Horrible Gremlin, Armchair Dilettante

32. Free statistics tutoring.

[horsefriend]

[putnamspuppeteer]

For those who don't know: Ikumi Nakamura is the woman who was senior artist on Bayonetta, and designed the titular character along with Hideki Kamiya. Their greatest moment of bonding was over their insistence that Bayonetta keep her glasses on at all times. Nakamura cannot go to horny jail. She is the warden.

[brookietf]

[catgirlforeskin]

Happy pride month to her and her exclusively

[seraphiminn]

she made a comic about the experience on twitter

[catboybiologist]

happy pride

[ikindamaybewanthertositonmyface]

An Update from back in October I'm surprised wasn't added to this post. lol

[rabiesofficial]

sometimes my surgery scar hurts like i'm harry potter

[rabiesofficial]

[prokopetz]

Untwisting your tropes by making a video game about a quiet kid with an ugly shirt and a worrying preoccupation with knives who actually has nothing wrong with them at all.

[venndaai]

have you guys heard about the greenland shark. some crazy shit happening there.

[venndaai]

they are sexually mature at ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OLD.

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

ma'am you are delightfully strange and I'm privileged to share a planet with you

[fluorescentbrains]

this post prompted me to refresh my memory on Greenland Shark Facts and this detail about how they feed goes so hard

just vacuuming up their unsuspecting prey. whole !

[muffinlance]

Good news good news good news! Recent research suggests the eye parasites do NOT blind them!

Eye-opening research: Greenland sharks maintain vision for centuries through DNA repair mechanism

Dorota Skowronska-Krawczyk sits in her office, eyes fixed on the computer monitor in front of her. "You see it move its eye," says the UC Ir

I <3 you a normal amount Greenland sharks

[fatpunk]

where is transgender flag "I'M TOO FAT FOR THIS HEAT"

[fatpunk]

FOUND IT

[fatpunk]

it's that time of the year again folks

[war-crime-wizard]

my blog is a safe space for me. the rest of you are in danger i think

[sociallyunacceptableart4]

This was my art school’s water fountain. Drink from them wolf tiddies

[mando-lore]

Assignment misunderstood. I have now built a city.

[mando-lore]

[mando-lore]

Give it a day

[alexaloraetheris]

[miseria-fortes-viros]

yoooo guys these wings my dad made look INSANE i can’t wait to try them tomorrow

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i don’t think you understand i totally thought we were gonna die locked up in this castle but this fucking genius was like “im going to invent a way for humans to fly”. shout out to my dad he’s a real one fr

[miseria-fortes-viros]

LMAOOO this dude told me to be careful as he affixed the wings to my back…..dad no offense but you just invented flying and we have to go high enough to avoid the king’s archers. soo

[miseria-fortes-viros]

HOOOOLY SHIT YOU GUYS I AM SO AFRAID. THE GROUND IS SO FAR. HOW DO BIRDS DO THIS. OH MY GODS OH MY GODS OH MY GODS

[miseria-fortes-viros]

it’s so beautiful up here

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i don’t like seeing the ground. i’m going higher

[miseria-fortes-viros]

it’s cold and i can’t see anything. not sure if that’s better or worse

[miseria-fortes-viros]

by zeus….what is that thing…….it’s as bright as the sun and twice as warm

[miseria-fortes-viros]

the gods look truly down on me this day…apollo calls to me from his chariot of fire. a mere mortal. he must think my flight such a wondrous feat

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i don’t understand why but he’s coming closer. he is not supposed to stray from his path, lest the sun fall from the sky. why does he look so anguished to see me?

[miseria-fortes-viros]

oh. i am in his path

[miseria-fortes-viros]

it’s so hot…was it this hard to fly before? maybe i’m tired

[miseria-fortes-viros]

the wax

[miseria-fortes-viros]

he really does look like the sun…the light emanates from his fingers, his hair, his skin. he means to catch me. i reach for him

[miseria-fortes-viros]

his skin burns. i cannot hold on

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i slip through his fingers.

