Cishet Asian-American male. This is a repository of posts on feminism, racism, the environment, and similar topics. Trigger warning: there's a lot of discussion of rape, sexual assault, racial aggression, etc. here.
Totally normal for a legitimate for-profit company to refuse to reclaim or stop running their products even after they're no longer being paid to do so. I'm sure it's very normal to just keep running your service for free when your contract's been terminated. Spending money to continue running cameras that supposedly no one is looking at is definitely not an indicator they are just run by the federal government to spy on everyone and only a wacko conspiracy theorist would think so.
kids of color, you’re allowed to get a bitey when a white friend does something racist. literally 0 percent of people of color are obligated to be nice and palatable for white people. holding your tongue in the name of kindness doesn’t really do much in regards to stuff like this because white people are going to see you calling out their own racism as unkind anyways.
white people, if a person of color comes off as aggressive while calling you out for racism, just fucking listen to them. they’re not coming from nowhere, and believe it or not: they know more about racism than you do! shocker, i know. just thickskin it, because it’s really not about you.
The worst sin you can commit around so-called "woke" white liberals is pointing out that, actually, NOT every homophobic republican is gay!, actually, many of them are just evil cishets doing their thing, and the closeted ones affect people more through evil than through their gayness so why are y'all so fixated on it? Hooooboy y'all those liberals will FLIP THEIR SHIT because how DARE you fuck with their hilarious narrative turning every evil anti-queer politician into a good ol' fashioned fag like they deserve, it's actually SUPER liberal and cool and effective to blame all queerphobia on queer people, why are you RUINING our GOOD TIIIIME
"BUT DOESN'T GRINDR KEEP CRASHING WHEN--" no. Jesus it happened ONE time at ONE republican gathering. Yes there's a SLIGHT increase in traffic on the site for their gatherings - the same as EVERY SINGLE BIG GATHERING OF HUMANS. If you've been telling people "Grindr crashes at EVERY GOP convention" you've been spreading misinformation to blame queer people for the violence they face in the US and it's gross
mandatory viewing on this subject (particularly the second one which provides some well-needed critical thinking and fact-checking on the whole "republicans always crash Grindr" claim; there's a shit ton of blatant misinformation going on there we need to make people more aware of. like, a major part of this myth stems from a straight up satire twitter account's post that was taken at face value.)
from the second video:
But building on that essay [first video], and what we’ve discussed today as a prime example of a narrative born from the “homophobes are secretly just gay” trope, I want to examine why it’s so resistant to correction, and why people that are otherwise usually media literate and concerned with truth over comforting myths might grab onto this with both hands and refuse to let go.
And I'm including myself in this. The first time I heard the Grindr crash thing, I laughed. I'm not coming to you from moral superiority. I'm coming from a position of "I also fell for this and then felt annoyed about it and made it everyone else's problem in the form of a video essay because I think the truth is actually a more effective political weapon than a lie."
So why does this work? I think there are four main reasons, ranging from "understandable" to "I'm not sure that's healthy babe."
The first reason: yo, it feels good. Queer people are constantly on the receiving end… Of right-wing politics in a material, tangible way. These aren't abstract disagreements. These are people who've campaigned on the premise that your love is invalid, your identity is a disorder, your existence is a threat to children. And when the power imbalance is that stark, there is something extremeeeelllly satisfying about the idea that the oppressor who thinks they are so much better than you is nothing but a fraud. They can’t even meet their own bar for “deserves rights.”
It's the political equivalent of "the bully has a crush on you." We're told that story from childhood. So when someone offers an adult, political version, "they're homophobic because they're secretly homosexual", we’re already primed and lubed, and it slides right in to how we understand the world. And suddenly, the power dynamic feels more manageable, they’re just pathetic self-hating gays, I’m not scared of that. It feels good, and it feels true. And that’s the exact kind of story that goes viral, regardless of whether it’s based on evidence.
The "Republicans crash Grindr when they gather" claim has every quality of what misinformation researchers call “sticky”, as in, it’s sticky. It’s sticks to your brain. And it does so, even after you learn the truth. Researchers call this The Continued Influence Effect (CIE). It’s a cognitive phenomenon where misinformation continues to influence a person's reasoning and beliefs even after it has been clearly and credibly retracted. The paper posits that people continue to use misinformation because, on some level, they still feel it is relevant or useful, even if they know it's false. This paper frames this not just as a problem of forgetting the correction or new information, but as a problem where the feeling of familiarity and narrative coherence from the original misinformation overrides the factual knowledge of its retraction. We believe, because it feels true.
And you’ll see this under any post that’s been debunked. People who fell for it will say “well, it might as well be true” or “This case might be false, but this really happens, so it might as well be true, and in a way it is true.” [laughter] Like yeah but in another way that isn’t nonsense, it isn’t. But it doesn’t matter, once it’s in your head, it’s often hard to get rid of. Especially when it’s gone so viral that you’ve seen people talking about it from all directions, each time your new worldview being compounded and cemented. And this… it went viral. And I get why.
One: it’s funny, and funny storied spread faster than boring ones.
Two: It’s ironic.
Three: We have a clear villain being a hypocrite. People love an exposed hypocrite because...
