“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.”
Your shit is *apart*, and it's rather unbecoming of a cop and a human being. It's supposed to be the opposite of that: *together*. Compressed in a small area. To achieve a solid level of shit-compression, squeeze your butt-cheeks together for 30 minutes. Do something similar with the two hemispheres of your brain. Talk to people, maybe that will help.
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
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
every day it just concerns me how little compassion people have. no compassion for those living in the global south. no compassion for immigrants. no compassion for disabled ppl. no compassion for addicts. no compassion for prisoners. no compassion for children. like holy shit ...
i made a separate post about this but actually there are plenty of people cough white people who care about animals more than they ever do human people . not what i'm talking about make your own post
Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???
As others have pointed out before, if you visited a web page 20 years ago and it acted like that, you would rightly assume your computer had gotten a virus.
i re-watched it several times, looking for what he does differently. finally i spotted it. look at the line of motion in his strike. it’s not especially fast, he doesn’t wind up more than the others, and it’s not a matter of strength – the guy who knocked over the stand probably put more muscle into it. but there’s a unity of movement he has that the others lack. his body and sword are all one curve. everything moves at once along the same line.
from a physics perspective, that means all the force he’s applying is concentrated at the point of contact between his sword’s edge and the target, and it moves at just the speed that breakage propogates through the material. too slow and it wouldn’t have enough force; too fast and he’d get ahead of the break, shoving the target over instead of cutting it.
from a writing perspective, that means that i should focus on describing a master swordsman’s smoothness more than their strength or speed, and can also have witnesses be confused at the effectiveness of strikes that don’t actually seem all that fast.
Martial arts are all about physics, my karate sensei is has a mechanic/physics diploma and he loves to explain the biomechanics of human body and how this was turned into fight via martial arts. It’s a very good way to teach. The sword master has a larger stance of the feet, much more than the others, allowing his barycenter to lower and thus giving more stability. This, united with the movement of the sword that follows the angle of his body increases the power of the blow without actually using too much muscle strength. Pretty sure he’s also just tending (not contracting) the muscles under the armpits, near the rib cage, the serratus anterior. That makes a huge difference.
Putting my five cents to this: Another skill shown here is often called "edge alignment". Basically you need the plane of the blade be identical with the plane that your movement is describing. This way the force is only applied on the edge of the blade.
While this is relatively simple in principle, it is difficult to keep the alignment for the whole movement. The movement needs to be as straight as possible, which is not something the human body is build to do. Most movements describe curves instead, even if only slightly. Such precision in movement takes thousands, if not millions of tries to master.
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.
Ich bin immer begeistert wenn in irgend'nem Buch oder einer Doku gesagt wird, dass jemand "nach [...] eilte". Auch wenn eigentlich eine flotte Kutschfahrt usw. gemeint ist, muss ich mir immer vorstellen wie der Kurfürst von Schlagmichtot querfeldein losgesprintet ist. Und der Hofstaat hinterher. Nette Vorstellung.
auf verlorene Schuhe und Perücken wird in all der Eile keine Rücksicht genommen, es geht hier um empfindliche diplomatische Angelegenheiten. Wenn man das straffe Tempo beibehält ist man schon in wenigen Wochen in Paris.
Für mich ist "Eilen" nicht Sprinten, sondern eher so in Richtung Powerwalken. Immer ein Fuß mit Bodenkontakt. Die Vorstellung von Adel mit Hofstaat absolutely moving mit Wanderstöcken find ich aber auch irgendwie witzig!
"RITTMEISTER! Holen Sie meine Walkingstöcke aus dem Stall, und machen Sie meine Nordic Walking Gruppe mobil. Oh, und sorgen Sie dafür dass mein Schrittzählerstand in jedem Dorf verlesen wird. Der Pöbel soll inspiriert sein"
und so walkten sie von dannen, hinter ihnen eine Staubwolke aus Perückenpuder
Im enjoying the longevity of tumblrs recontextualization style of humor. a seemingly innocuous post followed by like "posts that a gnome would make" or like "are you a phone"
Not disabled enough to fit the picture of a wheelchair user but also not healthy enough to easily walk several kilometers.
My experience with renting a wheelchair for a festival.
Disclaimer: I can walk, stand up, even lift my own wheelchair in places and I do LOOK able-bodied. I don't use a wheelchair in my everyday life.
As a result people are very confused when I'm just standing up from my wheelchair just to carry it out of the tram or bus.
This lady tried to help me but didn't ask. She just grabbed me by my arm as I wanted to stand up like she's expected that I can walk or stand very poorly. Of course she thought so.
She looked very confused and upset when I said I didn't need help and carried my wheelchair outside the bus on my own. I was at very low spoons of energy and just couldn't explain more to her. She probably thinks I'm a troll or something. (And many more other passengers)
But I'm not. This mobility aid really helps me a lot. I can attend a festival which I couldn't without it.
Well, that got me thinking about the stereotype of disability. Especially the stereotype of a wheelchair user.
Not every wheelchair user can't stand or walk. To be partially impaired is a thing and is also valid. My disability is also valid. This weird feeling of not being disabled enough but also not being healthy enough for the able bodied world. It's a form of inner ableism and a struggle.
Disabilities are so individual. There's never a picture of a stereotype that fits. Never.
wow, honestly I don't think I particularly like dnd, I just like opportunities to tell stories with my friends and dnd winds up being the right vehicle for that. But Shadowrun????? Oh my god I love shadowrun
