Live from the Depths of my Psyche

Apparently I blog about Whatever

[thethunderbirdrising]

I don't want to go to work, I want to wander through the woods for 10,000 years

[depsidase]

[phaeton-flier]

Bear religion probably fucking rocks. You're a fucking bear, you're the deadliest thing on earth, once a year an endless supply of salmon just flings itself up the river to gorge on and then you nap for 3 months.

[phaeton-flier]

The most delicious food in the world is protected by tiny demons who can defend it from everyone except you. Your natural armor is thick enough that you can just eat the damn hive while they buzz around you. God's chosen animals right there

[theaudientvoid]

[centrally-unplanned]

Regular bears tell stories of angel bears sent by the Bear God, pure white and twice as strong as any normal bear could be, who rule the summit of the Earth and kill all who stand in their path.

And they are right, those bears exist and totally do that. Humans just have fake angels as a cope.

[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.

[apricops]

that post about “you get bandits when you cut soldiers loose without pay” reminds me of the Thirty Years War, because one could say that beneath all the religious schisms and diplomatic jockeying, the heart of the thirty years war was “what happens when you have a state with just enough capacity to raise massive armies but without enough financial capacity to actually pay those armies” and the answer is that the line between professional armies and roving gangs of bandits disappears and every time you try to raise an army it just becomes another independently acting wildfire devouring the countryside. No matter how bad things get, every day I wake up and thank my lucky stars that I do not live in 17th century Europe. Or 17th century China. Or the 17th century Americas. Or basically anywhere in the 17th century.

[probabilitydirigible]

One of my favorite little anecdotes about ancient mercenaries is that it was tradition for most of history to give your mercenaries two wages- "Bread" and "Gravy." Both were set at a daily value, but where "Bread" was intended to cover regular maintenance and life stuff and therefore paid out frequently (Here's your week's meal and gear repair budget!) the "Gravy" wage was paid out exclusively at the end of the contract as one lump sum. So like, your gravy wage and bread wage might be one silver coin per day each, so you're getting a handful of coins every week to cover food, and then at the end of an 800 day campaign, you get a wheelbarrow with 800 coins.

Employers liked offering this structure because then they didn't have to like, try to guess how long the invasion of spain will take and then carry 800 coins per soldier around the battlefield where it could be captured. It also gives them the chance to budget around the assumption that they take an enemy city and *find* vast sums of treasure even if they don't have the full value at the beginning of the war.

The main flaw of this system is that it's very easy to end up in a scenario where if you have, say, 50,000 guys that have been fighting for 800 days, you now owe 40 million silver to your army, and if the budget has not worked out to a 40 million surplus, you literally can't afford to end the war, but you can probably afford to pay them for a couple more weeks. So then you have to start thinking creatively.

Anyway across all time and history a lot of generals were ultimately beaten to death by men chanting gravy.

[mortalityplays]

so I spent a lot of last year working with / around this local activist group mostly made up of your typical ambiently queer, ambiently leftist college students. like every loose affinity group it struggled with the sort of unpredictable fluctuating capacity problem of most participants being tied to day jobs or college term times, variously disabled, turning up when they could make it and then vanishing for months at a time. it's to be expected with that kind of organising but it does also make for kind of a pain in the neck.

anyway this particular group does (or did?) have kind of a nucleus of very committed members who were more tight knit and ended up taking on a lot of the practical work themselves. they were your more serious vanguard party type communists, very much structure and role enjoyers, which is probably why things eventually played out the way they did. they took their commitments seriously and were constantly sort of irked that others saw the voluntary nature of the group as a reason to deprioritise it in favour of what might be life necessities but are still basically capitalist pursuits. fair, maybe.

about this time last summer, that inner circle apparently decided to get more serious about recruitment and figure out how to do outreach in a way that would bring in more committed membership to reliably spread the workload. the way these things go, a couple of these guys had originally met through a local gay bar's drag nights (specifically the drag king circuit) so one of the first things they did was draft in another friend who did marketing for those events already and get him pushing for more eyeballs on their event listings via twitter and instagram.

