so exhausted by how fundamentally anti-human the capitalist world has become. like ageing, getting fat, being slightly inefficient, and making mediocre art are all extremely normal and extremely human activities, why is every corporation trying to convince us to spend all our money fighting that
I feel so many feelings about Rocky during the first contact. He wants to connect SO BADLY. Do Eridians have horror stories about scary aliens? If they do, Rocky doesn't care. He wants this alien to be friendly. He does everything he can to accommodate. Here, a little gift I'm sending your way at the speed you're comfortable with. Please be there. Here, the next gift is going right into your airlock so that it's easier for you to catch. Please don't fly away. You made a strange gesture with your limb, I'll make my robot make that gesture back. Please belive that I'm friendly. Here's a tunnel to connect us, I'll make sure you can breathe in it. Please come meet me. I'll let you choose the material for the wall separating us; I'll rebuild the whole wall if it makes you more comfortable, no trouble, just please let's talk. You're all alone on your ship, I can hear it, please come sleep here where I can watch you, it's unsafe for you to be alone. I'm alone and scared, it's been 46 years since I felt safe while sleeping, please please please watch me sleep too. I'm very vulnerable when I sleep and I trust that you won't use it against me. I want to visit your ship, am allowed, question? I'm moving in with you. Let's save the stars.
I think we are focusing on the wrong thing when talking about mainstream romantasy adult books, instead of shaming straight cis women for reading kinky books, we should tralk about how most of the newer books aimed at that demographic are just conservative propoganda, rebranding patriarchy as a kink.
There's nothing inherently wrong about liking the types of kinks that are present, control, power imbalance, dark themes, but when you really look at the top performing novels (which they are mass prodicing at questionable speeds) it's hard to ignore the ever present morally grey man, who's posessive over the heroine who starts off as otherworldly different from the 'regular woman' aka damsel in distress), is cruel to everyone except her, and the fantasy world revolves around the control of women, especially when it comes to forced pregnancy.
I'm seeing a lot of responses to this saying "this is why I read queer stories" but you're missing the point! You can relate to queer media because you're queer, cis straight women should also have material that aren't turning their opression into kinks in almost every. single. book. If they want to choose to read those stories, that's absolutely fine, again nothing wrong with exploring those dynamics, but the concerning part is how fast they're being made with the rise of booktok, and the looming threat to women's autonomy.
Remember when all mlm stories were borderine assault stories in the early 90s-2000s? and how long it took for other queer stories to be made? we all used our voices to make a change, it didn't magically stop we fought for it to not be the only type of story.
And the solution to this, for people who are wondering, isn't to try to suppress romantasy books because they're not "good for women." That's an old, old game and never goes anywhere good. The solution is not less kink and less porn. The solution is more kink and more porn.
Because when you think about it, the problem isn't that you can go to your chosen bookseller and find a story where Sparklia Special gets semi-forced to have babies for Broody McDarkenfay (it's okay, she's into it). The problem is that it is unnecessarily difficult to look a little further down the shelf and find a vampire princess domming the hell out of the hunter who knows he shouldn't love her. Reducing people's choices always serves the reactionary agenda one way or another. Expanding choices. That's where it's at.
(If this sounds like I am making a pitch that we should write porn to defeat fascism, that's…not entirely a mischaracterization. I mean, of course it won't defeat fascism, but I do feel that while we work to defeat fascism, we should at least have diverse and satisfying porn.)
truly dads with new born babies v dads with children are two completely different people this man used to strap this child to his chest with a double chest wrap because he was terrified of giving her shaken baby syndrome and now he just kinda hucks her , I'll be sitting on the bed and all of a sudden my child just comes soaring towards me
Husband when child was newborn: you are my beautiful soft amazing little creature and I will be so gentle and lightly clean you softly and sing you sweet songs
Husband now that child is 4 years old: carries feral child upside down into the bathroom telling her she is a smelly little beast and she has to wash her butt while she sings him songs about spraying him with the shower head
Husband when child was newborn: "bath time and bed time is my special one on one time with my sweet baby angel where I tell her how special and soft and sweet she is and spend much needed time relaxing and getting her to relax and snuggling"
Husband now that child is 4 and "sturdy" (his words not mine): "bath time is my special time for hand to hand combat with my warrior princess where I teach her how to throw a punch and try to exhaust her enough that she passes out until tomorrow, and if that doesn't work I just start making deals like she's a mob boss and I am a desperate flunkie"
Husband when child was newborn: here is your hypoallergenic formula heated to the exact temperature that you need to have the thickening agent activate in a ulta double sterilized bottle my miracle NICU baby, it takes 25 -35 minutes to make but it is what we must do to keep you safe and healthy.