[miseria-fortes-viros]

it takes a really long time to fall from the sky. longer than i thought

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i wonder if he cried for me

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i pray to him just in case. i am grateful he tried. my palms are red and cracked from where they touched divinity. the ground does not look any closer than it was

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i have not seen my father since we took flight…i hope he escaped. i hope he will not witness this. i wish i could tell him how joyful these wings made me before the wax melted

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i do not regret it. i have seen with my own eyes what others will only dream of

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i am not afraid

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i am not afraid i am not afraid i am not afraid i am not afraid i am afraid i am afraid i am afraid

[miseria-fortes-viros]

please please please please please pleaseplease

[miseria-fortes-viros]

the gods will not save me. i suppose this is a lesson in hubris. i am forever a flightless thing

[miseria-fortes-viros]

please please please i have no coin for the ferryman if i am to die now i will never reach the realm of hades please turn me into a bird any bird or a bug or something anything please please pleasepleaseplease

[miseria-fortes-viros]

I AM NOT AFRAID I AM NOT AFRAID I AM NOT AFRAID I AM NOT AFRAID I AM N

[prokopetz]

The three essential blasphemies of contemporary gaming:

First-person shooters where you gun down angels

RPGs where you kill God at the end

Metroidvanias where you fight the Pope

[chiropterearcanique]

I am not knowledgeable in the noble art of pope fighting and the only game I've played featuring it wasn't a metroidvania, but given the post's phrasing I take it this is a common thing?

[prokopetz]

Blasphemous (2019) is almost certainly responsible for popularising the trope via its final (non-DLC) boss fight (spoilers for the bad ending, if you care), though it's been imitated here and there since. The forthcoming Silent Planet - Elegy of a Dying World showcases a very promising Pope fight in its latest teaser trailer (skip to 0:38 if you're impatient), and the current demo for Being and Becoming features an excellent fight with an evil nun (gameplay footage – nun at 1:33), so I'm hopeful for a proper Pope fight in the full game.

[reddeckwinner]

Also what are some fps games where you fight angels? The only one that comes to mind is ultrakill. Most other popular entries like the New Blood fps catalogue and classic FPS games like Blood and Doom have you fighting demons pretty exclusively.

Just generally games in the FPS genre are far more often aligned with demon killing as opposed to angels.

[prokopetz]

Doom Eternal (2020), most obviously. Yes, the "angels" are technically alien cyborgs, but the demons in the Doom franchise are technically aliens too, so it counts.

(That one goes the extra mile blasphemy-wise by pulling a sort of reverse Gnostic thing and revealing that its Satan analogue is the true author of Creation, while the usurping demiurge who imprisoned him is theoretically the good guy!)

[prokopetz]

@meandering-monotreme replied:

honestly it's weird that you DON'T fight the pope in silksong

I agree that Silksong is a remarkably Catholic game for presently lacking a Pope fight, but I wouldn't rule it out just yet – Team Cherry have added major boss fights in DLC in the past, and we already have at least one DLC confirmed.

(Granted, Sea of Sorrow doesn't seem like a terribly likely venue for a Pope fight, unless it's... like, a pirate Pope, or something.)

[rincewind87]

You definitely fight angels in Diablo 3. You fight hell demons, then you fight angels.

[prokopetz]

I expected the folks in the notes arguing that Assassin's Creed II is a metroidvania, but "Diablo III is a first-person shooter" is admittedly a new one.

[probabilitydirigible]

its a very violent game I hears. you shooter da firs person ya meet probably.

[prokopetz]

The three essential blasphemies of contemporary gaming:

First-person shooters where you gun down angels

RPGs where you kill God at the end

Metroidvanias where you fight the Pope

[probabilitydirigible]

Don't forget the less-common but still essential RTS where piety/divine favor are completely transactional resources such that 400 gold gets you 100 God which gets you one Smite, two Cures, or 1/10th of a Resurrection.

[orteil42]

we're overdue for a reactive wave of anti-cozy games. animal crossing but office workers. restaurant management but applebee's. farming sim but all spreadsheets. never see an ear of corn the whole game

[trans-girl-nausicaa]

a young witch trying to solve a gristly murder in the Italian alps during the Years of Lead

[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.

[irispurpurea]

This is the paper. It's excellent, highly recommend reading it.

I remember reading about Gebru's firing but I had no idea this was the paper she was fired over.

[probabilitydirigible]

Thinking about DNA... we say it's the instructions for life, but it's way wilder; instructions are carried out by minds. DNA is just an object with chemical properties that change how it interacts with the world. It's the difference between a recipe for waffles and an actual rube goldberg wafflemaking machine. It's like using the world's smallest lathe to carve the surface of a ping pong ball so you can exactly predict its pachingko path. And then finding out you carved basically the exact same ball as your mom

[prokopetz]

Daily affirmations:

What is this place?

