Am researcher. Do media research. Mostly use blog for fun and learning.
If you have like media or labor questions I can do my best to answer them with the powers of my library database access.
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i need everyone to get into college football right now i am dying to talk about the texas tech situation. this is the kind of thing that will be referenced for the next 100 years. there will be documentaries and biopics about this.
texas tech's quartback, brendan sorsby, was investigated for sports gambling. i know sports betting is all the rage right now, but athletes themselves are not allowed to do it. it is Rule Number 1 and it is the highest priority rule for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), who governs all athletic programs at about 1,100 colleges in the US.
the invesitagetion of sorsby revealed that, not only did he place more than 9,000 sports bets when he himself was a collegiate athlete, but 40 of those bets were AGAINST HIS OWN TEAM when he was playing at indiana university. immediately, this threatens the integrity of the sport, and especially because indiana is the hottest team right now as the defending national champion.
the NCAA, which is largely a sham organization these days (they've truly lost their grasp and college athletics are the wild west now) actually enforced their Number 1 Rule and told sorsby his career is over, that he would never play college football again (and, subsequently, that he would never get drafted into the NFL because his college career was cut short).
well, because the NCAA is a husk of its former self, sorsby and texad tech immediately took this to court. MANY athletes have learned these past few seasons that if you can find a judge who's a fan of your team, you can get any NCAA ruling overturned. that's exactly what texas tech did. they filed a suit in Lubbock, where the university is located and where every judge is an alum of texas tech. so sorsby was granted an injunction and will now only be suspended for the first 2 games od the 2026 season (which are alwayd against no-name teams that will be destroyed regardless of who's suspended).
every other school in the country immediately went on the defensive because this is a very clear integretiy issue. so nebraska and georgia (sic em dawgs) released statements saying that all currently-scheduled competitions witb Texas Tech in ANY sport will be canceled and there will be no future schedulings. at least 3 of the major conferences (SEC, Big 10, Big 12) , who account for almost all division 1 sports teams in the country, are also in discussions about cancelling comtests. Texas Tech is part of the Big 12, and there is serious talk of all other teams in the conference shutting texas tech out.
now would probably be time where i say that texas tech is one of the wealthiest programs in college football becaise there is a single billionaire alumnus pouring money into the program with hopes of essentially buying a championship. so texas techs integrity has always been questionable. anyway, the university president put oit a statement that he doesnt care that sorseby violated regulation and that texas tech will sue any school that refuses to play them because it jeopardizes their championship prospects if they're umable to play any games.
this is all just startomg but its so juicy and delicious. the NCAA is going to crumble to dust if they cannot get this injunction overturned. schools like georgia and nebraska have plenty of money so a suit isnt necessarily a concern, but this will absolutely change college football forever. i cant stop reading about it.
update on this: texas tech is claiming that every school who has/is considering cancelling all contests is "afraid" that texas tech is better than them. what's funny about this is that sorsby's stats are average. he is not good enough for this kind of protection. many schools who have already cancelled or are considering it have much better quarterbacks than sorsby. also, texas tech's head coach had said that it's actually ok that sorsby bet against his own team because it "its not murder or assault."
the claim is now that texas texh university just cares so much about brendan sorsbys mental health that they have to sue everyone who calls this an integrity violation. any other school who wouldnt defend an athlete that committed this violation "doesnt care about mental health"
I havenât seen anybody add this part yet: Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General, is currently running for Senate. The race is shaping up to be fairly close.
If Paxton pisses off enough people with this Texas Tech stuff, it could contribute to him losing the race and the Senate seat flipping from Republican to Democrat.
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Convergence of form in groundwater wildlife from different regions of the world.
A quick definition... characters that are considered a result of permanent life in subterranean habitats are referred to as "troglomorphisms."
Dr. Ron Brandon wrote of the suite of characteristics that tended to be observed in North America's diverse, obligate subterranean, groundwater-inhabiting salamanders:
An elongation of the head, a flattening of the head, a general trend toward a "shovel shaped" head, an increase in the number of teeth, a reduction of pigmentation and of eyes, and an elongation and attenuation of the body and limbs.
These are common troglomorphisms observed in said salamanders. The same trend is also observed in Europe's "Olms." The "duck-biled" mouth is a characteristic observed in various groundwater fishes as well - see the image here comparing the face and mouth shape of obligate groundwater fishes from opposite sides of the planet (China and North America).
