by the way it's fine to like sexual content just for the sake of it. "we can't ban porn because other stuff will get banned" "sometimes nude art has value" "the government will classify queer people as sexual" this is all true but it's okay to just like porn. its okay to not want porn to be banned because you like it.
RIP Marjane Satrapi, author of the amazing graphic novels Persepolis about living during the fundamentalist revolution in Iran in the 70’s and 80’s. She also created the animated movie based on the graphic novels, which is where these gifs come from.
Reblogging in honor of Marjane Satrapi, one of THE great graphic novelists. Her comic Persepolis was a crucial text for shaping my belief that comics can deeply explore identity, culture, politics, and history.
I'm an orc who boxes, I box orcs, I'm a boxer who orcs, and I orc boxes. There is a golden ticket hidden somewhere on my blog abd if you find it yoiu win one million dollats
Polish sabre; 4th quarter of the 17th century (blade), 3rd quarter of the 18th century (mounting)
Wawel Royal Castle – National Art Collection
The blade may be associated with the reign of Jan III Sobieski and possibly originated from his armoury in Żółkiew. It later entered the Radziwiłł collection, was taken to the Hermitage, and was returned to Wawel in 1924.
Type: Sabre with scabbard
Overall length: 94 cm
Blade length: 79 cm
Sheath length: 82 cm
Blade width: 5.5 cm
Scabbard width: 7 cm
Origin: Poland
Blade maker: Attributed to Armenian craftsmen of Lviv
I feel like we're living through the "first as tragedy, then as farce" version of the conflict b/w Marius and Sulla. Everybody stay alert and keep an eye out for Julius Caesar he could appear anywhere at any moment
So Trump as a Sulla analogue is an easy sell, but we don't seem to have a Marius. The role of Marius in this slapstick production seems to be played by a rotating cast all like sharing the energy or wtfe. Screaming and pissing and weeping like babies over fairly unremarkable economic reforms is the Republican Party's favorite hobby and that's pretty Sullan so for a while back in like 2021 I thought Joe Biden and/or Kamala Harris might be the Marius just by eliminateskies but they both evaporated like a fart in the wind and I couldn't see either of them swinging all that much extralegal military authority. I don't think Joe Biden ever saw more than 1 or 2 eagles at one time.
#okay i see it#well the US self-mythology always did like to immitate rome#frequently relieved that i'm a provincial peasant tbh
Back when I was a weird little girl I was always the type of weird little girl who'd excessively romanticize the barbarians and view Roman civilization as synonymous with political corruption and cultural extinction and she was right so this is all par for the course tbh
hot take monday: emma shouldn't be one of the most popular austen novels. like it's FINE. and sure it's longer than the rest of the novels for maximum slow burn. but it's not Special. it's just... fine
Never underestimate the power of a good slow burn tho…………
Never underestimate the power of getting into a big disagreement with a loved one, getting proved wrong, growing and changing, and still being loved after it all.
To call it a “slow burn” is to read it through like a particular fandom-oriented romance*-centric lens where the marriage plot is the main goal of everything—which is fine but it’s not all the book is or can be, and I don’t think that’s the reason for its length. The novel is largely considered to be Austen’s best by Austen scholars, not because of any feature of the romance, but because it’s where she used the technique of free indirect discourse most extensively and most sensitively. The language itself is just extremely clever—that plus the way the book functions for me as an epistemological problem (what’s the nature of knowledge?? Why does Emma observe things and yet still get them wrong? Why does Mrs Taylor do the same? Does Knightley “know” that’s something’s up with Jane and Frank, or is it a lucky guess? Does observation + being proved correct = knowledge, or is there a way to be “right” in a way that does you no credit and to be “wrong” through no fault of your own?)
I think Emma might not be one of my favourites if I were reading it “for plot,” but that’s just not how I read it. I’m not... enormously into Emma & Knightley as a couple, lmao
* “romance” in the modern sense, not as in “a fantastical story”
I think I've studied Emma about four times now throughout high school and uni (because of the nature of my degree) and yeah... it's an absolutely masterful piece of literature.
I think all of Austen's works are, but Emma is arguably the tightest in terms of how much meaning is fit into every line. The word play and social commentary is such a focus, I second the bit about the free and indirect discourse, and you have so much more lying and deceitful truths in this book which completely change in tone and meaning upon rereading. It really makes you question the characters and what they say or believe they know.
But what is of particular interest to me is how it explores that lower boundary of the genteel class and more than her other novels. From a historical perspective, it offers us so much nuance and information about the shifting of classes:
Miss Bates is genteel but barely clinging on because of her severe financial distress, and is reliant on her neighbours to quietly overlook the usual requirement of returning dinner invitations (she couldn't afford to reciprocate) in order to continue participating fully in genteel society.
