You know when there's like, a straight show and everyone's like "it's full of queer subtext between the main straight dudes, and this character is obviously autistic and they really meant to say trans rights"? And then there's a queer show and all of a sudden it's "no but they weren't sensitive about this character's trauma and the queer sex scenes are too short and they're all problematic as fuck, i can't even watch"? And then our shit doesn't get renewed, and we hated on it the whole way for not embodying the perfection we'd never dream of demanding from the straight show?
having a hometown is such a fucked up concept. i grew up here so i do not want to stay here anymore. i miss it when i am away but once i am back i realise why i wanted to go away as far as possible from it. i am familiar with every corner of this place i did not realise when it slowly changed into something unrecognisable. i would probably like to be buried here but i'd rather die than live here
I am begging you. Please learn about stress/discomfort tolerance. Practice raising it. You need this to survive. If someone online can ruin your day with a throwaway comment, you desperately need to understand discomfort tolerance and consciously, systematically build that shit.
Also! Stress tolerance is such an important skill that having a learning disability in that area is a major symptom of a whole lot of other disabilities/mental illnesses! Struggling with it is a huge part of life! It sucks!
Am I saying everyone with misophonia needs to listen to chewing noises all day? No. But you need to find ways to tolerate it enough that you don't treat others like shit if they make a mouth noise near you.
No, you don't have to read the fic with your trigger tags. But you do need to be able to handle scrolling past the tags without being upset.
It is hard! But not having it also makes you so so so easy to manipulate. That grandma is racist AF because her mom raised her to be uncomfortable around black people and she never fought that discomfort. Trans people make so many cis people uncomfortable and that discomfort turns into bigotry real fast.
Letting your discomfort dictate your actions and beliefs about things is a great way to become a terrible person. Learn. Discomfort. Tolerance.
I agree with all of this but the thing that doesn't quite fit with the rest is the misophonia mention.
If you're a misophonia girlie (genderneutral) like I am, like actual misophonia, you won't be able to build up distress tolerance the same way you can for "regular" disgust reactions.
Exposure therapy does NOT work on misophonia. It makes it worse.
Misophonia can't be unlearned, it's a neurological reaction that bypasses regular cognitive processing and instantly triggers a flight or fight response.
"You need to find ways to tolerate it" often just isn't the right approach! We can't be made to tolerate it. Our neurological wiring literally doesn't allow for it.
And this is so important for people who don't have misophonia to be aware of. Its not, currently, a condition that anyone can overcome.
“trans men don’t experience misogyny because they’re men thus cannot experience women’s oppression”
I hate to tell you this but even cis men experience misogyny if they step a toe over the line of what our incredibly sexist society sees as “proper” for a man. You really don’t think that a man with interests or expression the world sees as “female” aren’t treated with violence?
“would you say that of other privileged groups? do you think white people experience racism?”
I mean sometimes they do yeah. I know a white guy with monolid eyes and zero known Asian ancestors and he absolutely experiences anti-Asian racism on a fairly regular basis because people think he’s mixed Asian/white. I know a woman who was told throughout her life that she was Native as an adoptee with no known history or background who experienced incredibly violent amounts of anti-Native racism until she discovered as an adult through DNA test that she is 100% white. I know white people who tan incredibly dark in the summer comparatively that are constantly accused of being mixed race and experiencing racism due to that, usually anti-Mexican racism perpetrated against white people with Greek or Italian ancestors.
Their ability to make it stop by saying “hey, I’m white actually” only goes as far as the person enacting violence on them is willing to believe them. They still have to live with the trauma and physical scars from the altercations. We live in a racist world and thus there will be violent people who force all others to pass a whiteness test and eliminating or harming the rest.
Got an ask that I just block/deleted but it was basically “so you think cis people experience transphobia!?!?!?!?” and uh
If you think cis butches don’t experience both transphobia and misogyny and homophobia for daring to be women who break gender roles while still holding onto their womanhood you’ve sorely misunderstood just how bad butches have it in this world sorry. If you don’t think cis queens experience transphobia and homophobia and misogyny for daring to be men who break gender roles while being loud and proud about it and still holding onto their manhood then you’ve sorely mistaken just how bad they have it in this world as well.
Not to mention all of the cis men who wear dresses and skirts and makeup and nail polish and heels simply because they like them who experience all of these things. All of the cis straight women who simply just exist but something about them doesn’t pass society’s “woman enough” test, leading to them being caught in bathroom bills and sporting rules and being attacked by people who mistake them for being transgender or gay.
