竟 - jìng - finally, at last, after all
竟然 - jìngrán - unexpectedly, surprisingly
竟自 - jìngzì - unexpectedly, to one's surprise
镜 - jìng - mirror glass
镜头 - jìngtóu - camera lens
镜片 - jìngpiàn - lens
镜花水月 - jìnghuāshuǐyuè - flowers in a mirror or moon in the water (a very pretty idiom with the meaning of an illusion)
暗 - àn - dark, secret
暗暗 - ànàn - secretly
暗淡 - àndàn - dim, faint, dark
暗察明坊 - ànchámíngfāng - to investigate and understand a situation using various methods
境 - jìng - boundary, area, region
境界 - jìngjiè - boundary, a state
环境 - huánjìng - environment
入境 - rùjìng - to enter a country
出境 - chūjìng - to exit a country
韵 - yùn - rhyme, vowel
韵律 - yùnlǜ - prosody (the metrical rules such as tone patterns, rhyme, and parallelism used in poetry)
韵文 - yùnwén - a literary genre that arranges sentences according to a specific rhythm (e.g. specific types of poems such as Tang poetry, etc)
韵人韵事 - yùnrényùnshì - a charming man enjoys charming interests (an idiom meaning elegant people doing elegant things basically e.g. drinking tea under a moon, painting or playing instruments.)
谙 - ān - versed in, acquainted with
谙练 - ānliàn - skilled, proficient in something
深谙 - shēnān - to know something very well
深谙世故 - shēnānshìgù - having seen much of life, well-versed in life
韶 - sháo - originally this was name of an ancient musical piece, said to have been created during the time of Emperor Shun. Later, it's meaning changed to mean something beautiful.
韶光 - sháoguāng - beautiful
韶华似水 - sháohuásìshuǐ - time/youth passes like flowing water
黯 - àn - dark, sullen, dreary
黯淡 - àndàn - similar to 暗淡, meaning dark and gloomy
黯然失色 - ànránshīsè - to be cast into the shadows/ to be overlooked
黯黑 - ànhēi - pitch dark
喑 - yīn - mute
喑哑 - yīnyǎ - mute
万马齐喑 - wànmǎqíyīn - 10 thousand horses standing mute (an idiom meaning a situation where no one dares to speak up)
歆 - xīn - to like, admire
歆慕 - xīn mù - to admire something
歆羡 - xīn xiàn - same meaning, also means to admire something
薏 - yì - lotus seed, seeds of job's tears ( a plant)
薏仁米 - yìrén mǐ - Job's tears
洋薏仁 - yáng yìrén - a type of barley
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Chinese tech vocabulary: chargers, cables and ports
Needing to buy headphones and being unable to specify that you need wired headphones and NOT wireless ones can happen to anyone, so here is some technical related vocab in Chinese to help.
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.
I would love to share this with everyone who may happen to see this post. Please support this wonderful human being. He spent nearly a half century in prison for a crime he never committed. And the only thing that kept him going was his artistic endeavors. He deserves the best life can offer anyone ❤️
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i can't believe i didn't watch comprehensible input/listening videos on YouTube for 95% of my Japanese studies. Not sure if they didn't exist back then or if my algorithm just didn't recommend them until recently. But they're such a rich resource.
If you're learning Japanese and want stuff to listen to and shadow with, here are some recs:
This guy ^ has 80 videos of N4 listening practice on Patreon. They're $80 until April 9, and if you're around N4 and can afford it, it looks worth it imo. I just got it for my student to practice.
So many of the videos are travel vlogs or discussions about Japanese culture and language. They help you learn while also preparing you to enjoy a trip or move to Japan.
Part 2 of the commonly used structure with some examples:
忘不了 - wàng bu liǎo - can't forget, unforgettable
她对我的帮助，我忘不了 - I’ll never forget her help.
那种感觉真的忘不了 - That feeling is unforgettable.
受不了 - shòu bu liǎo - can’t stand it
这么热我真的受不了 - I really can’t stand this heat.
这种噪音我受不了 - I can’t stand this noise.
大不了 - dà bu liǎo - at worst/worst case scenario, no big deal
大不了重来一次 - At worst, we’ll just do it again.
大不了不去了 - Worst case, we just won’t go.
少不了 - shǎo bu liǎo - inevitable, unavoidable, indispensable
这顿饭少不了辣椒 - This meal needs chili, it's indispensable.
用不了 - yòng bu liǎo - can’t be used/ isn't needed by that much
这些资料用不了 - These materials won’t be used.
