Magen

Posts about gaming, art, cosplay, and even some of my own art tossed in for good measure. SageOfMagic's Deviantart Friends Bard buddies Catch a Mermaid Pirate Spazztard Chinchilla Lord

[theconcealedweapon]

The assholes openly admit it. The whole point of college is to enforce the hierarchy. When those who were supposed to be low on the hierarchy started going to college, the assholes get angry and want to make them suffer for challenging the hierarchy.

[ambidisastrous]

every major structural social problem right now is basically "we don't have enough skilled workers on the ground" and the reason is always "well we've been intentionally underpaying and understaffng them for decades to increase corporate profits" and somehow the news always just mentions the "shortage" without digging into the cause

air travel is a mess? shortage of air traffic controllers - for some mysterious reason

logistics a mess? shortage of truck drivers - for some mysterious reason

public transit can't meet demand? shortage of bus drivers - for some mysterious reason

We even mysteriously have shortages of doctors, nurses, teachers... FOR SOME MYSTERIOUS REASON

FUCKING PAY PEOPLE AND HIRE ENOUGH STAFF

[moniquill]

Yes and: Make education more affordable and achievable!!

[resumbrarum]

The destruction of public and higher education and the degradation and subjugation of workers has been an active part of conservative policy for more than fifty years.

Related: when conservatives say "no one wants to work anymore", what they mean is "no one wants to give up a substantial portion of the fruits of their labor in order to enrich an idle capital-holding class".

[komsomolka]

looked up russians vs japanese piracy twt beef and its worse than i thought😭 it all started with japanese users being mad at discovering there's all those unofficial russian manga reading sites. russians tell them that there's not much licensed manga in russia to consume legally in the first place. japanese say its your problem, you should then go to japan and buy it legally. russians obviously go ??? it's crazy expensive to fly to japan plus we're sanctioned and often can't purchase foreign things with our money. japanese go full russophobia and say ahhh you evil aggressors deserve it for war. russians answer that even before the war this wouldn't be a solution. then brazilians join russians to fight on the side of piracy and started gotcha japanese with their war crimes and xenophobia. then other japanese users joined on the side of piracy and said anti-piracy japanese are hypocrites because its common in japan to listen to pirated western music. i guess this made japanese anti-piracy people even madder and they went all in saying crazy stuff like comparing piracy to rape. the more hilarious example was one japanese user trying to gotcha russians by threatening to pirate and read... dostoevsky🤣 sums up their level of ignorance regarding this whole topic.

[komsomolka]

when i still took liberals seriously i recall how much they praised japan for having flourishing small businesses and connected japanese economic rise to it. now im assuming this prevalence of petty bougie sector in japan and those widespread reactionary attitudes are connected.

[komsomolka]

but the whole thing had a good side as russians and brazilians started bonding over being pro piracy😁

"Japanese, don't mess with my Russian friends".

[muttsandmustelidae]

From the Nashville Zoo’s fb page! Here’s the petition, please please please take a moment to add your name (even if you’re not from Nashville!). If you are from Tennessee, contact your representatives and make it clear that the people do not want this data center. This is an AZA accredited zoo which is home to several species of critically endangered animals, we NEED to protect it. Make your voice heard!

[muttsandmustelidae]

Because people will pay attention to cute animals, here are some of the critically endangered/endangered species housed at the Nashville Zoo!

The Amur Leopard and Clouded Leopard (which recently celebrated its 50th cub born at the zoo!)

The Sumatran Tiger

The Red Ruffed Lemur and Ring-Tailed Lemur

The Cotton-Top Tamarin and White-Cheeked Gibbon

The Colobus Monkey and De Brazza’s Monkey

And the Mexican Spider Monkey!

Look at them!!!! Look at them and fight like hell to save them!!!!

[hamjensgar]

- Mahmoud Jaber

[maudit]

[profeminist]

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.

Gifset source

[missbliss12]

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.

[weirdmageddon]

have you guys seen this guy haunted daily by randomly placed white rugs on dream islands yet

he’s started posting daily rug sighting updates now

[weirdmageddon]

update: apparently he’s not the only one

(notice the timestamp on that photo was from march)

it doesn’t seem to happen to everyone

[ventresses]

This is a perfect time to read the brilliant and unforgettable graphic novel(s) Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, about growing up in Iran during and after the Iranian Revolution, and the rise of the oppressive theocracy that persists to this day.

Both graphic novels are available free online (Persepolis vol. 1, Persepolis vol. 2)

It also was adapted to a wonderful film (co-directed and co-written by the author) which is available to watch for free on Sundance Now (sign up for the free trial)

[xteacupx]

Today after about a week of confusion and asking people in real life if they've noticed anything, I discovered that there is, in fact, not a bizarre 2026 trend of "Mr Beast Pregnancy Memes" and it is all in fact just a series of tumblr posts from one Ukranian who I've never met named Petro and my two chaos incarnate tumblr mutuals who are so fascinated by the world he is conjuring that they have both been drip-feeding it onto my otherwise relatively normal tumblr dashboard.

[hotvampireadjacent]

[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.

[sageofmagic-squeaks]

I feel like every programmer needs to go back and take a lesson in coding for the worst computer systems and also learn how to design for idiots.

A website I use daily got rid of right clicking to copy/paste because 'you should already know to ALWAYS ctrl+c/ctrl+v!'

I do know that shortcut. I'm still judging you. Why would you purposely code something like this.

[twistcmyk]

[depsidase]

[iamnotlanuk]

New one in the saga of Tony Hawk trying to live life as Tony Hawk

[should-be-sleeping]

[should-be-sleeping]

[should-be-sleeping]

[should-be-sleeping]

If you are here, you need to not be.

The mandatory evacuation zone stretches from Ball Road to the north, Trask Avenue to the south, Valley View Street to the west and Dale Avenue to the east. That includes parts of Garden Grove, Cypress, Stanton, Anaheim, Buena Park and Westminster.

[should-be-sleeping]

[should-be-sleeping]

[should-be-sleeping]

[should-be-sleeping]

[should-be-sleeping]

Potential blast zone:

[should-be-sleeping]

[sharas-bae]

here's the local abc affiliate for ongoing live updates (including a spanish version)

[orbitingrook]