Husband now that child is 4: "I had to make her a breakfast snack of two eggs and toast before we go out to brunch because she was gnawing on the bars of her enclosure and I am frankly terrified of the small piranha she becomes when hangry."
"Now I've shot so many Nazis, Daddy will have to buy me a sable coat." (From his Wikipedia article).
Neil Munro "Bunny" Roger
June 9, 1911-April 27, 1997.
Bunny Roger killed a bunch of Nazis and then invented Capri pants.
He was expelled from Oxford for his indiscrete gayness (discrete gayness being perfectly fine at Oxford and part of the curriculum until...today probably, at least like 1992?). Then, having been sent down to London, he started his own fashion business, and his first client was Vivien Leigh.
Bunny served in WWII, killing fascists in North Africa and Italy, and often wearing a mauve scarf in the field. Roger claimed that he had gone into a battle brandishing a rolled-up copy of VOGUE and commanding: "When in doubt, powder heavily!"
From an obituary: "Beneath his mauve mannerisms, Bunny was stalwart, frank, dependable and undeceived; to onlookers a passing peacock, to intimates, a life enhancer and exemplary friend."
“Do it scared” “do it alone” are all great tips, but my biggest takeaway from therapy is do it messy. This is especially true if you’re getting out of a burnout, which I experience often. Literally just do it messy. You don’t need to pick the perfect trail to walk, the perfect playlist to listen to, whatever the fuck it is. You don’t need to have a meticulous to do list and wake up at the exact time you planned and drink the exact amount of water you planned to drink. Like the biggest thing for people like me to remember is sometimes it’s okay to do it messy. Put on a random yt workout and just get it done in sweats. Do 5 minutes of a daunting task and go from there. Sometimes just getting up is a win during intense burnouts or depressive funks. Literally just do it messy.
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 watched a 2-year-old for the weekend. Mom claims 2yo is pretty emotional and cries often. Don’t really see that during stay. Occasional normal kid stuff but always resolved quickly. I noticed she occasionally asked to play on her iPad but as a babysitter I felt it was more responsible for me to say “not right now, we’re going to [activity, game, tidy up].” So there was no iPad or TV for three days. And a lot of it was independent play. She would color and read and play with toys without me for long stretches. (Once she told me she was “busy” and she was just observing a keychain and taking in its contours.)
Her mom and dad return and give her iPad on first request. She plays with it peacefully while adults talk. Mom moves to take it away for bedtime and it’s immediate tantrum. Screaming and crying tears. The screaming continues all the way to bathtime and bed. Mom and Dad have to cajole her with a snack and lots of attention for about twenty minutes before her crying stops.
Now, I want to be fair to these parents: toddler is overwhelmed by Mom and Dad returning from a, by her standards, “long” time away. It’s getting late, toddler is tired and maybe actually did need that snack. Toddlers also just act different around babysitters than they do mom and dad.
But for a toddler who was a pleasant and attentive kid for three days to dissolve into tantrum of that length as soon as she is reunited with and then separated from her iPad freaks me out. She is not a teen upset she can’t communicate with her friend. She’s not even a grade-schooler who didn’t save their Minecraft world. She’s a toddler who is distressed by being separated from an overstimulation machine.
Her parents have convinced themselves it’s a tool and a convenience by handing it to her and gaining silence at mealtimes and car rides and every request when she’s a bright kid who can spend just as much time with a book as with a screen, with much less distress at separation.
Idk, maybe there are people out there who are actually having great experiences with their kids with iPads but if I wasn’t turned off from iPads before, damn I am now. I felt so WEIRD and UPSET seeing that sweet kid scream like that. It was totally against everything I knew about her personality, but totally in line with everything her mom had warned me about.
You know what trope I wanna see more of? Couples who have been married forever who are estranged but still in love but estranged. You know me better than any other person on earth. I haven't seen you in three years. I never stopped loving you. If I have to spend another minute in your presence I will murder you. I'm hurt and I need you right here with me. God you're such a dumbass. You're the only one I trust to do this job. I want you out of my sight.
gummygunk
blakekathryn
kianamaiart
