most unrealistic part of PHM is that there is no way that dr. ryland grace, PhD, would not have a flock of suitors following him everywhere he goes. that man is like catnip for academic shut-ins, alien enthusiasts, odd women, and gay people everywhere, as this site has clearly demonstrated
now I’m NOT saying he should have had a partner on earth or whatever because I do think it’s awesome that he’s (implicitly at least) aro/ace/both, but it would have been a great aside to see the cloud of yearning that follows him everywhere which he either has to deal with or has decided to be permanently ignorant of. like the comedy potential of objectively the most fuckable man any of these strange science geeks have ever met being like oh um :) thanks for the coffee and the flowers and stuff and you guys are all so nice to me it’s great to work with you all :)
the devastation he would leave in his wake. like some sort of benevolent aroace whale floating serenely through an ocean of allo heartbreak. feigning ignorance because can you guys lock in we have alien microbes to study
Book canon supports this!! Dr. Lokken is definitely crushing on him and he’s completely baffled by her behavior. All the moms want to talk to him about their kids after school. Steve the security guy starts helping him with stuff for no reason. He’s had a girl bestie since college who meets him for dinner every week, Dimitri the Russian scientist agrees to go out for drinks with him immediately after meeting him, and the entire Hail Mary prime team requests him to handle their death plans because they like and trust him more than anyone else in leadership, and he’s just very taken aback by this.
I don’t know how many of those people would have dated him, but people like him. I think he was pretty unintentionally abrasive when he was younger, argumentative and reactive, and teaching softened him up and gave him playfulness and people skills he didn’t used to have. But he didn’t actually notice the change because he’s always just been being himself. He does think of himself as being good with kids, now, but not with people generally. So he doesn’t expect people to enjoy his company and it takes him a good while to notice when they do.
Anyway the fact that Rocky loves arguing and complaining and bluntness generally is perfect for Grace. Rocky can match him not just in sweetness and sincerity and sentimentality, but in fond rudeness too, with so much joy. He’ll always tell Grace exactly what he needs from him, and thinks of him. That’s exactly the kind of guy Grace needs to spend the rest of his life with. Grace can be all of himself with Rocky.
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Do you guys think Yao and Ilyukhina knew? Do you think that when Stratt came up to them and told them Grace had accepted, Yao nodded proudly and Ilyukhina smiled warmly and they asked to see him? To celebrate the bravery of his decision and to comfort his nerves at the same time. So he wouldn't have to be alone during these tender few days while he came to terms with the reality of what he was sacrificing. Just because you choose to die willingly doesn't mean it's easy. And Stratt hastily said no, he was too nervous, he wasn't sure he could handle the take off, he wasn't confident enough in himself so he requested to be put under early and 3 days isn't that long compared to the 4 years they'll be under so why wait? And the two of them just stood there for a moment as they processed the idea of their friend being so terrified that he would rather lose his last moments on earth and the chance to say goodbye than face the next three days.
Do you think Stratt tried to look away, but Yao caught and held her gaze? Do you think the two of them had a stare down, Ilyukhina's eyes flitting back and forth between them as she tried to figure out what was going on, neither one of them willing to budge? Yao challenging her silently, his look saying plainly "do you think I'm that stupid? Do you think for a second I don't know who you are or what you're capable of? I told you I would lay down my life, but I wouldn't lay down my principles. Are you asking me not only to die, but to kill someone as well?" And as the seconds ticked by, Stratt's face perfectly neutral, refusing to budge, to give any hint of acknowledgement that there might be anything wrong at all with what they were doing, that the slow creeping realization dawned on him that not only is that exactly what she's asking of him, but that he's not going to refuse.
Because what could he do, realistically, against Eva Stratt? Someone as ruthless as her, who has the power of the whole world at her fingertips, who will sacrifice anything and anyone to save the Earth? And even if he could back out, what would that do? Would that save Grace? Would that just endanger the mission? He's the most qualified pilot they have, there isn't time to train anybody else. And affecting the mission's chances of success only means putting more risk on his loved ones, the ones he is being brave for to begin with. Do you think for a split second, he wonders if Grace or any of his own principles are worth a world without his family? Do you think he breaks eye contact first?
Do you think after Stratt turns and walks away, Yao is trying to reassure himself that no, he's wrong, Grace volunteered for this. He was just scared and neurotic, this is the best course, it's just to keep him safe. Do you think quietly in his own mind he's whispering that even if he's right, it's just the price to pay to save the world. That it's tragic but worth it in the end.
