She/Her. An old fart who loves history, scifi, & computer games. My current obsession is the Admiral (FFXIV). I mostly play FF XIV, SDV, & No Man's Sky. But other games may pop up (SWtOR & Dragon Age mostly). I write fanfic when I have time. I also reblog other things. 18+ only. Banner and icon art are my ffxiv characters, art courtesy of my DIL
Yeah remember when the ussr oppressed jews? Neither do I.
That form, "Remember X? Neither do I" only makes sense if your correspondent does not, in fact, remember X, or if X didn't happen. I for one remember it very well, from slurs, to anecdotes in the usual USSR fashion where they punch down on minorities, to the Дело врачей which we learn about in school, to the simple facts of life that Jews were among those ethnicities it was hard to get higher education or get a home, or obtain a good job, to literal ethnic cleansings like was done to krymchaks (a separate ethno linguistic group within Jewish people) along with other indigenous people of Crimea in 1944. Uh, I think you westerners/global southerners are pretty ignorant of realities of the USSR, and that's because you don't study it enough+you're not living with consequences, you don't talk with or read what's written by survivors. Also, because you don't want to. Like open a fucking wiki, if it's too hard for you to reach out to someone who actually lived in the USSR, or who now lives in a country liberated from the USSR. Maybe talk to a Jewish person? Here's a food for thought. Or do you use MAGA sources to check black people's history?
I mean, no? I don't begrudge people not knowing, I begrudge them confidently perpetuating antisemitism while remaining wilfully ignorant. Like, you could spend your 20 something years of life, or however old you are, without asking yourself a question, hey, but how exactly were Jews treated in the USSR, and that's okay. You probably won't be talking about Jewish people in the USSR then. So, like, don't be so wrong and yet so loud like this anon. If you have an opinion, you outta be able to back it up with facts, and not whatever bullshit txtl or another tumblr favourite tankie is spewing this week.
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Do other countries not tailgate? I mean I know pickup trucks aren't a thing everywhere, but they're not a necessity, even if you'd think you need a tailgate to actually tailgate. Ya don't. Just brews and brats and buds.
Off the back of a quick search: The Foxborough stadium there and the largest stadium in Scotland, Celtic Park, have about the same seating capacity, about 65,000.
The Foxborough stadium normally has 20,000 parking spaces.
Celtic Park has 800, with another 600 nearby.
You might not need tailgates, but you do need to be parking there.
OceanGate, the deep-sea exploration company that created the Titan submersible, has removed its Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn a
poor things, well we should definitely make this easier on them by never repeatedly mentioning their name and deeds on the "reblog things forever" website
Here's some summer advice from a guy who worked in skincare:
-you need to wear sunscreen if youre going out in the sun. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. You don't need the expensive designer stuff but please just wear sun protection.
-you still need sunscreen if you are black or dark-skinned. Not only can you still sunburn, but direct UV light exposure also increases your risk of skin cancer, no matter how much melanin you have. There's tons of brands out there that are made for darker skin tones that don't leave that ashy finish behind, you just need to know the terms to look for. Look for the words "tinted, matte, mattifying," and shea butter-based sunscreens. There's also lots of brands that are formulated with your skin tone in mind. I don't have any to recommend unfortunately because I don't have experience needing that, but I know they are out there.
-if youre very hairy and cream sunscreens get caught in your body hair and glob up, get a spray sunscreen instead. It'll get in all the nooks and crannies instead of getting caught in your hair. Spray sunscreens are also good for those who have troubles with the effort and time it takes to put on sunscreen. Just make sure you spray it in a well ventilated area or, better yet, under cover outside, like on a porch or balcony.
-dont believe the fearmongering about chemical sunscreens. They're much more reliably protective than mineral sunscreens are. Thats because theyre chemically formulated in lab settings to be consistently protective and keep on shelves for long periods of time, while mineral sunscreens have a bad habit of ingredient separation and uneven formula mixes. Really, unless youre swimming directly in the great barrier reef or you have a specific skin condition or allergy to the ingredients in chemical sunscreens (the only customer i actually recommended our mineral sunscreen to over our chemical one was a regular who had skin cancer), you don't need a mineral sunscreen. Your wallet will also suffer less.
-you might have to double cleanse in the shower to get all sunscreen residue off your skin. Thats a good thing actually, it means your sunscreen is really good at barrier protection, but its also annoying. The way to do this without drying out your skin too much is by doing one quick cleanse of your skin with about half the soap you's typically use just to loosen up that residue and dirt, and then another deep, proper clean like you usually would that will get it all off. While leftover residue isn't really a health risk at all, it can clog your pores over time and cause uncomfortable acne breakouts, as well as trap dust and dirt under all the gunk. It can also get on your bedsheets.
