Christian. Lover of Beauty. I love Frankenstein and fanfiction,
Tolkien and tragedy...non-alliterated things also include Greek Myth and pretty pictures. I will probably not follow you back right away, but if you prove yourself friendly I will at some point! I am the tag rambliest tag rambler I know. Also love using emojis in the tags. Occasionally I hijack posts in ways only I find funny. Shall this stop me? Never.
“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s 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 isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”
"Some men think the earth is round, others think it´s flat. It is a matter of capable questions. But if it is flat, will the kings command make it round? And if it is round, will the Kings command flatten it? No. I will not sign."
“Last night I photographed a Barn Owl hovering above prey at a local farm where I have been baiting them for some time, I did attempt this last winter but failed due to the lens misting, still a work in progress” ~ Roy Rimmer
It's tooooooo late at night for me to be having these ideas but I just desperately want Grace from PHM and Ransom from the Space Trilogy to meet and I have so many ideas for that that sound patently ridiculous.
Like, for instance, in the book Stratt keeps Grace in solitary confinement for the four days before he's supposed to be sent up on the Hail Mary, so that he can't get help from anyone.
So after a day of anxiety, paranoia, angst, probably a lot of crying and screaming, Grace is curled up on the floor of his cell and all of a sudden this ghost-like man appears and asks him if he's alright. And Grace thinks he's hallucinating from stress or something and at first tries to ignore the guy because he can't take one more thing and he dozes off.
But when he wakes up the guy's still there, just sitting on the floor, and he looks more solid now but Grace is still pretty sure he's hallucinating. The man asks him what's going on and why he's locked in this room and Grace bitterly explains everything to him, because why not, this guy isn't real anyway. And the guy gets real quiet and thoughtful and when Grace finally finishes he goes, "I understand. I was kidnapped and taken to another planet against my will. And while it was terrifying it lead to more wondrous things than I have ever experienced and will ever experience again."
And Grace is like "wait what? YOU were kidnapped and taken to space to?!"
And the guy starts explaining what happened to him, how he ended up meeting an old schoolfellow and got kidnapped and drugged and woke up confused and disoriented on a spaceship and ended up on Mars and running for his life from aliens only to meet other aliens who were friendly and helped him and let him be a part of their world, and how he found out that the first aliens he met were actually kind as well and how he met strange incorporeal beings that reside in the heavens and, eventually, that he decided to undertake the extremely dangerous trip back to Earth with his fellow humans, even though they would most certainly die during it.
And Grace listens intently. For the next few days of his captivity he listens to this man tell him all about his insane space adventures, keeping him company while he waits for his own to begin. And at the end of everything the man starts to fade and he leaves Grace with this, "Do not lose hope. Greater things are at work around us than we can ever hope to understand. I think you will find your courage, in the end, just as I found mine. And the denizens of heaven will be about you and your ship, I can hear them telling me so."
Grace reaches out to him as he disappears and he calls out to him to wait but doesn't know what to say to that so he just asks, "I never got your name?"
And the strange man smiles.
"It's Ransom. Godspeed, Grace."
And then he's gone. And of course, Grace remembers none of this at first, it's a long time later, on the way to Erid, when he finally remembers Ransom and when he does he jerks bolt upright and startles Rocky and then spends hours thinking about that conversation and how Ransom was right about everything.
He also starts to notice weird little lights and movements in the corner of his eye occasionally and he remembers what Ransom said about the eldils and how they lived in the heavens, in space, and how they'd be with him and his ship.
He mentions them to Rocky one day and Rocky gets excited because it turns out Rocky can perceive them too he'd just... kind of thought he'd gone insane from being alone so long and was hearing things that weren't there. Nope. Apparently the eldila have been watching over Rocky this whole time too.
At some point on the long trip to Erid, Ransom actually reappears, still a lil bit ghostly, but very much there. Grace, now in a bad way physically, jokes that if he didn't know better he'd think Ransom was just a hallucination. Rocky skitters over at the sound of a new voice and is very excited to encounter a second human.
Ransom is saddened by Grace's plight but fully believes that he'll survive, just like he has on all his adventures. He has a new one to tell them about now, about Perelandra, Venus, and Grace suddenly gets extremely excited to hear about Venus and struggles to explain why but between him and Rocky they manage to explain Venus' significance to their mission and astrophage and all that. Ransom is fascinated that, once again, Perelandra is a battleground, and links it to the spiritual battle he fought there.
Ransom hangs out on the Hail Mary for a surprisingly long time. When Grace asks why he just shrugs and replies vaguely. They have a lot of fascinating conversations about planets and aliens and their many adventures (Grace is quite pleased to be able to reciprocate the stories now by telling Ransom about how he and Rocky met and their adventures, especially their near-death experiences with Adrian).
Ransom does get called away again at some point but he promises Grace that the eldila are continuing to watch out for him and Rocky and guard their ship. Grace sees more and more of the weird lights and hears more strange sounds around him as he gets weaker and weaker. He hears Rocky pleading with the eldils more than once. He hears Rocky singing with them more than once and it sounds like a whole choir is aboard the Hail Mary.
They continue to appear after they arrive at Erid. Eventually, after Grace has been there awhile, Ransom does too, and this time they have a long conversation about the cost of their adventures-
-and how they wouldn't change a single thing that's happened to them.
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 thing is that the quest for the silmaril was clearly intended to be celegorm and curufin's shot at redemption and it's not anyone's fault but their own that they continually beef it. the quest cannot succeed without the hound of celegorm and the knife of curufin. there are clearly celegorm and curufin shaped holes in the questing party to retrieve the sacred objects to which celegorm and curufin are oathbound. it is the fault of no one except celegorm and curufin that they aren't there for the main event. i wonder if that's why angrist snapped is because beren and luthien only needed the one but it would have held for all three if celegorm and curufin had been where they had every chance to be. shame they'll never know
all i want for 2026 is that gigantic rancid AI bubble to finally burst in such a catastrophic way that the consequences will be so good and i'll never have to see another AI generated image ever again
turnnoffyourmind
dailybridgerton
blakekathryn
dededos
prguitarman
