I wanted to test out this new lightbox I got, It was not expensive and the results reflect that. Anyway @horsefigureoftheday here's all the equine figurines I had when I was a kid.
Here's my herd of generic cheapies which I assume is all too mass produced and unbranded to be identified. Marked with "CHINA" or nothing.
Generic donkeys or mules, and this one zebra which is marked "SINGAPORE" (just notable because it's the only one from there)
Probably generic but seems higher quality than the rest. Marked "MADE IN CHINA"
I have a feeling this one is movie merch or something, marked "CHINA"
This one with moulded reins, not marked that I can see.
This cute palomino family marked "Š CREATA CHINA" which seems to be from this set or at least the same mold.
This foal started out with a white base but the plastic has yellowed. Marked "MARCHON INC 1998 CHINA"
Excuse the state of the hair, I was a small child and not interested in grooming. Not sure what the mark says. I remember the black ones are supposed to be Morgan breed, and I think they came with accessories.
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Squick is a noble word. It recognizes and honors your own personal taste while recognizing and honoring that your personal taste does not dictate morality.
The biggest bullshit with Adultism is basically that the people will defend it with: "Well, if we did not force X on kids, kids would not do it, because they hate X."
And then you actually look onto the research.
Kids do not generally hate learning or school. Quite the opposite. Children tend to enjoy learning and are naturally curious. It is exactly the fact that they are forced into school and into the rigid structure of it that often punishes curiosity but also is hostile towards the differences inherent in people, that kids hate it.
Kids do not naturally hate medical care. While medical care is scary at times, the fear usually comes from medical care scenarios being defined by adults overriding a child's agency, not explaining things to him, and otherwise being abusive, that makes children afraid of medical procedures. Additionally the way a lot of medical procedures go hand in hand with denying a child's reality ("Look, it is not that bad") tends to be traumatizing to children.
There have been studies done in this. If you explain a child - even a toddler - what you do and why, children will generally be a lot more okay with stuff like needles and simple procedures, and will even agree to necessary surgical interventions.
If you create a learning environment that allows more for self-directed learning, and involves less specific testing, most kids actually will enjoy learning.
The way kids hate school, and are afraid of doctors is the result of those interactions being associated with violence and coercion. The hatred is because of the coercion, rather than the hatred making the coercion necessary.
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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.
The rest of you can (and really ought to!) reblog, but it's not your turn to talk. Just listen and reflect!
What DOES a good apology for antiblackness look like, to you?
Not a shitty twitter apology that dodges accountability. Not a genuine apology made to white fans to soothe their embarrassment and egos and maintain white solidarity.
What does an ACTUAL apology for antiblackness consist of, to you?
What actions do you need to see from people who claim to be better, to deserve your support despite a history of being unsafe?
Why do you think nonblack people feel they're entitled to grace, and what would actually EARN them your grace? What makes you not want to offer it at all?
I think there's a disconnect between what the group being harmed needs, and what people think the group being harmed should settle for. We've been forced to know the latter. How do Y'ALL feel?
What does an ACTUAL apology for antiblackness consist of, to you?
it needs to be actually take the situation seriously and not trying to be funny when addressing antiblackness
It has to be directed towards black , can't be saying"the ppl offended by-" or POC when it's Abt antiblack rascim especifically
Actually listen to the ppl calling you ou
Accept and acknowledge that u were antiblacks
actually talk Abt the situation and why and how it was antiblacks,
U are in the internet u have access to information don't hide behind your own ignorance and face the guilt
Don't victimizw urself talking Abt ur intentions or how u "didn't mean it" . It doesn't matter bc it doesn't make it less racist or harmful.
It doesn't matter how old it was bc it's the internet everything u do is there forever and it still was racist and it hurt black ppl them and it hurts black ppl now and even if it wasn't online spreading antiblacks shit is always a bad thing
If context is really that important be clear that if doesn't make it less racist or less bad
If there's a black person involved in the situation address them directly and apologize to them too privately and publicly if necessary
Don't use the fact that there might be black ppl defending you too, just bc some don't care doesn't mean other black ppl that sealed with ur shit don't deserve this apology
Don't try to paint urself as a victim. Just because some dipshits might be harassing doesn't mean ur antiblackness will suddenly go away.
Do not try to paint black ppl rightfully calling something out as bully harassers or whatever
Don't enable any racist fuck from joining the conversation trying to defend you and as always treat the situation with the severity it deserves
Be ok with black ppl disliking you distrusting etc bc of your actions specialty this goes is double if there's and history of past antiblackness from you
If this is not the first time ur having to address your antiblacks behavior u REALLY need to actually stop to think and unlearn shit bc 1 time might have been ignorance or a mistake at 3 or more you racist and antiblack and probably dangerous and horrible in general
Start being a actually ally to black ppl , and don't actually let any instances of antiblackness happen bc of you or the ppl in your circles
Don't do it again
But either way 90% of the time it's not an actual apology or an apology that isn't for nonblacks to pat themselves in the back and stop feeling bad. So I make my own conclusions based on the situation but even when there's apologies I do accept most of the time I still carry the distrust and disappointed towards them
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was thinking abt the difference in how (some) people view women's products as "things companies are trying to sell to women" while men's products are "things men want as consumers" and like. men's desires are constructed by the patriarchy. this is the problem w engaging w the concept of the patriarchy as like, the culmination of every single individual man's active desires instead of a system inherently intertwined with other systems of power. like men are constructed manhood is sold to you! if you think that everything the patriarchy says about women is a lie but you take it at it's word on The Ways Men Naturally Are. I simply need you to rethink things
The Article About Internalized Transmisogny literally ends by making a point about manhood and masculinity and misandry in queer/feminist spaces:
I hate that the only effective response I can give to âboys are shitâ is âwell Iâm not a boy.â I feel like I am selling out the boy in baseball pajamas that sat with me on the bed while I tried to figure out which one I was supposed to be, and the boys who I have met and loved from inside my boy suitâwho believed they were talking to a boy. I feel like I am burning the history of the naked body that sits on the floor of my shower. The body that went to prom in a boxy tuxedo and coveted the dresses.
