You’d think that once you finally get long term access to a cat and your yearning to have cat access is fulfilled that you’d become slightly less obsessed with seeing people’s cats but no if anything it gets worse
I am reminded every day why I love cats because they’re right there, doing cat things, being absolutely adorable and committing cat crimes. They are friends with me and are so soft and also sharp.
just wanted to chronicle the Idyllic Summer Day™ i just had:
sleep in not too late but later than usual
excellent morning cuddles with my cat
go downstairs, best friend/roommate is making french toast with the homemade brioche she made yesterday
consume delicious french toast with roommates
play stardew valley (expanded) for a little while
eat a blt and a bunch of cherries
more cat snuggles
it is like a hundred american degrees outside so we spent the afternoon in the above-ground pool we set up in the backyard last month. 11/10 experience
emerge from pool after like 3 hours with that nice floaty post-swimming exhaustion feeling. dry off and play more sve
eat some popcorn shrimp and broccoli
take a lil walk to the nearby public-access university farm where they let you pick berries and flowers when they’re in season. the blueberries and raspberries aren’t ripe yet but they’re close! tons of lil baby green berries there
return home, take a 10mg edible and play more sve. intermittently play with my cat during Big Zoomin Crepuscular Hours
take another 5mg, [redacted], get ready for sleepytime, currently lying in bed with my cat and phone, as is the routine. still just slightly stoned. the moon is right outside my bedroom window.
not to sound like a christian facebook mom but some of yall need to have grace in your hearts for the people in your lives or the people you pass once on the road and never see again like you literally need to stop assuming the worst of everyone and their intentions it is poisoning your brain. you can be careful and responsible without being a miserable person. it is possible i promise
honestly i have been responding to some of these replies at face value bc i do also think you have a duty as a human being to be nice to people. but if you think this post is scolding you to be nicer to people then youve already lost the plot. this post is about how assuming that everyone you meet is hostile and wants to hurt you is bad for you. it ruins your life and it is a choice you are continually making.
a related thought: i've voluntarily spent time with people whose idea of conversation is criticizing and judging what other people say and do, and let me tell you, i have walked away from some of those interactions feeling absolutely disgusting. truly like a tar pit.
i've mostly encountered it in professional contexts where people with a lot of advanced skills and knowledge just can't shut the hell up about how much everyone else in the field sucks. and i usually even agree with them when they're complaining because the field in question really is one where most people don't have sufficient access to training or resources and there is a real problem with outdated and harmful ideas persisting. but that also means that people with more skills have opportunities to be mentors, and you can't be a fucking mentor if you go home at the end of the day and talk endless amounts of shit about the people you're supposed to be building up. you might think you're a mentor but you're not, you're just using people for ego fuel. if i thought i had a mentor but then learned that they were constantly complaining about me behind my back, i never had a mentor in the first place! what good is any of your skill or knowledge anyway if you just use it as a way to revel in how much better you are than everyone else? what a fucking waste.
i had to quit a job a few years ago for multiple reasons, one of the primary ones being that my coworkers kept poisoning the whole atmosphere with constant talk about the apparent complete incompetence of everyone in the other department and in our partner organizations. every situation was a chance for some shitty comment about "haha, remember when [former employee] did this WRONG? what an idiot" "omg [other department] is so incompetent, they can't be reasoned with, why the fuck were they even hired" "did you see what [partner org] put on social media? so unprofessional, they should have their licenses revoked" etc. etc. etc. fucking constantly. every goddamn day i drove home feeling like i was coated in tar. worse if i'd participated in it, which i tried not to do but you know, we're all human. and the complaints were often pretty valid. things i was also appalled by. righteous indignation is a hell of a drug. but like, also, shut the fuck up. the tar, we've all seen it, we know it's there, keep that shit contained because i don't want it all over me and neither do you. talk about something interesting for once, goddamn.
being judgmental or edgy or whatever other flavor of asshole doesn't make you interesting or clever or superior, it just makes you poisonous, and even if you don't care about everyone else you're poisoning, remember you're not immune to your own toxic ooze.
one very cool and fun thing about working in my office is the coworker whose normal speaking voice is YELLING VOLUME and they apparently have zero awareness of this. the office is pretty quiet in general other than this one voice just absolutely tearing through the hallway at a truly absurd volume. and this person talks a LOT. they’re actually very nice and otherwise pleasant but i can’t stand their presence because it’s just constant shouting all goddamned day. i can’t focus on a goddamned thing sometimes and it makes me want to also scream except my screaming voice is actually not as loud as this person’s regular talking voice so what would be the point.
and now I share an office (a whole other frustrating thing) so i can’t really close the door when the hallway is too loud. i am losing my mind.
incredible how being submerged in water can brighten a mood. roommate and i set up an above-ground pool last week and finally tried it out yesterday (despite it only being like 65 degrees outside, or 18 for the rest of the world, so not really warm enough). i felt like a goddamn mermaid. I stayed in the water until it was almost dark and watched the local bats start to forage. my eyes hurt a little today from the chlorine but that’s fine. i am an aquatic mammal
I first encountered this book on Ðe Olde Interwebs approximately… 20 years ago? Something like that. Obviously I found the title hilarious and baffling, and apparently it got tucked away in some corner of my brain because today, out of nowhere, amidst my latest depressive funk, I started laughing my ass off about “Malarkey? or Effective way?”
