Welcome home.

What if I told you a story; how the world became peaceful and just? [Delta/Sunny, 26, he/they, icon by @vintagecandy]

[i-am-a-fish]

I hope you get your favorite food this week and your favorite drink and your favorite 2k dollars

[i-am-a-fish]

I'm sorry there's no magic in this post I'm just talking. I hope good stuff happens to people online I hope good things happen to all of us

[miss-mania]

I'm just pulling your chain. I mean yanking your leash. I mean jerking you off. uh I mean I'm just messing around with you,

[vinnyherring]

The place to lounge with the employees

[the-owl-tree]

i'll always make fun of how stupid the "born evil baby" trope is but truly it is such a wretched trope i hope it dies forever

[the-owl-tree]

it's like the perfect package of "child you are allowed to harm" and "easy way to not interrogate how commonplace child abuse is". thank goodness this child was simply born wrong, we never have to examine the conditions they grew up in.

[wormzone]

try again, but harder

[vintagecandy]

🔆 sun salutations!

Etsy || Commissions

[toastchild]

Happy Pride and don’t forget that black trans women like Marsha P. Johnson fought for, and are the reason we have the rights that we as lgbtq+ people have today!!!

[manuciruja]

awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?

[manuciruja]

i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users

[nariarts]

Longtime readers may be aware of how much I relish an excuse to bully a company, so I'm sharing the wealth;

Clothing company Patagonia is currently sueing drag queen Pattie Gonia for "irreparable” harm to their brand.

To be clear; Pattie named herself after the region in South America.

So Pattie is asking people to politely ask Patagonia to drop the lawsuit.

I'm extending the invitation to all of you, because sueing a drag queen for 'infringement' in the current political cultural landscape is vile. Especially a drag queen who has raised millions of dollars for non-profits, uses her platform to raise awareness for climate activism, and fully aligns with Patagonia's apparent climate-conscious mission statement.

They're claiming they're sueing for $1. They're actually asking her to stop using her name, and pay over $1 million in legal fees. They're straight up harassing her.

In contrast, drag queen Jan Sport has a Jansport bag line. It's that easy to just... work with a queen.

Anyway. Be respectful(ish), but feel free to be annoying on Patagnoia's socials, asking them to 'DROP THE LAWSUIT'

I think they have a twitter and tiktok too!

[shadow-manor]

This is being discussed heavily on Bluesky, such as here.

Patagonia is suing specifically for trademark infringement, and they're suing for the sum of $1. If they don't sue, then that means they could lose the trademark. They aren't trying to "silence" them or prevent them from using the name, they're specifically protecting their company trademark. They'd have to sue *anyone* who was using such an obvious knockoff of their logo; in this case it happens to be a drag queen.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

you'll have to forgive me for not weeping for a billion dollar company's trademark being violated

[shadow-manor]

Go nuts. The point is that this isn't a company trying to dogpile on a drag queen, it's a company following a standard legal practice to protect its trademark. Disney does it all the time.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

... yes, and I also hate Disney? I don't understand what you think you're selling me on here

[shadow-manor]

If you get a soda out of a vending machine and it has a Coca-Cola label but it's actually a knockoff made with ditchwater, that's obviously okay because Coca-Cola is a huge corporation and it's thus fine for someone to violate their trademark.

You can hate Patagonia all you want, but the lawsuit is about anodyne trademark law, not specifically that a drag queen is involved.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

and what part of Miss Gonia's schtick is doing the harm equivalent of tricking someone into drinking ditchwater exactly?

[shadow-manor]

...the trademark part.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

right, okay, I forgot that she's singlehandedly putting Patagonia out of business by using a silly joke name

[netherator]

if Patagonia loses their trademark, which they would if they didn't sue and win (again for one dollar), there would be no assurance against people putting a Patagonia label on amy dogshit

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

well I hope Amy Dogshit enjoys wearing the label I think she'll look very nice

[kitsunekat9]

Oh my fucking god y’all bootlickers are driving me crazy.