now, bar guy was very very good at this. one of his big innovations was the idea of using club promoter type strategies to get more students more consistently engaged with the group's activities. that basically meant appointing some of the more active members as 'outreach officers' and encouraging them to do things like organise socials for new volunteers and train those people in turn as recruiters, with a tiny bit of a floating budget for pot lucks and house parties every couple of months.

this worked astonishingly well, like beyond anyone's wildest expectations. at a certain point they had brand new members throwing their own parties just to introduce their friends to the people who recruited them, who in turn had been recruited by the volunteers the outreach officers trained. it worked so well that it got to be a problem because most of these newer members were also relatively new to organising and didn't have a whole lot of theory. it was getting very vibes based and suddenly there was a huge influx of people to handle who most original members didn't know. and also, because they'd asked a gay guy who promoted gay club nights to organise all this peer-to-peer recruitment, it turned out almost all the new members were gay men.

in itself that's not necessarily a problem, but obviously it presents a challenge for a group that's supposed to be open and diverse. especially because outside of the little clique who started all this, most of the old guard were not gay men. it didn't blow up into the kind of messy schism it could have, fortunately, but a lot of the older members (especially those who were less into the hardline soviet-nostalgia communist utopianism of the main organisers) decided around this point that they didn't feel the group was a good fit for them any more, and split.

so now the inner circle had a new problem. the remaining group was overwhelmingly now made up of very sweet well intentioned young gay men who wanted to volunteer with this cool voluntary circle of other young gay men who liked to party, and vanishingly few of them actually knew a whole lot about mao or lenin or the practicalities of community organising or what have you. but club guy was like "don't worry I've got this", and suddenly out of nowhere started producing all this orientation literature and politics 101 material that he was chain emailing to his army of new recruits and recruiters. like he just had all this shit ready to go. he had slogans, he had essays, he had these weird point by point breakdowns of what karl marx would have to say about your college courses and why communism was like actually a lot like bdsm if you think about it.

you will probably not be shocked to learn that it very quickly came out he had been generating all this shit with chatgpt. the group went into absolute meltdown, the vanguard party shut down their website and disassociated themselves completely from the whole mess, and the last I heard they're back to organising with some of the older group members and whoever turns up whenever they turn up. but club guy was unrepentant, he'd already sent out all his ideologyslop to his recruiters, who had sent it to their guys who sent it to their guys, who I guess are still out there recruiting twinks into the fully automated contentless communism mill,

or the MLM MLM LLM MLM if you're nasty.

[thebisexualwreckoning]

They’re so funny let’s all read the book called ‘the book that kills you’ from hit audio drama ‘do NOT under any circumstances read the book called ‘the book that kills you’’.

[gondwana]

When u like a movie so much that everyone's quippy little letterboxd reviews start pissing you off

[thethunderbirdrising]

More and more, this is what all fandom has begun to feel like to me

[solarprominence]

I maintain that the best summation of my feminist beliefs are that men and women are not fundamentally different. There are a few quantifiable differences if you average out every woman and every man, but they are not qualitative. And most of them are socially constructed, and would be fixed if we started treating men and women the same. Neither is inherently smarter, neither is inherently kinder, neither is inherently more stoic or stronger or angrier or softer. Everyone is obsessed with the differences between women and men, with finding them and creating them and distancing themselves from the "other half". It's fucked up

[nonbinary-wrath-month]

The reason why so many of y'all's feminism sucks is because you still believe deep down in your hearts that there are only two kinds of people in the world: precious, ethereal, fragile dollthings called "women", and violent, lustful, rage-fueled apes called "men". Until you throw that idea away, 3rd-grade-tier "girls rule boys drool, girls are princesses and boys are stinky :(" is as feminist as we'll ever get-- and I hope it's obvious that that's lightyears away from the bare minimum of where we need to be.