Yesterday I got fed up with myself and started making myself do things by asking myself “okay, what would someone who’s not depressed do in this situation?” And then doing that thing, provided it is reasonable. At the grocery store yesterday I kinda wanted to buy blueberry soda as a rare treat for myself, then immediately started a whole spiral of like “ugh I’m not worth the five bucks” and “why bother” and “yeah of course you want treats, you [heinous and uncalled-for things about my body]” and then I just… had that thought. I know what my brain is doing and I can decide to tell it to fuck off. What would someone who’s not depressed do? Spend five bucks on something I enjoy. I don’t have much money rn but I was comfortable spending five dollars. It’ll last several days. Future me will be pleased. If the soundscape in my brain isn’t that of a mentally healthy person yet, fine, but i can at least tell it to fuck off.
This morning, I didn’t really want to sweep the floors and shake out the rugs and clean the bathroom and wipe down the fridge drawers, but what would a depressed person do about it? Couch-rot and doomscroll, that’s what. So I’ll cross that off the list of options. A depressed me might also choose to play video games all day or occupy my brain with endless sudoku games. Also off the table. Well shit, I guess that leaves cleaning, huh?
And then I got into a groove and cleaned way more than I meant to, but I made myself stop before I got really exhausted. That’s when I took a break for video games and sudoku. At that point, things I enjoy became a reward or a respite rather than a rut.
Anyway, the whole time I was cleaning, I kept reminding myself that I am doing this as a “fuck you” to depression. And after decades of trying a bajillion different meds and learning from a lot of different therapists, and still finding myself depressed at almost 40 years old, I ended up laughing my ass off as I told myself, “look, it’s either this [doing the things a non-depressed person would do] or the anus constriction thing, which I’m pretty sure is malarkey.”
titanic Wreckage perfec t size for put trillionaire in to n\ap! inside very Cool and Meme trillionaire look so sick put trillionaore in Titanic Wreckage. Put Trillionaore In Titanic Wreckage. no problems ever in titanicc wreckage because good Shape and Support for trillionaire ti visit in little snubmarine. Thetitanic Wreckage yes a place for a trillionaire put trillionaire in titanic wreckage can trust Mad Catz xbox controller for giveing good submarine control to trillionaire. friend titanic wreckage
I have the most perfect and special brown tabby cat named June and hashtag no ragrets HOWEVER next time I adopt a cat I WILL be naming them something much more unhinged.
(June was named for a character in TAZ Balance, it’s also short for Junior Mint bc it made me giggle, it’s also a reference to Junie B Jones bc my cat is also a child menace, she shares a name with Pride month, and I’ve also decided that her nicholasname - like a nickname but elongating instead of shortening - is Junimo, as in Stardew Valley.)
But also, I’m such a goddamned internet-poisoned millennial dork, why tf don’t I have a cat named Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way, or Trogdor the Purrninator, or something equally goofy. I need to rectify this.
Unfortunately, June won’t allow me to have another cat at the moment, and my roommates have 4 anyway, so that’s a lot for the time being. The Time Being would also be a very funny cat name.
Also, how do I not have a cat named Feline Dion
Maybe I should volunteer at a cat shelter until they start letting me name kittens tbh
saw a guy in a suit and tie this morning and it occurred to me that the only difference between that outfit and, like, a fursuit is which aisle of the halloween store you'd find it in. both of them are expensive costumes for roleplay (some people dress up as anthropomorphic animals, others like business penguins, i bet there's overlap somewhere). i doubt either getup would be very comfortable to wear on a humid summer day like this one. it's just kinda weird that we made up some rules about which costumes "look silly" and which silly-looking costumes are not only accepted but expected. anyway i hope suit guy had a good day of performing business or getting an a+ in interview or whatever he was up to, and i hope he's able to wear something more comfortable when he gets to dress up like himself again.
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.
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?
You've gotta have good biodiversity in your reasons for not killing yourself. Rotate them out like crops when the yield gets low and the soil poor. We're mixing our metaphors. Whatever helps it stick.
You like warm blankets. You like the sound of birdsong. You have a pet that needs taking care of. You have someone to outlive. You have a loved one. You think death would be boring. It's coming for you anyway. Death is patient. When was the last time you had cake? Your favourite musician is going on tour. Or maybe just a halfway decent band at your local bar. You've never seen an elephant. Isn't it amazing that the sky is blue? Aging is a gift not afforded to most. Don't let the bastard grind you down. You can't mend any suffering in the world with your death. You want to see if you can grow herbs on your windowsill. Killing yourself seems like so much effort. What does tiramisu taste like? You're trying to be curious. You're angry and spiteful. What you want more than to die is to rest. This sandwich is so good you don't want to die. Not so long as there are plums to eat and somebody, anybody who gives enough of a damn to haul them to you. A stranger on the internet is holding their hand out and asking.
You haven't finished that book. It's almost strawberry season. There's a chrysalis on the porch that should open soon. There are pastries you've never tried. It's going to be sunny tomorrow. You're going to look very distinguished with gray hair. You have to outlive him. There aren't any easy ways to die. Your package is supposed to arrive on Friday. There are people who will love you that you haven't met yet.
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