off comm for a sec

double duty medic currently reading about inefficient spies

[dyk-this-musical-song]

Do you know this Musical Song? #285

I know the song and the musical

I know the song but not the musical

I know the musical but not the song

I may know this

I have never heard this

Remaining time: 2 days 11 hours

[charl0ttan]

dog i gotta move like yesterday

[miri--writes]

“I know you're angry,” Louisa said. The directness caught Emma off guard. She adjusted. “I'm not angry.” “You went to Wales. And you didn't have to. And you got…” “I went because I thought it mattered. What happened to you.”

H O L L O W C O U N T R Y

Read on AO3

When the niece of Oliver Nash, Head of the Limitations Committee, goes missing, Emma Flyte brings in the one person she trusts to help and can still, if necessary, deny. Because Louisa Guy is not really MI5; she is one of those who inhabit thresholds, between what’s alive, what’s never quite gone, and what’s rotting, buried.

But instead of a missing-persons case, both learn that something in the Fens—that wants to remain nameless and hidden in the dark—has been collecting the overlooked and the disposable for years. And these flatlands do not give the truth up easily; not the earth, not the water, not the dead

Huge thanks to @therineye for beta-reading!

[911onabcbts]

Ryan, Oliver, and Gavin talking about how they would get Eddie and Buck to be together.

credit @/divadiaz118

[miri--writes]

H O L L O W C O U N T R Y

In preparation for the first chapter this Sunday, here's one of the many illustrations I created for the animation, and a playlist of songs I've been listening to while writing and drawing.

The illustrations became more complex as I noticed I needed more elements and scenes. I like this one particularly, there's something serene about it. Maybe I'll share others in the future.

The land is sinking. It has been for centuries. Sometimes the earth gave her what the people would not.

[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.

[therineye]

on twt from oliver’s panel today

source

[therineye]

actors crying on cue scare me

[minothtime]

Linguistic Games - A Non-Comprehensive List

Obsessed with games about languages? Played one and crave infinitely more? Fear not, for I am here with a small handful of recommendations that will perhaps tide you over for a little bit before you start going crazy again!

This is a humble list of some games about linguistics or languages (or anything adjacent) as a main feature that I, a translator by trade, have played or heard about. Hopefully this is useful for anyone that's looking for new linguistic experiences!

Games I've Played

These are games I've actively played to full or near-full completion. They've all been great too btw.

Heaven's Vault

Oh boy, where to even begin talking about this game. Heaven's Vault is a game in which every single choice you make matters... and there's no turning back! This game is made to be replayed, as tedious as it might be to do so, and the lack of savefiles does hurt it a bit if you're as impatient and curious as I am. However, the story is so gripping and the twists and turns are so captivating that you just wanna keep playing to know everything!!

The story is simple on the surface: you're an archaeologist traveling across space with a simple goal: find out both what's going on with your curious companion and what has the Nebula in such a tizzy.

The artstyle is amazing, the game feels good to play, characters will remember every decision you've made and react accordingly... You might even discover a route so far from what you originally set out to do, it may derail your entire ending!

The language mechanic itself is fun, and figuring out the symbols and how they build on each other is incredibly enrapturing! Sometimes a bad guess can send you hurtling down the wrong path, but that's just life!

All you really need to keep in mind about this game is that two routes will never be the same... but they might be heavily similar. Or not. As long as you are aware that this is a slow-paced game with plenty of replayabilty, you're in for a fun, mysterious experience of trying to fit the jagged edges of the puzzle pieces together. And the picture they form is absolutely worth it.

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation4, PC (Steam)

Price: €21,99 (Steam, PlayStation Store), €15,99 (Nintendo eShop)

NOW €8,79/$9,99 UNTIL JUNE 5TH ON STEAM!!

----------------

Chants of Sennaar

Yeah, it's me again, Chants of Sennaar's #1 megafan. What about it.

CoS is perhaps my favorite game out of this whole bunch. You're basically dropped in a strange, unfamiliar place... and everyone speaks a language you don't understand! Through logic and experience, you'll uncover the meaning of all the words you've been hearing though the sunny lower floor of the tower... because of course, this is a tower!

Tongue-in-cheek Babel reference aside, you go through different societies, each with their own language reflecting it, in your efforts to reach the very top of the tower. The story is plural yet simple, with a central one revolving around your character and lots of small side stories that keen-eyed players will find a delight to uncover.

On the language side of things, well... Language is Sennaar is both a device to advance the story and a collectable of sorts. It is possible to finish the game with incomplete knowledge of all the languages, but filling your notebook with every single word is just so much FUN! Apart from that, many languages have certain patterns one might recognize - verbs or nouns or some words may be written in a specific way, which makes it easier to understand the meaning of some things.