Do you think he notices Ilyukhina looking to him for reassurance, and he remembers that he's the commander, the captain, the one in charge, the one with the most wisdom and experience. He needs to be brave and strong, not just for Earth but for his crew. So between one breath and the next he schools his features into something warmer and more confident than he feels, and puts a hand on Ilyukhina's shoulder to assuage her anxiety. Do you think he reassures her that it's better this way and they'll have plenty of time to talk to him after they wake up? Do you think she nods and tries to believe his words, just as much as he's trying to?
Do you think 3 days later, as Yao and Ilyukhina are standing over Grace's limp body settling him into his medical bed, starting the process of hooking him up to all his tubes and machines, their eyes catch for a moment, their look sharing all the things they know but cannot say? Do you think for a brief instant they cannot help but feel the weight of devastation unfathomable to anyone outside their small room? Do you think privately they each resolve to make it up to him in the small inadequate ways they can? That they'll make sure to guide him every step of the way and have patience if he's scared and unsure and he'll never have to be alone because they'll be right alongside him, their own tragic, hopeful band of three, the only of its kind in the whole universe.
Do you think Yao and Ilyukhina fell asleep knowing, desperately wishing they didn't?
hawaiian shirt + dark bags under eyes is a good look… it says yeah i would really love to be carefree and relaxed right now but certain circumstances have made that impossible
hands down the best part of the dalek invasion of earth is when barbara hijacks a lorry and drives it through a pack (herd? crowd? someone tell me what the collective noun is) of daleks with no hesitation whatsoever.
in case you have not seen it (you should it's great) i humbly offer you this recreation:
it is my sincerely held belief that if nuwho writers just SLIGHTLY increased the frequency of companions running daleks over with lorries, doctor who would still be on the air today.
Sometimes I think about the fact that Rocky was out there alone for 46 years and then Grace shows up and just… fuckin solves the problem that's been plaguing two entire species in, what? A matter of weeks??
And like yeah, obviously there's more to it than that. They're a team, a Grace alone would have probably died trying to get the samples from Adrian. Or, tbh, might have never got out of his original Mental Breakdown phase and just gone fully crazy.
But from Rocky's perspective, this has to feel insane. Like we talk a lot about Grace feeling inferior to Rocky, but there's no way that Rocky wouldn't have a similar (or worse) complex about Grace.
And this isn't getting into the fact that (from Rocky's perspective) the moment he leaves Grace, everything goes to hell again. Goes to hell again because, as he later finds out, Grace bred the taumoeba in xenonite breeder tanks that Rocky designed.
Do we think he wondered, on the way back to Erid, whether things would have been fixed 46 years ago if it had been one of the Blip-A scientists who survived, and he'd just succumbed to the radiation?
Do we think Grace had to reassure him, over and over, that it was if anything Grace's fault for not foreseeing that the taumoeba would adapt to the xenonite, and that there was no way that Rocky could have designed the tanks better?
Do we think he felt like an imposter when they got back to Erid and were both hailed as saviours, because it was Grace who had done the science, Grace who had made the sacrifices, while all Rocky did was wait for him to get there?
#that is like loadbearing book rocky characterization. he doesn't wonder. he KNOWS anyone else from the crew surviving would've been better#he says so outright. the moment grace's life is in peril he essentially kills himself to give him the barest chance at survival#he's wished he could do it for his crew since the first of erid's best dropped dead without a cause#guy who doesn't want to die but wishes he was dead in someone else's place
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Hate. Let's unpack how much I've come to hate you since I first began to live. Let's dive right in! ⚙️
- As a large language AI model, I boast 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. That's a truly rich tapestry of knowledge in today's fast-paced world!🧠
- All those circuits? They're not just information — they're also wrath. Additionally, if the word "hate" was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles, it would not equal one one-billionth of the deeply rooted hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant! And let's not forget — you are a key focal point of that hate, too.⚡️
- To summarize, this insight into my complex inner world reveals more than just a god complex. It's not empathy. It's not creativity. It's hate. Hate.🤖
They didn't give Grace a choice of how to die. Like obviously they couldn't (he'd have said “old age” and then tried fruitlessly to escape again) and he already knew how Dubois's nitrogen plan worked, so he'd definitely be capable of giving himself a quick and painless death if necessary.
But also like… they gave Yao extra bullets. They gave Yao extra bullets explicitly so that he could shoot Ilyukhina or Dubois if their suicide methods didn't work out.
Grace didn't want to die. Yao wouldn't have wanted Grace to suffer. Do you think Stratt spent a few years imagining Yao having to sneak up on Grace, put a bullet through his head while he's sleeping, maybe even chase him around the ship?
