I Like To Listen To The Echoes

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

Signs of a biblical church:

Actually preaches from the Bible

Sin is called what it is

Members love and serve one another

Jesus is the center of everything

[youngestthunderbird]

No one sin is called out more than the others, except if the pastor believes it’s a current problem for the congregation (EG, condemning homosexuality but not fornication).

[andyboops]

"The best thing we can do with power is give it away" - On the leftist critique of superhero narratives as authoritarian power fantasies:

The ongoing "Jason Todd is a cop" debate has reminded me of a brilliant brief image essay by Joey deVilla. So here it is, images first and the full essay text below:

"A common leftist critique of superhero comics is that they are inherently anti-collectivist, being about small groups of individuals who hold all the power, and the wisdom to wield that power. I don’t disagree with this reading. I don’t think it’s inaccurate. Superheroes are their own ruling class, the concept of the übermensch writ large. But it’s a sterile reading. It examines superhero comics as a cold text, and ignores something that I believe in fundamental, especially to superhero storytelling: the way people engage with text. Not what it says, but how it is read. The average comic reader doesn’t fantasize about being a civilian in a world of superheroes, they fantasize about being a superhero. One could charitably chalk this up to a lust for power, except for one fact… The fantasy is almost always the act of helping people. Helping the vulnerable, with no reward promised in return. Being a century into the genre, we’ve seen countless subversions and deconstructions of the story. But at its core, the superhero myth is about using the gifts you’ve been given to enrich the people around you, never asking for payment, never advancing an ulterior motive. We should (and do) spend time nitpicking these fantasies, examining their unintended consequences, their hypocrisies. But it’s worth acknowledging that the most eduring childhood fantasy of the last hundred years hasn’t been to become rich. Superheroes come from every class (don’t let the MCU fool you). The most enduring fantasy is to become powerful enough to take the weak under your own wing. To give, without needing to take. So yes, the superhero myth, as a text, isn’t collectivist. But that’s not why we keep coming back to it. That’s not why children read it. We keep coming back to it to learn one simple lesson… The best thing we can do with power IS GIVE IT AWAY." - Joey deVilla, 2021 https://www.joeydevilla.com/2021/07/04/happy-independence-day-superhero-style/

[generallemarc]

Kids don't want to be Batman because he's rich, they want to be him because he's got tons of cool gadgets he invented himself, is a badass martial artist, is a genius on par with Lex Luthor, and uses all this to be on the same level as Superman despite having zero actual superpowers. They see the little boy who lost both his parents, decided nobody else should ever have to live through that, and want to be like that.

Kids don't want to be Superman because he's superior to humans(he isn't, that's always been a core part of his character that he rejects that outlook and it's always just Lex projecting his view of Superman onto Superman himself), they wanna be able to deflect bullets and shoot lasers from their eyes because Superman uses all that to show the best side of humanity, to show how humanity isn't even tied to actually being human but to how you act towards other people.

[catchymemes]

[morgan5451]

[the-davest-of-uncles]

She should be arrested for elder abuse.

[youngestthunderbird]

Funnily enough, the paper for the largest city in my region ran a front page article on her a few days ago, claiming she was afraid Biden was ‘having a stroke’ during the debate. It must have been a slow news day. I wonder why she’s coming back into the limelight now.

[magnetictapedatastorage]

i think a lot of younger teenagers who are against sex-based sports leagues haven't really grasped the strength difference yet. it's not a comfortable thing to understand, and its very tempting to deny it as long as you can.

[stupid-pig-came-home]

Also, if they start questioning the difference in strength and bodies regarding sports then they also have to start questioning the difference in strength and bodies when it comes to dating and marriages and they're not ready to question the problems of hetero partnerships.

[youngestthunderbird]

I would respectfully disagree. A great deal of romance novels for younger and younger teens are hinged the idea that a man has a great deal of physical power over the female protagonist, so she can ‘change’ him and gain a protector. It’s creepy as all get out but increasingly popular with the 13 to 15 demographic at my library.

[mevil]

[amberstone-16]

genuine answer; that corners got the most light.

as pretty as the blue light is, its too dark and cant penetrate the water well. its confusing them

switch to white lights, sorry not sorry for the aesthetic of your room but the health of your pets comes first.

[youngestthunderbird]

I think there is more light usually, the tank photo is probably a ‘night mode’. For the close up it really looks like the fish are backlit by very bright white light, so likely there are two lighting setups/settings.

[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.

