okay so spock (the alien in blue) essentially goes into heat. like literal heat like an animal. Anyway, spock’s in bloodlust in this episode and must go back to vulcan to have sex with his finace (or someone. but its supposed to be his fiance) or he’ll literally die. this is called pon farr and some backstory spock is half human and thought he wouldnt go through pon farr so he abandoned his HOT fiance to fuck around in space except oops pon farr happens so. he and kirk (in yellow getting his tits cut open, he’s also spocks captain and best friend) and their other friend mccoy go to vulcan so he can have sex with his fiance or get married or whatever so he doesn’t die. but then spock’s fiance (t’pring) is like no i dont want to marry spock i want to have him fight someone to death (which she can do) and spock at this point is fully in the ‘blood lust’ and is basically not in his right mind and doesnt get what’s happening. and t’pring picks kirk to be her ‘champion’ in the fight (her logic is that if spock dies in the fight she doesnt have to marry him and if kirk dies, spock will be so upset with her he won’t marry her anymore anyway). anyway kirk doesnt know that its a fight to the death and so he’s like of course i’ll do this fight if it’ll help spock and then he gets told it’s a fight to the death and he goes WHAT and right afterwards spock slices his titties open like in the gif. also eventually spock and kirk roll around in the sand and kirk fakes his death and THIS somehow knocks spock out of his blood lust and he goes back to the ship super sad bc he’s killed his ‘best friend’ only to discover kirk’s alive and we see one of his biggest smiles of the series (a big deal bc spock is vulcan and they dont show emotion). anyway this aired as the season opener in 1967. know your history and all that happy pride
HOW is it possible that I am seeing this for the first time? Now safely installed in my tumblr short cuts folder. I am SO bad at coding that this is a real life saver.
Darkwick Academy (Island) is in full swing. Now I just need better clothes. Only house missing now is Dionysia. Process journal and OC list under the cut
I made MC first and then made the ghouls in order of when she meets them. I have something like 16 OCs because I felt like Darkwick needed girl ghouls and had lots of fun ideas of archetypes for them. I might do the teachers after Dionysia.
OC list with some WIP concepts for stigmas and artifacts. I only have first names for most of them so far because Japanese is not a language I speak. Am more than willing to take suggestions on all of these things!
Name - Archetype - Stigma - Artifact
Frostheim
Miyuki - the Housemaid - Cold/Ice - Glaive
Kyoka - the Dame - Magnetic - Armor
Hinata - the Princess - Scream (what does the scream do? Idk yet) - Morningstar
Vagastrom
Minori - the Thief - Invisibility - Lockpick
Rinka - the Vandal - Stretchy - Spraypaint, Baseball Bat
any conversation about who could play odysseus well (as opposed to the obvious terrible choice matt damon) is inane, in my view, because it’s already been done and served by toby stephens of maggie smith’s son fame in an acclaimed yet underwatched show black sails under the name james “flint”—
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.
gummygunk
2087
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