I’m a law student specializing in Intellectual Property, which includes Copyright and Trademark. I’ve studied these subjects and the law is clear that everything y’all said about Patagonia “losing the trademark” if they don’t sue Ms. Pattie is absolute bullshit.

Trademarks are only lost if they are abandoned by the user or if the product made by the company becomes so ubiquitous, everyday, and common that people start calling all types of that product by the trademark name. This is called genericide, because the trademark has become so generic, it is no longer an indicator of one singular source. Think Band-Aid or Thermos; we use those terms to refer to the generic products they’re associated with. We call pretty much all sticky bandages Band-Aids and all containers used to keep things warm in Thermoses.

What Patagonia is doing is actually closer to suing for trademark infringement based on tarnishment, which means the infringer is using the trademark name in a way that makes the company look bad or associates the company with things like drugs or pornography. Queen Pattie Gonia is someone who raises awareness for climate and environmental activism. Nothing about Miss Gonia’s use of the name tarnishes Patagonia’s brand.

The only possible argument the company has is that Miss Gonia’s queer identity could be seen as not “adult-friendly” but that very quickly slides into homophobic and moralistic territory that will absolutely be shot down by the court based on First Amendment rights. People are allowed to use “not safe for work names,” based on caselaw that states that “labels that are disparaging or morally offensive” are a violation of free speech because it’s people’s choice to say and use those names. For example, an all-Asian band applied for the trademark name “The Chinks” because they were taking the racially disparaging name and reclaiming it. The Trademark Office attempted to refuse to grant the band’s trademark, and when the band sued, the Supreme Court sided with the band.

That got off on a little bit of a tangent, but the long and short of it is this: Patagonia has absolutely no basis for a trademark name. Any IP lawyer would say the same. The reason Patagonia is getting away with a frivolous suit like this is because they know their target is a member of a vulnerable minority. Miss Gonia is 100% correct that they are trying to bully her because they know she doesn’t have the money to withstand a years-long expensive lawsuit.

It’s because of idiotic bootlickers who kiss companies’ asses like this that big corporations can get away with hurting independent creators. Patagonia does not have any chance at winning, but they know that just by filing and announcing their lawsuit against Miss Gonia, they are putting pressure on her to give up. If this lawsuit goes on, even if it doesn’t make it to court and just goes to a judge for a quick summary judgment, Miss Gonia would still have to pay for a lawyer to defend her and lawyers cost more money than the average person has. Miss Gonia would win, but because Patagonia set the damages for $1, even if she did win, she’d still end up in debt because in America, the typical rule is that each party pays for the cost of their own attorney’s fees. The only time the opposing side would pay your lawyer’s fees is if you have a contract with them that says so, and that’s usually only used in contracts between businesses or high profile individuals.

What Patagonia is doing is capitalizing on society’s hatred for queer people and anyone resembling a trans woman. Miss Gonia is a drag queen, not trans as far as I’m aware (though please do correct me if I’m wrong) but it’s not like a big company cares to differentiate; they’re just mad that a queer person is using their name in a way they don’t like. Patagonia knows that this particular population has been facing harsh discrimination in society currently. By siding with them, people are actively harming the queer community. Don’t pretend to hide behind trademark law to cover up your prejudices.

[standwithdaanes]

Honestly this all seems like a hot fucking mess; this article from the Guardian gives some more details. I don't know enough about IP law to really know what's going on here. I think there is truth to the claim that this case is not as legally open-and-shut in Pattie's favor as some might claim.

That being said, reading Patagonia's actual complaint... they wanted her to not use the words "Pattie Gonia" on any products, regardless of font or logo? Seriously? & it seems the logo shown above was never a product she was selling but rather fan art they wore on social media. He is running a clothing brand, yes, but the clothing he's selling is not trying to look like Patagonia clothes or imitate its logo, & the brand seems fixated on the fact that Pattie wears fan merch of the logo or jokes about Patagonia clothes in a Ted Talk.

