Pyrrhic Comedy

your grouchy big sister who explains stuff to you but also clowns on you in front of your friends.

[beholdingslut]

in absolute tears about the pride module at my work

[dikdikpronouncedxylophone]

[bigfoots-biggest-fan]

HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY

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Tempted to actually put this on spotify so I can secretly stream it at work...

Tagging @batshit-auspol because as an Australian you're the only big account I know who might share (sorry).

[punkrorschach]

happy first day of pride everyone

[innerchildabortionclinic]

mind palace that was formerly a palace until the ruling family was killed mercilessly for its crimes. and now it's the thinking woman's socialist republic.

[pyrrhiccomedy]

the other day my wife was watching one of our cats 'bury' her dinner (sort of sweep her paws around on the floor near her dish) and went "it's cute when cats have these instincts that they don't really need anymore because of how they live but they still act on them anyway" and I was like "we do that too. I make pottery for fun. your main hobby is textiles"

[pyrrhiccomedy]

I am always one bad day away from quitting my job and living out of a van to track down every single person involved in making a decision in the production of Troy (2004) in order to force them to account for themselves

[pyrrhiccomedy]

we're heading towards some record setting humidity this summer so JUST A REMINDER that if you're in any way prone to migraines, this weather is great at triggering them! Be EXTREMELY diligent about staying hydrated if you're going out, EVEN TO AN AIR CONDITIONED SPACE, and ESPECIALLY if you are drinking any alcohol at all! even a single glass of wine or a cocktail! You will feel fine for an hour or two but then you will NOT FEEL FINE. If you have a headache that isn't responding to painkillers and it gets noticeably worse when you move or change elevations (sitting to standing, not like, going to the mountains) then drink a full glass of water and go lie down in a cool, quiet, dark room until it passes! DO NOT LOOK AT A SCREEN UNTIL THE DANGER HAS PASSED. I know you're bored but it could be so much worse!

[pyrrhiccomedy]

I see this is going around again! Happy Migraine Season everybody! Remember to keep a damp washcloth in your freezer so that if you feel the migraine coming on you can lay down and press it against your forehead and temples to give yourself a better chance of ducking it before it's too late!

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

i have to admit, I do like that one folk-punk song where the person with the kind of whiny voice sings about being an addict

[sexhaver]

Who deserved to live more?

The Romanovs (entire royal family circa 1917 including the kids)

Harambe the gorilla

Voting ended onMay 30

[braaaaain]

A polling group that never read accounts of of the children were executed.

[sexhaver]

oh my god Harambe had kids?

[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.

[sleepyspoonie]

when you see a tumblr poll with this picture attached and you know it's time to lock the fuck in lest you get a bad grade in an impromptu absurdist pop quiz you didn't know you were about to take

[charl0ttan]

best multiple of nine

9

18

27

36

45

54

63

72

81

90

Voting ended onMay 28

[dominaexmachina]

The Label Is the Work

There is a study. Duke University, published 2023. Researchers showed participants a set of paintings and labeled them either “human-created” or “AI-created.” The twist: every single painting in the set was AI-generated. Same images. Different labels. Different ratings — across liking, beauty, profundity, and perceived worth — every time, in favor of the “human” ones. The effect wasn’t visual. It was entirely top-down: the label rewired the experience of the object itself.

This is not a niche academic finding. This is a description of how aesthetic judgment actually works for most people, most of the time. You don’t encounter a work in a vacuum. You encounter it with a story attached. The story is part of the work.

Which makes the following cases interesting.

2023. Miles Astray, photographer. He submitted a real photograph of a flamingo — taken on film, no AI involved — to a photography competition’s AI-generated category. To make a point. The image won both jury and public vote. Contest organizers disqualified it when Astray revealed it was real. The photo was too good to be human, apparently. Until it was.

2023. Suzi Dougherty, Sydney. She shot a photograph of her son mid-stride in a Gucci exhibition, mannequins in the background. Entered a local photo contest. Disqualified for being AI-generated. The judge said the image felt “too perfect to be true”. It was a phone photo taken in ten minutes. The mannequins read as uncanny. The son was just photogenic.

