this morning my coworker and I were evaluating some beans and I said ‘man these beans look pretty good’ and he was like ‘meh I’ve seen better’. top ten exchanges that have happened for thousands of years in every language ever spoken
art blog(derogatory)

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blake kathryn
Sade Olutola
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
we're not kids anymore.

izzy's playlists!

Janaina Medeiros
DEAR READER

Origami Around
taylor price

tannertan36
Acquired Stardust
Misplaced Lens Cap
AnasAbdin

@theartofmadeline
Stranger Things
Sweet Seals For You, Always
NASA
seen from United States

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@averixus
this morning my coworker and I were evaluating some beans and I said ‘man these beans look pretty good’ and he was like ‘meh I’ve seen better’. top ten exchanges that have happened for thousands of years in every language ever spoken
In Pride month, I think it's important to remind you of this iconic dialogue. You don't have to talk about who you are if you don't want to❤️
My latest finished project: a lined waterproof bag!
I designed the pattern myself. I wanted it to be easily convertible between wearing over a shoulder, and around my waist like a bum bag. So the strap extends out from the sides instead of the top corners, and has a belt buckle for easy length adjustment.
The main body is just one big section that opens at the top of the front. And there are two pockets on the front as well. All with double-ended zips.
The outer fabric is waxed flax/cotton. I designed it so that there would be NO exposed surface stitching on any seams, in the hope that would minimise seepage (although time will tell). I also built in flaps covering all the zips to help stop rain getting in.
The seam-hiding design was quite a challenge, especially with the pockets. I ended up cutting a hole in the front fabric piece and inserting the pockets as if they were panels of their own, rather than patches.
Getting the top zip flap in the right place also took some trial and error. The top is like the flap of a pillowcase inside-out, and the zip is not directly on the centre line between the front and back but is slightly down the front.
I added darts on both the front and back to give it a bit more volume with a smooth shape.
I also ended up using glue to hold the zip-cover flaps together. I couldn't think of another way that woudn't mean surface / top stitching.
Every single time I sew in a zip, I have to work out how to do it from first principles. My brain is just incapable of remembering it (but also incapable of following patterns/instructions). It's quite satisfying every time though.
This was also my first time making a lined bag. It makes some things more complicated, but also takes the pressure off finishing all the seams, which I like.
Even though I designed it, at first I wasn't sure how to actually carry it. I was thrown off because trying to have it symmetrically down at my side doesn't work (because the straps aren't at the top, so the bag just flops outwards). Here are the three configurations I've worked out so far: medium strap over shoulder with bag on back, long strap over shoulder with bag on front, short strap around waist.
All the zips are double-ended so they can opened from either direction easily.
The end!
Darren O'Connor
"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."
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Rebecca Solnit
Read this. The link to the paper discussed is here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922
i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges
there are four human activities and they are crafting, stories, math, and fucking around. whatever you're doing is at least one of those four.
im asking you to stay here. i cannot tell you why, i dont have any other reason except i want to see you here. i want to see you as happy as you can be. please, do what you can to stay. to find happiness wherever you can. i know that it is selfish of my to ask this. but i’m asking you anyway. take care of yourself. if not for yourself, then for me
Cedar Waxwings by jocelynefeizo1 http://ift.tt/1RM3Kk0
#do cedar waxwings ever eat anything besides photogenic red berries#do cedar waxwings ever do anything besides eating photogenic red berries#is there any way this child can get its parent to stop feeding it photogenic red berries
watch how many berries I can cram into this other bird
I designed and 3D printed a little bracket to attach these ikea mushroom lamps to the wall (I put it on printables to download too)
this site gets accused of being way too usamerican a lot but i wonder what the actual proportion is
are you usamerican
yes
no
some other nuanced answer (pls elaborate in the tags i’m nosy)
I made a little web app to generate xkcd 2501 edits right from your browser
Oh nice, now I can do my favorite dumb joke but more formally!
The world really is an astonishingly beautiful place. The sublime emanates from everything around you all the time. And like you can't actually spend all day enraptured by the infinite beauty of all that exists, because that'd get in the way of doing other stuff, but I do think that that's the right sort of attitude to have
"it's just stress" oh thank god, it's just the silent killer that slowly kills you, perfectly harmless, no need to worry
when you see a tumblr poll with this picture attached and you know it's time to lock the fuck in lest you get a bad grade in an impromptu absurdist pop quiz you didn't know you were about to take
best multiple of nine
9
18
27
36
45
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63
72
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90
re ehrc guidance. which is not legally binding.
“scientists don’t want you know” is a phrase that always cracks me up because if you actually meet a scientist they will be shaking and crying like an overstimulated chihuahua with the need to let you know
Stampaganda
[Not a real word]
If you need to buy stamps, buy commemorative ones.
Which is to say, if you walk into a post office and ask for stamps they will automatically give you this:
When, if you ask, for the same price per stamp you can get one of whatever interesting stamps they're doing at the moment.
Featuring such nerdy and delightful tiny pictures of
Cool old/cultural stuff like CASTLES
Movies and TV shows such as LORD OF THE RINGS, complete with a feature that's only visible under UV light:
Quite often, NATURE STUFF (landscapes, flowers, plants, animals, space, etc.)
Sometimes, SHAPES
Whatever they've got, I GUARANTEE it is more interesting than whatever boring stamp everyone else is putting on their envelopes. And the price is the same. Why would you not do that??
If you are in a post office to buy stamps [which is totally normal for anyone born after 1980, shush] just be like, "do you have any interesting stamps in at the moment?" Sorry, I know it feels weird to do that but they will know what you mean.
If you don't ever go to the post office or you feel self-conscious, check if your postal service has an online shop and buy cool stamps from there. A nice bonus of getting them that way is, they do still cost the same and the shipping is usually free because they are the postal service.
Unrelatedly
It is always delightful to get something nice through the post from someone you know and care about, right? You can just do that for someone else anytime, and it's totally legal and super cheap. You can make a postcard out of a cereal box, put someone's address on it, stick a stamp on it, chuck it in a postbox - and they will be SO CHUFFED to get it.
That's what I'm talking about!!!!