This is not the kind of post a mother wants to write
When I look at this picture, I see a child who should be allowed to enjoy a beautiful moment without fear or worry. But I am writing this because I need help providing basic essentials for my family.
I am sharing this because I want people to see him first, and to remember that behind every fundr@iser_ there is a real family trying to hold on.
If you can don@te_, thank you.
If you canât, reblogging this post would still h_elp us.
Together, we reached the full $300 goal for my university application fund.
I honestly didn't know if I would make it when the deadline arrived. After six days of effort and one final extension, your support made this possible.
Thank you to everyone who donated, shared, encouraged, and believed in my journey.
This is not the end. It is the first step toward my Master's degree and a future I have been working toward for years.
Mahmoud is a gazan student who has been working really hard to support his fellow university students through the Isnad Foundation (please check it out at @isnadfoundation Tumblr), even as he works toward his own studies.
Here is his campaign link, because the road ahead is still filled with hardship.
éœçè§ć° "Boring into the tip of the ox-horn." edition
(Definitely boring for folks not into it!)
*
The alleged story is embroiling me in questions of grammar in a constructed language.
The beautiful Dai Bendu conlang created by @aroacejoot , @ghostwriterofthemachine , and @loosingletters on @dai-bendu-conlang, is very deeply constructed around being. Nouns are meticulously inflected for case, number, and even semantic category. (With explanations! Check them out!)
Similarly, the construction of the verbs and their tenses (including some wonderfully inventive ones) feels very reflective of a Jedi philosophy of time, and cause and effect.
As best I can determine from the resources I've found, the matter of verb-subject agreement is simply that one must specify a subject with a nominative case noun or pronoun in the sentence. Thus, one does not have constructions such as in Spanish: where the verb ending tells the subject (first/second/third person, singular or plural), and so pronouns are often omitted in a sentence. [E.g. ÂżViste la pelĂcula? (Did you see the movie?) ~~ The ending of the verb tells not only that the question is about something in the past, but also that it is about the person being addressed, i.e. âyouâ / 2nd person singular.]
As I'm writing, I often find myself wanting to write a Dai Bendu sentence as comprehensible without having to name the subject (especially in cases where the subject would be named by a pronoun.) (Not sure why that is. Spanish or similar languages are not my first.) Somehow the sound and sense feels smoother? But without conjugation of the verbs for person and number, leaving out a subject pronoun can lead to confusion.
Is it kosher for a random writer to "contribute" to a constructed language by adding new features? When they are not part of the team who created the language?
We've been meaning to make a post about it for a while but neither of us og creators are into Star Wars anymore or working on this language. So please, do as you desire and have fun with it! Change it, add to it - whatever your heart desires. We believe it is in the spirit of conlanging and star wars in general to work together and collaborate and just have fun with a huge world
I'm here after a long break, due to many circumstances, it's been a very difficult period, guys.
I hope everyone is well and safe, I miss you, I am here now because I need you at this time, as you know, my family and I live in a house we have rented and at the beginning of every new month I collect the costs here with your help, so that I can pay the rent and maintain the shelter that shelters us all.
I've done it many times, and you guys haven't let me down, but honestly I don't get much attention lately, and that's why I'm not always active here, but I love you from the bottom of my heart. My family has always been fine thanks to you, please guys, we need you so much now.
I only need $700 so I can pay the rent and keep my family safe.
Any delay from the payment date will be kicked out on the street homeless, life is very, very difficult, I use you guys.
Payment date will be on 10/06/2026
Hello guys, this fundraiser was created with the help of my friend Adam.
Our goal is to help ⊠Adam M needs your support for Help Samir
I will not prolong much, this is the purpose of the publication, as for the circumstances I went through, I will not bother anyone here, whoever wanted that, I can write to him privately and reveal all the details, I was injured two days ago, and I hope to be fine in the coming days.
Drug arrives years after pandemicâs peak, but could still offer protection to vulnerable populations.
An antiviral pill has, for the first time, been shown to prevent COVID-19 in people exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus at home, according to trial results published today in the New England Journal of Medicine1.
The drug could be a lifeline for those who still face real danger from the virus, such as care-home residents or transplant recipients on immune-suppressing medication.
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 itâs PayPal, it's easy and secure. Donât 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 âIâm a person and my name is Anakinâ showing his name is a central way he retains identity while a child slave vs âthat name no longer has any meaning to meâ in almost the same breath as âI must obey my masterâ 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
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
A mĂ me gustarĂa 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 sĂ mucho mĂĄs «nicho» en espacios hispanohablantes que otras RRSS como TikTok o Instagram, y si tus intereses no son muy populares, despĂdete.
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
đđđ â ïžVetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #380 )â ïžđ
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 contributionâno matter how small it may seem to youâis 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.