Just like how straight people experience homophobia to such a degree that they literally beat their children out of any potential deviance from rigidly upheld gender roles and let politicians make jokes on national TV about how they’d drown their pre-teen kids if they came out as LGBT. Do you really think a straight kid still figuring themselves out hears that and doesn’t internalize that homophobia? Doesn’t rigidly hold themselves to some impossible standard so that no one could ever possibly think they’re gay? You don’t think straight teenage boys who maybe don’t pass some bully’s straightness test are getting the shit kicked out of them for “being gay” when, surprise, they aren’t? You don’t think all those kids being attacked by their priests and coaches and teachers are being told “this wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t gay” when they’re literally not gay? Do you know how many straight kids had close calls at my school that famously expels all gay kids, because someone made up a believable enough rumor? Do you know how many of them still got their shit kicked in even though administration ultimately decided to let them stay?
All bigotry is violent and all bigotry catches people it doesn’t “intend” to and hurts them as well. It doesn’t matter what someone’s label is, or if they even have one. It matters if the person enacting the violence is doing it because their victim didn’t pass whatever “acceptable enough” test they didn’t know they were being subjected to.
Everyone is at risk. Oppression doesn’t care what your label is. Some people are more visible targets than others, and as a result those people are the more common targets. That doesn’t mean no one else experiences it.
It doesn’t say anything about tma/tme because I was written before I knew those acronyms.
For the record I don’t use the word transandrophobia because I was mentored in transgender political theory directly by a trans woman in college and she taught me that the correct word to use is transmisogyny, as all transgender people regardless of lived or assigned gender experience an intersection of transphobia and misogyny, and the details of this intersection may change based on the context of the individual in question but trans men and trans women have way more in common than not.
That was, however, 16 years ago, so if our current understanding is that transmisogyny is experienced by trans women and trans fems *only*, then another word should be created to describe the same phenomenon for trans men and trans mascs. I don’t really care what word we use. Transandrophobia and anti-transmasculinity are the most popular of the options, and I’m not a cop or anyone’s dad.
Trans men are, however, intentionally targeted by misogyny, and transphobia, and an intersection of transphobia and misogyny, so the point is sort of moot. This nearly 5 year old post was in response to other transgender people telling me that it is impossible for trans men to experience misogyny because they’re men. Well, sorry, but even cis men experience it, so that’s just a silly thing to say. Bigots don’t check my pronouns before passing laws to force me to detransition so I can get to work on becoming a baby factory.
online communities are so strange because people slip away so easily. you can be on here for years, folding people you've never met into the fabric of your daily life, and then they disappear, leaving only ghost posts scattered across tumblr behind. or their blog stays dormant, for weeks, months, years, until you're only still following them because you remember that they love sunflowers or they were kind to you when they didn't have to be or the last thing they posted was sad and raw and you still worry about them sometimes.
and sometimes they come back when you least expect it, years later, even, and there's this sudden rush of relief like there you are, there you are, even though you barely knew each other.
there's a strange kind of love to it. i don't know you and i want to hold your hand across miles and time zones and oceans. i can still see the imprint of you in this community you left. you don't think anyone will notice or care when you're gone, but we notice and we care and we wish you well.
i hope you're all okay out there. i hope the sun is shining on your face and you are breathing deeply. i miss you.
hey boss i can't come in today it's a sunny day and there's a lovely breeze coming in through my window, yeah it's rustling the branches of the tree outside that's finally bloomed so it's pretty serious
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.
If you use Firefox, you can go to the about:config page, search for "media.mediasource.enabled" and double click on it to set it to false. After you restart Firefox, all youtube videos will load entirely even when paused! This also affects other streaming websites :)
go to About:config
find media.mediasource.enabled and toggle it to false
find media.cache_readahead_limit and change it to 9999
find media.cache_resume_threshold and change it to 9999
additionally if you'd prefer mp4 to webm
also in about:config, find:
media.encoder.webm.enabled
media.mediasource.webm.audio.enabled
media.mediasource.webm.enabled
media.webm.enabled
and toggle them all to false
note!
this will limit video to 1080p
and use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dont-accept-webp/ to kill WebP
Fuck Google
romaincrisis
dailybridgerton
yousharknotpass
ellievsbear
andulkaphoto
titsay
prguitarman
jacobvanloon