-if you double cleanse, I recommend moisturizing after because it does dry you out a bit. You don't need a big fancy designer moisturizer either, just go to the drug store and get their basic pump bottle of body lotion, and separate facial moisturizer (the separation matters, the skin on your face is a lot more thin and delicate than the skin on your body). The main thing you want to look for with any product is that you arent allergic or sensitive to the active ingredients and avoid anything that uses alcohol as a binding ingredient.
-hats, hats, hats!! They keep the sun out of your eyes and your face!! You cant put sunscreen on your eyeballs!! Wear hats!!
-go have fun!! You can have your beach days and sun fun without cancer risks!!
If I might add a few more things (from someone with skin cancer in their family):
- if you're out in the sun for a while, or you swim or sweat, you will need to reapply your sunscreen. Putting it on once and spending seven hours in the sunshine or an hour in the pool won't cut it.
- Your lips can get sunburned too so don't forget to use a safe lip balm with SPF.
- You still need sunblock on cloudy days.
- You still need sunblock on any exposed body parts like your face or hands if you're in a snowy environment. Snow has a really nasty way of reflecting the sun to make you burn worse.
- You may not realize you have a sunburn until later, so glancing at your skin and thinking "eh, I haven't burned yet" is not a reliable metric of whether you should get out of the sun or reapply your sunblock.
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If there is one thing I have learned in fandom it is that some people get really pressed about how other people play with their dolls to the point that their entire fandom experience is throwing one long tantrum instead of just enjoying themselves
Gotta tell you guys something wild in the Chinese fan sphere
So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.
So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.
And that is how this charity received over 1 million in donations in three days lol. Oh btw the “freedom of expression” side won by a landslide (960k to 40k)
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“We need to talk,” Mako said after she had finished turning off the droid’s audio receptors, “about the melee.”
“What about it?”
“Don’t think I haven’t noticed you never kill a target if you can help it, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” Mako added quickly when Noara shot her a look. “It’s kind of a misconception about Bounty Hunting, it isn’t always about killing others. Lots of bounties are for bringing in a target alive, those sometimes even pay more because it’s harder to contain some beings than just killing them.”
Noara hummed thoughtfully as she worked on pulling her hair back up. “I am starting to see that, and I would prefer it if I didn’t have to kill targets like Altaca. His only crime was being gullible.”
“That and his taste in women,” Mako said with a laugh before her expression sobered again. “But that doesn’t mean you can always avoid it. Some targets will require it and the melee definitely will. The other hunters are going to be desperate to continue, and they will kill you if you hesitate or try to show mercy.”
Noara waited until she was done tightening her pony tail and brushing her bangs so they swept to the side the way she liked before she turned to give Mako her full attention. “You’re right, both that I’d prefer to avoid it and that sometimes I won’t be able to. I promise I am prepared to do what needs to be done in the melee.”
“Good,” Mako replied with a grin as she leaned back in her seat. “I’m just getting used to having a space monk watch my back, I’d hate it if you died now.
One of the core things capitalism is interested in is making any labor performed invisible.
Capitalism does not want you to think about the people who designed your furniture. It does not want you to think about the people who sewed your clothes. It does not want you to think about the people who plant and harvest the food you are eating, or the people who work to keep your infrastructure running. Capitalism has a vested interest in you never thinking about the people taking away your trash, or the people who work in the warehouses from where you order. It has a vested interest even in you ignoring the work of the many invisible hands who might work on your entertainment - the caterers, set builders, gaffers, and so on.
Because as long as you are ignorant of the labor put into the things you consume, you will be fine with those laborers being treated like shit.
That is why you need to keep thinking of that labor. Look at the things in your room and keep the people who worked for it in mind. Look at your clothes, your furniture, your gadgets. Think of the sewers, the warehouse workers, the miners, the technicians. Think of the people capitalism wants you to forget.
As spam continues to be a problem on AO3, here's an update on the types of spambot comments you may see, what we're doing to combat them, and how you can help! Read more at https://otw-news.org/mr42w8j9
As of June 2026, bots are also leaving guest spam comments that are:
suicide baiting (often machine translated into other languages)
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As always, please be cautious if something in the comments seems untrue or strange, and follow internet safety best practices.
If you're not sure if something is a spambot comment, you're welcome to contact Policy & Abuse for assistance. Refer to the original post for more information!
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)?
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It's pride month and I had a few friends not know about this so let me introduce you to the Queer Liberation Library.
A free digital library, available through Libby (and other apps, Libby is just what I use personally) and only requires an email address for sign up.
Allows 5 loans at a time, and they're always adding new books. I use them all the time, they're a vital resource for me not having to buy all the queer books I want to read. They have eBooks and Audiobooks available.
They're doing fantastic work ensuring open access to queer books, and I'll always support that goal.
Queer Liberation Library (QLL) is fighting to build a vibrant, flourishing queer future by connecting LGBTQ+ people with literature, informa