Which, sure, I get the claim that people might think they are formally related (their evidence for that is a few Tiktok comments). But, as I (a laywoman) understand it, their claim is based around Pattie selling clothes that infringes on their trademark since they are a clothing brand specifically, yet his merch doesn't imitate Patagonia's to my eyes, and their most compelling evidence is Pattie saying or wearing things that relates to their brand, not the things they are actually selling. Again, the logo shown above was seemingly never being sold by Pattie, it was just something someone made him that they wore in public. If she did sell that logo, why didn't they put that in the complaint? & again the ask of her not using the name Pattie Gonia on merch at all, no matter how it is presented, just seems ridiculous to me? Its a pun based off a fucking geographic range, man.

Regardless, whether Patagonia is legally in the right in the lawsuit, and whether we should give a fuck about the legal rights of a multinational corporation, are two different questions. We will see how this plays out in the legal field, but personally I think even if it comes out in Patagonia's favor, its fucking stupid.

I am also annoyed seeing people in the notes defending Patagonia as this poor innocent company, "owned by its employees," which does so much good work and is being unfairly maligned! & the claim that it is employee-owned surprised me, so I wanted to look it up, and oh boy did I find some interesting information on Patagonia Inc.'s business practices re: human trafficking and taxes!

In 2022 the founder "gave away" the company by giving majority stock to an enviromentalist collective (which, btw, is not the same as the corporation being a worker's collective):

Chouinard’s family donated 2% of all stock and all decision-making authority to a trust, which will oversee the company’s mission and values. The other 98% of the company’s stock will go to a non-profit called the Holdfast Collective, which “will use every dollar received to fight the environmental crisis, protect nature and biodiversity, and support thriving communities, as quickly as possible”, according to the statement. Each year, the money Patagonia makes after reinvesting in the business will be distributed to the non-profit to help fight the environmental crisis. The structure, the statement said, was designed to avoid selling the company or taking it public, which could have meant a change in its values. “Instead of ‘going public’, you could say we’re ‘going purpose’,” said Chouinard. “Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.”

Which is the current big claim to fame with regards to it being a super politically conscious "good" corporation.

So to add a little nuance to this:

Patagonia's clothing has been made by victims of human trafficking and slave labor. This was reported on in 2015 and in 2021 they were named in a lawsuit alongside other companies. & in fact Patagonia uses the same factories as fast fashion companies where workers have workdays over 16 hours, and that article is from 2023, nearly a decade after Patagonia was first saying they just couldn't move their jobs to the US because they had to stick with the factories in Taiwan to make sure they helped end the human trafficking that was going on!

In 2024, the company was dealing with lawsuits in Japan over how it was treating its workers, specifically engaging in some scummery that allowed them to get around contractual obligations to employees.

The "Holdfast Collective" page on Influence Watch:

Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard has faced criticism for skirting taxes through the unique structure of the deal that formed the nonprofit Holdfast Collective. According to media outlet Bloomberg, by creating a social welfare nonprofit instead of selling the company, Chouinard owed $17.5 million in taxes for the shares he transferred to the trusts as opposed to paying potentially $700 million to the Internal Revenue Service in estate and gift taxes that he would have owed if he sold Patagonia, which was valued at $3 billion in 2022. Chouinard has said he hopes the collective will influence a new form of capitalism [note: he's also claimed to be a socialist, but more Scandinavia than Venezuela, in his words]. In a statement announcing the creation of Holdfast Collective, he also said the collective is one way to put money into campaigning on climate issues while also maintaining Patagonia’s environmentalist values. 1 After the announcement to form Holdfast Collective, Chouinard claimed that “Earth is now [Patagonia’s] only shareholder.”

Also, I am generally critical of anything and anyone which champions enviromentalism and "saving the planet" but only through means that don't fundamentally disrupt anything in any major way. We will not save the planet through capitalism of any kind, we will not "save the planet" without massive societal disruption on some level, & the saviors of the planet will not be individual corporation-owning "philanthropost" -aires' of any kind who throw a bunch of money gained from their shitty labor practices at shiny nonprofits funded by the same governments hungry for oil and lithium, and no one is allowed to criticize them because "ohhh so you think its BAD to give money to CHARITY??? you would rather they did NOTHING???????" cause we let corporations play in our fucking faces all the time.