I want to spoil this game as little as possible. This is a game that should really be experienced if possible, so this little overview probably feels somewhat lackluster... oh well! One thing that stressed me out BAD in this game -spoiler alert, I guess?- were the stealth sections (there's not that many, just two stressful ones near the beginning and at the very very end), but in retrospect they were not bad at all. Trial and error makes it all work, and to be fair this game is incredibly lenient when you get caught.

Also the ending's nuts and i've been rotating the main character in my head ever since i first played this. artsyle is so cool too. insane game please give it a chance.

Platforms: PS4, Nintendo Switch, PC (Steam), Xbox One

Price: €19,99

NOW €12,99/$12,99 UNTIL JUNE 5TH ON STEAM!

----------------

Sethian

Alright this one is for the true linguistic nerds out there. This is NOT a puzzle game. The other two games so far had puzzle and adventure elements, but this one? You only get two fucking things: a diary that updates as you go... and a weird screen with even weirder symbols.

You wanted a language to decipher? Well here you go! Learn this language. Use it to ask questions. Get answers. So on and so forth.

Sethian's language is impossibly interesting. This language doesn't take its grammar, syntax or stuff like that from English. Oh no. As the creator stated, it "borrows elements from Chinese, American Sign Language, and other real world languages, in addition to some features which have no real world counterpart."

Also, just as a heads up, you're not gonna get the meaning of every single symbol or word. Sorry. But let's be real - that's just true to learning any new language. Some things are better left as a mystery!

Sethian is not very long, but if you're into this language stuff it's honestly an incredible experience. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Platform: PC (Steam)

Price: €4,99

----------------

Cypher

This game is relatively similar to Sethian language-wise, even if it's not nearly as complex. Premise is as follows: you're helping a stranded space traveler make their way out of the planet they crashed onto... by acting as a translator between them and his local companion!

It's very fun and the way the language works is quite interesting, but don't expect much length or depth. Honestly, this is an amazing free game you can play if you want to scratch the itch a bit! ...Even if it might leave you itching for more. Oh, well!

In case you're seeing this on PC, here's a link to the game's itch.io page. Have fun!

Platform: PC (itch.io)

Price: Whatever you want it to be!

----------------

The Gostak

This is the one exception: I still haven't finished playing this game. In fact, at the time of writing, I just started. But this 2001 text adventure is an absolute masterpiece. Difficult as fuck, but a masterpiece nonetheless.

This game does not have convenient graphics or a handy way to keep track of what you've learned. What I'm doing is taking out my notebook and my multicolored pen and getting to WORK. You have to discover, parse or even guess the meaning or function of words based solely on their relations to OTHER unknown words that you uncover... by using the same words you know nothing about! You are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. From there, it's all on YOU to not only understand what's going on, but also complete this adventure... because it IS an adventure!

Your goal is unclear at the beginning, but as you unravel the language and begin to understand your surroundings, you'll see more and more of this world. As mentioned before, this is a text-only game, which can be a turnoff for some people. I, however, would say that the joy of figuring out words and the relationships between them without even knowing what they mean is simply amazing.

Here's the link to the game's website, so you can whip out your trusty word processor (or, if you're old school like me, your handy pen and paper) and go to town! May the gitches frike and the duscats glake!

Platform: PC (website)

Price: Free!

----------------

Games I Have Not Played

Homicipher

Well. From what I know about this game, it's a threefold game: horror, language, and adventure all rolled into one!

The only reason I haven't played this game is because I despise horror games with all my heart. They make me extremely anxious and I just don't have a good time at all. Everything else about this game is screaming out to me - a developed language-learning/guessing system? A crazy point-and-click adventure with multiple endings and interesting character interactions?

I'd say that if you don't mind the whole horror side of things, you should absolutely give this a try. I'm afraid I can't say much else about this game!

Platform: PC (Steam)

Price: €13,79

----------------

7 Days to End with You

All I know about this game is that you're given basically nothing to work with from the very beginning and that your interpretation of the language affects the story itself. Interesting concept!

A few reviews seem to imply this game is a bit divisive, but it's still on my to-play list. Maybe you, too, should give it a chance!

(If you're interested, maybe try and find a spoilerless review or a better summary... I'm sure there's much to be said about this game, but none of it will be found on this post!)

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC (Steam), Android (Play Store)

Price: €11,79 (eShop), €7,79/$7,99 (Steam), €5,49/$4,49 (Play Store)

----------------

Honorable mentions

Tunic

This is just a soulslike! Maybe I'm just so bad at videogames I struggle to get past the beginning, but as far as I know I don't think the language is the main focus of the game. It is still a translatable, learnable language, tho!

Outer Wilds

Keeps the same feeling of "knowledge drives you forward" that Heaven's Vault and Chants of Sennar have, but as far as I know there's no language translation central to the game. I mean, there is, it's just automatic and you don't get to play with a new language. Amazing experience nonetheless! (I'm still yet to finish it...!)

Tork (Can you torque the talk?)