这么多时间用不了 - That much time isn't needed.
算不了 - suàn bu liǎo - doesn’t count/ not a big deal, isn't worthy [of]
一次失败算不了什么 - One failure doesn’t mean much.
短不了 - duǎn bu liǎo - 1. indispensable 2. something that inevitably happens
植物短不了阳光 - Plants can’t exist without sunlight.
管不了 - guǎn bu liǎo - unable to control something
有些事情真的管不了 - Some things just can’t be controlled.
过不去 - guò bu qù - can't get through something, someone making things difficult for others
门太窄，搬不过去 - The door’s too narrow, it won’t fit through.
你别跟我过不去- Don’t make life difficult for me.
下不来 - xià bu lái - can’t step down, can’t climb down
他面子上下不来 - He can’t back down because of pride.
话都说出口了,下不来了 - I already said it, I can’t take it back.
划不来 - huá bu lái - not worth it
这么贵，真的划不来 - It’s so expensive, it's just not worth it.
来回跑一趟太麻烦了，划不来 - Going back and forth is too much trouble, it's simply not worth it.
合不来 - hé bu lái - can’t get along
我们性格不一样合不来 - Our personalities are different, we don’t get along.
他跟同事合不来 - He doesn’t get along with his coworkers.
来不得 - lái bu dé - not allowed, [something] can’t be done because it's impermissible. This is more so used to emphasize certain important rules and norms.
安全问题来不得半点大意 - Safety issues can't be taken lightly.
工作中来不得开玩笑 - There’s no joking around at work (joking around is not allowed).
了不得 - liǎo bu dé - extraordinary, serious, impressive
他才十岁就会三种语言，真了不得 - He’s only ten and already speaks three languages, that’s incredible.
你一个人完成这个项目，太了不得了 - You finished this project alone, that’s really impressive.
I fear a lot of people learned to take good care of library books as children and instead of internalizing "leave shared community items as you found them as much as possible, because other people will use them too" they internalized "printing and binding a book imbues it with sacred energy and if you dog-ear a mass-market paperback you're desecrating the entire concept of written language"
if you work in a creative field...or if you do creative hobbies like writing or drawing...you need to make friends with people who don't do those things. you need to befriend normie Steve who has never written a story in his life. and this is because when you are in a creative job or hobby and spend all your time doing that thing, surrounded by very capable people, who you inevitably compare your own progress and skills to, you forget what the baseline human skill at that thing is. and it's usually zero. normie Steve has not written a story since the 3rd grade when his teacher made him do it. he's very good at other things that are not storytelling - but if you tell normie Steve that you wrote a full 300-page book from start to finish, he will think you're some kind of savant. he does not know ANYONE else who has done this. you need this perspective. because when you're constantly on Let's Write Stories dot Com then everyone on Let's Write Stories dot Com will inevitably be like "oh of course everyone on earth has written a book or several at this point!" and you canNOT let yourself think that. that is not even close to the average human experience. you are in a bubble. do not put yourself down. do not give up.
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"Popular" apps (cough Dingolingo, you know which i mean, cough) may feel like a fast and easy way to learn... but in the grand scheme of language learning, it'll actually take you MUCH longer. It's like collecting grains of sand to make your own beach... they toss you breadcrumbs... words... phrases... when there's SOO much more to the language. Avoid. There are better ways that are just as effective and comprehensive.
Listening is the key to... speaking. If you can listen, you can speak. Audio programs are best for this. Particularly ones that have dialogues for your level. You can also listen to dialogues on repeat 'til they're stuck like a song in your head. Imagine knowing all the words for ordering coffee in Japanese/Korean/Spanish/etc. or talking about the weather. That’s what happens if you play these on repeat.
Listening and reading along helps you process the language faster and better. You get to pick up on every word that's said so nothing slides past you. Then next time you hear it, you'll understand it all.
5-10 minutes a day won't get you fluent... but 1) you likely can't handle more and 2) that's not the point. The point is that you make it easy enough to keep at it... and more importantly, that you're STILL at it 1-2 years later. By then, your routine will expand past 5-10 min.
