u/TychaBrahe

I have a gas oven with the primary element below the main cooking box.

On Friday I cooked something that was kind of drippy. My daughter took it out of the oven, and I guess something spilled. I didn't see anything on the bake pan, so maybe it went down underneath?

Anyway, today I went to preheat the oven, and a few minutes after I turned the oven on, I noticed smoke coming out from the range. Through the oven door window I was able to see a flame coming up from one of the vent holes in the bake pan.

I shut the oven off. I was debating about opening the oven and hitting it with a fire extinguisher or seeing if it would burn itself out. I chose the latter and after about two minutes the fire went out. I opened windows and doors to air the smoke out of the house.

So, what do I do now? Is there a way to pull up the bake pan and clean underneath it? Do I call an appliance repairperson?

Besides 19 screenplays for *Twilight Zone*, some based on his own short stories, Beaumont also wrote short stories, both for pulp SF&F mags like *Amazing Stories* and *IF* and more upscale magazines like *Playboy* and *Esquire*. He wrote two novels, stories for popular comic books like Mickey Mouse and Woody Woodpecker, and two non-fiction books on pop culture and an introduction to motorsports. In addition, he wrote movie scripts, including *The Haunted Palace* (adapted from the Edgar Allan Pod story of the same name and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by HP Lovecraft), *7 Faces of Dr. Lao* (adapted from "The Circus of Dr. Lao" by Charles G. Finney), and *The Masque of the Red Death* (adapted from the Poe story).

Many of his short stories are in collections that are still in print.

[An analysis of his writing by Bill Ryan](https://www.thebulwark.com/p/hopeless-horror-charles-beaumont-writer-twilight-zone).

*Twilight Zone* can currently (as of May 2026, US) be streamed on Paramount+.

[*The Haunted Palace*](https://youtu.be/gUgYOzubRpU) and [*The Masque of the Red Death*](https://youtu.be/chPcECU3M2s) can be watched free with ads on YouTube. Both were directed by Roger Corman and star Vincent Price.

In the US, *7 Faces of Dr. Lao* can be purchased or rented on [YouTube](https://youtu.be/ERVaBzEzzUs), Amazon Prime, Apple+, or Fandango at Home. (Check JustWatch.com for local availability.) It was directed by George Pal and stars Tony Randall and Barbara Eden.

This is AMAZING!

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."

Makes about six 2-cup portions. Takes under 30 minutes with negligible prep time.

Ingredients

- 1 23.2 oz can or 2 10.75 oz cans condensed tomato soup (I recommend Campbell's)
- Twice that much vegetable broth or equivalent water plus bouillon/soup base (I used Better Than Bouillon's Garlic Base)
- 5 oz frozen green beans
- 1 20 oz package Buttoni three cheese tortellini
- black pepper to taste

Instructions

The normal instructions on a can of condensed soup are to reconstitute it with either a can of water, to make tomato soup, or a can of milk to make cream of tomato soup. **You are going to double the volume of liquid that you add to the condensed soup.** You can do this by pouring liquid vegetable broth into each soup can twice, or you can do it with water and then add soup base. I used Better Than Bouillon's Garlic Base, which is supposed to be 1 teaspoon for each 8 ounces of water. I used a 23.2 oz can, so I added twice that much water (46.4 oz) and 8 tsp of base. This creates a thinner, more broth like, soup that is still very flavorful.

Heat the broth in a heavy pan on top of the stove until it begins to simmer.

Add pepper to taste and reduce the heat. Add the green beans.

Depending on the temperature of your soup, it will take 5 to 10 minutes to bring the green beans to "warmish." You don't need them as hot as you're going to want them when served, because the tortellini take 15 minutes to cook in the broth, but they should no longer be frozen.

Add the tortellini and stir. Cook the tortellini for 15 to 20 minutes until tender, stirring occasionally, as they tend to float.

When the tortellini are tender, remove the soup from the heat and serve.

Add bread and a salad to make a complete meal.

I have a cat with Medical needs, and one of the things that I like to give him is his favorite, fresh turkey. I recently bought a frozen turkey breast, thinking I could roast it and he could eat turkey until he turned into a turkey.

I didn't want to take the trouble to rearrange my refrigerator to make room to defrost this turkey breast, so I googled, "can you cook a turkey breast direct from frozen?" The AI answer that popped up was that yes, you can. Stupidly, I didn't take the time to read the link, just trusted that the information would be available when I needed it.

Well, it turns out that the AI is taking its answer from a Butterball (US based turkey vendor) site. Which is all well and good. Except that the instructions are for a product that butter Ball makes to specifically go directly from the freezer to the oven. This is an even Butterball product, but it's not that product. And I cannot find instructions for cooking it directly from frozen except for ones using a slow cooker on low, which I know for a fact is not safe.

Fortunately, it will be ready to cook tomorrow after defrosting overnight in the freezer. But dammit, if I had ignored the AI, I would have put it in the refrigerator yesterday.

This was originally written for the eclipse thread the Iceland sub. It applies everywhere, but look east, not at Russia.

•••

If you have a choice about where to go to see the eclipse, try to choose a point at some elevation. You want to be able to see quite a distance in all directions.

The city of Reykjavík is at about 64° north latitude. At that latitude, a cross-section of the Earth would be a circle with a circumference of about 17,500 km or 10,900 miles. Since it takes the Earth about 24 hours to rotate on its axis, that means that the speed at which Reykjavík is rotating about the Earth's axis is about 730 km/hr or 450 mph.

[The farther south you go, the faster the rotational velocity of your location. I see several people talking about going to Spain to watch the eclipse. The latitude of Barcelona is 41.8°N. At that latitude, the circumference of a cross-section of the Earth is about 30,000 km or 19,000 miles. The shadow of the eclipse would be moving toward you at over 1200 km/hr or 750 mph.]

If you can stand on a hill and look eastward, in the direction of Russia [or whatever's east of where you are, if you aren't in Iceland], in the seconds before the eclipse happens, you will be able to see the shadow that the Moon is casting on the Earth run up at you at that speed. Science (and science fiction) writer Isaac Asimov wrote about expecting it but still being blown away to witness the phenomenon.

For example, if you were able to go to the top of Mount Esja, you could see at least 30 km or 19 miles eastward. You would be able to see the eclipse shadow running toward you for a total of about 2 1/2 minutes.

A discussion of the creation and effects of wet microbursts, extremely powerful and narrowly focused storms with rapid rainfall and powerful straight line winds.