Queer, wlw, she/her, a fic writer, and I used to make fan music. I'm still here but I'm spending a lot more time on mastodon these days and you should look up #monsterdon if you come over, it's fun :D
And, of course, they’re very upset some intern on the DNC Twitter account called Stephen Miller an ugly fuck (factually correct) and responded to his passive aggressive and insulting transvestigating of Texas senate nominee James Talarico with a similar level of inflammatory ire. We need more Dark Woke. I am so tired of the Democratic Party playing respectability bullshit and acting like what people saying on the right should be treated as reasonable and sane. “Shut up you ugly fuck.” is really the only way to respond to that.
People really need to take a wider view of this paranoia about age gaps and realise this is how we lose the ability to build communities. You need to be able to realise that people can have things in common with you even if they grew up in a different time/place/culture. You also need to realise you can build communities with people who don’t have obvious things in common with you, that people can have the same goals and needs as you even if in most ways they’re very unlike you. Now, more than ever, we need to be able to work together to have any chance to stand ip against the few who have so, so much more power, money and influence than any of us do individually. We need to form communities that reach across age (and class and race and sexuality and so on…).
This is one of those topics I feel very strongly about and agree completely with the points in this post.
I struggle to make fandom friends on Tumblr, and sometimes I worry that it is because people in their 20s think they can't be friends with someone in their 40s. That I'm uncool, weird, cringe, intimidating, or just too different from them.
But things don't change as much with age as most think. Older people still are silly, awkward, overwhelmed, enthusiastic, confused, playful, irresponsible, obsessive, dumb, cool, horny, and all these other things young people think we stop feeling or being as we get older. We're just humans. I am really great friends with someone on here more than 20 years younger than me because we have so much in common! You can't tell that we're different ages when we chat.
And also—you can be friends with people who you do NOT have much in common with! Because fundamentally, you always have humanity in common.
Years ago, there was this lady in my community who was maybe 30 years older than me and who I knew was far more conservative than me. I dismissed her as someone I didn't want to spend any time with because she was obviously too different than me. But, I was forced to spend some time with her (long story), and guess what? I became really good friends with her! Because I found out I was wrong about all those things that made her different than me? NO! I was right about that—she was just as annoyingly conservative as I had suspected. BUT that wasn't the whole of her person. She was so much richer than that. There were lots of things I didn't know about her. A few of those things were commonalities, but overall, we still didn't have much in common—but that didn't matter. We could still be kind to each other, help each other, respect each other, even enjoy each other's company if we stuck to topics where we didn't clash too badly. I feel really bad for judging her, and I'm so glad I gave her a chance.
So yes, please make friends with people who are not your same age. You probably have more in common than you think, and even if you don't, that doesn't matter. We're all humans and we need each other. Our communities need us to get along.
The constant framing of an older person interacting with a younger person as something with clearly predatory intent is a huge part of the problem. Learn to spot actual grooming behavior and patterns, don't substitute a difference in age for your actual judgment. This pedojacketing shit has to stop. We were not meant to stick to only socializing with people within two years of our own age. That is not how you have a functioning society.
Also, we built these sites and all the source material for your fandoms. Stop acting like it's weird for us to be in our own damn houses. Learn to talk to people older than you. Go learn to quilt.
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.
The christofascists sure like to talk about “biological reality,” particularly lately. It’s stupid and meaningless, particularly given how much they hate science, but wow, do they like to whip that shit out against trans people when they think they can get away with it.
It’s not just against trans people, though. It slithers out eventually to any class of people they want to beat down as either inferior or eliminate entirely – lesbians and gays, women, anyone not white – it’s all “biological reality” sooner or later, their self-proclaimed “biological” superiority giving them the right to do horrible things to the rest of us.
Of course, their “biological reality” is always – always, never forget it – a stack of blithering bullshit sorted to suit whatever fascist political agenda they want to serve at the moment. None of it’s in good faith, so don’t treat it like it is. If they believed in biological reality – in biological science – they wouldn’t be a bunch of fucking vaccine deniers. They’d be all over vaccination, and yet, surprise! They’re not!
“Biological reality.” Their use of the phrase genuinely disgusts me.
Anyway, I was thinking about this, and came up with a teardown rant. Next time some fash brings their “biological reality” shit up as an attack on trans people, maybe try some variation of it.
You want to talk biological reality? Are you sure? Is that what you want to embrace?
Because great. Let’s talk biological reality.
Biological reality is that you are an animal. A mammal, of the clade of the great apes, no different from a chimpanzee, and very little different from a dog or a cat. Take any decent college course in anatomical biology and you will see every part of the biologically real you in every creature you dissect from the flatworm on up.
Biological reality is that you are a short-lived animal in the life of this world, and even shorter in the life of the universe. You were born through an accident of complicated chemistry to live briefly and then die, ending forever, and that’s it. You have no more soul – no more immortal part – than does a cockroach, and in the long term will leave exactly as much behind.
Biological reality is that you. are. an. animal. like. every. other. animal., and not one iota more.
So if you want to embrace biological reality, fucking do it, you clown, you fool, you coward. Because that is what you are embracing, because that is the actual biological reality. And you are no more made in the image of God than is a scarab, the dung beetle the ancient Egyptians thought holy.
But you won’t do that. You won’t embrace actual ‘biological reality.’ You can’t.
I don’t even mind that you can’t. I don’t mind that you don’t.
But my gods, I loathe the pretence – the filthy, disgraceful lie – that you do, and that you only pretend to do it as a weapon against others. You only claim you care about science when you think it’s a weapon you can use to hurt.
In my head, I deliver it hot; you’d probably want to present it cooler, particularly if you’re not in person and can’t get hot yourself, which is important for hot deliveries. Maybe deliver it cold. Maybe very cold. It’s up to you, by which I mean do not quote it, make it your own.