Her niece, Jane Fairfax, is as genteel as Miss Bates by birth and far more genteel in education and manners, yet she's the one about to take a half-step down socially by becoming a governess.
Mrs Weston went from that half-step down to unquestionably genteel for life by marrying Mr Weston (himself "born of a respectable family, which for the last two or three generations had been rising into gentility and property" but was still low enough on the gentry ladder that to marry a wealthy, landed gentleman's daughter for his first marriage was a big step down for Miss Churchill "of a great Yorkshire family") who is now rich enough to have a carriage which places him in at least in the top 2% of society via income.
Augusta Hawkins is from the mercantile middle class and thus born a full step down but also moved into the gentry class by marrying Mr Elton (which is partially why she tries so hard to look the part and pushes the connection to the 'estate' of Maple Grove, she needs to establish herself in this social sphere) who, as a clergyman, is genteel but on the lower end of the scale.
Harriet Smith is in a nebulous quasi-genteel state as her education is genteel enough to allow her to mix with the gentry, and clearly someone with a bit of money is supporting her, but she's illegitimate and therefore can't fully be placed until her family connections are known (because she would naturally be lower than them) unless she happens to marry first and thus assumes her husband's position.
Mrs Goddard was likely a governess or teacher in her youth, genteel enough by birth to educate young ladies, but poor enough she had to work, and's now the mistress of a school. Which makes her less genteel than Miss Bates, technically, but with more financial freedom. And it's a respectable enough career that she hasn't been completely cut from Highbury high society, though she exists on the periphery.
The Coles are a merchant family whose wealth is allowing them to takes those steps to move up the social class (via the education of their children and hosting the local gentry) and we see those tensions in the novel and how delicately it had to be balanced (Mrs Cole couldn't just invite the Knightleys and the Woodhouses to dinner, her husband could befriend the local gentlemen freely but Mrs Cole was first friends with the lowest on the genteel scale, Miss Bates, and had to slowly establish herself socially before making an overture towards Emma).
The Martins may be what Mr Weston's family was two or so generations ago, especially if Robert Martin ever buys the farm he rents from Mr Knightley (which would also put them on track to be like the Hayters from Persuasion), and are also becoming more respectable and educated. They're not moving into the gentry class yet, the Miss Martins are too securely lower class to have tea with Miss Woodhouse even though they've got the same education and perhaps greater wealth that Miss Smith, but Robert Martin is already starting to mix equally with families along that genteel border, like the Coxes, though he and his sisters are not high enough to be invited to the ball. It's an interesting contrast to Miss Bates, who is poorer and less educated than them, and yet unquestionably genteel and invited where they are not.
Then the Coxes themselves are "very vulgar" but their son, William, is a lawyer (perhaps his father too, and likely 'only' an attorney, given he seems to have an office in Highbury - so not nearly as impressive or genteel as Mr Knightey's barrister brother) so we might think of them as the same social sphere as Mrs Bennet's father in Pride and Prejudice and learn more about her status before her marriage from that.
Though Emma and Mr Knightley are the main couple, and are both far above the border of gentility, the majority of characters in the novel are not. And a lot of the tensions between characters are caused or exacerbated by minute class differences. Emma's treatment of Miss Bates is so dangerous because it could set the tone for the rest of Highbury and result in Miss Bates being shut out from genteel society since her position is already so tenuous, aside from Emma not wanting to marry Elton she's offended he would even aspire to her, and is extra offended his wife considers herself Emma's equal, Emma wavers over accepting the Coles rise or opposing it by declining their invitation, her desire and attempts to secure Harriet's as genteel causes many problems for them both, her shunning of Jane Fairfax as a friend gains an extra layer of insult when you understand that she's the suitable and natural choice due to her class and education, and Mrs Elton being patronising to Jane would've been even more unjust to contemporary readers than us since they knew Jane's 'naturally' the social superior by birth.
You lose so much of the novel if you see it only as a slow burn love story and not a deft study of blurring class lines, the resulting tensions, and the difficulties of maintaining and risings ones' status. None of Austen's other novels let us see so clearly the influence and importance of wealth as opposed to birth and education on class. (I actually have an essay about that topic in Emma, lol)
All of Jane Austen's books offer social commentary and explorations of class as well as studies of human character, let alone amazing wordplay and pioneering language style, but even among them Emma stands out. It's not my favourite to reread, or my favourite couple, but it's such a masterpiece of literature and I love it dearly.
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.
alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.
we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)
please rb for larger sample size!
Question 1/3
What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?
pixelskylines
germansingergirl
2087
ellievsbear
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