A place to put stuff that I like - current fixation: Love and Deepspace
I like to write and draw - 40F - Feel free to ask me about anything
@purpleshootingstar.bsky.social
🌊🫧If you lived at the bottom of the sea for thousands or tens of thousands of years, you would know how precious it is to see even a sliver of vibrant color 🪸🐠
⟢ a/n: just a lil something since valko is coming and sylus probably knows him and is not his bestie
The sound of your curious hum has Sylus’ ears perking up in interest.
“What is it?” he asks in a low murmur, peering at you over the top of his reading glasses. There’s a novel caught in his grasp - The Count of Monte Cristo, one of his favourites. He watches you pause at the foot of the bed, engrossed in your phone, using two fingers to zoom in and out of something on the screen. You tilt your head to the side, scrutinising the image, and hum again.
“Sylus?”
His lip twitches, tempted to tease you about not hearing him. “Yes, sweetie?”
“What do you know about EonCore Tech?”
Sylus’ eyebrows arch up with intrigue. He sets his book down in his lap and removes his glasses, red eyes smouldering as you glance up at him.
“Are you asking as a Hunter or as my girlfriend?” You pat his legs, signalling for him to make room before you take a seat on the edge of the bed.
“Hunter,” you admit. “I’ve been assigned to investigate the incident from last week.”
“Ah, the terrifying beast that was skulking around Linkon,” he smirks. “Are EonCore related to it?”
“The creature was last spotted by their building and they have state of the art surveillance tech. I was going to ask if I could borrow footage for the investigation but I can’t seem to get through to anyone.”
“Well,” Sylus says, pulling you onto the bed by the hand so that you’re curled into his side. His arm wraps around your waist, holding you snugly. “That makes sense. They’re awfully secretive.”
“So you do know them?”
Sylus lets out a hearty chuckle. “You could say we’ve crossed paths.”
“Stop being cryptic,” you whine, smacking his chest. He feigns benign hurt with a soft hiss, frowning at you.
“Ouch.”
“Sylus.”
“Alright, alright. What do you need to know?”
“Their CEO.” Jumping straight to business, as always. He expects nothing less from his favourite Hunter. You turn your phone to show him the picture you were looking at before. Sylus’ lips curl with barely concealed distaste. “Do you know him?”
“We’ve met,” he says simply. “Is that what you were looking at so closely before?”
You pause at his tone, sitting up a little to eye him carefully. To the ordinary eye, Sylus’s face is devoid of emotion, but you know him far more intimately than anyone else. He may look bored, but you can see the annoyance spelled out on his forehead in red ink. “Yeah…” you say, trailing off. And then you add, “He’s kinda hot.”
Sylus scoffs, rolling his eyes. “He looks like he lost all his hair in a disagreement with his barber.”
“You don’t like the undercut?” you say, squinting at the picture again. “I think it’s kinda cute. He looks like one of those brooding businessmen. Guess I must have a type, huh?”
The teasing sparkle in your eyes makes him roll his, before plucking your phone out of your hands and tossing it aside. “He and I are not the same ‘type’, thank you.”
“Then what type of person is he?” you press as you reach over him to retrieve your phone.
“He’s barely a person,” he mutters darkly, but you don’t hear him, too concerned with reopening your notes. “He’s an all bark, all bite sort of man, let’s say.”
“What do you mean?” you ask, already tapping away.
“It means you don’t need to go and see him alone.”
You let out a laugh at his over the top reaction. “He’s a CEO, he can’t be that scary.” He gives you a pointed look and you lean back and stare at him like his grown another head, features scrunched in irritation. “You don’t think I’m capable of dealing with him?”
“The two of you would clash horribly, kitten, believe me,” he says in a serious tone. “His kind are… abrasive. You’re not incapable, he’s just unpredictable.”
“His kind? Sylus, I’m literally dating the guy that conquered the N109 Zone. I think I’ll be fine,” you remind him. It makes him warm a little whenever you refer to him that way because around you, he is most definitely nothing like that version of himself. “If I can handle you, I’m sure I can handle a single meeting with him.”
Pinching the bridge of his noise, Sylus sighs heavily. You truly are as stubborn as they come. It’s both a blessing and a curse. “Fine. But I have one condition.”
“Yes, yes, Mephie can follow me,” you say, waving him off as you add a few more notes to your case.
“No,” he drawls. “I’ll be coming with you.”
“Wha- Sylus, come on!” It’s rare that he insists upon accompanying you, usually doing so from the shadows without interfering, more for protection and peace of mind than anything else. But this is not the same. You know he means to be there at your side the whole time. “It’s just a meeting!”
“All the more reason for me to accompany you,” he shrugs, picking up his book and finding where he left off.
“That makes no sense,” you huff, crossing your arms over your chest. “I fight Wanderers every other day but a meeting is where you draw the line?”
“It makes plenty of sense,” he says, popping his glasses back on. “Besides, I have business of my own with him to attend to. Two birds, no?”
You deflate a little at that. “Oh. What business is that?”