Just whatever you do, don’t deliver it nicely. Nice is the opposite of the point. Be mean, because there is no “nice” response to the lie of “biological reality.”
If that doesn’t work for you, maybe just use the vaccination thing. That’s easier, I suppose. But it’s also less… direct. Less personal. And it leaves them a little room, where “YOU. ARE. AN. ANIMAL.” doesn’t leave any.
These fuckers want to talk about “biological reality?” Fine.
"You have telekinesis, but no one believes you even if you show them."
So I get all the advantages of telekinesis while also being able to maintain anonymity? That's entirely excellent. Gonna pretty quickly become some kind of trickster figure no one even knows exists.
Eighty-five countries have sought a roadmap to phasing out fossil fuels. A conference this month offers hope they could unite
From the article:
Now, a little noticed ray of hope may be peeking over the horizon.
At the UN Cop30 climate summit last November, Saudi Arabia led a group of petrostates in vetoing calls to develop a “roadmap” to phase out fossil fuels globally; indeed, the words “fossil fuels” were not even mentioned in the final text agreed at Cop30. But the 85 countries on the losing end of that veto may soon turn the tables.
Many of those governments will gather in Colombia on 28-29 April for a conference to begin a global transition away from oil, gas and coal. Critically, the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels will not be governed by UN rules, which require consensus, but by majority rule, thus preventing a handful of countries from sabotaging progress as petrostates did at Cop30. What’s more, the underlying terrain of this conference will no longer be principally politics, but economics: not the words that canny negotiators can keep in or out of a diplomatic text, but the implacable market forces that shape the world economy, including the potential emergence of a de facto economic superpower.
[...]
The conference aims to begin drawing up the roadmap blocked at Cop30. Energy and environment ministers of governments comprising a “coalition of the willing” will share plans to transition their economies away from oil, gas and coal without leaving workers and communities behind. Joining them will be climate activists, leaders of Indigenous peoples, trade union representatives and other civil society voices, sharing ideas and experiences on how to make the abstract goal of phasing out fossil fuels a practical reality.
The christofascists sure like to talk about “biological reality,” particularly lately. It’s stupid and meaningless, particularly given how much they hate science, but wow, do they like to whip that shit out against trans people when they think they can get away with it.
It’s not just against trans people, though. It slithers out eventually to any class of people they want to beat down as either inferior or eliminate entirely – lesbians and gays, women, anyone not white – it’s all “biological reality” sooner or later, their self-proclaimed “biological” superiority giving them the right to do horrible things to the rest of us.
Of course, their “biological reality” is always – always, never forget it – a stack of blithering bullshit sorted to suit whatever fascist political agenda they want to serve at the moment. None of it’s in good faith, so don’t treat it like it is. If they believed in biological reality – in biological science – they wouldn’t be a bunch of fucking vaccine deniers. They’d be all over vaccination, and yet, surprise! They’re not!
“Biological reality.” Their use of the phrase genuinely disgusts me.
Anyway, I was thinking about this, and came up with a teardown rant. Next time some fash brings their “biological reality” shit up as an attack on trans people, maybe try some variation of it.
You want to talk biological reality? Are you sure? Is that what you want to embrace?
Because great. Let’s talk biological reality.
Biological reality is that you are an animal. A mammal, of the clade of the great apes, no different from a chimpanzee, and very little different from a dog or a cat. Take any decent college course in anatomical biology and you will see every part of the biologically real you in every creature you dissect from the flatworm on up.
Biological reality is that you are a short-lived animal in the life of this world, and even shorter in the life of the universe. You were born through an accident of complicated chemistry to live briefly and then die, ending forever, and that’s it. You have no more soul – no more immortal part – than does a cockroach, and in the long term will leave exactly as much behind.
Biological reality is that you. are. an. animal. like. every. other. animal., and not one iota more.
So if you want to embrace biological reality, fucking do it, you clown, you fool, you coward. Because that is what you are embracing, because that is the actual biological reality. And you are no more made in the image of God than is a scarab, the dung beetle the ancient Egyptians thought holy.
But you won’t do that. You won’t embrace actual ‘biological reality.’ You can’t.
I don’t even mind that you can’t. I don’t mind that you don’t.
But my gods, I loathe the pretence – the filthy, disgraceful lie – that you do, and that you only pretend to do it as a weapon against others. You only claim you care about science when you think it’s a weapon you can use to hurt.
In my head, I deliver it hot; you’d probably want to present it cooler, particularly if you’re not in person and can’t get hot yourself, which is important for hot deliveries. Maybe deliver it cold. Maybe very cold. It’s up to you, by which I mean do not quote it, make it your own.
Just whatever you do, don’t deliver it nicely. Nice is the opposite of the point. Be mean, because there is no “nice” response to the lie of “biological reality.”
If that doesn’t work for you, maybe just use the vaccination thing. That’s easier, I suppose. But it’s also less… direct. Less personal. And it leaves them a little room, where “YOU. ARE. AN. ANIMAL.” doesn’t leave any.
These fuckers want to talk about “biological reality?” Fine.
Here’s the thing I feel like a lot of folks don’t get: I’m not trying to forget what you said. Honestly, I really tried not to. I can’t control what I do and don’t remember—forgetting things just happens. It’s annoying for you, I know, but for me it’s distressing as hell and when you make a big deal out of it rather than just reminding me you make me feel ashamed. I’ll remember that, at least.
It costs you nothing to be kind to people with memory problems. Please. It’s scary enough without people treating memory lapses as a personal failing.
I took this photograph today, May 5th, 2026, which means that here in the year of our lord 2026 someone is hating on homestucks. Honestly, what. Is this some antique Hetalia partisan still not aware the war is over?