2004 flash game, but it is now sadly unplayable. It employed a language-learning system similar to Chants of Sennaar.

----------------

Honorable honorable mentions

Rapid-fire list of non-language games that just scratched the same itch somehow.

Return to the Obra Dinn

Incredible notebook detective game about finding out what happened to the crew of a ship. Deductive reasoning takes the wheel here.

The Roottrees Are Dead

Another notebook detective game! This time, you're a private investigator in charge of filling out an extense family tree... and perhaps some surprises along the way!

Type Help

Rounding up the notebook detective genre, this one has you following the mysterious events that unfolded at a house party using only audio transcripts. Honestly, once it clicks, it clicks. Here's the itch.io link!

Sable

Low-stakes exploration with simple yet atmospheric graphics and a very interesting story to uncover!

Tales of the Neon Sea

An eclectic mix of noir, cyberpunk and pixel art that results in an unforgettable detective experience. Well-written characters, an amazing story, fun worldbuilding... I only wish it was longer!

----------------

Well, that's all! If you play any of these games (or have already played them), please don't hesitate to let me know!!! I just adore these little linguistic gems :D Also, if you know any other games not mentioned in here, PLEASE tell me I'm getting desperate

Hope you enjoy these games! Much love <3

[maxiemumdamage]

Sam doing this pose is how you know the cast have taken the challenge “say something we are legally liable for and terrified by” to heart.

[audible301]

Dropout fans: wow I feel like a proud parent watching Jeremy on SNL

Jeremy:

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

Meanwhile in Denmark: My mom knitted a hat for my cat

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

The face of a woman who isn't disappointed that her only grandchild is a cat

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

Just one day later she sends me this... My cat in different homemade hat. The woman is unstoppable!!!

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

Taking over the world... One silly hat at a time...

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

The source of her power:

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

The most delicious little strawbebby...

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

Presenting the politest of little gentlemen

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

This little alien is kinda done with our bullshit

[girldraki]

[leavethepuddle]

@sarumans

[zsh-official]

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

The real impact of AI at university level that I've watched in real time is how so many students come onto courses now - including Masters level - who straight up don't know how to analyse/evaluate things anymore. They just accept whatever they first read/hear completely uncritically. Every time you point it out you have to coax them into Actually Thinking.

I've spotted a huge decline over the last two years. What's upsetting is how so many of our current third years have declined since their first year. I did a seminar with them the other day, on the topic of the environmental impacts of different diets. One guy told me confidently that there would be no additional agricultural lands if we all went vegetarian.

"Cool," I said. "What's your source for that?"

"I'm sure I read it," he said.

"Fair," said I, "go and look it up. Find an academic source, let's assess it to see if it's robust."

The first thing he did was go to Google, and then read the AI summary.

"That's not a source," I said. "Find me a source."

Five minutes later, he happily tells me that a Guardian article says so, and mentions the World Economic Forum.

"Okay," I said. "Neither of those are academic sources, and the WEF is secondary anyway. Go to Google Scholar, and find a journal article."

Ten minutes later, he tells me he can only find articles that say it's a very complex issue in spite of pop cultural received wisdom, and we don't actually know.

A THIRD YEAR. This man has a dissertation due in THREE MONTHS. This is a skill we taught him in first year, and it's all dribbled out of his ears in the quest for easy summaries from an autocomplete algorithm. And I dearly wish I could say he's an exception, but Jesus Christ, that would be a lie.

I'm currently writing a lecture for the second years for their research methods module, and I normally wouldn't need to do this. But I'm having to re-introduce them to the basic concepts of how to actually analyse findings rather than lazily take whatever they seem to say at face value. I'm trying to find a good paper that had Surprising findings, because I want to show them a research question and a set of results and then get them to speculate and research on why they found something so different, but that's a difficult thing to search for.

Ngh. Yelling at the choir here, I know, but NNNNGH

[cosmonaut-observer]

If you live in the UK you need to see this

Protect Internet Freedom from now until forever. It's important existentially! Americans stand with UK citizens in our struggle against government censorship

[russettrush]

Growing up in the online world: a national consultation

We are consulting on further measures to prepare children for the future in an age of rapid technological change. This includes potential ag

Got the link via @finalducc

If you live in the UK, please be sure to take part in this!

[marasfanfics]

Also, please beware - many of these questions are trick questions, phrased to indicate that the government is only looking for support for their dipshit ideas. Things like "Which types of websites should have minimum age restrictions?" are irrelevant, and further show they're only looking for people to support their idiocy.

Please use guides like the EFF to answer these questions.

No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online

Young people should be able to access information, speak to each other and to the world, play games, and express themselves online without t

Age Verification and Age Gating: Resource Hub

Age verification (or age-gating) laws generally require online services to check, estimate, or verify all users’ ages—often through invasive

[omega-springsteen-truther]

I’m sick and tired of found families we need more found toxic workplace environments

[timrousbeastie]