Everyone talks about consistency - which IS important. But… that consistency will lead to a change in your identity. When you see yourself as someone that learns/speaks that language. At that point, you automatically want to get better/practice/improve... and that's what you wanna aim for - that change in identity. Or, heck, you could start reminding yourself that you ARE someone that learns/speaks the language. That’s something you can do today (fake it til you make it.)
the persecution of lefthandedness is insane to think about because it was so intense for so long, in some places still is, without any clear profit motivation. sheer love of the game. as late as the 70s at least they were smacking my stepdad's hands for it with a wooden ruler at school, to this day he's in weird ambidexterity situation where he's not great with either side and notably clumsy due to poor hand-eye coordination. just wtf
It is fascinating to me that people also think of handedness as an example of bigotry that just...went away. As you note, it...hasn't in some places. I know people who grew up in the mid-late 90s who still had this problem.
But also, and this is really important to keep in mind regarding bigotry that still causes in many ways larger problems, that the structural problems are not actually fixed.
If you go to any computer lab or public library, the mice will be on the right side of the computer. Sometimes they can be moved. Sometimes they can't. Many computer mice are curved to only fit in right hands.
It is impossible to find lefthanded scissors without going to a specialty store, because most scissor makers don't even make them. And it's not just a matter of grip; the slicing side of the blades is obscured if you use righty scissors in your left hand, so your cut is off.
All those signing pads with the little chained styluses? Almost always on the right side, often not even long enough to stretch to the left. Makes signing for lefties extremely difficult.
I caused actual muscular problems in college having to twist around in order to write at right-handed desks in college when there weren't enough lefty desks--and there never were. Some classrooms didn't even have a single one.
I could go on.
But the point is, bigotry isn't just a mindset shift. People can't just decide they're not bothered by that particular difference anymore and everything's fine, because society is still structured and designed to cause problems for marginalized people. And they're never even going to notice all the little ways their life is bent to convenience them that inconveniences others.
When kiddo was learning to write, their teacher—who was a beautifully kind, caring, compassionate person who even thanked me for making them aware of certain kinds of left/handed supplies, because their new toddler was a lefty and they’d never even thought about it—was teaching the kids a method for word spacing that involved placing their free index finger down at the end of each word and then writing the next one.
Pause for a moment, especially if you’re right-handed—and I’m being serious here, physically do this if you have two functioning arms and hands—and grab a writing tool in your left hand. Now place your right index finger down and try to start writing a word next to it.
Yeah. Great technique, huh? Really convenient and comfortable and easy. 🙃
I sent in a small baggie of small popsicle sticks I’d custom painted for them and labeled with their name for kiddo to use instead, but ultimately they stopped because it wasn’t as convenient when nobody else had to get something out.
Writing in English is difficult enough when you’re left-handed (most of our letters are designed with pull motions, but lefties must push), but even other foundational basics are made more difficult than they have to be, because their needs aren’t considered, even in situations where overt hostility isn’t intended.
Even now, in an older grade, they’re now all sharing a lot of the supplies, but my kiddo has their own pair of labeled lefty scissors they keep in their personal cubby. Teacher was 100% chill with me sending them in, but didn’t even consider to take the step further when I’d asked about whether or not they had them to just… get some for all the lefties. I know there are other kids, know some of them personally. (I made a set of writing spacing sticks for the single one that I knew of back in 1st grade.)
Regarding computer mice? Kiddo had standardized testing last year. They do it on chromebooks now at their school. They did their entire first day with the track pad instead of the mouse, because none of the teachers proctoring or assisting even knew you COULD switch the sides/toggle a setting to switch which button was the dominant select. We happened to have one at home thanks to remote learning during Covid’s early days, so that night we sat down together and found the setting ourselves so they could fix it the following day. But on a student account at school, they couldn’t change that setting. And? None of those teachers knew enough about technology to be able to override it. So even when I went above and beyond and personally sought out the skills and tools to help my child level the playing field on their own, the teaching staff was so unaccustomed to even considering this as a need or problem, that they weren’t able to remove the incredibly basic barriers to a fair schooling experience.
And this is honestly a good school, with staff that care and work hard and take 99% of bigotry concepts very seriously, teach about truth and compassion and how to recognize at this kid level a lot of the basic seeds that can grow into hate and hurt and also healing and helping. But the fact that left-handed needs are different? It is so ingrained to default to right-handed layouts that even left-handed staff don’t conceptualize these problems, because they were taught the exact same way.