Why? Dr. Brandon's hypothesis (Hâ):
The flattening of the head and the increased teeth (relative to surface-inhabiting related species) leads to more efficient prey capture and handling.
This confers an evolutionary advantage in a habitat where feeding opportunities might be scarce, even rare in some systems. Every opportunity is significant; maximizing said events is key to surviving in the habitat. If this is true, strong evolutionary pressures toward improved prey capture and handling will influence head shape in evolutionary time. In fact, that is what we observe in unrelated groups of organisms.
This doesn't mean that there can't be other hypotheses for the observed head shape and the convergence on it by multiple species in unrelated groups of salamanders.... OR that this is absolutely why we observe what we observe; however, the hypothesis does explain the convergence of head shape.
Hope you enjoy these amazing inhabitants of subterranean waters from around the world. Here is what the "salamander circle" is represented by: the following...
[âChild removal proved to be a profitable career path for many white women. The civilizing machine required humans to run it: white women teachers. The boarding school movement presented them with significant new career opportunities. Middle-class white women in the mid- to late nineteenth century were still largely confined to the private sphere. But civilizing the West was deemed an appropriate extension of womenâs domestic duties. This âmanifest domesticity,â in scholar Amy Kaplanâs memorable phrase, thrust white womenâs work into the center of the settler colonial enterprise. White women could respectably extend their own realm of power and influence through adopting a maternal attitude that saw Natives as children in need of their guidance. According to historian Margaret Jacobs, âthe majority of boarding school employees nationwideâ were white women.â]
Kyla Schuller, The Trouble With White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism
June 12, 2016. Putting a date on this for when it gets reblogged months from now by people who think the post is about something from 30, 40 years ago.
I am a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting, having grown up in Orlando and just turned 20 a month prior. If you didnât know, there were several families who refused to claim the bodies of their relatives due to their sexuality. One family even had their relativeâs name removed from the memorial. Murdered by the same hate with which their families reject them in both life and death.
Many, many people celebrated Pulse. We were told we deserved it. That it was Godâs punishment for our sin of loving the same sex. We are sent messages like these I received in 2018:
We in the community often call the victim count 49+ to include the survivors who couldnât live with the pain.
The event was never officially declared a hate crime or targeted homophobic attack and is rarely listed as one in databases.
At our vigils for those slaughtered, Extremist Christian groups showed up to protest, holding signs like this:
ID: Me kissing a woman I was casually seeing in front of an angry looking man with a âSodomy is Sinâ sign.
Please understand how much more than just a mass shooting this was. We are still to this day harassed and told we deserved it by some.
This year was the sixth anniversary. The first couple years I received dozens of messages checking in on me on 6/12. Year 5 got enough news coverage for people to think to reach out to me. This year it was my therapist, the woman I kissed in that photo, and a couple of other gun violence survivor friends. People are forgetting already.
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.
this is an important topic. please also remember folks that do research are a community. They are not lone adventurers out there alone but part of a broad tapestry of folks working together toward improving science. The idea of a solo researcher going against the grain against all odds can make it seem like you have to be extraordinary to do research and it can defer folks from getting into research.
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i walk into starbucks and order a pumpkin spice latte with 13 shots of espresso. i tell the barista that i intend to transcend humanity and become a god. i ask for no whip cream
you say this jokingly but i had a customer actually order a pumpkin spice latte with 9 shots of espresso (also no whip) and when i asked her to verify that she did indeed want 9 shots of espresso she looked me dead in the eyes and said âi have 5 kidsâ
I once had a woman come in and ordered an Americano with 19 shots of espresso. The drink took ages. It held up the line. I asked her why, and she shrugged and said âI just donât careâ. We still talk about that woman. We never saw her again.
