Kimmania

[insertusernameici]

[unicornempire]

I love that Leverage really goes out of it’s way to show us that just because you break the ‘rules’, it doesn’t mean you’re breaking the rules. Rules and laws and society are all made up, at the end of the day, and all you really have is your own moral compass and sense of justice; is this just to you? Is it right? Should it be OK for companies to put people in insurmountable debt for the rest of their lives just because our medical care is so expensive in this modern day and age? No law or rule should change what you know in your heart is right and wrong, and I think that’s the key thing that makes someone a good person in my eyes.

[theheroheart]

#there was a time when parker wouldn’t have noticed, #not because she lacked the capacity to care, #but because she had narrowed herself, #to stay alive she cut off as many unnecessary things as possible, #watching her get them all back, #is one of the glories of this show (via @seananmcguire)

[jack-the-bear]

Leverage hands down has the best character development I’ve ever seen.

[lets-go-steal-an-ot3]

This scene hit me like a brick. My parents were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt when I was 16 bc I’d had cancer the year before (my treatment ended up being free but the initial ER bills and such were not).

But somewhere along the line they just… Disappeared. My mom says they’re not being paid and they’re not in collections. It’s almost as if someone out there did…exactly what Parker did.

Ever since I saw this the first time, I’ve imagined it was Parker doing it. That she and Hardison had a free weekend and decided to take it out on a collections agency. That I was one of the lucky ones who got a little Leverage.

[gay-jesus-probably]

Okay but like yeah, that is actually a thing that happens, albeit not exactly like this. I don’t remember the exact process but basically there’s a booming industry to sell peoples debt - the business you owe money to sells it to someone else for a fraction of the money owed, wipes their hands of the whole affair, and now whoever bought your debt is riding your ass to get you to give the money to the. But it’s also entirely possible for people to just… buy up massive amounts of debt for pennies on the dollar, and then just. Forgive it. Because capitalism is a living nightmare, but the system is broken enough that it’s possible to exploit it for good sometimes.

Like, the main reason I know about this is because John Oliver did a piece on debt buying a few years ago, and ended it by revealing that he’d bought 15 million dollars worth of medical debt just so he could forgive all of it. Both to expose how broken the system was because some random fucker like him could buy millions of dollars in peoples debt with zero regulations, and also just to take the record for biggest TV giveaway in history.

[mikkeneko]

A charity where you can do this, right here.

Be Parker! Be somebody else’s Leverage!

[melyzard]

Reblogging for the website.

[nianeyna]

yes! if you want to help with the medical debt crisis in the US and have some extra money please donate to RIP Medical Debt if you can. They’re completely legit and really do what they say - you really CAN relieve an incredible amount of debt for the needy with even a small donation. I’m a monthly donor and receive a quarterly report of the debt they’ve abolished, and it truly is amazing. Based on those reports the average amount of debt abolished per person is actually I would say about $600 - which means, if you’re doing the math, that with a $6 donation to RIP Medical Debt, you can potentially pull one person out of a poverty spiral - maybe even one family. For six dollars. that’s a pretty good deal, I think.

[bethanyactually]

RIP Medical Debt is now called Undue Medical Debt!

Undue Medical Debt Homepage

Undue Medical Debt makes it easy for donors to make an impactful difference in the lives of those struggling with medical debt.

[corvidcall]

to anyone in the areas impacted by the wildfire smoke, my #1 biggest piece of advice as someone whos been dealing with wildfire smoke in the NW united states for years, is build yourself a Corsi-Rosenthal Cube

they perform as well as expensive HEPA air cleaners, and are comparatively VERY inexpensive. all you need is a box fan, 4 air filters, a piece of cardboard, and some duct tape!!!!

i think it took us maybe a half hour to put ours together, if that, and we replace the filters every 3 months. it's really made a HUGE difference, both when the air quality is bad, but also with our allergies

[o0fyuu0o]

Saw these easy to read instructions on Twitter. Stay safe 💚

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

Great time to start pricing this out by the way, fire season starts… on the summer solstice this year, that’s fun. Signs point to it being a doozy.

[dandelionsresilience]

There’s also a subreddit

[goldengirlsgifs]

THE GOLDEN GIRLS 2.05 — Isn't It Romantic? — 08.11.86 Betty White as Rose Nylund Lois Nettleton as Jean

[shipperwolf1]

1986!!

