i saw you made a post about the differences between queerplatonic and alterous... would you mind explaining that to me? im questioning if i feel them but i cant tell the difference between them and strong platonic attraction. im also aroace if thats important
I don’t mind at all! Thank you for giving me a reason to ramble about this :D hopefully it’ll make sense, you can always send another ask and bonk me gently if it doesn’t :3 It’s a little long too, sorry and thank you to anyone who reads >_<
A few clarifications before I start going off tho
A-spec or not, anyone can experience queerplatonic and alterous attractions!
I’m also a-spec so like… I also can’t tell the differences sometimes, but bestie I swear I’ll do my best to explain how I tell them apart
TL;DR:
Queerplatonic: Homies that hold hands, usually no romo
Alterous: Homies that hold hands, usually a little romo
Queerplatonic Attraction:
From what I’ve seen and felt, queerplatonic is like the feeling of wanting/having a best friend. Homies that link elbows/hold hands/kiss if you will. The fascinating and frustrating thing about this type of attraction is that everyone defines and feels it differently. Different people have different boundaries between the people they call friends and the people that they want to keep a bit closer than that. For me, it’s kinda like holding my beloved friends close to my heart compared to holding my qpp close to my soul.
Another example, I can vc and talk with my friends all the time and have a jolly good time with them. But when I do those things with my qpp, it’s generally a more grounding type of experience. They get to see a side of me that’s a bit more vulnerable than what I show my closest friends.
Cultural aspects and personal affection/intimacy levels can tie into how you experience these types of boundaries too, so keep that in mind I suppose.
Alterous Attraction:
This lovely term confuses the hell out of me when I experience it, I never expect it or realize that I’m having it until I’m literally giggling at everything and nothing around someone. Most things from queerplatonic attraction apply here, but the main difference is a sprinkle of romantic-like attraction. I see alterous attraction as wanting to do romantic things in a maybe just slightly romantic context but also homie context, compared to QPRs where it’s possibly romantic-esque things but in a purely homie context.
If you’re like me and don’t really know what counts as romantic feelings, haha heyy bestie same hat, but also this term kind of fits perfectly for that confusion. Once again, cultural aspects can tie into how you see the boundaries between platonic and romantic actions.
The fun thing about this is that the terms can also overlap since queerplatonic is kind of like alterous’s cool older sibling, the attraction spectrum isn’t something we can easily fit into boxes no matter how hard we try :’) but I hope this helps! And wow great job if you made it this far /gen
This mild Wikipedia sentence is like the understatement of all time
Here are some crazy grasshopper mouse facts for those who are not familiar with the most badass mouse species on the planet
- They are primarily carnivorous, and their diet is made up of not only bugs but also snakes, lizards and other mice.
- They hunt like true predators, slowly stalking and creeping up on their prey before ambushing them. They will sometimes let out a screech as they attack.
- Like wolves, they howl to establish territory and have a specially developed throat to produce louder vocalizations. They will stand up on their hind legs and throw their head back to howl- a sound that can be heard from 100 meters away!
- Grasshopper mouse behavior is linked to lunar cycles and they are more active during a full moon.
- These mice have been hunting bark scorpions and evolving alongside them for so long that they’ve evolved a mutation where scorpion venom that is lethal to other animals is converted into a painkiller in the grasshopper mouse’s body.
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.
As a society we have benefited so much from successful public health measures that we now have the privilege of declaring that we must not need them anymore
Bitch before enriched flour, neural tube defects like spina bifida were far more common. Even now, spina bifida clinicians and researchers are begging to have salt and maize fortified to reach groups that don’t use as much flour. Before iodized salt, the United States had a fucking GOITER BELT. Eleven years after the introduction of fluoridated water, a city in Michigan found the rate of dental caries among school children dropped a staggering 60%— in an era where tooth decay regularly fucking killed people
I’m literally not even going to start on vaccines, which are among the most successful and robustly studied public health measures in world history
You might say “oh well today we all have access to vitamins and toothpastes and dentists so we don’t need those things in our food supplies” and boy do white people on social media loooove to fucking say that. But here’s the thing: no, people don’t all have easy access to those things. That’s privilege talking yet again
the legally blonde mentality isnt just for law students. u can bring that attitude with you into every field of work. be the whimsical force of positive change. wear that neon outfit. snaps for us all.
this post was inspired by my boss telling me she couldnt "take me seriously" in a pair of dinosaur print overalls. sorry i have two degrees and a dope wardrobe. you dont need to take me seriously but You Will Take Me.