Actual conversation I had at register:
âHi, welcome to [Starbucks]! What can I get you, today?â
âHow much is it to fill a Venti with Espresso?â
âI- Iâm sorry?â
âA venti cup. How much to fill it with Espresso?â
âOh. uh. Well, itâd be I suppose⌠I only have a button for a Quad. I donât have special pricing for twenty ounces of espresso in a single⌠drink.â
âPrice is the furthest thing from my mind right now. How many âadd shotsâ is that?â
*deep breath of fear*Â âItâd be a quad with,â *clears throat*Â âuh, sixteen additional shots of espresso. But, maâam, I should tell you that the shots will start to get really bitter if they have to sit and wait for us to pull twenty of them-â
âTaste means nothing to me.â
At this point I am truly fearing for my very existence in the presence of what must clearly be an eldritch being.
âOh. Well, okay.â I put on my absolute best customer service smile to hide my terror and accept that I must face this dragon, fae, or demon with dignity. âWe can certainly get that for you! The price will be _____.â
She begins to pay, I shit thee not, with golden Sacajawea dollar coins. We are a block from Wall Street, and this eldritch demi-being is paying for an unholy elixer with golden coins. My life will end soon, I am sure of it.
âDo you still have the âAdd Energyâ packets?â
My heart began to race at this request. âYes maâam.â
âHow many can I add?â
Futile though it is, at least I know the rote response to this. âFor health reasons, we wonât add more than one per drink and we cannot sell the packets individually.â
âOne then.â
I alter the order and tell her the new price. She pays, dumps the change and five golden dollars into the tip box. I write the order on the venti cup and pass it silently to the girl working the hot beverage station. Normally we called and pass, but this was ⌠not something to be spoken aloud.
My fellow takes the cup, not thinking anything of the minor break with protocol, until she sees the order. She stares at me. âNo.â
The woman, which I call her for no other greater insight into her terrifying being is within my grasp, simply stands on the other side and says, calmly but with a commanding tone I expect of Admirals in bad movies, âYes.â
My fellow barista pales before her task. But we are dutiful, we are true to our task, great though it may be. She sets about clearing the two brand new Mastrenaâs of all distraction, and sets two tall cups in the ready position. The energy packet is emptied into the venti cup, and the shots begin pouring.Â
The barista was damn near shaking. This womanâs gaze felt like the fires of the sun. Finally, the shots are pulled, the cup is filled, and the hand off takes place.
Our visiting Incomprehensible takes it to our milk bar and adds a dollop of cream. Satisfied, she proceeds to down what must have been half the damn cup.
Then she smiled at us, like a benediction and I was honestly filled with joy. And horror. She left, and we knew nothing more of her after that.
When I talk with other former employees, we quickly begin talking about âThe Companyâ as if weâd never left, perhaps knowing that part of our soul still powers that awesome and terrible corporate machine. And when I share this story, other Baristas at first act shocked but quickly settle and comes the chorus,Â
One time I was working bar while a slightly new barista was working register. And we had an exchange like this.
Her: âI want you to know that I double checked the number of pumps on this next drink and itâs correctâ
Me: âok, why is it a lot?â
Her: âjust know that itâs right.â
So I go okay man, because she is already helping another customer and I have drinks to make. And I look down to read the sticker I just pulled and it is for a Trenta iced coffee, no ice, 40 pumps of classic syrup.
And the other person on bar is like: âmaybe she added an extra zero on accidentâ
And I say, âno she told me she double checkedâ
And the barista on register confirms âthatâs what he asked for.â And points to a guy in a hoodie with a buz cut who looked to be in his 30âs.
So I buckle down and my fellow bar barista counts with me as I pump 40 pumps of classic syrup. (And other barista know that if you put your hand over the cup as you pump it to keep syrup from going everywhere, it splashes up and makes your hand all sticky, well my hand felt like one of those rubber sticky hands you get from the prize box at school, except my hand was industrial strength stickiness with the amount of syrup on it.) So i finish pumping and it is about three inches of pure syrup.
Lets do some math! I looked it up and a Starbucks hot bar pump is around 0.25 oz. multiplied by 40 means this drink had around 10 oz of pure sugar. This is in a trenta, the largest size available at 32 oz. and he got no ice or other add ins. Which means this man was ordering about a 2:1 ratio of coffee to sugar.
A thought i had was âmaybe heâs taking it home to water is downâ because people do that sometimes. But as I called it out and handed it to him he took a straw and took a sip. He said nothing that I remember. No comment, no response to my usual âThank you, have a nice day!â No readable emotion. And he walks out the door. We had never seen that man before and we never saw him again.
