Fangirl

On 23 October last year (2024) the New York Times published an interview with former OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji who worked on organising and gathering data for OpenAI until 2022 when he begun thinking about the morality of it. He eventually came to the conclusion that what OpenAI is doing blatantly violates copyright law and decided to leave the company altogether in August 2024.

After he came out with this accusation he was set to appear in court to testify against OpenAI’s data-gathering practices, something which had the potential of being a complete disaster for the company and the generative AI industry as a whole.

That was until 26 November, just days before he was due to appear in court, when he suddenly and mysteriously was found dead inside his own apartment. Investigators concluded that the death was self-inflicted, something which his family has disputed.

There was also “sign of struggle in the bathroom and looks like someone hit him in the bathroom based on blood spots”, and his apartment showed signs of having been ransacked for evidence: “The pin drive is missing. His computer was messed up.”.

Overall it feels pretty clear-cut what happened, that is to say that OpenAI had him killed because he was a legitimate threat to their business, indicating that they are fully aware that the way they’re gathering data is completely illegal.

Sources:

Alys Davies, 14.12.2024, OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment. BBC News

Barney Davis, 16.1.2025, Suchir Balaji’s family demand outside investigation into OpenAI whistleblower’s death. The Independent

I’m an artist! I’ve always wanted to be an artist! And I’m a pretty good one! But I work two jobs in an unrelated industry so I can pay rent, and when I’m not exhausted from THAT I can do the thing I enjoy and have talent in as a hobby. And when I try to enjoy other people’s art, it’s completely saturated in AI shit made of stolen art generated by an algorithm used by people who have no skill and no desire to learn, who don’t actually appreciate the creative process.

My colleague has a degree in archaeology! He’s passionate about it! But he can’t afford to keep studying and works two jobs to pay rent. And when he’s not exhausted from THAT, maybe he can go online and watch videos and read articles… which are increasingly saturated by fake videos and conspiracy theories and unsourced bullshit hidden behind fancy headlines full of ads.

It’s like… People with skills and interests are too busy struggling with food and shelter to produce real art and real science and real tangible things, because prices keep going up while quality keeps going down, so the creators and the innovators who aren’t lucky enough to be born into wealth are stuck doing mindless shit they hate while machines churn out slop at low quality and low cost, and it’s all just become a race to the bottom.

It infuriates me. Cause why? why do I have to live with it? Why can’t I desire more time to myself? Why do I have to see my coworkers more than my own family?

Little Cherokee Seeds is a program where mothers and babies spend all day with first language Cherokee speakers, speaking nothing but Cherokee, so that the babies become a new generation of native speakers. They're also teaching traditional skills and mothering practices to the mothers to pass on.

This is so so important for the survival of the language. These babies are on track to being fluent first language speakers, and they will be able to keep the language going for another lifetime.

Sokoto state, a majority Muslim state in north-west Nigeria was bombed on Christmas day. It is still unclear how many bombs were dropped and where. Confirmed is a bomb dropped on a Mosque in Jabo, killing 5 people.

Trump has claimed that this is in retaliation of the "Christian genocide" happening in Nigeria, committed by "radical Islamists" of the ISIL (ISIS), and the specific choosing of Christmas day was to reify that this is a religious based retaliation.

This Christmas, I am in Nigeria. My family is majority Christian. We are without fear of being persecuted on the basis of our religion. So, what is going on?

There is no Christian genocide in Nigeria. Nigeria is a complex country that faces a lot of violence, exploitation and subsequent neglect from our government. But it is not Christians being targeted in our country. This insidious piece of misinformation has been dutifully organised by US officials for months and gained steam on platforms like X and Truth Social.

I do not believe though, that this action was done to fight Islamic terrorists or protect Nigerian Christians. The reason being:

Sokoto state is not a state with ISIL activity.

This is another display of US throwing its weight around, conveniently, onto the most oil-rich country in Africa.

Do not believe everything the US tells you about its foreign affairs. The US will gladly spill blood on the flimsiest of justifications just to continue gorging its empire.

Also yes, queer is more inclusive! Especially coming at it from an academic standpoint, people didn’t always use or identify with the terms we use now and you can’t always try to cram them into our modern perceptions of sexuality. We can argue for years about whether a famous historical figure was gay or bisexual or straight and trans or whatever, but if we can all agree that they were somehow queer then using that term allows us to move past the debate and into productive discussion. And not everybody everywhere shares the same terms for sexual and gender identity, or even the same concepts of those things, so queer really is a more inclusive term in a lot of cases.

Your words are slurs, too. Why do you get your words, but I don’t get mine? What makes you so special?

every single one of our labels has been used as a slur against us.

terfs and -phobes are always going to try and hurt us with what we identify as. but the fact remains these are OUR labels and always have been.

It just baffled me that people would think an identifier is automatically a slur just because someone uses it to mock someone. If we did that gay would be a slur. Stupid would be a slur. Autistic would be a slur.

I only learned that "queer" is used as a slur when I started interacting with the English speaking community.

Additionally, here are some interesting comments from a Mozilla employee who's been working on these features:

In portuguese, much like spanish, we have no gender neutral pronouns. People who do not use ele/dele and ela/dela (he/him or she/her) all use whatever neopronoun suits them best in portuguese (ie elu/delu, eli/deli) because we have no access to a universal gender neutral pronoun like gringos do. When I brought this up upon them making fun of my "neopronouns", they said to suck it up, and that being foreign does not make neos valid.

