Not an everyday form of transit. Isn’t that bad? Isn’t that an injustice?

Should you be forced to take on the expensive burden of a car to exist in this city? Shouldn’t the disabled and the young and the poor also have an easy way of getting around?

Okay maybe you personally will never give up your car no matter what. Even if it becomes inconvenient. But what about everyone else? Isn’t it stupid that they have no choice? Shouldn’t there be options? Isn’t it infuriating that there’s a way to give people more freedom of choice in how they live their lives in this city and nobody is trying to improve on that?

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

the problem with not having watched anime growing up is that when I watch anime now I am suddenly assaulted with psychic blasts in which I recognize the source for all mannerisms and aesthetics of my peers

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

anime character: [does a gesture with his hand]

me: [involuntarily skyrockets backwards through time while screaming]

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

you guys I am having a fucking moment over here because I just started hunter x hunter and I am faced with the strong possibility that my old enemy from study abroad based his whole personality on one of the characters

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

is this how cosmic horror protagonists feel when they receive secret truths about the universe that unravel their sanity? because I don’t know if I can keep mine burdened with the knowledge that I spent six months of my life violently beefing with someone who kinned this guy:

[wainswright]

sorry for elevating the tags op im trying to reconstruct this scenario in my minds eye.

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

literally the first day I met him I was like “this guy talks and acts like he’s trying to be an anime villain” and somehow it didn’t occur to me that he was trying to be a specific anime villain.

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

he’s the guy from this post in which I really downplayed just how fucking weird he was because it distracted from the point of the story but oh my god. I swear to god he quoted lines from the show. he kept his fingernails filed into sharp points for slashing damage. he thought suddenly appearing behind you and grabbing you by the throat was a really funny way to greet you. do you know how much psychic damage I am taking from this revelation? do you know???? after our first fight he brushed himself off and said “oh what fun that was!” in this stupid voice, even though I’d kicked his ass. I can’t believe I thought I was maybe going to be murdered by an alcoholic hisoka kinnie. how do I un-know this.

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

hey! you’ll never guess what he’s up to now!

he works for the department of defense.