[dovewithscales]

Golden Girls was so incredibly progressive for its time and not even slightly afraid to be loud about it. They talked about queer people, about race, about ableism, and they made it central and overt. They talked about things that mattered, and they never punched down, and they were allies off the stage too.

[dovewithscales]

Reblogging this again to add some context for anyone who may not know. In the 80's, being outed as gay could get you blacklisted in Hollywood. It ruined people's careers.

Bea Arthur and Betty White both suffered damage to their careers for standing up against racism and homophobia. Back in the 50s Betty White hosted a variety show that was canceled because she featured a black dancer and doubled down when they told her to stop.

[seymour-butz-stuff]

Time to feed unprofessional managers what they’ve been dishing out for far too long.

[beaniebaneenie]

Couple things here, for when you do this to people: 

1. if you get the “answer my call” text, NEVER ANSWER THE CALL. 

They are calling you because they want to have the conversation verbally, and be able to lie later about what they said or didn’t say. Force them to continue via text or email- force them to continue the conversation in writing or not at all. 

2. “Lack of 2 weeks notice is unprofessional!” or the other version, “Not providing notice is illegal!”

No it isn’t. Neither is true. 

And in the US, all states except Montana are “at will” employment (though you may hear an employer refer to it as “right to work” to make it sound better, it’s the same thing). Sure, at-will employment means they can fire you without cause, BUT! It also means that you are not legally required to give a reason for quitting, or to give notice of any kind. 

Is it polite to give notice when you can? Sure. Do bosses expect it? Absolutely. But that does not make you legally required to provide it. 

3. The only thing I would change in the worker’s interaction here was their response when initially asked to come in. 

Employee: “Hey Mark. Sorry I’m unable to cover the shift tonight because I’m studying for my exam tomorrow.” 

Don’t give a reason for your lack of availability. It may be tempting to. You may feel rude if you don’t. 

DON’T DO IT.

You do not owe your boss any information about what you do off the clock, and any reason you give will only ever be used against you. 

Boss: “Hey I need you to cover Jasper’s shift tonight.”

Employee: “Sorry, I’m not available.”

And leave it at that. 

Do not elaborate. 

Do not offer additional information. 

When you boss asks you to elaborate, because they will, be polite but firm. “With respect, that’s personal. I’m sorry, but I’m unavailable to cover this shift/work late/come in early/etc.”

Be a broken record- you’re unavailable. That’s the only information they need to know, and it’s the only information they have a LEGAL RIGHT to know. 

Please stop giving your bosses information they don’t need to know and don’t get to have, because they’re only going to try and use it to fuck you over later. 

[reasonandempathy]

My job is HR. The above is completely accurate.

[patricia-taxxon]

i love explaining the etymology of the word "rickroll" because the story starts with "ok, so at one point 4chan applied a filter to everyone's posts that changed the word egg to duck"

[maple-cloak]

[wrenanigans]

[croaksac]

grandfather....

[justalurkr]

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.

[irispurpurea]

This is the paper. It's excellent, highly recommend reading it.

I remember reading about Gebru's firing but I had no idea this was the paper she was fired over.

[idonthavepurplehair]

Chat gpt you will never be her

[geeoharee]

It'll never even be Bad Janet.

[catchymemes]

[segamascott]

got my first ever official customer complaint because when i was going over the terms of their life insurance they were like "well i don't plan to die" and i was like "well you're going to"

[garrett-hannah]

SHERYL LEE RALPH accepts her award for Best Supporting Actress In A Comedy Series at the 28th Annual Critics Choice Awards (January 15, 2023)

[thememedaddy]

[notaplaceofhonour]

Ryan Gosling’s career has just been one long quest to climb the Warner Bros water tower

[notaplaceofhonour]

that man has been trying to climb this tower since he was 16. he has asked multiple times, and every time they said no, but now he’s famous enough & variety was able to convince them to do a shoot on the tower. it all led here. it was all for this.

[notaplaceofhonour]

I’m obsessed with the implication that this was a coming-of-age ritual where a boy becomes a man, like a bar mitzvah

[babyanimalgifs]

for anyone that’s having a bad day, here are pictures of animals sniffing flowers

[heroes-get-made-deactivated2022]

A few more:

[goaliebunny]

@deansroman

[depsidase]

[barkingbarghest]

Here is an article from NPR about it (May 22, 2026):

Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click. "Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said. Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from. "If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."

And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):

While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model.  Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.

