Rewatching the prequels this week was NOT supposed to make me emotional about the jedi order but it was just the way obi-wan walked into the youngling's class and they all paused and said hello and yoda used it as a teaching moment and took the kid's answer seriously and gently poked fun at obi and the fact that jedi masters go by their last names with politicians and dignitaries but all the other jedi including the padawans and the younglings call them by their first names and how when the temple was attacked the younglings ran to the council chambers to find the wisest most powerful members of the order to help them fully believing they would find protection and instructions-
“The Shonen Protagonist joins The Organization” is such a cheap and easy hack for framing a narrative because the author never has to come up with a reason why the protagonist gets involved in each arc. It’s just that The Organization has a new Mission for the protagonist every time and the protagonist gets to say, “Righteo, thanks plot for telling me what to go do.”
Which makes Fullmetal Alchemist so much funnier because Edward Elric very very much does join The Organization. He’s in fact quite famous for joining The Organization. Where The Organization is a hostile fascist dictatorship with immense military power which is good at both giving orders and punishing defectors.
And yet over the course of the series Edward is so allergic to ever being told what to do that he in fact never ever goes on an Organization-Ordered Mission. And the exactly one time The Organization DID try to tell him what to do Edward hated it so much he fucked off and impaled himself at the bottom of a mineshaft about it.
Every time I think about Naboo it gets worse it get. Of course Palpatine is from Naboo, he’s like the planet’s perfect son.
Why would the physical manifestation of oppression come from Naboo it’s not like our planet is segregated and the native population can’t travel off world or trade with the greater galaxy unless it’s through our spaceport. It’s all cool though cause we let Jarjar in the senate so we technically let them off planet to represent themselves.
Our elected officials are teenage girls that are immune to corruption because of their unbreakable virgin purity, even though they get manipulated by grown men on screen. Naboo doesn’t have a shadow government.
At first I read “as an optometrist” and was just ready to accept the statement as is like oh yeah maybe some kind of pun about if people’s views weren’t clouded by hatred and biases they could be normal about aro and aspec in general but then I reread it was like “sigh, time for my nearsighted ass to go back to the optometrist.”
my friend and i have been sending the same twt post to eachother for the past week of the long haired padawant obi wan edits and its.....ingrained into my retinas....
…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment
likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post
the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like.
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 keep seeing folks on here talk about how confusing they found the first episode of The Vampire Lestat. And also talk about it as though it's completely different from anything else they've ever seen before, and it got me wondering...
Because, yeah, I'll be honest...as a fan of shows like Farscape (especially the episode Scratch 'n Sniff) and Legion, and films like Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Velvet Goldmine, I found the episode very entertaining and also very easy to follow. It's only the first episode so of course there are some unanswered questions...but, like, it all felt like a pretty straightforward depiction of a traumatic, drug-induced crash out.
But I'm curious about other folks familiarity with the visual language of the show. Not to, like, shame anyone for not being able to follow it...but just because I'm curious.
Have you seen film/shows written and edited like ep 1 of The Vampire Lestat before?
I have seen film/shows with a similar vibe & I understood it.
I have seen film/shows with a similar vibe but I did NOT understand it.
I have NOT seen film/shows with a similar vibe but I understood it.
I have NOT seen film/shows with a similar vibe & I did NOT understand it.
gamechangershow
vaporwave
andulkaphoto
theartofmadeline
pixelskylines
kianamaiart