“Oh, I just need to send a little message that he can’t ignore.”
“Right…” Realisation dawns on your face as you watch his jaw flex, and your face cracks in a wide, cheeky smile. “Is this cos I said he was hot?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says, licking a finger and flipping the page aggressively.
“Aww, you’re so cute when you’re jealous,” you coo, poking his cheek. “You think the big bad CEO is gonna steal your girl?”
Sylus catches your hand in his and meets your gaze, his eyes burning like the belly of a volcano over the top of his glasses. “No,” he says softly, kissing the tips of your fingers without blinking. He huffs out an amused breath, and something about it feels sinister. “What a laughable notion.”
Your breath flutters in your throat, heat prickling in your cheeks from the intensity in his stare. “Then, what?” you ask breathlessly.
“You’ll see,” he murmurs. “Age-old instincts are rather difficult to ignore, after all.”
Not entirely sure how to word this, but I’ve always loved the entire concept of Ghosts as a way to justify a revive/respawn mechanic.
In pretty much every game I’ve ever played that has a revive/respawn mechanic, it’s never explained as to how it works. Which isn’t really that big of a deal to me; it’s a game mechanic that allows you to keep playing the game, case closed.
And then you have Destiny. Get gunned down by a Cabal turret? Your Ghost will have you up in a hot second. Did another Guardian fire a rocket a bit to close to themselves? Go interact with their Ghost to rez them. Did you finally kill that bastard camping an ammo spawn in Trials? Better make sure their teammates can’t get to their Ghost, or they’ll be back up doming you from halfway across the map in seconds.
Except your Ghost is more than just a flying respawn machine. He can hack stuff, mark things on your tracker/radar thingy, oh and he’s an entire character with a personality who reflects the personality of your Guardian, who barely speaks.
The nonverbal communication and interactions in cutscenes between the two are fuckin immaculate. The way Ghost tilts the parts of his shell to express emotions - annoyance, shock, excitement, curiosity… and your Guardian reacts to him usually with a glance or a look, like… idk they just kinda get each other.
But while he is your Ghost, he’s not YOUR Ghost. By which I mean, Ghost is his own, independent character. He’s not a reflection of you or anyone else, and that’s made clear when his opinions and thoughts don’t align with the actions of you as the Guardian. In a lore thing from Forsaken I believe? there is a list of things he wishes he could say to you. One of those things is how he sees that you’re going on a rampage through the Tangled Shore, and justified by the death of Cayde-6 as it may be, he doesn’t like it; it scares him. But he still loves you - that’s also on the list, and even during Beyond Light we see this when he continues to stay by our side even as we start wielding the Darkness in the form of Stasis.
That’s not to say he can’t be vengeful himself. In the lead up to the final boss battle with Savathun during the Witch Queen campaign, Savathun taunts you and your Ghost. This isn’t anything new - bosses taunt you before and during boss fights all the time in Destiny campaigns - and usually you react by wiping the floor with them, without a word in response. Except this time, Ghost is PISSED, essentially says “how fucking dare you, you killed my friends”, lists a bunch of shit the Hive have done to humanity (most of which you personally have been affected by as a combatant against the Hive), and ends off by telling her that he would rather die than serve the Hive.
Speaking of the Witch Queen, we also get to see that Ghost isn’t perfect; he absolutely despises other Ghosts who joined the Hive, and makes that abundantly clear. He’s also extremely suspicious of Fynch, the Hive Ghost who helps you out in the Throne World. Ghost is kind of an ass to Fynch, because to him, the Ghosts who joined the Hive under Savathun betrayed the Traveller and humanity. But when he realizes that most of the Hive Ghosts like Fynch were coerced into helping the Hive in their search for their Guardians, he outright APOLOGIZES to Fynch. It’s actually a pretty cool moment in the story, and it shows like… yeah, he’s capable of making mistakes, but he’s also capable of at least trying to fix them.
Also he was really funny that one time when the Drifter didn’t show up to run tactical for you in Beyond Light, so he did an impression of him instead lmao
Btw. you HAVE to make an account to submit feedback. Like an additional account for help support. They have an "email option" but the email listed is apparently no longer in use or too busy to even accept email.
I won't say that this is on purpose or anything silly like that. :3
But it is easy to make an account and you don't even have to put in your discord account. You can use a separate email.
No need to say much. You can type as much as you want so long as you say "Don't put kind of age verification or I will cancel my Nitro, please." The subject line can be anything about Discord like Age Verification, Nitro, Subscription, Help, Account. Just official stuff. This is to ensure that they don't filter out their emails and ignore them. It helps if you genuinely have additional complaints unrelated to the age thing.
Go ahead and cancel your subscriptions if you have no reply for a week. Force their hand.
The thing is to overwhelm with numbers, a severe drop in sales that are CLEARLY related to your complaints (you can send an extra email right after you cancelled that says "hey I canceled my subscription. You didn't help me when I asked for it."), and make them panic.
