alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.
we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)
please rb for larger sample size!
Question 1/3
What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?
Can we stop acting like it matters whether the fucking global terrorists are respectful of their members religion or gender please? If weâre talking the US military, their Christian supremacist ideology isnât in question, and what theyâre doing to their targets is much more relevantâŚ
It doesn't matter how evil the underlying institution is, there should be zero government jobs that discriminate, because if discrimination against us is legal then it becomes common.
While I donât disagree with that statement, if weâre interested in any kind of liberation that goes beyond the borders of the usamerican empire, rallying behind âtrans people should have the same right as any US citizen to go kill people abroad for money!â is not really a move, yknow?
there not a pathway to ending the horrid atrocities of the us military that starts with "trans people are banned from the military". do you think we're going to get every single group banned and then no-one will be part of the military, or do you think we will actually take power and change things? because if we do, it's going to be a long term project, and in the medium term "make it so local minorities aren't openly discriminated against" is an obvious goal that doesn't even cost us anything in the long-term
Leftists when the canary stops singing: Well, it shouldn't have been down the coal mine in the first place. In fact, none of us should be down here. Coal burning is a major contributor to climate change, and the particulate emissions cause health issues in minority communities.
Ravings and urges get miscoded over time. Letâs say youâre thirsty, and you live in a strawberry field. Strawberries contain some water and a bunch of sugar so, over time, you may start to crave strawberries when you are thirsty because you get a reward and some relief in shorter time from the need starting than the trek to the stream. This can happen for every need: sleep, food, whatever.
Trevor Noah has a great tip, that when he craves ice cream at night he breaks it down into parts: I want something cold, I want something sweet. He drinks a glass of cold water then waits to see if he still has the ice cream craving. Usually he doesnât.
So listening to your body isnât âfollow every urgeâ but âdecompose the urge to discover the underlying need.â
If you always feel like getting cozy in bed you may be: cold, dehydrated, and/or malnourished (maybe a need for high calories that are bioaccessibleâŚnot processed).
If you do not feel tired at bedtime you may: need to eat dinner earlier because your body is still digesting, need to exercise or go outside more during the day, get the fuck off your screen for an hour so your brain can enter sleep mode.
Hope this helps someone.
P.S. notice i said nothing about neurodivergence. Not that itâs not a likelihood but the over-pathologization of behaviors prevents us from taking simple actions to improve our wellbeing. Also, these tips are pretty accessible and applicable to most brain variations.
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
they are sexually mature at ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OLD.
their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.
longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years
toxic flesh
has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.
lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion
largest genome of any shark
eats everything including moose and polar bears
ma'am you are delightfully strange and I'm privileged to share a planet with you
itâs so magical and beautiful that there are sprawling interconnected cave systems carved deep into the earth by various geological forces and you donât have to go in them. there are miles and miles of stone passageways in total darkness that require you to exhale all the air out of your lungs to squeeze through parts of them and you donât have to be there. some of these squeezes are underwater and require cave divers to take off their oxygen tanks and push them through ahead of them and me i am above ground looking at the sky as we speak. there are untold subterranean wonders no human has ever seen and i will not be the one to discover them #grateful #blessed
so true there could be any number of undiscovered species down there all of which are none of my business and never will be. peace and love on (the surface of) planet earth đ
Researchers focused on whether kids that are spanked are more likely to share or, conversely, more likely to have anxiety, years down the li
2021:
Spanking found to impact children's brain response, leading to lasting consequences.
2018:
The American Academy of Pediatrics says new evidence and research not only show that spanking affects a childâs brain development and increa
2016:
Kids who are spanked tend to act out more and have more problems later on.
2012:
A study reviewed more than two decades of research on the effects of spanking and found nothing positive to report, only that physical punis
2010:
A multiyear study shows spanking kids makes them more aggressive later on
I havenât pissed people off lately by reminding them that ALL types of physical punishment of kids has been proven beyond ANY reasonable doubt to have only negative long term outcomes.
So let me scream it from the hilltops:
Stop hitting kids. End of sentence.
If you think, âbut I was hit and I turned out just fineâ let me pre-reply: NO YOU DID NOT. You think hitting a child is ok, how the fuck does that qualify as âfineâ?????? From one abuse survivor to another: please start healing yourself.
Equivocating between "beaten with a stick" and "an open hand slap on the bottom" is the basis of all of these "findings" and is a good example of why social sciences are just propaganda wearing academia as a skinsuit.
TBH it's similar to "children who grow up in households with books have better academic results, therefore we should provide free books to everyone". Actually no, you just have a cargo cult understanding of outcomes.
The way things have always been done is the way they should continue to be done.
Hey fucking abusive dumb ass fascist--if your misunderstanding here wasn't so high stakes (you're advocating for hurting kids Real Grade A You Should Totally Abuse Kids comment) how much you've misunderstood this research is almost comedy.
Let me help you: it's actually saying that it DOESN'T MATTER if it's "light" physical abuse....the outcomes are ALL NEGATIVE. That's the point. Outcomes = bad from all types of "corporal punishment." 100% NO positivity comes from hitting kids. Period. Point blank.
What you personally consider to be "tee hee cutesy just for kids it's so light and itty bitty abuse" doesn't matter.
Hitting your kids will harm them.
If you can reply so fundamentally "my head is up my own ass DEEP" in the face of an overwhelming amount of evidence against your views, there's literally nothing I can do for you and I wish you a very blocked.
Ok so my kid had an ear infection, right? As kids often do.
The doctor scraped out a bit of earwax to have a better look inside.
I was sent a bill for $200 PER EAR for this 5 second procedure which I did not give permission for them to do.
That was key- they did not ASK me if they could do this "procedure". And, as I OWN a medical practice (it's me. The medical practice is me, sitting in my house on video calls) I knew to call them when this bill came in to be like "You did not obtain informed consent for this procedure, and it was not en emergency procedure. You had full ability to gain my consent and didn't. I'm not paying."
And the massive hospital who owned the bill said "yuh-huh you do have to pay."
And I said "I own a practice. I know these laws. I do not owe you money for this."
And they conducted an "internal review" and SURPRISE! Decided I totally owed them money and they had never done anything wrong ever.
And so I called my state's Attorney General office, and explained the situation because, as I mentioned, I know the law. The AG got in touch within a couple days to say they were taking the case and would send the massive hospital conglomerate a knock it off, guys letter.
Lo and Behold, today I have a letter where said hospital graciously has agreed to forfeit the payment.
"How not to get screwed over by companies" should be part of civics class.
Know your rights and know who to call when they're infringed on. This whole process cost me $0 and honestly less effort than I would have expected.
May this knowledge find its way to someone else who can use it.
This post is super cute and all but like.... This isn't practical advice. I called the AG???? And they got involved over a $200 bill. Maybe because you yourself are a medical practitioner. Not just your knowledge but also your status.
Civics class wouldn't help most people in this case because the AG will not take on all these cases and most people cannot afford an attorney in this instance or more importantly, the hit to their credit.
The issue is not education over the system, it is the system
I agree the system is a mess but I think education does matter because people seem not to know that this is actually perfectly routine AG office stuff. Iâm not the only person whoâs done this- this is just what they do?
Were they going to get into a lawsuit over my $400 bill? No obviously not. But they printed up a letter on fancy letterhead to say to stop and it worked. They followed up with me the next day to be sure, and so ask how much money they had saved me.
They use dinky cases like mine to track habitual misbehavior of large scale companies to build cases they could actually go to court over.
And because people are shocked- I never spoke to the AG of my state directly. He operates mainly by overseeing a whole crew of people. And this is what those people do.
This didnât happen because Iâm special because of my tiny therapy practice.
This happened because this is what the AG office is for.
âThe problem is systemicâ doesnât mean âand thereâs nothing you can doâ.
This is a systemic problem but that doesnât mean there are no resources to help.
Thank you for clapping back on this. I'm here to reinforce. Yes, you CAN call your state Attorney General office when an entity is doing something illegal, even if it's "only" for $400. You think they don't care a hospital is doing a crime because it's not a big enough crime?
Then you've been trained well by "The System".
Yes, that System you say can't be fought? Where did you get that idea, huh? Who taught you that "small" acts of illegality don't matter? Who made you think that there's no point in fighting back because it will all come to nothing?
Might it be the same entities that benefit if you believe all that?
Gonna pause and let you ponder.
Never. Ever. EVER.
EVER.
Let companies or corporations or hospitals or organizations or any business big or small get away with screwing you over without a fight. Maybe you personally don't win every fight, but you lose 100% of the time you don't try. You'll win more often than you think you will. I know cuz I've done it.
So have others. Attorneys General offices bring lawsuits against businesses all the time. They do so because citizens contacted them to say "someone is doing a crime" and the crime doers did not stop when told and got into way more trouble than if they'd just stopped. FAFO. The Find Out can't happen if you don't even bother to report the Fucking Around.
On that note, as OP said, please know your rights! And, in a situation where you don't but suspect something is hinky, ask! The people of the internet can help! So can librarians! So can many others. Find out what is and is not okay for them to do. If it's not okay, report them! See something, say something.
Additionally, pay attention to State Attorney elections! Here in Minnesota, our AG Keith Ellison has made it a POINT to go after slumlords, has created an entire UNIT in the AG office dedicated to wage theft, and gone after debt relief for people who were conned by those scummy fake universities. And despite MN being a blue state, one of his elections was a fucking NAIL-BITER.
Absolutely fight the system, absolutely go to your AG office if youâre being screwed over, and also pay attention to the people running for AG in the first place.
Government of the people, by the people, and for the people only works if the people make it work. That's you! You're the people.
"Don't bother doing anything because nothing will happen" confused cause with effect: it's really "Nothing will happen if you don't bother doing anything." Yeah, I know, it's a travesty that they don't hand you psychic powers when you take your oath as a civil servant, but until we fix that clear defect in our democracy: you're serving the public, too, when you report fuckers like this.