Because I am not a boy, but I had a boyhood. I was, and am, made to live as a boy and I cannot suspend the perspective that gave me and join in when itâs time to fluster one of those clueless fuckers into anger by calling him a fuckboi and then tell him his anger proves heâs a fuckboi, or to humiliate one with an OKCupid screenshot because weâve willfully conflated the clumsy ones with the threatening ones so we can grab those solidarity faves. Itâs fucked up. It has metastasized.
More than a few out transwomen have told me, privately, they they are uncomfortable with these things, but are afraid that speaking up about it would cause ciswomen to like and trust them less. âI play along,â one of them told me, âbecause in the queer community the only people who defend cisboys are cisboys. I donât want to give up finally being read as a girl.â
Another says âI do the misandry stuff because itâs an easy way to earn queer cred points, but when I think about it it makes me uncomfortable.â
Another: âItâs a coping habit Iâm not proud of. If I agree âgirls rule boys droolâ it makes me feel more like a girl.â
Have you noticed, when a product is marketed in an unnecessarily gendered way, that the blame shifts depending on the gender? That a pink pen made âfor womenâ is (and this is, of course, true) the work of idiotic cynical marketing people trying insultingly to pander to what they imagine women want? But when they make yogurt âfor menâ it is suddenly about how hilarious and fragile masculinity is â how men canât eat yogurt unless their poor widdle bwains can be sure it doesnât make them gay? #MasculinitySoFragile is aimed, with smug malice, at menânot marketers.
This conclusionâwidely sharedâis a product of insulated discourse. What I am NOT saying is: âopen the floodgates, let in the shitty male trolls!â I know the trollsâthey have tried to be my friends, they have tried to sneak into feminist spaces with no desire to learn or listen. I understand not trusting men who loudly and constantly hold forth on womenâs issues and refuse to accept when they are mistaken. Iâm not encouraging anyone to trust blindly. I am pleading to the discoursers: consider that this insulation has effects and try to mitigate them, if your priority really is finding truth amid a muck of concealed patriarchal lies. Check to see if maybe you are saying things and reproducing things mostly because it sounds good and feels good and nobody is challenging them.
These are not discursive problems that only apply to an âundercoverâ transwoman, these are discursive problems that are seemingly only visible to an âundercoverâ transwoman forced to carry multiple perspectives like bactrian humps.
Because I am interested in complicating your definition of maleness and of boyhood. I was born into that shitty town, maleness, in the remains of outdated ideals and misplaced machismo and repression and there are some good people stuck living there. They are not in charge. They did not build it. And I donât feel okay just moving out and saying âfuck yâall â bootstrap your way out or die out, I was never one of you.â I want to make it a better, healthier placeânot spend all my time talking about how shitty it is and how anyone who would choose to live there deserves it. And to me that means considering them with charity, even when they make it difficult to. [...]
Because itâs not a small deal that the words ânot all menâ have become entwined inextricably with male fragility and whininess. It makes it awfully easy to insulate the (largely cis-)female perspective on what males are. To begin a statement with those wordsââNot All Menââis to give grounds to anyone who wants to laugh at the rest of it. But here is the truth: not all men are what you think they are. Man does not mean what you think it means. Generalizing harshly and broadly but implying âyou know which ones I meanâ is an intellectual and rhetorical laziness that is not allowed to pass anywhere else in these communities. Because we donât get to choose who our words and behavior affect, we are obligated to choose them carefully.
@elodieunderglass I picked these up from the thrift shop today in a mixed bag of trinkets (though I actually bought it for the frogs)
The writing says "Taree", which is an Australian town, so they must be souvenirs from there. It seems like they are meant to hold something but I can't imagine what.
Bored staffy: I bet i could eat a rock if i tried hard enough. Maybe there is a rock in the middle of the sofa. I better chew my way through it to check.
Bored Husky: heyyy guyyyys come with me as I set the world record for speedrunning house demolition from the inside out â¨đđđđĽł
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Age verification has never been and never will be for "the safety of children." It is to collect personal data, that could be used in nefarious ways, and mass surveil.
Please research and resist your countries bills to pass similar legislation. This isn't fear mongering but if you take a look at what is happening in the world right now-- with AI, palantir, and ICE databases, you'll understand why this is a terrible idea.