Corporations are spineless. Remember how there was a severe drop in Pride Merch when conservatives got out of hand? Remember that they are only doing this because of other companies bending their backs over for governments that hasn't even implemented any laws yet? Just saying that they will?
Then you’re gonna love this photo of Annie Jump Canon.
Working at Harvard in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s as a “Computer”, Annie Jump Cannon cataloged stars using their spectra from photographic plates, in an effort to understand the mysteries and peculiarities of stellar spectra.
This was hard, detailed, nuanced work. By 1889, three years into her work, she had classified over 1,000 stars. By 1913, she could classify 200 stars an hour. She could classify three stars a minute, just by sight. Using a magnifying glass, she could classify stars down to 9th magnitude, 16 times fainter than the human eye can see. And she did this all with exceptional accuracy.
Over the course of her career, she personally classified more than 350,000 stars, accounting for a mind-boggling 98% of all contemporary stellar spectra classifications, a feat that wouldn’t be bested until the 1990’s with automated digital sky surveys.
Cannon used these classifications to develop the Harvard spectral classification system (O–B–A–F–G–K–M), organizing stars by surface temperature and physical properties.
It is hard to overstate just how foundational her work was to modern astronomy and astrophysics. Her classifications have enabled more than a century of breakthroughs in stellar structure and evolution, including the understanding of how stars change over time and how temperature, luminosity, and composition are related. The system underpins the Hertzsprung–Russell (HR) diagram, one of the most important tools in astrophysics, and remains embedded in modern research, from stellar population studies to galaxy evolution.
The immense scale of her work was itself a massive contribution to astronomy. For comparison, before Cannon, star catalogs contained between 600 and 4,000 stars. Her work single-handedly proved that large-scale stellar classification was both feasible and scientifically valuable. She helped establish systematic star catalogs as a core method of modern astronomy and laid the groundwork for astrophysical research on stellar structure, evolution, and populations that continues today.
As artists, our goal has always been to create worlds filled with wonder, mystery, beauty, and adventure. But what brings those worlds to life is you. You take our designs, our napkin sketches, our "wouldn't it be cool if..." ideas and transform them into something real. Your creativity, your passion, and your love for the game give our work purpose.
We've always believed Destiny could be a place where expression is celebrated, where players can see themselves and each other in the worlds we build, where every Guardian can forge their own legend—and you proved it.
Watching your Guardians grow, embrace new allies, take down bigger and badder bosses, solve mind-bending puzzles, dodge death traps, avoid Taken boopers, and overcome every Raid challenge we throw at you—all while looking incredible—has been a constant reminder of why this universe matters.
You shaped it. You made it matter. You are the light of Destiny.
With Monument of Triumph, we set out to create a series of love letters to Guardians, new and old. We shared a preview last week of armor inspired by early designs from the original Destiny but have also sprinkled some winks and nods throughout the rewards releasing tomorrow. We hope they feel like a small thank you for everything you’ve given us.
From all of us on the Destiny 2 art team, thank you for supporting us, inspiring us, and continuing to bring this world to life in ways we could never have imagined. You give our art meaning.
Start with a large sheet of cardboard. Stores like home depot have large moving boxes that come flat like this, perfect for this project.
I use a projector to trace my butterfly, but you can also put tracing paper up to a screen and glue it to your cardboard, or ask your library to let you use their projector.
Make sure to trace not just the outside, but also all of the markings and patterns. Doing the antennae as well and keeping the scrap cardboard will allow you to measure out the right length.
2.
Cut around the outside of your lepidopteran and crease where the wings meet each other and the body. I use my hands, but a ruler can help. After bending your wings into a natural position, make the body and head with your clay of choice, mine is foam clay which is cheap and easy to use.
Blend the sides of the body into the wings just enough to stick, this will hold the pose you've chosen.
Prop up the wings with whatever is around and keep in a safe spot to dry. Mine dries overnight at this size. You can see I've used bottles for mine
3.
Once dry and solidified, the clay holds the wings in place in the way you left them.
Measure your antennae wire a little longer than needed and poke it into the clay. If it doesn't stay, add a little dot of super or hot glue at the base.
Glue a mounting bracket on the back. You can angle this however you like to have your lepidopteran upright, sideways, or even upside down
4.
Paint your sections individually so you don't lose your trace lines. I go in with white first to cover up the print on the cardboard, then put the correct colors over that.
If making a high contrast lep like this, go in with black at the end to clean up your edges.
If adding any fur to the body, get a piece larger than you need and hot glue it on, then trim the backing underneath the fibers with tiny snips, as not to cut the fur itself, and carefully glue the edges of the backing to the body as well
5.
Brush a matte finish like mod podge over your final product. Hold your lep up to where you want it to hang, then mount with a nail
my fellow queers. happy pride month. Past 2 years ive made pride headers for diff flags but i didnt have time this year (due to recent news) so i made one big flag à la NASA. Tried to cover most destinations in D2!
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.
TLDR: 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.
But seriously, read it. this is a big deal and it's only getting worse; and fast.
snowghoul
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