Random Ramblings of A Crazy Writer

Where I discuss a lot of things from Homestuck to Mass Effect; fanfiction to roleplaying.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

https://www.ctvnews.ca/edmonton/article/this-aish-recipient-did-the-math-he-says-the-new-provincial-program-doesnt-add-up/

This AISH recipient did the math. He says the new provincial program doesn’t add up

One man with disabilities says he can and wants to work, but it’s impossible for him to be better off on the new Alberta Disability Assistan

[softichill]

I think abt this tiktok all the time

[thesadcyborg9million]

Diversity hire bryson ur absolutely slaying

[birdplushie]

"it's not that deep" START DIGGING!!

[magn-animously]

DIG

[14-opossums-in-a-trenchcoat]

DIG

[buriedunderyourmum]

DIG

[hannisconfused]

DIG

[kitsunesakii]

DIG

[yourlocalfandomfriendo]

DIG

[apple-notplural]

DIG

[vivitur-moritur]

DIG

[spacecat24-7]

DIG

[chub-froggy]

DIG

[thatghostthateatspeople]

DIG

[krowbreaker]

DIG

[spid-the-spider]

DIG

[annabelle--cane]

DIG

[yellow-faerie]

DIG

[vampiraptor]

[philosopherking1887]

OOPS TOO DEEP

[breaks-hetheon]

CLIMB

[artist-of-obsessions]

CLIMB

[fablegate]

CLIMB

[marzibird]

CLIMB

[the-luckyrabbit]

CLIMB

[staarbles]

CLIMB

[modmad]

[sebwritesstories]

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

GitHub - zoicware/RemoveWindowsAI: Force Remove Copilot, Recall and More in Windows 11

Force Remove Copilot, Recall and More in Windows 11 - zoicware/RemoveWindowsAI

[creechie]

How do I... use this? I don't know what to do ;-;

[the-future-is-chrome]

here’s a youtube tutorial by the guy who made it

[mentally-homeless]

[oneheadtoanother]

idk anything about this but I love it

[incorrectsmashbrosquotes]

Mario: WRITE THAT DOWN! WE NEED IT FOR THE NEXT MARIO PARTY GAME!

[leonbutchkennedy]

[a-totally-reasonable-username]

@namelessennes

[avidreaderffn]

@sandstonesunspear

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

Jesus Tapdancing Christ... THIS is a good welt pocket and the people who designed Simplicity 2895 ought to be blasted well ASHAMED of themselves for the crap way THEY wanted a welt pocket made. *SNARLS*

[makereadgrow]

This is how I learned to do it and a good example of what you want to see in a short form tutorial: pinning, pressing, seam finishing, good fabric handling.

I would mention that you can make the pocket facing with a small panel of your matching fabric that is visible and the rest in a lighter fabric to reduce bulk. That's a lot of denim layers for comfort.

[teaboot]

HOT DAMN

[corvidcall]

to anyone in the areas impacted by the wildfire smoke, my #1 biggest piece of advice as someone whos been dealing with wildfire smoke in the NW united states for years, is build yourself a Corsi-Rosenthal Cube

they perform as well as expensive HEPA air cleaners, and are comparatively VERY inexpensive. all you need is a box fan, 4 air filters, a piece of cardboard, and some duct tape!!!!

i think it took us maybe a half hour to put ours together, if that, and we replace the filters every 3 months. it's really made a HUGE difference, both when the air quality is bad, but also with our allergies

[o0fyuu0o]

Saw these easy to read instructions on Twitter. Stay safe 💚

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

Great time to start pricing this out by the way, fire season starts… on the summer solstice this year, that’s fun. Signs point to it being a doozy.

[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.

[dragongirlsweetie]

ok i am curious. how long is the longest song in your library (not counting tracks that are like several songs in one file like a full album mix or symphony recording or whatever) (also if it is longer than 20 minutes say the name in the tags i am curious)

how long

< 3:00

3:00–3:59

4:00–4:59

5:00–5:59

6:00–6:59

7:00–7:59

8:00–11:59

12:00–15:59

16:00–20:59

21:00–24:59

25:00–30:00

≥ 30:00

Voting ended onJun 1

[dragongirlsweetie]

ok i would like to clarify it has to be music and it can't just be a short song that's been looped a bunch. that still counts as several songs in one file, it's just several of the same song in one file. no audiobooks no podcasts no plants vs zombies theme 2 hour loop

[prokopetz]

The closer to the modern era you get the more fascinating "lost at sea" becomes as a backstory element. Being lost at sea in 1612 is a downright normal kind of lost to be. Being lost at sea in 2012 is like, okay, back up – I need to hear this one.

[prokopetz]

Like, come on, man.

[burr-ell]

YOU ARE A REGULAR GUY. YOU CAN HANDLE CRITIQUE. YOU ARE A REGULAR GUY. YOU CAN EMBRACE BEING TOLD YOU WERE WRONG. YOU ARE A REGULAR GUY. YOU CAN ACCOMPLISH UNPLEASANT TASKS. YOU ARE A REGULAR GUY. YOU CAN DELIVER DISAPPOINTING NEWS. YOU ARE A REGULAR GUY. YOU KNOW HOW TO BE DISAGREED WITH. YOU ARE A REGULAR GUY. YOU CAN BE CORRECTED. YOU ARE A REGULAR GUY. YOU CAN BE TOLD YOU MESSED UP. YOU ARE A REGULAR GUY. YOU ARE ABLE TO DO HARD THINGS.

[otherwindow]

why is it always a male character going mad avenging his dead wife and never a female character cradling her dying pure of heart husband in her arms then dragging the whole world down with her

[swan2swan]

[charlesoberonn]

First of all, this is a very clever use of this gif. Secondly, fuck you.

[hail-dondus]

Finding out Hans Zimmer is a transphobe genuinely had me falling to my knees

[cartoonistfreak101]

Thank you blastybaku for explaining this!/gen

[poetry-protest-pornography]

If you've ever heard a movie score and thought "holy shit, this is incredible", there's like, a 50% chance it was Hans Zimmer who composed it.

This is a pretty major letdown, ngl.

Anyways, fuck transphobes, which includes Hans Zimmer, apparently.

[pepperpatrol]

Hopefully, when some of his ghostwriters break free from the basement he has them trapped in we'll find out they were responsible for the good stuff.

[memories-of-ancients]

Drinking horn with gilded copper mounts, Europe, 15th century

from The Hunt Museum, Limerick

[tarvek-sturmvoraus]

[localxenospores]

i was compelled

[beastoftheblackhole]

I was also compelled

[cumvvelt]

"Guy" and "man" have different connotations with adjectival nouns. Like "tree guy" = arborist but "tree man" = he lives in a tree, or maybe he is a tree.

[thedupshadove]

"I know a guy" = "I have a useful contact."

"I know a man" = "I am about to tell you a story."

[turtletotem]

“He’s a great guy” = he is pleasant and fun and well-intentioned

“He’s a great man” = he has saved countless lives and changed the world irrevocably

[as21-7]

tags have passed peer review