[ID: Tweet by Fiona Robertson ♿️ @FionaSNP “I am loving that #DisabilityTwitter is using ‘are you helping or are you just buttering the cat’ as a phrase for ‘is this a useful accommodation.’ And a friend recommended the Tamarian ‘Jorts, his fur unbuttered’ for ‘this person’s access needs have been met.’ @JortsTheCat”]
the source tweet quote-tweets how disability activist Fiona Robertson wrote a whole essay on this!
Jean the cat has been in touch to tell me my initial title was wrong, because people do need to hear it even if they don’t know it yet. As J
also a free digital zine entitled Your Life Is Not Over: A Book of Apocalypses and How To Survive Them (A Guide for Newly Sick and Disabled People; link is downthread of this announcement tweet
check out the JortsTheCat Twitter too, is vast fun
people hate it when i say "black people getting cancer is racist" but im literally fucking right because systemic racism has led to chemical dumping being acceptable in black/brown neighborhoods and black people have higher rates of cancer as a result
There’s so much about this. The tumble itself is so irredeemably funny. The child stops asking for food and just stares in silence as the adult completely beefs it. The adult, absolutely ashamed, wandering off screen, refusing to make eye contact with the baby.
“Haha remember when murder-hornets were gonna be a thing? What a nothingburger.”
Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.
“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”
Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.
“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”
You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?
One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.
The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.
And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.
And I refuse to let the cynics own a chunk of my heart.
there is something so fucking insulting about someone complimenting you over your weight loss when the weight loss was not intentional and was, in fact, frightening. like, thanks asshole. I wish having a BMI over 25 was the only thing I had to worry about. I’m glad you apparently believed my body was less than ideal and it is now more pleasing to you after I have been dealing with a flareup of a serious autoimmune disorder for months. I miss being able to enjoy food but I’m so glad you think I look better, apparently.
of course, you can’t say this because in the diet culture infested world that we live in, no one thinks twice about complimenting someone on their visible weight loss. it isn’t meant as a insult, it’s a thoughtless comment. it is unfathomable that someone may have been happier or healthier when they weighed more. and you don’t want to have to recount your personal medical history in graphic detail to explain why losing weight was not good.
‘you’ve lost weight since the last time I saw you’ is a completely neutral observation, it’s an acceptable comment to make in my opinion. automatically complimenting someone on it is so presumptuous and gross.
Like I don't think you guys comprehend what happened in Poland just now but everyone needs to be talking about it.
A random influencer decided he'll listen to an anti cancer song on loop. People liked it enough times he ended up listening for 9 days.
He raised 90 million in these 9 days, and then 160 million more over the last 10 hours, for a total of 250 million.
Hundreds and thousands of people signed up to donate marrow.
Hundreds of celebrities shaved their heads in solidarity.
The Foundation receiving this money had to create a special commission to figure out how to distribute the money.
The national TV stations got highjacked to stream this for hours because it was better news than anything happening in the world.
Because we broke and DOUBLED the world record for this kind of thing.
They raised about as much as the biggest running charity event in Poland did in a whole year with three decades of tradition and a goddamn army of people.
And they did it on a goddamn amateur set up in a shabby room sitting on folding chairs.
given all the rising transphobia and shit, we should remember that white trannies are still relatively safe and will be able to endure more escalation more easily, we're not at the top of any shit list even if we near if, trans women of color however are very vulnerable, and we need to remember they're our sisters, not our shields
Here's a pretty good organization that does this type of work!
The Black Trans Travel Fund is a Black trans-led collective rooted in self-advocacy and mutual aid for Black trans women globally, our mission is to provide travel support, connect communities internationally, and establish paths towards opportunities, safety, and success.
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.
by the way it's fine to like sexual content just for the sake of it. "we can't ban porn because other stuff will get banned" "sometimes nude art has value" "the government will classify queer people as sexual" this is all true but it's okay to just like porn. its okay to not want porn to be banned because you like it.
everybody: you’ve got to advocate for yourself in medical settings!
medical professionals when a patient advocates for themselves in a medical setting (x100 if that patient is a part of any minority): damn. you’re a hypochondriac crazy bitch who has every mental illness and is seeking every narcotic in existence. that’s the only reason you’d be disappointed in the care you’re receiving here. in retaliation, we will be even less helpful and less sympathetic. our jobs are hard. people are dying. we don’t have time to deal with anyone who is slightly inconvenient for us.
I actually do think we should discourage women from becoming housewives. Do not become financially dependent on a man. That's how a lot of women ended up dead over the years. A man gets violent suddenly and you have to choose between homelessness or potentially dying at his hand because you have an enormous gap in your resume and no degrees or certifications or anything that will help you pursue a career that will allow you to be financially independent. He owns your bank account. His name is probably the one on the car. Try and leave and he can report it stolen. Where will you go then?
And if you do become a housewife, take steps to protect yourself. Make sure you’re legally married, for starters; stay-at-home girlfriends have very little legal recourse to claim their partner’s assets in a breakup. Make sure your name is on the house deed/rental agreement, and have your car in your name, even if your spouse is paying for it. Have your spouse transfer money every month into an account solely in your name, so you can buy yourself things without needing permission, but also so you can save up to leave if needed.
If your spouse fights you on any of this, then don’t quit your job. The tradwife to poverty pipeline is real, and so is financial abuse.
also, many women/people experience controlling behaviour and domestic violence from their partner for the first time during pregnancy. don’t risk thinking “he’s just stressed, it’ll get better when the baby comes” because it won’t. neither you and your child will ever be safe with that man. get out as early and safely as you can