[nonbinary-wrath-month]

I don't know how I'm supposed to explain to ostensibly trans-friendly feminists that "women are beautiful soft things made of glass, men are obsessed with violence and sex" is exactly what the patriarchy wants you to believe. Patriarchy wants you to believe that being a woman and/or having a vagina (patriarchy generally believes those two things are synonymous) makes one shatter on impact with reality. It makes you easier to control if you are scared shitless of the other half of the population, and it makes you more compliant with your lot in life if you believe it is in the nature of the other half of the population to rape and kill rather than realise those were choices those individual rapists and murderers made. There is no way to make gender essentialism progressive and feminist, because it is one of patriarchy's tools of subjugation. Stop trying to make it progressive.

And I can scream all of that from the rooftops over and over again, and what I hear in reply is "Trans men really are men because no woman would ever decide to become an inherently evil repugnant rapist ape", and "You're so right. Trans women are women because they too are pretty delicate little objects I can fuck", and "You're non-binary? So are you fucktoy non-binary or sexpest non-binary?", and my patience runs ever thinner.

[thethunderbirdrising]

Where we started

Now we're here

[goodman-grace]

Fucking love the Green Lantern comics the Guardians fucking despise Hal and they fire him like every other week but it keeps failing because Hal can literally just make his own damn ring with infinite charge because he’s him and continues on galavanting as a GL across the galaxy not giving a single shit. Sometimes he shows up at their door calling them pussies and daring them to kill him. Like what do you do. You MADE this irritating asshole and he's literally your most skilled Lantern in the entire history of the corps, anyone you send after him get their asses handed to them or go off the grid because they swore loyalty to Hal with a blood pact. They are FORCED to keep employing him. Brilliant stuff happening here.

[jackkdaniels]

when i was a kid i decided that killing people was bad therefore war was bad therefore the military was evil. and adults would tell me it's more nuanced than that and i would understand when i grew up. well i'm a grown up now and idk i still think that killing people is bad and war is bad and the military is evil

[aa-400]

this is such a thoughtless post but thankfully other people have addressed the core issue in few simple words (ty @raksha-the-demon for the screenshotted tags in particular:)

[subwaybug]

More people should get into poly shipping. Both because polyamory is awesome and because it's really fun to make complicated ass diagrams

[aadamantine]

Whatever is happening with Peter, MJ, Flash, Venom and Felicia

[s-nnoh]

someone made a website where you can declare your favorite pokemon & why. let's all see if every pokemon is someone's favorite... Together

[thecoastalcity]

Mixtape Does Not Need to Prove Itself to People Missing the Point

It Is Asking You to Feel Something, Not Win.

By theCoastalCity (Bryce) - 15th May 2026

______________________

The way some people are talking about Mixtape is honestly ridiculous and frustrating to see as it is taking up space.

Not liking the game is one thing. That is fine.

Not every game is going to connect with every person, and Mixtape was never going to be for everyone.

But calling it “not a game”, “slop”, or acting like it somehow tricked players and reviewers into liking it is just lazy criticism from people who are clearly missing the point.

Because Mixtape is a game.

It is not an action game. It is not an RPG. It is not trying to be a massive open-world experience full of systems, skill trees and constant fail states.

It is a story-driven narrative game about music, memory, friendship and growing up.

Since it was announced, it was very clear what kind of experience this was going to be, so watching certain parts of the internet acting shocked by that feels exhausting.

And this is where the review discourse around the game starts to get even more frustrating.

Back Pocket host Ruby Innes made a really good point in a short video on their social media, saying: "There is realistically no such thing as an objective game review because everyone brings different feelings and experiences into a game".

I think that matters here because Mixtape is the kind of game that is going to hit people differently depending on what they bring into it.

That is exactly what you can see in Simon Cardy’s IGN review that has been centred around some of this ridiculous noise thats going on. He was upfront about why Mixtape connected with him. He stated that:

"I was always going to be a mark for Mixtape. As a coming-of-age movie lover with an ear lent to guitar music of decades past who often indulges in the bittersweet sensation of melancholy, Beethoven & Dinosaur may have made it just for me." IGN REVIEW

So when people get angry at a review score like that, what are they actually mad about?