Big story: My second master's degree, the school had a clinician come in to do a workshop on unconscious bias and whatnot. To explain privilege in a way that would (theoretically) not immediately get dismissed by the more conservative among us, she got us talking instead about handedness. She asked the right handed people "when is the last time you thought about which hand you use?" And the answer was, of course: never. A small number of people had sort of thought about it, but they struggled to name a time that it had come to mind. Then for the lefties: "when is the last time you thought about which hand you use?" My answer was, two minutes ago when we all sat down. Because of course, all of the lefties were hoping to get the corner seat at their table so that they wouldn't be bumping elbows with their neighbors (though funny enough, all the lefties ended up at the same table anyway). Right handed people rarely-to-never think about where they're sitting at the dinner table; if they do think about it, I 100% guarantee it's because they dine regularly with a lefty.
Small gripe: we got a new coffee maker a while back. It's a great coffee maker, top of the line. But the lid opens to the left. I have to turn the damn thing 90 degrees just to pour water into the reservoir. I can't prove it, but I guaran-fucking-tee that there's not a single coffee pot that opens to the right.
Left-handedness is a perfect example of the Social Model of Disability.
It is not inherently disabling to be left-handed but because society is structured to cater to right handed people to such an extreme there are many ways that left-handed folks find themselves at a disadvantage, or in some cases with a functional impairment.
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Imagine that everywhere in the mechanical engineering world suddenly got infatuated with lasers.
Lasers have a lot of uses! Measuring things, heating things, cutting things, entertaining cats, particle physics. Lasers are pretty cool. Very versatile, very useful, potential to be very powerful.
Someone shows up one day and says "I have developed a never before seen technology! I call it a Death Star."
And it's a 3.4mW laser. Well no, we haven't seen this exact size of laser much since that's not really standard, but that's a bit of a misnomer, and I wouldn't call it new -
"HOLY SHIT GUYS! This Death Star is so entertaining! My cat loves it and it has such a nice color!" The Death Star becomes a viral novelty, and is mildly entertaining, as laser pointers often are.
Somehow, seemingly overnight, this leads to mania. "Lets stick lasers in EVERYTHING! The public loves them!"
More companies make 3.4mW lasers to jump on the bandwagon. Everyone that makes anything vaguely mechanical starts sticking lasers into their designs.
Everyone is calling them Death Stars. Any time there is a "Death Star innovation", it is just that they made a bigger laser.
Ford's next truck comes out and it has "Death Star integrated headlights", where they have just stuck giant lasers in place of their previously functional headlights.
An electric toothbrush is now "Powered by Death Stars" and shoots a laser at the tooth its cleaning. You think that maybe this could have actual applications as a sanitizing device if you're being generous, but when you actually look at the product, its laser has no purpose but to point at the tooth and drain the battery.
Mechanical products across the board get noticeably worse as everyone starts stuffing lasers in places where lasers have no right to be.
The lamp business gets in on it. "Here's a Death Star powered lamp!" These guys haven't even tried to stick a laser in their damn lamps. They've just started calling their light bulbs Death Stars and hoped you bought it before you could tell the difference. You at least appreciate that they haven't ruined their lamp about it.
Death Stars are lauded as the solution to all the world's problems. If it's not working, you should stick a laser in it! That'll fix it, everyone says. Once in a blue moon, it's even true! Weather prediction is really good now. But most things are garbage. Like "Death Star powered washing machines". What the fuck does that even mean?
Meanwhile, since all functioning mechanisms are being replaced with lasers, problems start showing up. All mirrors now cost $1000+ dollars, because the whole supply is being used up to make more lasers. The earth heats up, because everyone's blasting lasers at everything. People keep going blind, on account of all the lasers.
You, in fact, study optical mechanics. You know what a laser is, and how it works, and that it was invented many years before any of this nonsense actually started. People keep asking you about Death Stars, since surely you must know so much about them.
You explain that this is not really what lasers are for, except you have to call them Death Stars now, and that they're causing a lot of harm, so you don't like them much.
"Oh, but they're still such new tech!" they reply. "They'll figure out how to make Death Stars that don't burn your eyes out soon, and then it won't be an issue anymore!"
Somewhere, deep and buried, you remember lasers being used in particle accelerators, or in telescopes, or in laser cutters, or funny cat videos. They are, in fact, still interesting. Still cool.
But by this point they have replaced roads with "Death Star Powered Pathways", which are just laser pointers propped up on tooth picks pointing vaguely through the forests.
I think many people underestimate how much the English language has permeated the lives of young, non-English western people. I can go a whole day without speaking a word in my own language. I wake up to British music, then watch my favorite YouTubers or new series that hasn't yet been translated, play an Indie game in English, write with my Dutch friend, go to our English discord server, and the first German words I'll encounter that day will be the instruction for how long to put the pizza in the oven for dinner.
Randomness and languages @antuntunum - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook