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
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.
this is a highly controversial opinion, I have no doubt King Arthur was bisexual but I think he was one of the few people in Camelot not interested in fucking Lancelot. he wanted to retain him as an employee but it did not cross his mind that Lancelot was fucking his wife because Lancelot is such a weird little twerp that he did not perceive him as a sexual being. my interpretation.
So true. The Galehaut/Lancelot relationship was like a dynastic marriage to resolve the conflict between two imperial powers. I like to imagine Galehaut was like âI have decided to abandon my plans of capturing [what is now] all of southern England and surrender to you despite my military advantage, all for the love of my achingly beautiful and spectacular new male wife, Lancelot du Lac.â and Arthur was like âOkay. Weird. Not homophobic or anything but Lancelot? Youâre in love with Lancelot?â
Co-signed. Thatâs some real shit you said. Also, unlike Arthur, he was willing to yield and share his lover for everyoneâs benefit. And then he died for love. A real freak. One of the best freaks in 13th century French literature.
I started a mental sentence with, âwell, when we diagram the Arthurian polycule-â
And then realised that would be such a good title for a paper. âDiagramming the Arthurian Polycule: Mapping the Dynamics of the Round Kitchen Tableâ
Doing a final project in my stats class, we have to pick a subject and collect data on it. We need at least 100 data points, and I figured this blog is big enough that a poll on here could get to that pretty easily!
Doing my project on if itâs more likely to be born in certain months :]
I have gotten the OK from my teacher to collect data using a Tumblr poll, btw. Iâm also going to have to send her this post as proof of where I got the data from / proof I didnât just make up the numbers. So. Behave
[ID: a cuneiform tablet displayed on glass, with a museum label that reads 'Complaint about delivery of the wrong grade of copper' - 'About 1750 BC (Old Babylonian Period), from Ur'. There is a larger tablet on the left, cut off by the border of the picture. End ID.]
some interesting things about our guy Ea-Nasir and his hate mail
1: the most famous one is the first one we found and it was by a person named Nanni. I just think we should remember the person who wrote it
2: we wound up finding like, a whole closet full of complaints about Ea-Nasir
3: I read translations of several of them as well as suplemental information on Ea-Nasir by the professionals that studied him, and it's been a while, but i will now tell you a summary of his life story to the best of my ability as i remember it
He started off early in his career becoming one of the main copper dealers working directly for the palace, where he built up a good reputation for himself.
Then he moved into being more of a middleman, buying the copper from the outlying city states and then selling it to his old contacts at the palace. And also on the open market. Soon he was dealing in both the wholesale ingots (which is what most of the complaints are about) and finished copper products direct to both smaller merchants and the general public - things like decorated copper pots etc.
At some point he wound up in one of the city states buying copper and stayed there.
It was the island city state of Dilmun, in the Persian Gulf, downstream from his hometown of Ur.
There is absolutely no evidence to say i am right about this next point, but i know how people work, and given what follows, i strongly suspect he got in with the wrong crowd and developed either a gambling problem or a drug problem (or it could have just been women and beach parties, but i do suspect drugs or gambling more)
Anyway, what we do know is that he sort of stopped coming back to his old city, and started running a sort of scam. I really think it was basically like the bernie madoff thing, he would say "if you give me the money, i can buy you the best copper at a good price" and someone would give him the money, and then he would spend that money, and then he would get really really hard to track down, and then when the person finally did track him down he'd be like "fine!"
So he'd get someone else to give him money for top shelf copper, then he'd spend like half that money on bottom grade copper and send the shitty copper to the person who was hounding him to complete his contract. That person would write an angry letter, often threatening legal action, and Ea-Nasir would basically be like "listen, you gave me money for 100 ingots of copper, i sent you 100 ingots of copper; if you don't want them now, that's on you"
He did this a lot. Two of the guys in charge of buying copper for the palace itself (his old job) had to buy good copper with money out of their own pocket after he took the palace money they gave him and sent shitty copper to the palace. And remember, he KNEW what the palace standards were.
At some point in all this he got himself a business partner, and one of the tablets is from this business partner, and it basically says "i'm sending you a good customer with good money who is exactly what this business needs. Please, please do not be the asshole you usually are."
Another complaint tablet i liked is like the third one this author is sending him and among other things it says "do you not know how tired of you i am?"
Anyway, as you can imagine, he burned all his bridges, ruined his reputation, and drove himself out of business. At which point he had to move back home. My guess is he left some angry loan sharks in Dilmun holding a large IOU when he bailed.
Then he tried to start a lot of other businesses. I think he opened a restaurant briefly? He even did some speculative real estate.
Somewhere in here, he had to sell some of his house to his neighbors. All the houses were touching, like, they all had shared walls like an apartment complex, so he basically plastered over the doors to, idk, half his house, and they knocked a door in one of the shared walls to access it, and just like that half his property became part of his neighbors' home. He must have been very broke.
In the end, he wound up running a second hand clothing store out of what was left of his home.
So that's the tale of Ea-Nasir, people really have been living the same stories since always, haven't we.
Anyway I think we should try to remember Nanni's name, the person who wrote the most famous of the complaint tablets
âFor me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, âOf course.â When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.â
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