A tabletop roleplaying podcast where we pay full campaigns in less well-known systems! RSS feed and general info at dicepunks.com; also on cohost.com/dicepunks, @dicepunks.bsky.social, and patreon.com/dicepunks!
Dice Punks is a pretty DIY actual play TTRPG podcast wherein I, most-of-the-time-GM Adam, and some of my friends play full campaigns in less well-known systems (with some interstitial one- and two-shots mixed in every now and then).
Here's an up-front link to our 2022 Halloween standalone one-shot, in case you want to cut to the chase:
0.5 – Starless – Songs of Myself
Or you can check out the beginning of Nightfall, the 54-episode campaign we just released episode 50 of; it starts with Episode 1.01 – Riotous, Quiet, if you want to check it out! The campaign is set in a world of my own design, using an unholy, quixotic, quarantine-induced combination of Greg Stolze's REIGN and Jenna Katerin Moran's Nobilis, and focuses on, essentially, demigods unionizing.
We'd be much obliged if you gave us a listen to see if our thing is your kind of thing (or maybe someone you know's kind of thing) – thanks for giving this post a look!
A little more info on us below the cut, and this sample of some of our cover arts, courtesy of @anythingsewsembroidery, who is on a few episodes and does a lot of our editing!
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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 just went looking for the post on X and got a message that it didn't exist
I searched for Guri Singh and got search results showing his account existed, but when I clicked on it I got a message his account did not exist
Does anyone know if he made his account private or if he got nuked by Elon? Or do I just suck at X (because I never go there)?
Putting the term "Catholic guilt" on a high shelf where fandom can't reach it until everyone learns how to identify characters who are very very clearly coded as Protestant.
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We don't work directly with many billionaires but the ones that we do are uniformly whiny pissbabies who throw tantrums about totally normal tech stuff and try wheedle their way into free services by threatening to fire us if we don't give them free shit.
The problem is that every whiny pissbaby billionaire is perfectly willing to whine to the board members of companies and nonprofits we *do* want to work with, so if you fire the whiny billionaire as a client or get fired by a whiny billionaire as a service provider, it can destroy your business.
This the same with massive multinational corporations. Business owners get excited at the chance to work with them and see a potentially lucrative customer. They demand so much extra special treatment and labor that working with them destroys every business, hemorrhaging money, cutting quality standards to meet absurd demands. They ultimately end up taking cheapest, lowest profit option and receive it a massive discount, and never return or generate any other business down the line. It's fascinating how they all seem to be the worst people to work with on all levels, but company owners blind themselves to the risk, repeatedly. You'll see people walking around hollow eyed and numb, and it's because you did like a one word logo design for an Amazon subsidiary or sold copper wiring to Microsoft or whatever, everyone worked 100 hour work weeks for a month and they paid two shiny nickels for it. And they will not send business your way either, no chance, unless it's like, you're a company specialized in corporate accounting and it's some dude who wants you to print a t-shirt idea he thinks will make a billion dollars.
It’s important to note that this is a poster on a glass window. It’s very important to note that the (fuck yeah) and the (fuck them white supremacists) have been written in with a pen by someone on said poster.
very telling that even if you’re not allowed to view content related to self harm/suicide/eating disorders due to not giving up your ID on the uk internet you will still be shown relentless ads for weight loss drugs and fad diets showing unrealistic/AI generated bodies and unhealthy methods and time frames for weight loss that can only be achieved by starvation. oh and also so so many gambling ads. relentless ads for gacha and gambling services. almost like it’s not actually about protecting kids at all or something
Boo hoo i'll be able to add more physical storage to my phone and be able to change out batteries if they degrade as well as all these other optional features I won't have to touch
I love how they add totally absurd things no one is asking for to make the idea look crazy. And still, I must emphasize, failing to make this look like a bad idea.
"Is this what you want? Is this ugly stupid bullcrap what you want??" the biggest loudest idiot in the room asks, holding up a picture of the hottest looking shit I've ever seen
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Anita Sarkeesian, feminist who interpreted media under a feminist lens. She did a series about video games and she was the subject of targeted harassment. That was the start of gamergate
Minor correction, the start of gamergate was based around a different reporter, Zoe Quinn, but they were both absolutely violently threatened over their involvement in video game criticism and development. A hate campaign was started by Quinn's ex-boyfriend when he wrote a post falsely accusing them of dating video game journalists in order to receive positive reviews on their own game, Depression Quest, which led other bad actors to accuse all women in the industry (Zoe identified as female at the time) of perceived sexual immorality. Anita Sarkeesian's brilliant Youtube series Tropes vs Women in Video Games (which everyone should watch, right now) sparked a particular nerve for criticizing popular games of killing and/or victimizing any important female character (there is a CHILLING bit that borders on ludicrous where she describes the plots of a seemingly endless parades of games as "In [title], [male player character's] wife dies, and you then have to rescue [his] daughter."). That series did actually make a huge change in the industry, especially when touted by progressive legacy developers like Tim Schafer (Monkey Island, Psychonauts), who went on to expand hiring in his company to front women and minority voices, but the shift didn't really show for a long time and echoes of the sexism that plagues the industry at its core are still rampant.
In all seriousness, if you live in the US and you aren't familiar with the misogynistic harassment these people in the game industry faced during Gamergate, you need to watch this series right now.
This was the beggining of the current form of the US fascist movement and it underpins the entire thing about it to this day. If you live in the US and Gamergate isn't familiar to you, you're missing critical history to understanding US fascism. I'm not joking even a little bit here, you will understand modern United States fascism so much better if you are familiar with Gamergate.
Genuinely insufferable that the UK has this upper-middle journalist class that get to endlessly pontificate their horrible opinions to the point it seeps into public consciousness.
Eryka Caldwell is a back trans woman who was murdered by her partner in her apartment last Sunday, and the story is getting a fraction of the attention that the murder of Juniper Blessing did. The police had already been called several times about her partners violence before her murder and did nothing, and she deserves the same outrage and mourning as Juniper got, and every one of our murdered trans siblings deserves. Trans women of color are more likely to be the victims of murder than any other group of queer people, and they need our solidarity, protection and support.
Caldwell’s boyfriend, 38-year-old Jonathan Fernandez, has been charged with murder.
i hate you private jets i hate you bitcoin i hate you cars that go 200 mph i hate you golf parks i hate you yachts i hate you huge mansions with a pool i hate you luxery resorts i hate you exessive wealth causally killing the planet and using up ressources we all need
“okay but it’s their money! They can decide how to spend it!” Yeah okay but it’s our atmosphere! and water! and no amount of wealth should give you free reign over that!
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For those who have missed it, a tourist in Hawaii decided it would be fun to chuck a rock (a BIG rock) at a monk seal. He missed, but he was captured on video, and when told it was illegal to interfere with them, said "I'm rich, I can pay the fine."
Is the best part that he got doxxed? No.
Is the best part that he got tracked down by a local and beaten? No.
Arrested on state at federal charges, looking at up to 5 years and 50K? Nope.
The best part is the local city council's reaction.
And the best part of that is the look on the attorney's face.
I love that even city council is like "we're not fucking narcs, we have no idea who that guy beating the shit out of him is." Extremely hobbified behavior.