In mocking people who use neopronouns in english, you are mocking a very large sum of latin american genderqueer and trans people.

I know various latin language speakers that struggle with their identities in their native tongue due to us not having they/them equivalents, so they are forced to let go of their, in example, brazilian queerness, to appease to anglos who would harass them and call them mockeries of trans people for not sticking to what The Cis want.

When non-anglos tell you the usamerican and british dominance over queer spaces ruins things for them, they mean it. We are forced to repress our identites because you people think they're too "out there and problematic". We are forced to suppress our own queer culture because we don't fit into your neat little boxes of what makes someone gay what makes someone a lesbian what makes someone trans or what makes someone anything else.

You tell us to remember "our queer elders", but do you know of any queer latin american figures? We learn your history, and you refuse to learn ours because you already have "too much on your plate". You disregard us and shame us for not fitting your ideals of queerness and using labels for ourselves you dislike, and try to baby us and tell us the proper way to be gay.

Your culture is not universal.

You are not saving queer people by making jabs at other queer people you don't personally get. Odds are you are harming an entire group of foreign queers you never bothered to consider, because your anglo bubble is too self important.

If you want to do queer people a real favour instead of getting mad at identities that existed long before you were even born, here. Make yourself useful. Donate to queer brazilian housing and support programs. Your beloved dollar is worth a lot more than the Real. Even five dollars help.

Casa Um

Eternamente Sou

I feel the need to warn you all that Teasers and Trailers from TeaserCon on YouTube are mostly fake and made with Al.

Adnan Al-Bursh was one of the most respected surgeons in Gaza.

He was arrested in November 2023 and died in April 2024, aged 49; fellow prisoners told media that a few days before his death he was dragged to the prison yard and dumped there, naked from the waist down, bleeding and unable to use the toilet unassisted.

The family asked for an investigation and an autopsy; to this day, Israel has his body, making it impossible to establish the abuse and violence he went through.

Let us also not forget about the case of the 26 year-old prisoner who underwent sexual abuse so severe he had to be admitted to an Israeli hospital with a ruptured anus and a ruptured intestine

his rape was filmed by security cameras but as soon as his potential aggressors got investigated, massive protests broke out in front of the prisons demanding for the soldiers to be released.

Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

One day I'll write about what it's like to grow up knowing you might have a terminal, incurable illness, and not be allowed to test yourself because "it's such a serious decision" they don't want it hanging over you until you're an adult (as if it doesn't hang over you as you witness a parent die, and know you've got 50% chance of inheriting the same illness--as do your siblings). One day, I will talk about how, in the fear of traumatising children with the knowledge they might be incurably, terminally ill, they also took away their right to decide over their bodies to a degree that is traumatising. One day.

But today I am going to cry. Because it's over. Because no child will ever have to go through the same uncertainty, because at least they will know there is a treatment option available. A treatment option that one of my siblings might come to rely on. With all the shit things happening around us, my childhood hope and dream have been realised. That's got to count for something.

“why do we bake cookies at 180 for 9 minutes when we could do 400 for 2 minutes?” -enter the godawful lump of coal with a still gross wet and uncooked inside

“why do we have to scoop out little cookies instead of doing the whole tray?” -ok well that one you can technically do if the spread is even. you just end up with one giant, structurally unsound cookie. “PLEASE CAN WE MAKE GIANT COOKIES” (we did make 1 giant tray cookie)

we talked a lot about why consistency is important, but i don’t think it really hammered home until i said “okay everyone gets ONE cookie, that’s fair, right?” and then handed out cookies of hugely varying sizes. + baked one fat lump of a cookie that still wasn’t done at the 9 minutes, vs the regular one i put in that came out charred by the time the first was actually done.

we also made a row of cookies where each one had one single differing ingredient omitted, like a cookie with no flour, or a cookie with no butter, and laid them all out on a single tray to bake together to see how each ingredient affects the outcome.

two of the little girls added cocoa to their cookie doughs until it matched the colour of each others skin to make best friend cookies, and that almost made me tear up a bit 🥺

got briefly distracted (…for over half an hour…) talking about how eggs form when someone cracked an egg and it had 2 yolks

expertly tolerated being asked how old i am (just turned 31 the other day) which was immediately followed by asking if i watched the moon landing live on tv

was so focused on keeping track of all the kids that in the end i forgot to make a cookie for myself, but it’s ok because one of the girls gave me this

“will there be knives involved?” we are baking cookies.

“what temperatures does the oven get to/will it be hot enough to burn?” we are baking cookies.

“will there be [insert ingredient used in cookies]?” we are baking cookies.

“are you using fahrenheit or celsius?” ??????? d-does it matter?? it’s going to get Hot. (also celsius; this is ontario)

“are the ovens childproof?” no?? i’m assuming you’re asking if i’m going to let your kids reach into the ovens while i’m staring out a window in another room. i will not be allowing your children to use the ovens. they will not be left unattended. 

“why is the library baking class taking place at the high school?” the library does not have 10 ovens. the library does not even have 1 oven. the high school has many ovens.

“what if i don’t want my child to have cookies? can you let her make muffins instead?” this is a baking class for cookies. we are baking cookies.

“cookies aren’t healthy. why don’t you make [insert whatever]” do you know how many cookies i can make with a $40 budget and a trip to the bulk store? we are making cookies.