Four: it feels like justice. It’s someone we see as a threat getting caught in the act, exposed for their lies! They finally get their just desserts! And on top of that, it’s easy to believe because...
Five: it’s just plausible enough even for a skeptic.
I would like to emphasize that I agree with all of these tags by the way. My post wasn't aiming to pin all of Europe's grotesque racism on the new elections.
A few weeks ago I was at a board game night with some of my old classmates from various mainland European countries. They started talking about how horrible Trump's treatment of immigrants is and how they're so glad to be in Europe where nothing like that is happening right now. I asked them what they thought about the fact that their own governments were complicit in turning the Mediterranean into a mass grave of asylum seekers, and some of them legitimately didn't even know and were surprised to hear that their own governments had enacted policies that caused the deaths of thousands of asylum seekers.
Even here in Iceland, almost nobody has been talking about the fact that some of the far right populist parties have legitimately been talking about wanting to establish detainment camps to keep asylum seekers in.
This post is a few months old now, and the bit about Iceland is now outdated, because Alþingi (the Icelandic parliament) passed the bill approving the detention center for asylum seekers. It will be legal to handcuff and detain children there.
Never let anyone from Europe feed you the lie that racism and fascism are unique to North America in the 21st century.
Today is a good day to remember the 1942 Zoot Suit Riots, in which WWII army members and the LA times accused Mexican American men as a unit of sexual assault and gang activity.
Earlier that year, a young Latino man was possibly murdered by an unknown assailant? (LAPD botched the case so bad no one is sure if it was actually murder) and 17 Latino boys were arrested without evidence. They were not given a fair trial, with accusers even going so far as to bring in a sheriff to claim Mexican people had a biological need for violence. Activists who helped get the case thrown out and the accused men released were investigated for communism.
US soldiers, cops, and white vigilantes used this as an excuse to violently attack Angelinos with Latino, Black, and Filipino heritage. These attacks especially targeted young men wearing the counter culture zoot suit, which they saw as a sign of gang membership and who soldiers believed flew in the face of fabric rationing. Media suppressed the truth. No soldiers were arrested but many People of Color were. The MEXICAN EMBASSY had to intervene, finally leading to investigations. Some scholars call it a program against the Mexican American Community.
i love when exclusionists try to fearmonger about hypothetical cishet alloaro men as if they're the last line of defense against some sort of Fuckboy Invasion of Queer Spaces. like we all universally agree aros are queer and suddenly Gym Bro Josh is going to pride in aro flag gear so he can siphon money from queer charities or whatever the fuck
like i WISH there was a flood of cishet men openly identifying as aromantic. i wish aromantic identity was known and accepted enough that Gym Bro Josh could realize that about himself and live his truth but unfortunately we live in a world where even niche queer spaces can barely wrap their heads around the concept of alloaros let alone, like, the rest of society
Hey, if anyone’s curious, this IS making a serious impact — this handbook was taught as standard practice for my EMT license course, as well as several other programs. A lot of new providers are being taught this as a matter of course.
[id: tweet by Black Britain (@theblkbrit) from 2020-07-02: “Medical Student - Malone Mukwende, creates a medical handbook for Black and Brown people.
“The Second year student identified racial gaps during his studies. He explains that many resources refer to symptoms on white skin.
“The handbook displays signs and symptoms on darker skin.”
Underneath is a picture of the book: “Mind the Gap: a handbook of clinical signs on black and brown skin” by Mukwende M, Tamony P, and Turner M, with cover art that shows various skintones displayed in stripes next to each other like paint swatches. There is also a picture of Mukwende, a smiling young Black student with a pink button down and a stethoscope around his neck.]/end id.
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 wanted to use what ‘reach’ I may have here to share the Carolina Wildlife Center’s urgent plea for donations. If they are unable to raise $75,000 to cover ongoing and future care of their wildlife patients, the center will have to close July 20th, 2026. The services provided by CWC to the community are incredibly valuable, and without them, many wild animals will suffer without the care they need.
An update from the center: they've reached their goal!
I will be keeping my offer open through the end of the month, since any extra money they can get will probably be a big help in keeping their doors open while they arrange more stable funding- but thank you to everyone who donated or shared! It's so great to see so many people rallying around a cause like this.
Now that everyone is discussing Nolan's Odyssey movie, I feel like it's a good time to let non-Italians know that the production dumped plastic props into the Italian sea. Weirdly enough I could not find any article in English about it but it's a fucking problem nonetheless.
I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.
Non è la prima volta che la produzione solleva un vespaio in Sicilia. A Lipari una squadra di sub sarebbe però già impegnata a bonificare i
They dumped plastic skeletons in environmentally protected areas, against the literal contracts they had to sign to get the permits to film in environmentally protected areas. Like they not only did a bad ecological thing that freaked out some divers, they literally broke environmental protection laws and their contract with the Italian government
“why should my taxes fund needles for drug addicts?”
because you should care less about sticking it to the junkies than you do about not letting blood borne diseases run rampant through your communities. it’s not about whether they deserve to have their addiction funded. it’s about whether we all deserve to live in a healthier society. needle exchange programs are part of a healthier society.
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