a funny thing about having conversations with people within institutions (academic in this case but also others) about gatekeeping, is that you end up having a conversation over and over in which you're like, "hey this alligator spike pit moat you have erected around your institution is keeping a lot of people out," and they're like, "well *I* navigated the alligator spike pit moat just fine," and you're like, "right. by dint of us having this conversation, you within the institution and me without, it is understood that you navigated the alligator spike pit moat. due to that being an inherent requirement of entering the institution," and they're like, "I don't think you understand the prestigious history of our alligator spike pit moat," and you're like, "is there a reason why there needs to be an alligator spike pit moat encircling the concept of higher education?" and they're like, "look, the alligator spike pit moat isn't for everyone. some people just aren't cut out for the alligator spike pit moat :)" and you're like, "right, yeah, like disabled people and people coming from poverty or unstable home environments or underserved communities or people dealing with difficult to navigate life events like pregnancy or abuse or prison or addiction or the death of a loved one, for example" and they're like, "how dare you imply that we are keeping those people out on purpose. it's their own problem if they can't wrestle the alligators and avoid the spikes while also disabled and/or poor and/or pregnant etc" and you're like, "well that seems evil," and they're like, "it sounds like maybe you're just bitter about the alligator spike pit moat because of your totally random individual experience with ONE bad alligator spike pit moat. have you considered therapy?" and you're like, "did you know that there's some patterns here in terms of how y'all are handling this stuff?" and they're like, "actually yes. we even have a department of alligator spike pit studies :)" and you're like, "that's great, how do I get access to and participate in those conversations?" and they're like, "well firstly you must cross the alligator spike pit moat"
if you can document that you have a medical condition that might make it challenging for you to navigate the alligator spike pit moat, they'll give you an extra 20 minutes to complete your navigation of the alligator spike pit moat
IMPORTANT: any injuries incurred as a result of navigating the alligator spike pit moat will be the sole responsibility of the injured parties. once you leave, the people who made you navigate the alligator spike pit moat and the institution that installed the alligator spike pit moat will never contact you again. except sometimes to ask you for more money.
As an author now, I feel like I'm supposed to know what I'm doing but I don't. Should I make a flip through? (Usually I have a plan for everything but rn I'm just sitting here trying to rest, not burn out too much and hope I'm not supposed to do something I don't know about lol)
You can pre-order here http://adhd-alien.com or in many bigger (and smaller) book stores in your country!
I subscribed to UNNAMED STREAMING SERVICE a few days ago and gave the login info to all my friends, as one does, but one of them went in and turned on 2-factor authentication and set the phone number to her own cell phone, locking me out of the account
It was an accident and we got it fixed but for a brief moment the betrayal and fury was so great I blacked out and was possessed by the spirit of like a 19th century naval officer, I was pacing around my room like "TO THINK THAT JUDAS HIMSELF NUMBERS HIMSELF AMONG MY COMPATRIOTS"
I finished the last constellation tonight. All 40 of them are now done! Went through and double checked and every stitch is in place for them and all the beads are in place. Which just leaves the milky way part to do.
Started stitching the Milky Way in. Slowly making progress on it as I am hiding the travelling thread so the back will look nice.
Looks pretty cool and keeps the readability of the other stitches. Very happy with it. Just a thousand or so to do. As they are in a grid roughly every centimetre apart.
Update on the constellation quilt. I have gotten the last Milky Way stitch done now. Which means the quilting part of this project is done. My next step will be to baste the edges down, remove the pattern, trim the quilt square, and lastly attach the binding.
Progress on the constellation quilt has come along quite a lot now. Finished the binding on the quilt over the weekend. I prefer to machine stitch the binding to the front then hand stitch the back side. It gives such a nice finish to the quilt. Took the time to measure it also and it ended up being 72" by 72" (183cm by 183cm).
With that done I could finally start removing the pattern. Which is taking both less time and more time that I thought it would. As it rips really easily so that goes fast, but the tiny corners and removing it under the beads is slow. You can now see the difference in the glow effect with it against the dark front of the quilt instead of the pattern.
Behold the stars of the constellations of the northern sky! I love how this quilt has turned out. It was a lot of fun to work on and the effect is so cool in person. Overall I would estimate it took about 90-100 hours to complete. Give or take 10 hours if you want to count the time I spent custom dying the fabric.
I made sure to get a nice photo of it in daylight. For once I also remembered to get a quilt label on it. The back really shows the difference in readability of the quilting on the ice dyed fabric compared to the solid front. Thank you everyone that has followed this. I am glad you all found joy in it.
