Jasper. they/them. 30s. historian, ecologist,
& reptile keeper in so-called "Canada"
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been unfollowing a lot of ppl lately bc I was overwhelmed; if I broke mutuals feel free to let me know, I promise it was NOT personal
multiple people in my immediate circle of acquaintances have seriously injured their feet indoors by not wearing shoes! either by stepping on small, pointy objects or stubbing their toes so hard they got nerve damage. some of us like to be protected! get yourself a cheap pair of house slippers or something. fuck.
*going to a festival that celebrates what has for a long time been considered sexual degeneracy by society* Oh boy I sure hope I don’t encounter anything that society views as sexually degenerate!
speaking of volcanology i am at my LIMIT with people thinking that yellowstone is "overdue". Its not fucking pregnant. if it ever erupts again we'll have decades if not centuries of warning. whenever theres "increased activity" there it means something vibrated a bit more or something.
and while we're on it the eruptions happening rn are also not out of the ordinary. what kilauea is doing is not a cause for alarm. volcanoes erupt all the time its a part of our planet I am losing my mind
tragic when a thing gets hate for being 'woke trash' and you look into it and its not even that woke. like cmon man i was promised monacle popping gay commie propaganda. this is just a video game with a woman in it.
I am honestly also so weirded out how people just internalized that kids are just dumb. People will just parrot this idea of "minors are not neurologically developed", and like... no one who is parroting this has actually read any neurology paper on brain development, or actually knows anything of what is actually developing and what is not.
And I just have so much hatred for people who parrot ideas without even putting effort into understanding them. If you actually read the associated papers, you would know actually what abilities do develop over time. But you would also know that a lot of how those abilities develop and at what point is actually very clearly bound to culture, and cultures that do not treat minors like things actually generally show different brain development in them. Because, guess what: brains develop very dependent on cultural context.
Those same people also do not get why adultification and parentification are actually a problem. Spoiler alert: it ain't because you let kids make decisions, it is because of the pressure, the expectation to perform and often associated emotional neglect.
I'm just not all that sympathetic when transmascs talk about how hard they have it receiving misplaced hatred from people who mistake them for trans women. Like, I saw a lengthy post earlier today from a guy talking about a "Trans Periods" event that was being held exclusively for transmascs (they did not include transfems in this event) that had to be delayed — not cancelled — because it received a bunch of hate from transmisogynists who assumed it was an event for trans women to talk about our periods. When they cleared it all up with the public that this was a transmasc-exclusive event the harassment died down enough for them to hold it.
When that hatred is directed at us, it isn't misplaced. It's striking its intended target. We can't dispel it by telling them "No no no! We're not trans women!" Because we are trans women. So you may notice that we don't get to hold events like that because of it.
So sorry you catch some easily deflected strays every now again from the firing squad that's constantly shooting at us. Go cry me a river about it and then maybe I can sail far away from all of you.
I shared a post from another side about AI here and I just saw someone arguing that we shouldn't use AI to detect cancer cells because "AI will literally destroy humanity". And I'm like. I'm as happy as anyone that so many data centre projects have been cancelled and can't wait for people to stop wrecking everything I use by shoving unnecessary AI into it, but I do not think that you are correct, sir. If we could maybe focus on the real problems instead of falling for the AI investor hype (who want everyone to believe their product is world-destroying dangerous, because that gets more investment for some reason) then maybe we can have more useful conversations.
AI will kill a lot of mostly poor people through normal boring means like resource deprivation (most notably water and electricity), stupid mistakes (vehicle accidents, medication accidents, etc.), and being turned into military technology. It is not part of a Vast Conspiracy to Permanently Destroy Human Critical Thinking, turning us into Mindless Zombies, and then being used to Kill Us All. It's not exciting enough for that. And the solutions aren't exciting culture wars, either; they're long, boring campaigns of politics and legislation, all very monotonous work.
