Tootfinder

Day 8 (a bit late): Timnit Gebru
Academic authors are authors too, and there are a bunch of people I deeply respect both in my fields and adjacent.
Gebru is someone I have huge respect for because she stood up for her (mild, completely reasonable) principles to the point of losing her job on Google's AI ethics team (since disbanded entirely), and then went ahead and founded an independent research institute to continue doing AI ethics research.
Why was she fired? Because she insisted on publishing her "Stochastic Parrots" paper after it passed Google internal review only to have extra nonstandard scrutiny applied at the last minute. Why did Google want to suppress her paper (which included an academic co-author)? Because it expressed valid criticisms of the large language models fad, and Google was planning to make money off that fad. Personally, I don't think I'd hire an "AI ethics" team only to then try to suppress their publications, and Google seems to now agree, having scrapped the team (during the initial furor, Timnit's boss also effectively quit to support her).
That "Stochastic Parrots" paper? Indeed, it predicts the core underlying problems with large language models that lead to so many of their user-side harms today. You can read it here: #20AuthorsNoMen

Okay, here's the promised follow-up with more authors I respect who didn't make it onto this list. I won't do deep dives but I'll list at least one work per author:
YA novelists:
- Randi Pink ("Girls Like Us")
- Louisa Onomé ("Twice as Perfect")
- Emery Lee ("Meet Cute Diary")
- Robin Benway ("Far from the Tree")
- Angela Velez ("Lulu and Milagro's Search for Clarity")
Children's book authors:
- Jacqueline Davies ("Bubbles Up")
- Freya Hartas ("Slow Down in the Park")
Novelists:
- Rimma Onoseta ("How You Grow Wings")
Graphic novelists:
- Linda Medley ("Castle Waiting")
- 🖋️Magsalene Visaggio 🖌️Paulina Ganucheau ("Girlmode")
- Ursula Vernon ("Digger")
- SJ Sindu ("Tall Water" w/ Dion MBD)
- Hope Larson ("Be That Way"; "Salt Magic" w/ Rebecca Mock)
- Lily Williams Karen Schneemann ("Go With the Flow")
- Maia Kobabe ("Gender Queer")
- Kay O'Neill ("Tea Dragon Society")
- Marjane Satrapi ("Persepolis")
Mangaka:
- Kaoru Mori ("Young Bride's Stories")
- Ryoko Kui ("Delicious in Dungeon")
- Natsuki Takaya ("Fruits Basket")
Anime writers/directors and/or Japanese light/fantasy/SF novelists:
- Nahoko Uehashi ("Moribito")
- Sayo Yamamoto ("Michiko & Hatchin"; "Yuri!!! On Ice")
- Mari Okada ("Ano Hana: The Flower we Saw That Day"; "Toradora!")
Game designers/programmers:
(Upon review I was pretty remiss in skipping over a few of these people, some of whom I wasn't aware of but most of whom I just didn't remember when writing my short list. Subconscious misogyny in action. Short & Thorson probably would have squeezed out some of the YA authors I included, although I have no real regrets.)
- Junko Kawano ("Suikoden")
- Elizabeth LaPensée ("When Rivers Were Trails")
- Momo Pixel ("Hair Nah")
- Zoë Quinn ("Depression Quest"; narrative designer on "Solar Ash")
- Kellee Santiago ("Cloud"; "Flower")
- Tanya X. Short ("Moon Hunters")
- Kim Swift ("Portal")
- Maddy Thorson ("Celeste")
- Andi McClure @… ("Jumpman")
Note: I haven't included composers or artists here, but there's a deep bench.
Games journalists/steamers:
- Tanya DePass @… (#/INeedDiverseGames; twitch streams)
- Anita Sarkeesian (Feminist Frequency)
Game/play scholars:
- Mary Flanagan ("Critical Play")
- Tracy Fullerton ("Game Design Workshop")
- Brenda Laurel ("Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System")
- Janet Murray ("Hamlet on the Holodeck"l
- Susana Tosca ("A Pragmatics of Links")
- Jichen Zhu ("Agency Play: Dimensions of Agency for Interactive Narrative Design")
- Magy Seif El Nasr ("Design patterns to guide player movement in 3D games")
- Kate Compton ("Causal Creators"; also "Spore")
P.S. upon consideration I've decided not to include any authors who are men in this coda.
There are definitely others who probably deserve to be here that I'm forgetting...
#GsmeDesign #Authors

There is a cult of action at the heart of tech.
This cult says: don't mind that the systems are broken. Don't try and fix them. You can just do things, using you ubermensch will.
AI has plugged into this cult to promise 10x-ing your action. But instead your will becomes subservient to the machine.
Doing what is easiest is only going to make things worse. The only helpful course of action is to fix the system.

"Just doing things" is not a path to value
Action for the sake of action feels good, but the path of least resistance leads you to surrender your own agency.

From BC Humanists
Last fall, we pushed the government to finally fulfill a longstanding promise to regulate dangerous and deceptive unregulated (crisis) pregnancy centres.
These fake clinics cloak their religious agenda to deny people their reproductive autonomy and freedom. Many of these groups are registered charities, meaning your taxes subsidize their donations.
Now, the government has let religious anti-choice groups off the hook with its lack of action in Budget 2025.…

"Out of curiosity, I used this brand-new search engine you might have heard about, “Google,” to learn more about the subject. I found a copy of CaptureNet, a freeware packet sniffer part of the SpyNet/PeepNet by Laurentiu Nicula; then I looked up for the port number used by MSN Messenger (it was 1863 in case you were wondering.) Finally, I found out how to enable “promiscuous mode” in the network card in my laptop."

The Weakest Link
The professor stopped the class. He asked one students for his phone number. After entering the number into a device looking like a handheld calculator, he asked this unsuspecting student to go outside the classroom and call a friend or a relative. The student complied. After a few seconds, to our astonishment, the machine picked up the call. We could all clearly hear our friend talking to his mum about dinner plans for that evening.

> Fueled by depression, the man meant to back up his collection and create a base for training AI to make better “robot pornography” but he uploaded it to the government computer by accident.
https://infosec.exchange/@josephcox/115372769635804774

SITCOM: Scaling Inference-Time COMpute for VLAs
Ayudh Saxena, Harsh Shah, Sandeep Routray, Rishi Rajesh Shah, Esha Pahwa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04041 https://

SITCOM: Scaling Inference-Time COMpute for VLAs
Learning robust robotic control policies remains a major challenge due to the high cost of collecting labeled data, limited generalization to unseen environments, and difficulties in planning over long horizons. While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a promising solution by grounding natural language instructions into single-step control commands, they often lack mechanisms for lookahead and struggle with compounding errors in dynamic tasks. In this project, we introduce Scaling Infere…