How long do y'all think it took for people to forget mammoths? One generation, two, three? They got rarer and rarer, until the clan felled the last one that they would ever kill, and the hunters who were there would, for the rest of their lives, keep telling the story of how they once slayed the most elusive grand beast, that was only seen once a generation. And the youths would listen their descriptions of them, and though the description didn't make much sense - there was nothing else quite alike a mammoth that it could be compared to - they listened and thought that one day, they would encounter a mammoth, too.
They might tell their children and grandchildren of this, how the old hunters would tell them of a spectacular beast that one might see only three times in a lifetime, and perhaps kill just once. It must be true, since the clan still has the tusk of one, but no-one alive has seen one.
Their children and grandchildren would tell their own children only vague tales they used to hear the old folk tell, of grand beasts bigger than horses and bovines, the grandest game of them all, but no-one alive has met someone who has seen one.
When Amal surprised me by telling me she named her newborn after me, I felt like part of my heart had gone to Gaza and remained there ever since.
This part of my heart is now breaking. Amal, who's been on a poor diet because she can't afford better food, is unable to breastfeed baby Mina any longer, and is unable to afford enough formula to compensate, and now both mother and baby are weak and malnourished.
Amal is suffocating from the stress of having to provide for her daughters. Her husband Motasem is doing everything he can (recently, he was almost caught in a bombing while trying to get food) but they're both overwhelmed. I wish there was anything I can do for them.
I'm begging you to donate if you can and share if you can't. I want, more than anything in this world, for these kids to grow up healthy and for their parents to be able to rest.
90-ghost has done so much for the people of Palestine. He is trying to get the rest of his family out of there while the war rages on, so to show your support, please donate to his sister's and brother's respective Paypals!
Help support Samar Saed Kamel Saed by donating or sharing with your friends.
Go to paypal.me/bushrabo and type in the amount. Since it’s PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don’t have a PayPal account? No worries.
@gazavetters Vetted List lists Ahmed and his family at #740.
Happy (belated) 32nd birthday, Ahmed. I hope you know how much you've done to help the Palestinian people. I might not have any money, but I shall always do my best to spread your hard work and the words of others.
something something “I’m a person and my name is Anakin” showing his name is a central way he retains identity while a child slave vs “that name no longer has any meaning to me” in almost the same breath as “I must obey my master” thirty years later after Sidious accomplished what Gardulla and Watto never managed to: breaking his spirit and convincing him he has no other options but obedience, accepting painful consequences, never looking for a way out. something like that
Today I would like to share some news that brought me a small moment of joy.
The link to my campaign has been updated in the documentation file to number 219, thanks to my dear sister @fifthnormani 🩵 and close friend who reached out to @el-shab-Hussein and helped complete the update. I feel deeply grateful to her and to everyone who continues to stand by me and support this journey.
Despite this good news, the war in Gaza is still ongoing. We are still living under constant shelling, losing loved ones, while life becomes increasingly difficult due to the rising prices of essential goods.
Thank you to everyone who supported my campaign, shared it, or prayed for me. Your support gives me hope and reminds me that we are not alone in this hardship. We still need you to stand with us and share our story.
maybe this is not my place to say because I am monolingual, and I'm sure it's part of a larger, more nuanced discussion about visibility and accessibility on the internet, but I think it'd be cool if people posted in their native languages more instead of in english. I see people do it way more on other platforms than on tumblr which is almost exclusively in english
El problema es, como bien has dicho, la accesibilidad y la visibilidad.
Tumblr en concreto es muy anglocentrista y un gran número de los usuarios no habla más que inglés. Si quieres que tus cosas lleguen a gente con gustos u opiniones similares, escribirlo en inglés asegura que la gente por lo menos lo pueda leer. Suma a esto el hecho de que bastantes series y tal son originalmente de habla inglesa (y a veces ni se traducen a tu lengua madre), lo que crea un fandom principalmente angloparlante.
Más allá de eso, también hay que tener en cuenta las diferencias culturales que surgen entre fandoms de distintos idiomas. Por ejemplo, durante mucho tiempo el fandom de Vocaloid angloparlante y el hispanohablante han chocado con respecto a temas como la piratería. En ocasiones es complicado manejar estas expectativas, y si sabes varios idiomas, peor incluso.
A mí me gustaría subir cositas en español y encontrar a gente que comparta mis gustos, pero en Tumblr en concreto es casi imposible. Tumblr ya es de por sí mucho más «nicho» en espacios hispanohablantes que otras RRSS como TikTok o Instagram, y si tus intereses no son muy populares, despídete.