That someone connected with a game?

That it was made for a certain kind of player and that player happened to review it?

That a game can be emotionally successful without needing to be mechanically huge?

It is all stupid and noise that is just unnecessary.

When I finished Mixtape, I was not thinking about whether it had enough mechanics to pass some imaginary gameplay test.

I was thinking about growing up in the 90s, about how much music shaped me, and how certain songs still attach themselves to moments in my life.

I thought about my parents sharing their music with me when they were my age, and then eventually going out and finding my own sound.

That is what Mixtape brought out for me.

It is not asking you to win. It is asking you to feel something.

The game follows musician, Van Slater (left), music curator, Stacey Rockford (middle) and sports prodigy turned rebel, Cassandra Morino (right) on their last moments together. Screenshot from Mixtape game.

______________________

It is completely fine if Mixtape did not work for someone.

I can understand people thinking it is a little short. It is around a three-hour game, and for some people, that might not be enough. But it is also priced like an indie game, and indie games are often where more experimental ideas.

They are not always trying to be for the masses, and that is okay.

The issue is not people disliking Mixtape. The issue is the lazy criticism around it.

Calling it “not a game” does not make sense to me because there are gameplay mechanics in it.

They may not be the kind of mechanics some people wanted, but they are still there. It is a narrative-driven game, and the gameplay exists to support the story, the emotion and the moments between these characters.

Even calling it a “walking simulator” feels unfair because a lot of the time, there is dialogue happening that is actively pushing the narrative forward.

And honestly, most of the time you are not just walking anyway.

You are on a skateboard, doing sick tricks, moving through the enviroment as you rebel to the conformative and skating through a contruction site.

All of this adds little pieces of expression to the scene and they are really great.

Then there is the whole idea that reviewers must have been paid or that a high score must mean something suspicious happened, which is such a lazy thing to throw around.

Paid or misleading reviews are not some casual thing that outlets can just do without consequence and here are the facts in the form of Law.

In Australia, the ACCC says "fake or misleading reviews are against the law", and in the United States, "the FTC has rules against fake reviews and testimonials that can lead to civil penalties."

I dont know about you but I like to not break laws and face potential criminal charages, and I am sure others do too.

So maybe, and let this sink in, just maybe, some reviewers connected with the game because it worked for them.

Shocking, right?

That is the part of this whole conversation that feels so frustrating to see.

It is okay to say, “this did not work for me.” It is okay to say the game was too short, too light on gameplay or not what you personally enjoy. That is criticism.

But saying it is bad, saying it should not exist, or jumping on the same tired talking points these keyboard warriors keep vomiting up on every post they can find, without doing any research is not criticism.

THAT, is lazy and uncreative.

To me it is noise that just feels like sheep-following behaviour from people that can't let people just enjoy something.

You do not have to like Mixtape. But if you are going to criticise it, at least criticise what it actually is.

I'll even give you one right now.

I didn't know too many of the songs that were played in the game which left me wondering in the early stages that if I was going to even like the game.

That means its a bad game. No, it means that I needed to look deep into why those songs were chosen for the moment.

And that is where I understood the game and the feeling, or the vibe they were going for in that moment.

Just because I didnt know or understand something, doesn't mean it is automatically bad, I just needed to look a little deeper into it and understand why the developers decided on those songs for those moments.

No gameplay? Pfft. This stone skipping challange gave you targets to knock over, hoops to throw through and getting to the other side with perfect precision whilst converstations between the three are happening that pushes the narrative of the game. Screenshot from Mixtape Game.

______________________

At the end of the day, Mixtape does not need to prove itself to people who were never willing to meet it where it is.

It is not trying to be the biggest game of the year.

It is not trying to be the most mechanically deep game of the year.

It is not trying to give you a skill tree, a combat system, a hundred-hour open world or a constant loop of rewards to chase.

