Zerrin's Clumsily-Felled Ex-Tree

36, he/him. Galka, gamer, techie, strutter, coffeehouse culture fiend. Wreck-It Ralph is my everything. Rule 35 Enforcer. Occasionally NSFW; 18+ only, please!

[yellowmage]

The Holy Quaternity of Videogame DILFs

Dr. Vargas (Knack)

Don Roger (Pokémon Duel)

Kobayashi (Shadowverse: Champion's Battle)

Bikke (Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin)

Honourable Mention: Hector "Spanky" Soldado (State of Emergency)

[ramdragons-deactivated20240319]

need people to see this i feel insane

[glumshoe]

I’ll never understand why anthropomorphic animal cartoons like Robin Hood and Zootopia will go to the trouble of creating character designs that are meant to be understood as “attractive” or even “sexy” to the human audience but explicitly avoid showing interspecies romances between anthropomorphic animals. Why is THAT weird but, like, trying to make rabbits recognizably sexy-coded to humans isn’t?

[glumshoe]

Sometimes, sure, but why was Maid Marian a fox in Robin Hood? There wasn’t anything particularly “foxlike” about her personality, and it would make more sense for her to be a lion. They made her a fox only because Robin was a fox and making her something else would be “weird”, but I don’t think the wolf cop or the chicken maid or the lion prince were actually meant to represent race.

[countesspetofi]

The best inter species couple is Kermit and Miss Piggy as the Cratchits in A Muppet Christmas Carol, because all their sons are frogs and all their daughters are pigs, as God clearly intended.

[glumshoe]

there are only two genders: frog and pig

[forestdwellingrat]

I’ve pointed out to my friends that the fact that Kermit and Miss Piggy’s kids are like that means either

1) they reproduce asexually and the children are clones of each parent OR

2) Kermit and Miss Piggy are members of the same sexually dimorphic species, hence the split between their male and female children

yes I have spent too long running about potential muppet biology

[glumshoe]

oh god

[sailor-lady]

Third option, when they want kids they get some fabric and make one, and hope a Hand inhabits it

[glumshoe]

Do you think there’s a ritual for inviting An Inhabiting Hand to possess the empty husk of your muppet baby?

[jenivi]

[aflowerthatbloomsinadversity]

Just wanted to show u guys that in Muppets Most Wanted, Piggy fantasizes about her and Kermit having babies and this is what they look like

So do with that what you will

[fremedon]

Recall that in The Great Muppet Caper, Kermit and Fozzie are brothers. And this was their dad (right):

[capitalism-and-analytics]

Thank you for specifying, which one of the two individuals in the picture was the dad haha

[la-pou-belle]

I, for one, think Shrek handled interspecies coupling the best. By this I am of course talking about the Dronkeys.

[kestrelsparverius]

[adrnired]

In season 3 of BoJack Horseman, we learn Diane (middle) has been impregnated by Mr. Peanutbutter (left). The fetuses are confirmed to be puppies.

[autisticexpression]

This is the worst addition to this post

[araku-validrava]

I am reminded of Treasure Planet.

In which Captain Amelia (left), an extra terrestrial anthropomorphic cat, had hybrid babies with Doctor Doppler (middle), an extra terrestrial anthropomorphic dog, whom also gave birth to the babies

[wizardlizardinhislair]

I always thought that in muppet movies like muppet Christmas Carol the characters are played by the muppets (so kermit is acting and playing the role of Bob rather than being him) so the kids in that film would just be other acting muppets right?

Or is that just something my brain made up?

[ridiculouslyphotogenicsinosauru]

[kingscrown666]

Last time I saw this post (YESTERDAY) it stopped at the second Eggman

[the-haiku-bot]

Last time I saw this

post (YESTERDAY) it stopped at

the second Eggman

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[astronomical-bagel]

anyone in this thread smoke weed

[susiron]

In Leo the Lion (2005) a lion and elephant have the most cursed hybrid children and I think yall should see them

(also Matt Mercer voices the villain, Maximus Elefante and I think that’s very important)

[spaceinvaydr]

[headspace-hotel]

I think that what they are talking about is perfectly clear.

[hiveswap]

Amogus

[hellsitegenetics]

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Closest match: Clivina fossor genome assembly, chromosome: 13 Common name: Digger Slope-rumped Beetle

[nudityandnerdery]

[heyguffaw]

HAPPY🏳️‍🌈PRIDE! - Oh, hey! It's Nick and Andrew!

[interestingmistakes]

Reblogging this manually. Op doesn't want credit for fear of being terminated.

[bcman89]

[pukicho]

I’m literally in my beast form going to bed

[pukicho]

[natnormalatall]

roald dahl was antisemitic and misogynistic. george orwell was openly homophobic. edgar allan poe married his 13 year old cousin. dr seuss cheated on his wife (and was racist as well as antisemitic!). hp lovecraft was racist as fuck. anyways they’re fucking dead it’s not like you’re enabling their behaviors in the afterlife or something. then again I think they bleed into the books so uh keep an eye out for that

the difference between these old white guys and jk rowling is that the former group is all dead. jk rowling is alive and using your money to oppress trans people

[lenofi]

me

[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.

[orcbara]

i know most leftists agree that everybody should have a right to food, water, shelter, and healthcare but i think a vitally important fifth pillar is privacy. people should not be compelled to be tracked, monitored, or to share personal space with others to access their other essential rights

[lyinginbedmon]

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is and always has been fascist rhetoric everyone.

[theconcealedweapon]

[tyriq-edits]

EVERYONE SHUT UP WE GOT OUR FIRST LOOK AT DRAGON QUEST XII!!!!

AAAHHHHHHHHHHHH

[cbfanart]

[xanaxfarts]

Final Fantasy II: Main Characters (1998) artist: Yoshitaka Amano

[strawbeb]

it’s not ‘talking to myself’ it’s called a soliloquy you fuck

[saywhatjessie]

#it’s only a soliloquy if it’s in verse #otherwise it’s just a sparkling mental breakdown

[bleedthebeat]

[bleedthebeat]

[bleedthebeat]

don’t worry about it