[buckykingofmemes]

Will you tell a Bucky bear story?

so you gotta understand that us howlies were basically one big PR stunt. i mean, we were totally competent and effective, but not so exceptionally amazing that we were totally unprecedented. what we were was actually “the face of american soldiers overseas,” and a representation of allied unity. (thanks, dernier and falsworth.) during the war, they made howling commandoes comics, trading cards, posters, radio dramas, toys, jackets, and more, all in the interest of supporting the war effort. most of it we had no idea about. we were pretty busy fighting nazis, and the journalists and PR experts they sent to tag along with us mostly just got in the way. so pretty quickly the ‘news’ coming from the front lines about the howling commandoes was totally fabricated, because we wouldnt cooperate with them. which is how some of the more outlandish captain america stories happened. 

most of this steve and i never knew about, not until we wound up in the future. 

anyway, in the early days they would sometimes send stuff to us. not sure what they wanted us to do with it–we once got a crate full of trading cards with our own faces on them, which we promptly defaced and mocked each other relentlessly over. steve took twenty-six buckys and twenty-six steves and drew card suits on them, and we used them as playing cards. (we also had a pair of dumdum dougans as jokers.) and another time they sent us a box of teddy bears. specifically, cap-and-bucky bears. 

the cap bears were decent. pretty much just a regular bear in a stripey shirt and spangly helmet. but the bucky bears were wearing this silly little domino mask, and none of us had any idea why. we figured somebody must have snapped a picture of me while i had some greasepaint around my eyes.

obviously, the other howlies gave us some crap about this. no matter what steve and i did, teddy bears magically appeared everywhere we went. in our cots at camp, in our footlockers, in our packs–everywhere. i once watched dernier slip a cappy bear into steve’s backpack while they were both taking cover from gunfire. 

the real problem for steve and i, of course, was what to do with the bears. we couldn’t just throw them away, but it was a war zone, so we could hardly keep them all. i gave a bucky bear to peggy just so i could watch stevie awkwardly offer a cap bear to go with it. there were always a few kids around–refugees passing through, often, and we passed off bears to them as quickly as we could. 

steve got it into his head that one of the Star Spangled Showgirls, ruby, would get a kick out of the cap bears, so he mailed her one. she thought it was hilarious, and shortly he got letters from the rest of the Showgirls demanding bears as well. so steve managed to get rid of all the cap bears pretty quick. 

but the bucky bears…those things were everywhere i went, and people kept calling me “Bucky Bear,” which is not a super dignified nickname for a famous, feared sniper to have. it seemed like every lad left from the 107th had a little masked bear head poking out of his pack. the howlies all had them too–dumdum kept one sticking out of a coat pocket for a long time, until it ran afoul of some shrapnel, and then insisted we hold a tiny formal funeral for it. we got an air-drop of supplies in the field once that contained emergency rations, ammo, and a bucky bear. and one time i went to colonel phillips’ field office for a debriefing and he had one on his desk. 

i’d have been more annoyed about it all if they hadn’t been such an effective stupid-decision deterrent. i once saw steve eyeballing a tank like he was gonna go take a swing at it, glance at falsworth’s bucky bear, sigh, and call in artillery fire instead. 

steve had one of his own too, a raggedy little thing missing half its stuffing that one of the camp kids had insisted he take. he kept it stuffed into one of the silly pouches in his belt. i like to think it kept him company in the ice. though if i ever lay eyes on that particular bucky bear again, we’re gonna have stern words about its obligation as a bucky to talk steve out of doing stupid things. 

[dreamycastaway]

New York Times readers share a moment when they have felt truly swept off their feet — or have been the ones doing the sweeping. (Bonus: more stories from the comments)

[atlantic-riona]

watching a movie made twenty years ago and remembering what they took from us (color)

[uncle-beanbag-mojave]

And the ability to see at night

[youngestthunderbird]

And sincerity!

[anka-dm]

My illustrations the most based poem about tigers by Nael, age 6

Every time I read it I feel space inside my chest expand in very *emotion* way.

[emilyscartoons]

[luxangelae]

the same was in the beginning with God.

prints.

[lakecountylibrary]

⚠️SUMMER READING IS COMING⚠️

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

DON'T FORGET TO SIGN UP FOR YOUR LIBRARY'S PROGRAM!!

[sentient-cargo-shorts]

I hate wedding and engagement culture. It's stupid to get engaged and spend a year or more planning a wedding. And the fact that anything under $10,000 is considered budget is also ridiculous. It should not be normal to spend over $10,000 on a wedding.

[youngestthunderbird]

We used to have the ceremony at church (or other place of worship, or perhaps the courthouse) and a party at home for less than many people spend on a night out! You didn’t even buy a new dress in some cases! This has morphed in less than a century to something unrecognizable to your great grandparents!

[heyyoufriendthere]

This new fish species is called Snuffleupagus. You can probably guess why | CBC Radio

S. snuffleupagus, a newly described species of fish, is named after the beloved Sesame Street character, Mr. Snuffleupagus, to which it bear

SNUFFLEUPAGUS REAL

[brightnessrandom]

Fantastic article!! The guys looking for it were fish researchers who saw it one time, knew instantly it was an undescribed species, and then tried for nearly 20 years to find and document it!

It's a type of ghost pipefish, related to seahorses, and it floats around coral reefs looking like a piece of algae and hunting unsuspecting prey

They are, of course, named after Snuffleufagus from Sesame Street!

Later on it the project, they got citizen science involved, and people across the Pacific started reporting sightings of snuffy fish from all over!

Hooray for science and hooray for S. snuffleufagus !

[subjectsix]

I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!

[subjectsix]

glad this post is resonating with the local populace fr