(Also we had a regular who ordered 9 shots of espresso in an iced venti mocha or latte every Saturday morning.)
Mexico amends its constitution to cut the maximum workweek from 48 to 40 hours by 2030 and gives 13.5 million workers the legal right to ign
Mexico amends its constitution to cut the maximum workweek from 48 to 40 hours by 2030 and gives 13.5 million workers the legal right to ignore their bossâs calls, messages, and emails after their shift ends, in the most significant overhaul of Mexican labor law in a generation.
Mexico has rewritten its constitution to guarantee every worker in the country a shorter working week, a legal right to switch off from work after hours, and a guarantee that no employer can cut their pay in response, enacting in a single legislative package a set of labor rights that workers in wealthier countries have spent decades campaigning for without success.
post so bad tumblr offers 5 delete buttons and no post button
[id: screenshot of broken tumblr queue footer ui with one reorder button, 5 delete buttons, one edit, and one unreadable button where post button should be./end id]
You can really tell who got invited to parties in high school and who didn't based on their reactions to the photos those freakshows on Twitter dug up.
I 100% do believe a bunch of shitty drunk white kids at a party thought it would be sooooo funny to draw hate symbols on an Asian kid. To me, that photo is just more proof of what Hudson has had to put up with while daring to exist as a POC in a white dominated space.
All these horny parasocial freakshows digging years and years back into his past to find something, anything to use against him, is just more proof of what POC have to put up with in this space. At the end of the day, even with other POC heading the charge against Hudson, they're still doing so at what they feel to be the behest of two white men. Which is telling.
I'll tell you right now, as someone who worked in tech, when Hudson was vocally antagonistic towards AI, I can promise that some rich guys made some calls. I'm not joking. They've made them over much less. Just ask college professors who spoke a little too positively of Marxism at schools dependent on their donations. But I digress.
This entire smear campaign reeks of the plays the Epstein class used to organize on 4Chan. They're weaponizing anti-racism to do a racism. They want Hudson gone, but people like him. People are supporting him because they want to see more POC in Hollywood. So, they have to convince people he's racist. To kill the organic fandom he's built independent of the Hollywood machine.
They did the same thing during Gamer Gate. When women pointed out what slimy unfuckable troglodytes most of them were, they quite effectively shut that up by weaponizing body positivity against them. That's what's happening here, and I can promise you at a scale this organized, the smear campaign is being funded by some fuck-ass tech bro with investments in AI.
I know what racism looks like when I see it, and I don't see it in these pictures of one lone Asian kid trying to fit in.
I see it in the absolute relentless determination of the people trying to ruin his life, because he dared to succeed alongside his white costar. I see plenty of it fucking there.
âThe LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that heâs the most boring average person in the world. Itâs impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if sheâs female sheâs already SOMEthing, because sheâs not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but itâs weirdly prevalent in childrenâs entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, whoâs a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new charactersâ is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?â
â Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg commenting on how weird gendered defaults in entertainment are, and why we should think twice about them. Excerpted from this longer original post.
(via 360degreesasthecrowflies)
#Shit I say this stuff all the time#Default is not male#Women are not a different species from men#Itâs a toaster itâs make believe it can be whatever you fucking want it to be#Also voice actors get cast in the âwrongâ gender roles all the time#Do you know how many little boy characters are played by women#Do you know how many little boy characters are played by *Tara Strong*???#I did not watch an anime in which an adult man is played by a woman VA for 90 fucking episodes in the 90s#To have to suffer the stringent gender opinions of men who feel too threatened by the idea that a woman could be their equal
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If the trash pickup people stop doing their job for two weeks you'd be throwing a fucking tantrum. Same for the janitors who keep your office spaces and bathrooms clean. (And that's before the various illnesses start to spread all over your city from the build up of pathogens.)
The people responsible keeping our spaces clean (and thus, mostly disease-free) should both be paid more AND thanked more.
You should be starting a recipe book. I don't give a shit if you're only 20-years-old. The modern web is rotting away bit by bit before our very eyes. You have no idea when that indie mom blog is going down or when Pinterest will remove that recipe. Copy it down in a notebook, physically or digitally. Save it somewhere only you can remove it. Trust me, looking for a recipe only to find out it's been wiped off the internet is so fucking sad. I've learned my lesson one too many times.
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