Tumblr is the reason why I have something I call the cashier test which is, if i told this to a random cashier at the grocery store, would they think you're crazy at best or at worst would they be warranted in leaping over the counter and beating the shit out of you. Karl Marx mpreg is crazy, but not beating the shit out of you crazy. The cashier will probably talk about you to their coworkers and it might even make their day. Telling someone they're complicit in their own oppression by working a minimum wage job at a grocery store makes them warranted in leaping over the counter to beat the shit out of you.
No midroll ads and it’s just a polite man playing hitman with meditative music in the background this is actually just insane enough to be my new favorite thing to fall asleep to
they are sexually mature at ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OLD.
their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.
longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years
toxic flesh
has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.
lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion
largest genome of any shark
eats everything including moose and polar bears
ma'am you are delightfully strange and I'm privileged to share a planet with you
i have a story for you, tumblr. last year my coworkers and I were riding in a golf cart at a music festival passing out drinks to people, because the festival had been cancelled that day and everyone was trying to make the best of a bad situation. after some time we spot a guy on the other side of the road dressed as lord farquaad, walking alone. we yell, “LORD FARQUAAD! DO YOU WANT A DRINK??” dude yells an affirmative, walks into the road without looking, gets hit by a fucking car, and goes flying.
I really need you to picture a lord farquaad being dummy yeeted into the air by an incoming vehicle while a golf cart of inebriated, glitter and mud plastered coworkers are full-on horror movie screaming together. before we can even process this, lord farquaad gets up like 🤪 how bout that drink?? completely okay, utterly unphased, red hat and bob wig still locked the fuck in. we check on him several times, all talking over each other, and while he’s calmly and pleasantly assuring us he’s fine, he passes each one of us a tiny jesus figurine. he bestows a “god bless you all” and then resumes his jaunt, drink in hand.
after that we drove in total relieved hysterics, the kinda laughter that only happens when you narrowly avoided catastrophe. and i have NO idea if the driver that hit him even said a word because my entire consciousness in that moment was farquaad, there was only farquaad. I hope that he reads this one day and knows that he is STILL talked about and regarded as some sort of festival cryptid. we are blessed indeed
sometimes people experiencing psychosis and/or mania will come up to you on the street and talk in confusing or upsetting ways. your job is to either have a regular human-to-human conversation with that person or politely leave. your job is not to call 911. do not call 911. you might kill that person if you call 911.
I don't even have the energy to screenshot and respond to your tags- what the actual fuck is wrong with you? "the cops are scared and rightfully so" "mental health calls are the scariest for cops" OH so this isn't about the safety of psychotic & manic people this is about piggy feelings?
and no, actually, this is not USA specific and no, actually, people from other countries should not ignore this post. police violence and sanism weren't invented in the US and they are certainly not unique to here. if you (or anyone) thinks that this bullshit doesn't happen elsewhere then you are not listening.
This is legitimately useful reframing. A while ago I started replacing the word "cop" in my vocabulary with "a man with a gun." It really puts things into perspective.
This homeless person is making me uncomfortable. Should I call [a man with a gun]?
My neighbor is having a loud party. Should I get [a man with a gun] involved?
There are some teenagers skateboarding. Do you think [a man with a gun] would get rid of them for me?
It makes it very clear what you're saying. I can call a man with a gun to threaten or hurt someone mildly inconveniencing me. You're not calling the cops, you're calling A MAN WITH A GUN into a situation that does not warrant a firearm handled by a volatile lunatic who will not be held accountable for his actions.