#you’re right#but I still fill like it’s doing an excellent job at destroying critical thinking
Maybe I'm just jaded but I've seen way too many panics about things "destroying critical thinking". Search engines destroyed critical thinking and mobile phones destroyed critical thinking and wikipedia destroyed critical thinking and religion destroyed critical thinking and Sparknotes destroyed critical thinking and teaching annotated Shakespeare in high school (that is, Shakespeare written in books that has footnotes explaining the jokes and historical references) destroyed critical thinking and letting kids to book reports on things written after 1980 destroyed critical thinking and adults watching kid's cartoons destroyed critical thinking and whatever random youtuber the person complaining hates the most destroyed critical thinking. I dunno mate I think that the concept of critical thinking is a bit more robust than that. There's always going to be people who mindlessly use whatever tool they have without analysing things properly -- I myself have shared my fair share of clickbait articles without tracking down the info sources. But none of these things "destroyed critical thinking". That was the amount of critical thinking that those people were inclined to do anyway. Your mum asking chatGPT how to cook a chocolate cake, following patently stupid instructions and then getting confused that the cake is shit has not lost her capacity for critical thinking. She's just trusting a gimmick app too much and couldn't be bothered tracking down a more trustworthy recipe.
Every time I tell someone about how much better bidets are and how its ridiculous we dont all use them its like talking to a cis man whos convinced he has really good aim
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 just went looking for the post on X and got a message that it didn't exist
I searched for Guri Singh and got search results showing his account existed, but when I clicked on it I got a message his account did not exist
Does anyone know if he made his account private or if he got nuked by Elon? Or do I just suck at X (because I never go there)?
colonialism did not create the gender binary grahhh there were hundreds if not thousands of pre-colonial societies that believed in some cultural cognate of man and woman and enforced those notions as normative. Yes some had gender-transgressive cohorts within them (mostly trans women) but there were and are clear rules that often delineated them as lesser peoples.
what colonialism *did* do was enforce the specific european cultural context of man and woman to nonwestern societies, something that was in fact aided by the pre-existing sex binaries in those cultures!
I have seen like 3 posts today implying or outright stating that binary gender did not exist outside of europe pre-colonialism and I need you all to understand That Is Insane, Untrue, And Unhelpful!
Do not twist my words; I do not say this to cast undue shadow on non european nations and peoples pre-colonialism, nor do I say this to absolve europe of culpability in modern (trans)misogyny! I say this because the fight against misogyny is a global one and the accuracy of our adversity is important to its discussion and dismantling!
There is a running undercurrent in a lot of popular faux-progressive thought that the only real enactors and benefactors of oppression are those who sit at the pinnacle of all axes, but this is false and a blatant rhetorical trap! I benefit from my whiteness despite being disadvantaged on the axes of class, gender, and trans status! Privilege is neither a math equation to be zeroed out nor is it an albatross around your neck to be mopily brought up on every occasion! In this sense all men (all men) ALL MEN benefit from misogyny! A minority man being affected by racism/classism/ableism/etc. still retains advantage over women on the axis of gender because patriarchy is global!
India's carbondioxide emissions per person is half the global average, while USA's is 7× to 8× times higher than India, 3.5× to 4× times the global average, yet USAmericans are the ones comfortably sitting with air conditioners in their office jobs while Indians die in heatwaves in outside manual labor jobs
And even then its the Indians who contribute the least who are the most vulnerable, it's not the Indians who own shares in oil companies being inconvenienced, it is the workers who work in farms under the sun, those who work in physical construction, outside in manual labor, the regular families who can't afford to move somewhere where there aren't regular blackouts. It's simply not fair, you understand
[leftistly] [secularly] having sex causes a hard to quantify but unmistakable change in your personality and being that can be detected by others. Having sex for the first time imbues you with qualities and deep understandings that you did not have in your pre-sex state.
Tumblr user standing at the front of the classroom picking petals off of roses and crumpling and uncrumpling paper and showing you that the tape is never the same amount of sticky again after being used: -except I think this is a good thing