La lingüística de los espacios de fans también está hipercentrada en el inglés. No es una pareja, es un ship; no es un universo alternativo, es un AU; no es destripar, es hacer spoiler, etc. Incluso las siglas: en español es LGTB, pero lo que sueles ver es LGBT. Parece una tontería, pero esta disonancia cognitiva hace que resulte muchísimo más complicado hablar en tu propio idioma en un fandom. Por no hablar de las innumerables referencias a posts o a memes... en inglés todo, por supuesto. Como te atrevas a hacer cualquier referencia cultural no inglesa, no te entiende nadie. Pierde la gracia.
Casi todo esto se puede achacar al imperialismo cultural estadounidense. El inglés es útil para comunicarse con gente de todo el mundo, pero su omnipresencia sirve de barrera para todos los demás idiomas. Quizás habría que reflexionar un poco sobre por qué coño el resto del mundo tiene que tragarse años de clases de inglés para hablar del juego que le gusta en una red social mientras muchos angloparlantes no se dignan ni a meter un texto en un traductor automático y prefieren pasar de largo.
In every child's eyes lies a story waiting for someone to write its happy ending. Your donation today is not just money; it's a child's laughter, renewed hope, and a brighter future. Join us in wiping away their tears and drawing genuine smiles on their innocent faces. Your giving makes all the difference in their lives! (Short and direct format suitable for websites
🙏🙏😭 ✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #380 )✅️💔
This initiative is not simply a request for financial support; it's an invitation to join me in building the future and making a difference. To achieve this goal, I need your sincere support and encouragement. Your contribution—no matter how small it may seem to you—is the fuel that will propel me and shorten my path to success...
Every amount brings me one more step closer to the finish line...
Sharing this message with your family and friends may lead you to someone who will be the reason for its success. ..
Thank you for believing in my abilities, investing in my future, and for being an integral part of my upcoming success story. With deepest gratitude, [Nazmi
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 the second time I've seen a video of this technique and this explanation is so clear! It does use more fabric than English paper piecing (EPP) but you end up with a double sided hexagon so don't have to source fabric for the backing.
I'm doing EPP at the moment but I have a hole punch to make the papers and just use leaflets and junk mail, so it doesn't feel wasteful. I don't think it's difficult either- in the video she mentions it's not for beginners, but I don't have that much experience with hand sewing or EPP and I've been finding it pretty easy so YMMV
I saw this video yesterday and was seized with the need to try it out immediately. Lookit my cute lil' hexagon baby!!
Here is what the backside looks like. OP notes this takes more fabric than paper piecing, but that excess fabric makes it already triple-layered. Besides not needing backing fabric, I don't think you'd need batting for this quilt at all. It's already thick and soft just from folding all that fabric into a hexagon.
Hexagon quilt tutorial video by tiktok user camelscrafts. Method:
Each hexagon begins as a 6" circle. camelscrafts does this by creating a paper template using a compass. According to the video, a 6" circle will create a hexagon that is 2.5 inches tall.
These hexagons are hand-sewn. Thread the needle.
With the fabric right side facing, find the center of the circle by folding it in half right sides together, then folding it in half again (wrong sides are facing). The top of the triangle shape is the center of the fabric circle.
Make a small stitch into the center of the fabric. The wrong side is still facing.
Unfold the circle. There will be a small stitch in the center.
Now the hexagon is created by folding the circle into itself: Take the needle to one of the edges of the fabric (it doesn't matter which one). Pull the needle through and pull the thread tight. This will fold down the fabric and create an edge of the hexagon. Crease the fold with your finger.
This fold has two corners, one at the top and one at the bottom. Put the needle into one of the corners and pull the thread taut. This will create another fold.
Continue this going around the circle until all of it is folded down, creating the hexagon. camelscrafts notes that the last corner pulled in may be a little bit "wonky" (no precise point in the corner) if the corners were not done precisely. However, that corner is pulled into the back, so is not visible from the front.
The hexagon is now formed. Sew around the folds in the middle of the circle to hold the folds in place. Tie off and cut the thread.
Attach hexagons to each other along the sides. With right sides together, whip stitch the sides together.
that's a very good addition actually, a solid "you want me to ask people's kids about their genitals? can i have that in writing?" should make upper echelons very uncomfortable.
I always thought she'd be sent to the Agricultural Corps, but now I see why she wasn't. It's not that Master Yoda feels sorry for her. It' that she's already passed the test the rest of us will be facing — (Whie, about Scout.)
✨🌙 ART LOG -> @404ama
The comic text is from '3gatsu no Lion' it has been in my Jedi-isms folder for years I was so excited to use it with this theme T_T
From the Nashville Zoo’s fb page! Here’s the petition, please please please take a moment to add your name (even if you’re not from Nashville!). If you are from Tennessee, contact your representatives and make it clear that the people do not want this data center. This is an AZA accredited zoo which is home to several species of critically endangered animals, we NEED to protect it. Make your voice heard!