What manner of creature are you?

What sorcery is this?

[fuzzytheduck]

who goes there?

who sent you?

who dares disturb my slumber?

[scribe-awoken]

What is that beautiful house?

Where does that highway go to?

Am I right?

Am I wrong?

My God! What have I done?

[prokopetz]

Precision puzzle platformer where you switch back and forth between two characters to solve each screen, except the characters in question are those two guards from the Knights and Knaves puzzles, and you have to do the lying guard's portions of each screen with your controls reversed.

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

Sometimes the controls do wildly different things, too. A lie doesn't have to be "whatever the exact opposite of the truth is."

[prokopetz]

Celeste-style stage gimmick thing whereby the lying guard has a different interface screw in every level. Keeps you on your toes.

[probabilitydirigible]

Lying guard level where there's two paths, one of which looks really hard, and one of which goes through a cloud of poison fog that takes just over half your health, then there's a medkit worth half your health, then there's another cloud.

Unfortunately, although it makes the noise and fills the healthbar on the screen, the guard is lying about the medkit. Your HP doesn't go up when you grab it. You die in the second cloud every time.

[probabilitydirigible]

mermaid going on a land journey packing large amounts of specific weird food

to prevent the dangerous land disease mervy, which is caused by a deficiency of vitamin sea

[apricops]

that post about “you get bandits when you cut soldiers loose without pay” reminds me of the Thirty Years War, because one could say that beneath all the religious schisms and diplomatic jockeying, the heart of the thirty years war was “what happens when you have a state with just enough capacity to raise massive armies but without enough financial capacity to actually pay those armies” and the answer is that the line between professional armies and roving gangs of bandits disappears and every time you try to raise an army it just becomes another independently acting wildfire devouring the countryside. No matter how bad things get, every day I wake up and thank my lucky stars that I do not live in 17th century Europe. Or 17th century China. Or the 17th century Americas. Or basically anywhere in the 17th century.

[probabilitydirigible]

One of my favorite little anecdotes about ancient mercenaries is that it was tradition for most of history to give your mercenaries two wages- "Bread" and "Gravy." Both were set at a daily value, but where "Bread" was intended to cover regular maintenance and life stuff and therefore paid out frequently (Here's your week's meal and gear repair budget!) the "Gravy" wage was paid out exclusively at the end of the contract as one lump sum. So like, your gravy wage and bread wage might be one silver coin per day each, so you're getting a handful of coins every week to cover food, and then at the end of an 800 day campaign, you get a wheelbarrow with 800 coins.

Employers liked offering this structure because then they didn't have to like, try to guess how long the invasion of spain will take and then carry 800 coins per soldier around the battlefield where it could be captured. It also gives them the chance to budget around the assumption that they take an enemy city and *find* vast sums of treasure even if they don't have the full value at the beginning of the war.

The main flaw of this system is that it's very easy to end up in a scenario where if you have, say, 50,000 guys that have been fighting for 800 days, you now owe 40 million silver to your army, and if the budget has not worked out to a 40 million surplus, you literally can't afford to end the war, but you can probably afford to pay them for a couple more weeks. So then you have to start thinking creatively.

Anyway across all time and history a lot of generals were ultimately beaten to death by men chanting gravy.

[zanmor]

can I get a source on the use of that term, bread and gravy wages?

I assume that's a more modern historian coming up with a clever characterization of army pay, but all I've been able to find is either sites talking about modern fast food wages or else a thousand articles about "why ancient roman soldiers were paid in salt"

if it is a historian's invention I think I wanna read what else this person has to say

[wicker-and-scrap]

Don't know what @probabilitydirigible 's source was, but Bret Devereaux was writing about this subject recently, and mentioned the Classical sources calling them σίτος (bread) and ὀψώνιον (sauce).

(I had a brief moment of recognition reading that, because "opsonins" in immunology are a category of proteins that stick to foreign objects and make them tasty to your immune cells.)

Collections: Ancient Mediterranean Mercenaries!

This week we’re going to take a look at mercenaries in the ancient Mediterranean world! This was one of the runners-up in the latest ACOUP S

[probabilitydirigible]

I *also* thought of ACOUP when I made this and looked it up to confirm I was remembering the concept well enough for Tumblr, but he doesn't use the word gravy. I cannot tell you if I simply picked a punchier translation when I converted the article to long term memory or if someone else said gravy.

ACOUP is super good though. Neck and neck with Mike Duncan for Best History Guy