It is trying to tell a story.

And for me, that story worked.

Mixtape took me back to the feeling of growing up with music around me.

Having songs attached to memories, people, places and different versions of myself.

It reminded me how powerful music can be when it is tied to a specific moment in your life.

The gameplay is part of that. It is not there to test you. It is there to let you participate in the emotion of the scene.

Whether that is skating through a memory, setting off fireworks, causing chaos or throwing up two middle fingers because the moment calls for it, those interactions add feeling.

They give the player a way to express something inside the story.

That still counts.

Games do not always need to be about winning. They do not always need to be about losing. They do not always need to prove themselves through difficulty, systems or mechanical depth.

Sometimes, a game can just ask you to sit with a feeling.

And that is what Mixtape does.

You do not have to like it. You do not have to connect with it. You do not have to walk away feeling the same way I did.

But calling it “not a game” because it does not fit into your narrow expectations of what a game should be says more about you than it does about Mixtape.

Because Mixtape is a capital G, A, M, E.

It is just asking you to feel something, not win.

At the end of the day, Mixtape does not need to prove itself to people who were never willing to meet it where it was.

It is not trying to be the biggest game of the year. It is not trying to be the most advanced game of the year.

It is not trying to give you a skill tree, a combat system, a hundred-hour open world or a constant loop of rewards to chase.

It is just trying to tell a story that many can relate to as a shared experience.

And for me, that story worked.

And for some, it may not and that’s ok.

Mixtape took me back to the feeling of growing up with music around me, of having songs attached to memories, people, places and different versions of myself.

It reminded me of what I was like as a child and all the growth I have had along the way to adulthood.

It reminded me how powerful music can be when it is tied to a moment in your life. Good or bad.

The gameplay is part of experience that the game offers.

It is not there to test you. It is there to let you participate in the emotion of the scene.

Whether that is skating through the neighbourhood, setting off fireworks with a point of a finger, causing chaos by throwing up two middle fingers because what better way to get your anger out by flipping the bird.

It’s those interactions add feeling to the all the emotional we feel when we are young.

They give the player a way to express something inside the story and boy did I express it.

Games do not always need to be about winning and losing.

A game is not ranked by its difficulty, systems or mechanical depth. Sometimes, a game can just ask you to sit with a feeling through story and in-game character experience .

And that is what Mixtape does.

You do not have to like it. You do not have to connect with it. You do not have to walk away feeling the same way I did.

But calling it “not a game” because it does not fit into your narrow idea of one says more about you than it does about Mixtape.

Because Mixtape is a game.

It is just asking you to feel something, not win.

______________________

Mixtape has a place amongst the vast array of games out there. This is a game out there for everyone and some games aren't for everyone. Its important to note that is ok. Let people enjoy things the same way you might.

What are your thoughts on PvP games, and have you felt this way too?Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter/X @thecoastalcity or send me a message on Instagram @thecoastalcity as well.

If you’re on in my Discord, you can chat to me there and if you want to catch any of my streams, you can see me when I go live on Twitch or check out my previous streams over at YouTube

______________________

Sources:

Back Pocket: Mixtape Thoughts + Big Games Leak! | Back PocketLINK - https://youtu.be/DqPectqHSOE?si=rlg3xd3GyJLbmS1M&t=875

IGN - Mixtape Review: A musical delight from start to finish that sets a new standard for coming-of-age stories in games. By Simon Cardy LINK - https://www.ign.com/articles/mixtape-review

ACCC: Online reviews must be genuine LINK - https://www.accc.gov.au/business/selling-products-and-services/small-business-toolkit/misleading-conduct-and-advertising/online-reviews-must-be-genuine

FTC: The Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule: Questions and Answers LINK - https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/consumer-reviews-testimonials-rule-questions-answers

[hyperions-fate]

Tumblr's next update should introduce a Revolutionary Tribunal feature, by which we're made to denounce each other until the last remaining poster is forced to use the guillotine of deactivation against themselves. We shall be forced to be free.