Those that are interested, here is the pattern I used by Haptic Lab. I made the large northern hemisphere version, and plan to make the matching southern hemisphere one next year. I also got your back for the less crafty people. Haptic Lab sells finished quilts in this pattern, both as a large quilt and a small one.
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 an art major, while I know Fountain is a valid piece of art that accomplished exactly what it set out to do, I also think itâs one of the stupidest things. We have a urinal in a museum display. I have yet to see a work I think is dumber.
The thing I love most about Duchamps urinal piece is that it was so âlow costâ in terms of creative labour (compared to say, a large scale oil painting or sculpture for example), but itâs absolutely FULL of rage against the traditionalists and the world at that time and itâs SUCH a statement, itâs like, âoh just a mass manufactured item with a signatureâ but the reality of it is so many layers of meaning and without understanding the history at the time you donât get it.
Itâs an incredibly clever âfuck youâ and I love it
An old professor of mine, an expert in Duchamp who has written several books, has a theory. In part, âFountainâ was a prank, a personal âfuck youâ to the organization looking for artworks. Itâs importance cannot be overstated, and this importance stems from the fact that âFountainâ is /ridiculous/. It is enraging, it is hilarious, and it is very fascinating.
Aside from Duchampâs readymades, I love âBride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Evenâ. Pictured below, the work invokes a complex machine, one my professor spent a great deal of time studying. Eventually, he reached his conclusion. My professor had been pranked. He believes âBride Stripped Bareâ is a joke about masturbation, hidden to all except those study it excessively.
At first blush, Duchampâs works are stupid. Upon further study, theyâre very complex. And, upon true understanding, Duchamp is laughing at you. To me, it seems the closer you come to truly understanding Duchamp, the more he slaps you in the face with a large fish.
Let me rage about âtraditionalism revivalâ here. This is a dogwhistle.
As a lover of art, there are many complex and technically impressive works being created today, which both embrace different artistic traditions and break from them. To ignore those is to ignore contemporary art.
Here, OP is raging against conceptual art, which stimulates thought and challenges tradition. He wants his followers to believe that art has âdegeneratedâ, because the West has âdegeneratedâ. OP is intentionally engaging with fascist ideas of âdegenerate artâ.
If OP wanted to be accurate, he would seek to restore the Salon System, the Beaux Arts Academy, and classical training in the arts. The collapse of this specific system allowed for Modernism to evolve. Of course, thatâs not what OP is talking about. Heâs evoking beauty as a moral standard, telling his followers to ârestore Western traditionâ, to fight against aesthetic âdegeneracyâ in culture.
(By the way, Duchamp is commenting ON MODERNISM with âFountainâ. Duchamp submitted the work to the Society of Independent Artistsâ salon in New York, who would accept any work by any artist, for a small fee. In part, Duchamp is saying, âIs this what you Modernists want? A urinal? Look me in the eyes and prove this is not art.â
If OP dared to use his brain, perhaps he would agree with Duchamp here.)
The thing is that it isnât even a urinal! It doesnât match any model manufactured at the time. Also Duchamp was an accomplished ceramicist. Itâs likely that he made the sculpture and absolutely everyone is like âI know what a urinal looks like. This is sufficiently urinal-shaped for me to assume it is one without looking at it closely!â
Duchamp had other readymades, like his snow shovel, where if you actually look at the photos, the handle is square and the bowl is way too flimsy. Why would manufacturers make a snow shovel with a squared-off handle? Itâs impossible to hold! Duchamp slapped the âreadymadesâ label on all these items and the hoity-toity art people who were so good at looking at things didnât see it (probably because theyâd never had to do labor like shovel snow imo, amongst other things).
Marcel Duchamp. In Advance of the Broken Arm. Museum of Modern Art. (4th Version [Ed.!!!] after lost original of November 1915)
My favorite thing about Fountain (besides the fact it has been pissing off fascists for over a century, natch) is that the original was lost and he made a bunch of official editions to sell to various museums (after the original was lost, possibly on purpose).
And theyâre different! If it was a real âreadymadeâ he could have just bought some more at his local hardware store, but no. He changed them in OBVIOUS WAYS.
See the triangle of holes?
Hereâs the one from the Tate Modern:
Oh hello, cross-holes. Fancy seeing you here.
SFMOMAâs edition has the triangle holes, but it also has a line of holes at the top that are completely different from either other version.
Hereâs one from Moderna Museet. Line and a circular set of holes!
Duchamp definitely intentionally made these different on purpose. Itâs a âreadymadeâ but itâs not, really, each of these is a specific custom creation.