Regardless of if you think Pattie is legally "innocent" here, you simply do not need to suck Patagonia's dick like this. Something something read The Revolution Will Not Be Funded and stop falling for this blackmail charity greenwashing bullshit.

[googiekitsch-deactivated2024071]

THIS SONG IS FUCKING AWESOMEEEEE🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

[googiekitsch-deactivated2024071]

HOW THE FUCK DID YOU DO THAT THERES NOTHING THERE

[malscare]

hi

[foolofworms-deactivated20251128]

Legitimately good example of how thorough you need to be to protect private information

[justalurkr]

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.

[irispurpurea]

This is the paper. It's excellent, highly recommend reading it.

I remember reading about Gebru's firing but I had no idea this was the paper she was fired over.

[twentybrokenipodclassics]

the postal service names their shit exactly like how a 16 y.o. names angsty fanfic

[punk-squirrely-ghost]

Explain.

[twentybrokenipodclassics]

try and tell me literally any one of these would not fit above a short story about two wholly random men from the MCU fingering each other, or possibly 12 chapters of one or more characters from a CW show being in high school while having a photogenic but terminal kind of cancer. try.

[twentybrokenipodclassics]

ok so i want to say in hindsight i think i could probably have been clearer

[conarcoin]

resources for staying safe online

always important, but i feel like especially recently. particularly stuff that’s a bit more than just the usual “don’t post personal info”

feel free to share this post on twitter or anywhere else, staying safe is important

justdeleteme.xyz - direct links to delete accounts

how a photo’s hidden exif data exposes your personal information

have i been pwned? - check if your accounts have been compromised in a data breach. CHANGE ANY ACCOUNT THAT USES THE SAME EMAIL AND PASSWORD

online harassment field manual

form for removing personal information from google (for the eu), see also: “remove your personal information from google”

extreme privacy: what it takes to disappear (personal data removal workbook)

filter lists for ublock origin, and more

restore privacy - online privacy resources center

privacytools.io

online spyware watchdog

how secure is your password?

defensive computing checklist

cloudflare dns

non-technical tips on staying anonymous

webrtc leak shield - chrome, firefox

web safety tutorials by the electronic frontier foundation

crash override network - resources for victims of doxing and online harassment

[conarcoin]

note: very slightly updated, reblog this version instead

[orphanedsource]

the place I work at remodeled these split gendered restrooms into “inclusive restrooms” and never told us what they meant while construction was ongoing. I need you to know every atom of potential criticism or whining that could’ve happened disappeared when people found out this meant we got 10 fully separate private bathrooms with sinks inside. I’ve not heard a single person crack a joke about the inclusive signage. this is the world TERFs are trying to steal from you

[tomfooleryandthelike]

she was just a 19 year old girl. she'll never have the chance to grow into the woman she could have been. fuck the way this country is. before she was anything else she was a PERSON. a human being is dead because of the hatred spewed by the idiots that run this place. do you know the energy it takes to stab someone 40 times? FORTY FUCKING TIMES. she deserved so much better than this. i hope she knew how loved she was

[los-copa]

her name was Juniper Blessing, she was 19 and she was just doing her laundry

[wispthicket]

From one of her friends on a Reddit post.

[verajustsaid]

I'd like to make clear that this and so many other deaths are the fault of every single transphobic peace of shit running their mouth. It's stocastic terrorism. People like Rowling should have their tongues cut.

[macguffinandco]

THE BAD YEAR - Kickstarter Pre-Launch Page Open NOW!

The Bad Year contains 53 horror investigation adventures for any RPG system, playable as one-shot mysteries, concise arcs or a year-long interwoven campaign.

Keep your eyes peeled on our social media channels over the coming weeks for information, previews and more!

Head to our Kickstarter page and sign up to be notified on launch!

Art by @kingcael

[jonnywaistcoat]

Me and Sash have been working in this for a while, and I'm really excited to be putting it out there - a whole year's worth of system-neutral TTRPG horror investigations that can be played with games like The Magnus Archives RPG, Call of Cthulhu, Monster of the Week, Delta Green or more!

Check it out here, and have a look at the preview that covers the first 16 adventures!