Black Comic Alliance Announces Stage 2: DCBlackout, Escalating Calls for Structural Change at DC Comics
The Black Comic Alliance, the collective of content creators behind the viral #DCSoWhite campaign, has officially announced Stage 2 of its advocacy movement: DCBlackout, a coordinated protest calling on readers, supporters, and content creators to withhold financial support and pause content creation tied to DC Comics publishing initiatives until meaningful structural changes are made around…
[ID: Text that reads: "In almost 50 years, DC has only had 10 Black ongoing series in its mainline continuity, with only 1 surpassing 50 issues, and not a single [title led by a] Black woman. They constantly blame sales, but they're playing a game with the deck stacked against us. This needs to stop," said James Portis III, also known as JPenumbra. /End ID.]
Sheeeeee’s baaaaack! Hi everyone!!!!! I’m still alive! Real life has been super busy but Ive spent the past few months chipping away at this animation in my absence. I plan to make more animatics (tho they wont be as detailed but hopefully at a faster pace lmaoo.) I hope everyone is doing well! XOXO Silvi 💋
A reminder to use another search engine than Google as they are replacing their search engine with Gemini tomorrow (May 26th, 2026). This means Google will no longer provide search results; it will only provide whatever Gemini feels like sharing at the time. This is censorship 101--Google will have total control over the information you see. Use search engines like Duck Duck Go, Brave, Metacrawler, or Qwant.
Okey gang i have an emergency, i lost my apartment and i need to move asap! so i will take emergency commissions once more with low prices for Lancer mechs or anything, if you are interested sennd me DM for more info i will take as much as i can!
If you can share this one i will be very happy!
And also if you want to help your boy to keep making art you can give me a hand right here in my Ko-fi! thanks in advance to anyone who wants to help me in this one!
Longtime readers may be aware of how much I relish an excuse to bully a company, so I'm sharing the wealth;
Clothing company Patagonia is currently suing drag queen Pattie Gonia for "irreparable” harm to their brand.
To be clear; Pattie named herself after the region in South America.
So Pattie is asking people to politely ask Patagonia to drop the lawsuit.
I'm extending the invitation to all of you, because suing a drag queen for 'infringement' in the current political cultural landscape is vile.
Especially a drag queen who has raised millions of dollars for non-profits, uses her platform to raise awareness for climate activism, and fully aligns with Patagonia's apparent climate-conscious mission statement.
They're claiming they're suing for $1. They're actually asking her to stop using her name, and pay over $1 million in legal fees. They're straight up harassing her.
In contrast, drag queen Jan Sport has a Jansport bag line. It's that easy to just... work with a queen.
Anyway. Be respectful(ish), but feel free to be annoying on Patagnoia's socials, asking them to 'DROP THE LAWSUIT'
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.
My job is to be the Anti-Gen-AI person at a college (and teach the field of Artificial Intelligence). When people ask my why i dont trust Gen AI i just send them this paper.
Managers hum and haw, but everyone gets real quiet when i ask if they read the paper and still want to push Gen AI.
hey so uh the british film institute have selected some episodes of Philosophy Tube for preservation in their archive of national importance
that means future generations will be able to watch the show even after I'm dead and YouTube the platform is gone
this ROCKS
it's nuts that the show is now a part of British cultural history???! like, what?!!! they're gonna be watching me in the 22nd Century are you kidding me?????? Fukin Ikki and Erika are gonna be taking breaks from Medabots battles to watch Philosophy Tube are you for real????
details and a list of the preserved episodes here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/159300843?pr=true
A teen from Nova Scotia, Joy Akinkunmi, made a documentary about Africville. She hopes her film will be shared in schools across Canada.
Good on Joy for making this documentary, I may check it out. It's about Africville which is/was Halifax's black community that was absolutely devastated in the explosion of 1917. Their community was completely leveled while the rich up on the hill suffered only minor structural damages if that.
According to the article the community survived up until the 1960s.
But seriously, I think if any of you want to do positive as an ally to end out this Black Girl Magic May, you should go see Is God Is if it's in your theaters. No, it's not about religion, but yes there is symbolism. As there is in many a story.
Complex Black and complex female characters? Isn't that what we all asked for? Black and female characters that are allowed to get angry, to make mistakes, to get emotional, to get dirty, to lash out and win?
I also think we should support a Black female playwright and director, Aleshea Harris. It's such a brilliantly written piece of work and I would like to support her creations. Especially because we know what happens whenever films by Black people and women "fail".
We have a chance to put our money where our mouths are- buy some candy and sneak it into the theater so you don't have to pay for treats, and support Black creation!
"It is the principle of editing itself which distresses me.
I shall be very grateful to you if you help me to weed out bad grammar, but I do not think I would like my longish sentences clipped too close, or have those drawbridges lowered which I have taken such pains to lift. In other words, I would like to discriminate between awkward construction (which is bad) and a certain special—how shall I put it—sinuosity, which is my own and which only at first glance may seem awkward or obscure. Why not have the reader re-read a sentence now and then? It won't hurt him."
I’ll ring this bell forever but the UFC being unable to turn Ronda Rousey-mania into a pipeline for young women to get into combat sports should be seen as another example of their lack of investment in the sport.
Imagine if when Rousey was still in her prime and one of the top 4 or 5 most visible women in all of sports, the UFC decided to work with judo dojos and orgs across the country to provide free classes and access to local regional competition. Call it the “Be the next Ronda Rousey” scholarship or something, with seminars and trips to see her fight for local girl judokas and wrestlers etc.
Hell, the UFC “owns” a chain of gyms. They could have done it themselves.
We need people getting invested into combat sports to keep the sport alive.
The UFC, as far as I can tell, has (had?) 1 NIL athlete and it’s Frank Mir’s daughter, Bella Mir. Go throw 5 figures at some of these women. Yu Sakamoto, Audrey Jimenez, Cam Guerin, Riley Rayome, Katerina Lange, etc. Anybody that will say yes. Hell, throw some at the men too. We might get some American wrestlers in the sport again. Get the idea of MMA in there ear and make it a potential career option when wrestling ends.
its probably a normal sign for the economy that all of my adulthood fantasies are like "imagine having your own kitchen living room and bathroom to decorate" "what if i could get on a train" "maybe one day i could purchase a sturdy pair of shoes" "i should save and invest in a single bicycle"
turnnoffyourmind
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
romaincrisis