âBecause the truth is, tech doesnât have an image problem. It doesnât have a message problem. It has an intention problem. Whatâs wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasnât successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. Whatâs wrong is that heâs trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product thatâs designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isnât that you havenât told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.â
I dont even give my drivers license to guys who run good websites and you think im gonna give it to the weird motherfucker behind this pile of crap? No
Join me, my brave volunteers. Tell them no, we will not give our drivers licenses to Matt or any other weird asshole who asks for them. Raise up your voices in scorn.
Can we include darebee.com with ao3 and wikipedia on our list of really good nonprofits with excellent services that we stan?
It's a free, no sign-up, no ads fitness resource created by professionals who view this as activism (fitness should be accessible to everyone), and it's very thoughtful and thorough.
Features I really like:
- all instructions for workout routines are diagrammed on single pages with a clean, easy to read layout
- there's 30 or 60 day programs you can follow if you, like me, don't know what to do. they take you through a rotation of workouts so you're working different muscle groups on different day for a specific purpose
- there's so much variety and there's a filter so you can find the level and your goals and type of workout you wanna do
- you don't need any equipment
- some of the programs are RPGs or adventure stories! How's that for motivation. There's also badges and achievements or something but I haven't looked that closely at how that works yet
- they're nerds. they name workouts after D&D classes. There's a Lannistrr workout, a batcave workout, a witcher workout
happy 20 year anniversary of Neil banging out the tunes!
though every rat is special, it's a wonderful and unusual thing for their accomplishments to be remembered and cherished by so many people so many years later. we're all so fortunate to know about the rat who banged out the tunes!
thank you to all the people who sent me reference photos of their beloved rats for this piece!!! credits under the cut!
@joe-spookyy Ben and Socrates
@gooseontheinternet Chamomile and Beefy
@runawayy-rat BartholomÀus and Emo
@theunholystromboli Macrogryphosaurus, Xenoceratops, and Graciliraptor
@techlecticwtch Solas and Dorian
@merlyn-bane Roslyn and Rizzoli
@logictoinsanity Luna and Buttercup
@hagsthehag Orphie, Psyche, Calypso, Ariadne, and Eury
The fun thing is he would understand why people were getting him outfits with storks on them. Thatâs a word, itâs his name, straightforward. All the humans get him the same gag gift, but like, theyâre putting effort in at least. This is a genuinely nice outfit. Stork will be a walking zero-effort pun sometimes, rather than waste a perfectly fine robe.
Itâs fine. This is a readily comprehensible human illogic. Exactly the kind of thing he expected from moving to Earth.
Six years in he finds out about the stork bringing babies.
Stork has a good long meditation session about this myth, his name, his job, the outfits, the whole shebang (or whatever Vulcan concept is the equivalent).
And he decides heâs honored by it, in a humanly illogical way.
The humans are asking him to do what is after all his job, and specifically requesting him for the joy his name brings them on top of an already agreeable and satisfying task. He has no objection to engendering positive emotions in others. Harm hastens the heat-death of the universe, Surak teaches, so happiness must logically slow it down.Â
Plus, Vulcans of his generation love puns. There were two decades of punning competitions in colleges across the planet. So when he realizes that he is a walking zero-effort pun, and that the humans also love the pun, he is all for it. He is the Joe Cool of the entire Vulcan population in his city.Â
And via this pun, the humans are including him in a cherished and traditional myth, by casting him as the literal bringer of life and the expander of families.Â
Thereâs no downside. Stork wears his robes, pins, keychains, and other bird-related tchotchkes with genuine pride.Â
For real though working together with some human social workers, a Vulcan would be an excellent caretaker for children in an adoption center.
Child has a meltdown? Imagine Stork, perfectly calm and unbothered, approaching the kid and saying âYou appear quite upset, Eliza. If you would please allow me to relocate you to the âbean-bag-chair,â we can discuss the source of your distress.â
A Vulcan educated in medicine and child psychology would be endlessly patient with a kid with behavioral issues. Stork wouldnât get or upset or frustrated. After all, these are children with medical and psychological conditions. It would be illogical to blame the child or to not treat them with the appropriate care.
Even if the a little one was having a bad day or was just overtired, Stork wouldnât get angry. He might even be a calming presence. Any new kids acting out would learn real quick that theyâd have better luck trying to arm-wrestle a Klingon than get a rise out of Stork.
Not only that, Vulcans live much longer than humans. Imagine Stork looking virtually unchanged as decades pass. Kids heâd helped years ago would turn up fully grown, maybe there to adopt their own kids, and run into Stork, looking almost exactly as they remember him.
And heâd probably remember them too. âWelcome back, Eliza.â