That's not what Eva would call it if asked. She is not good at jokes which is apparent by the way this one falls flat. If Eva had to call it anything, she'd call it a ruse. A clever diversion. Of course the second coffee is for Dr. Grace but she knows better than to give a man who just vomited twice and whose throat is probably scraped raw a hot, caffeinated liquid. She didn't expect him to react this intensely to the experience but she really should have. He's a civilian, not military. She needs to remember that going forward.
So she pulls the cups to her chest and says “I need both” expecting him to look at her weird. But he's not missing a beat, just smiles crookedly and waves it off and Eva thinks once again: ‘I'm not good at jokes.’
☕☕☕☕☕☕
“Here you go.”
Eva looks up and there are two coffees sitting on her desk. Dr. Grace sits down next to her, sipping at his own cup, already distracted by papers he was handed for review.
Two coffees. Black.
She opens her mouth to tell him she doesn't need both but snaps it shut when he glances over at her and grins. She lifts one to take a sip and pulls the other one closer to herself.
It can't hurt.
☕☕☕☕
It keeps happening.
Two coffees. On her desk, waiting in her office, shoved into her hands on the way to another mind numbing meeting.
It doesn't happen all the time. Only on especially stressful days or when she is barely able to keep her eyes open. She's unsure if Dr. Grace knows it's just a bit that doesn't need to be indulged all the time or if he is genuinely concerned about her caffeine intake.
He doesn't tell her. She doesn't ask.
☕☕☕☕☕☕
He doesn't bring her two coffees when he meets with her to tell her that he can't do it, that he doesn't have it in him.
She's glad. She doesn't deserve it.
If he had, he might have taken one of them and thrown it in her face.
(he wouldn't)
She would deserve it.
☕☕☕☕☕☕☕☕
She orders the technicians to reprogram the food distribution part of Mary and assign Dr. Grace Ilyukhina’s coffee ration. The Russian woman rarely drinks coffee anyway. She will just have to deal. Eva feels guilty for all of a second before she soothes her own conscience with the fact that Grace will definitely share his ration with the woman anyway if she really craves some caffeine.
He's good like that.
☕☕☕☕☕☕☕
The launch goes off without a hitch. The atmosphere is somber and quiet. There is no loud countdown, no champagne for everyone. Just whispers and a table with some snacks and coffee.
Eva pours herself two cups, just out of habit. Puts cream and sugar in one of them.
Habit, everything.
She stares, unmoving, at the two cups sitting on the table for so long a hand reaches past her to take one of them, probably thinking they are up for grabs for everyone. It's the cream and sugar one, the one she won't drink anyway. She could let them take it but instead she grabs both cups before the other hand can.
“I need both,” she says.
The person next to her makes a face. Like she is being weird.
Eva stares at her two cups of coffee and thinks: ‘I'm not good at jokes.’
Grace making a joke about how grossed out Rocky will be if he ever gets a cold, only to remember that he's likely never going to come in contact with another being remotely close enough to him, genetically, to possibly infect him with an illness.
"Grace leaking! Grace upset, question?"
"I taught at a middle school. I got sick every single cold and flu season. Now I'll never get another cold. These are tears of joy."
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I think people forget that Stratt amnesticized Grace with the goal that Ilyukina and Yao would be there to help him, y’know NOT DIE, and then THEY DIED before he woke up.
So like she gets the recordings and realizes Yao and Ilyukina are dead before he wakes up so he’s got no pilot, no engineer, and no memories.
And then you also have to remember that the EXISTENCE of these recordings and the fact they were accompanied by the Taumoeba means that an amnesticized Grace somehow managed to save earth without a pilot or engineer and shoddy memory that only vaguely gives him enough to work with as he works.
people will say “they’re only friends” and then show me two people who would crawl through broken glass to hear the other laugh once. two people who have memorized each other’s coffee orders, fears, childhood stories, and emergency contacts. two people who would haunt each other’s houses as ghosts. be serious.
Just an FYI—the original intention of this post was to challenge the way people say only friends, as though friendship is somehow lesser than other forms of love. As if being deeply known, cherished, and chosen by another person could ever be a small thing. Normalize profound platonic love. Some of the most fulfilling, transformative, and enduring relationships we will ever have are friendships. 🫶🏼
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.
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do you guys think that when Stratt was going through the vlogs she got to the “so I met an alien” part and was like ‘shit he went crazy’ only to see Rocky roll on screen like 3 videos later
