Western passport holders will never understand. To go anywhere with a third worlder passport like a Filipino one, you need your tax returns, certificate of employment, bank statements, marriage certificates, sometimes a recommendation from a citizen of the country you want to travel to, everything possible to prove that you have a job and a family at home and you're not planning to be an illegal immigrant, JUST to get hit with a rejection because the embassy didn't believe you had enough proof.
Did you have travel plans? Already booked the plane tickets and hotels? Fuck you, better hope they issue refunds (they don't).
Americans and Western Europeans will never understand how insanely hard and bothersome it's to travel anywhere with a weak passport, let alone immigrate.
You want to study abroad? Show us proof that there is a quadrillion dollars in your bank account. Oh, an average monthly salary in your country is $400 and you plan to work when you arrive? You can't do that, silly, a student visa only allows you to work 2 hours every third Wednesday, and if we find out that you're working a second more we will deport you.
You want to work abroad? Better be a programmer, then of course you are welcome. Doctor, scientist, white-collar or, god forbid, blue-collar worker? You can fuck right off, your visa application goes straght into trash.
But if you marry one of our first-world citizens, then fine, you can come. Because we can't upset them, after all, they are a real person, unlike you.
EU Advice to people who have friends in places with weak passports- go to your department of foreigners and ask for something that called Formal Letter of Invitation or something similar. It usually is called something similar and costs a few euro/whatever currency you have. It will not be more than a fancy coffee at Starbucks or such place.
You will have to prove that you can afford a guest, have some income and also usually take responsibility for possible deportation cost.
But if you really are inviting a friend over, they will give you a formal document you can send to your friend. Then the friend applies for a visa while attaching the Very Official document with it. They will get the Schengen visa and most probably will get it expedited too.
It's some effort, but if it's for a friend it's worth it. And it's way less costly than the ridiculous loops the friend is being forced to go through and pay for multiple 3rd party services just to get a freaking visa for a month.
auto immune disorders happen when the immune system ignores regulatory factors and begins attacking healthy bodily tissues, due to what scientists refer to as "sheer love of the game"
alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.
we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)
please rb for larger sample size!
Question 1/3
What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?
i just apolitically killed the king like i have no agenda or whatever im just the jester here but i stabbed him anyway LOL all the courtiers and advisors are trying really hard to figure out who did it LOL all of them wanted him dead but they dont know whose scheme it was so nobody can promulgate a coherent political maneuver based on the circumstances LOL just playing my lute #MyLute
I guarantee you anyone who spends as much time as a Jester does in that proximity to a King WILL find a reason to want to kill him, possibly within the first month of the job.
There are few things funnier to me than the white-hot raging beef parents can have with fictional characters written for young children. You want to hear one of the funniest rants of your life, you ask nearly any parent of a young child their least favorite little cartoon guy. It'll be amazing.
in related news: my mom and I were talking a while back about how a whole lot of people used to be really hot for Steve from Blue’s Clues and she sent me this too:
Big shoutout to anybody who's fucking struggling right now
who having just a real dogshit trying time right now
anybody who's staying alive
anybody who's staying sober
anybody who relapsed but is moving forward
anybody who is choosing harm reduction
anybody who is seeking support when they need it
anybody who is trying their best
anybody whose best doesn't look that pretty right now
anybody who's fucking sick and tired and doing it anyway
shoutout to the weirdos, to the struggling, to the dykes, the fags, the queers, the trannies and the cripples
shoutout to those flaring up and forced to cope
to anybody who would really like to just not give a fuck but knows thats not an option
to anybody who's exhausted
to anybody who's alone or feels alone
to anybody putting off the bad shit for just another day
to anybody who's taking a nap instead of doing something permanent
I love you, the world's a fucking mess but it's a fucking better place with you in it
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.
your pal says something mean about a fat person in shorts this summer you SAY, "oh so they're supposed to get heat stroke because of your sensitive ass?" (fat people deserve to wear weather appropriate clothing)
you're getting ice cream with your friend and they make a comment about the fat person eating an ice cream cone you SAY, "oh then I guess you don't want ice cream, let's go." (fat people don't need to earn food even for enjoyment)
you're at the beach and a fat person is laying out and your dad says something rude about it you SAY, "I think they look comfortable. It's good they're getting some sun. I bet they work hard all year for this vacation." (fat people deserve to appear in public)
telling a someone you like their stretch marks does NOTHING for fatphobia and will NEVER make your friends and family think twice about their shitty learned hatred.
Speaking up like this is a thing that actually works. I know, because I've tried it, and it has led not only to people stopping this behavior, but also to them changing their views.
And if they don't stop? If they make no efforts to change, or if they purposely keep doing it just to annoy you? Then it might be a sign to stop hanging out with them. People who are that persistently disrespectful are not safe to be around.
We are the raccoons in charge around here @sootspritesprinkles - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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