2025. The Velvet Sundown. AI folk rock band. Over a million Spotify streams before anyone publicly questioned the source. People added the music to playlists. Then someone noticed the promo photos looked off. Not the music — the photos. The music still sounded the same after the reveal. Only people’s relationship to it changed.

Three cases. Three different directions of the same error. Human work flagged as AI. AI work enjoyed as human. The detector isn’t running on aesthetics — it’s running on suspicion, context, and whatever story arrived first.

The post from Tumblr says AI is always noticeable. Saturation gives it away. Movement gives it away. It’s just so easy to spot.

The data says otherwise. The data says you spot what you’re looking for, and you find what you expect.

[ozempicofficial]

[pyrrhiccomedy]

Being bi and then going into a relationship with a lifelong lesbian is great because there are so many movies she hasn't seen. I got to introduce her to The Usual Suspects. I got to introduce her to Terminator. We're watching Fight Club tonight, and she's never even been spoiled for it. I guess they don't do screenings at the temple of Diana where she raises those trembling dew-eyed fauns so delicate that they would sicken and die if exposed to the scent of a man

[pyrrhiccomedy]

She hasn't seen Die Hard!!

[pyrrhiccomedy]

SHE HADN'T SEEN THE FUGITIVE

[wizzard890]

THE ONLY MAN WHO HAS SUFFERED MORE THAN CHRIST AND MY BEST FRIEND JOHN MCLANE IS MY OTHER BEST FRIEND DOCTOR RICHARD KIMBLE!!!

they threw his ass off a dam!

this is the same picture, To Me.

[pyrrhiccomedy]

She hasn't seen Rambo actually she had never seen a single Sylvester Stallone movie until I made her watch Daybreak a couple of weeks back, that one's hardly essential I just remembered it after driving through the tunnel out of Manhattan recently

God. God. How deep does this go

[pyrrhiccomedy]

pretty sure the actual weirdest thing about me is that I don't care about music. like this is the one thing that makes me wonder if I might be a psychopath or something. I'll put music on maybe 2-3 times a year. it's mid-May and I haven't listened to any music yet in 2026, not counting when it's just on around me, like in stores or during a rideshare. I don't dislike music! If I'm in an environment where music is happening, it's cool. I just don't put it on myself. sometimes I put on headphones in public with nothing playing through them just so people leave me alone

[pyrrhiccomedy]

the fact that more than one of my Treasured Mutuals have commented to say that they're the same way makes me wonder if we're actually more common than we thought or if we just all follow each other because we have the same undiagnosed brain disease

[worstgirleva]

your cat will leak your nudes after you die

[pyrrhiccomedy]

well christ she's going to have to have some source of income, who's gonna buy her fancy cat treats now

I set up an onlyfans full of foot stuff to benefit my cat after I die and if you don't have one you must not love your pets

[exxos-von-steamboldt]

[delicatefury]

I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Thank God someone bothered to check.

[beardedmrbean]

>I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

Scientists shocked to find lab gloves may be skewing microplastics data

Scientists may have been unknowingly inflating microplastics pollution estimates, and the surprising source could be their own lab gloves. A

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics, U-M study reveals

Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny poll

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

An Embarrassing Mistake May Have Skewed Microplastics Research All Along

Researchers discovered a standard piece of lab equipment has added thousands of microplastic ‘false positives’ per each square-millimeter un

Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data

Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data: That doesn’t mean microplastics aren’t a problem, though

That should be enough

[sioltach]

"The Alpilles" and "Mont Gaussier", Yoann Crépin

[pyrrhiccomedy]

Being bi and then going into a relationship with a lifelong lesbian is great because there are so many movies she hasn't seen. I got to introduce her to The Usual Suspects. I got to introduce her to Terminator. We're watching Fight Club tonight, and she's never even been spoiled for it. I guess they don't do screenings at the temple of Diana where she raises those trembling dew-eyed fauns so delicate that they would sicken and die if exposed to the scent of a man

[pyrrhiccomedy]

She hasn't seen Die Hard!!

[pyrrhiccomedy]

SHE HADN'T SEEN THE FUGITIVE