And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:

When Google first started implementing AI-assisted results, news publishers warned of “catastrophic” impacts on the industry, much of which relies on Google search to drive users to their websites.  Last year, news websites saw significant traffic declines as chatbots increasingly replaced Google search as the primary way to find sites and ask questions.  Small businesses also noted drops in traffic to their sites from Google, which has traditionally delivered customers.   Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy & research at Amsive, a digital marketing agency, warned as early as last year that Google’s planned changes to search are “going to have a devastating impact on the Internet.”  “It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,” she told Technology Magazine.  

[anarchopuppy]

noai.duckduckgo.com blocks all AI content in search results automatically

[mankillercalledbunny]

The answer to "How did these Ancient People do this????" is basically always

1. A lot of dudes. Just a ton of fucking people from beginning to end of the process.

2. Ancient people weren't stupid, they just figured shit out the same way we do: fuck around until you find out.

3. We're gonna plan this out and it's gonna take ten fucking years, and you will cope.

4. Sticks and string are surprisingly versatile and can be used for a variety of purposes, like moving stuff and making sure things are even and go in the spot you wanted to put them in!

5. I want to make this easier and more efficient to move. If I put this on the round thing and push, it will move. If I put this in water, it will move. If I get some animals and rope and have a whole bunch of them drag it, it will move. All of these things are a better option than one guy trying to pick the whole fucking thing up.

[mankillercalledbunny]

"I'm not calling the people who believe in this conspiracy theory racist" I am. They're racist. Maybe not out of malice, but the fact that they believe in this is in itself racist. These conspiracies are always about brown people. Machu Pichu, the Pyramids, Göbekli Tepe, Easter Island, it is ALWAYS POC. It's never the Parthenon, it's never the Colliseum, despite the fact that these were built around the same time as some of the other sites these conspiracy chucklefucks like to throw around, it's never something fucking European. It's always "primitive people" with "stone tools" and "no understanding of modern engineering" so "clearly someone must have taught them this or given them the technology because CLEARLY they were just too Primitive and Savage to figure it out themselves." Fuck off with that shit.

[why-must-my-username-be-clever]

Pantheon: Uses the world's largest individual piece of unreinforced concrete as a roof

Parthenon: Almost every aspect of it is curved to make it seem like everything is straight

Conspiracy nuts: Yeah that seems like something ancient people could figure out

Pyramids of Giza: One of the most basic three dimensional shapes made out of blocks that weigh 2-3 tons which could be moved in a plethora of ways as OP mentioned and is actually easier to construct than a cube of the same size because the structure lends itself to a built in ramp set up

Conspiracy nuts: It has to be aliens because the math is too hard!

* Side note: These examples were picked out because they're ones OP used. I realized that the way this is written could come off as a "Yeah, European architecture was more complex than Egyptian architecture" which is absolutely not my intention here. I just don't know how phrase it in a way that makes it clear I'm only trying to emphasize Conspiracy Nut Hypocrisy/racism.

That being said these specific constructions aren't really comparable to begin with.

First of all the Pyramids were made in a completely different time period. I'm talking ~2500 BCE vs ~450 BCE vs ~120 CE. Literally 2,000 year difference here, we are literally closer to the construction of the Pantheon than the construction of the Parthenon was to the construction of the Pyramids of Giza.

Second is they were built with different goals in mind. The Pyramids weren't meant to be fancy complex pieces of engineering. They were built to be impressive and stay impressive forever, which they did a really good job of considering that the impressive version we see today is literally stripped down. The Pyramids of Giza used to be taller with solid white facades capped in gold, the top layer was removed so it could be recycled into different building projects. Meanwhile the Pantheon and Parthenon were built to be impressive in a more pompous kind of way. A "look at our pretty and complex stuff you can't afford to make and are probably too stupid to properly appreciate anyway" kind of statement. Athens was insufferably pretentious about that kind of thing. If I remember right the Parthenon actually set off some conflict within the Delian League because because Athens used the defense funds it collected from the other city-states for what is essentially a vanity project dedicated to a single city's goddess.

If you want to look at Ancient Egyptian structures that have similar architectural complexity you'd want to look at stuff like the Ramesseum or The Valley of Kings. They're both still from completely different time periods compared to the Pyramids and well known Greco-Roman ruins(~1200BCE and ~1600BCE), but they're structures with more frequent use cases than "one guy's burial site". Well, the Valley of Kings is also a burial site, but it was for multiple people over the span of ~500 years so it was more actively maintained than something like the Pyramids. Ancient Egypt is its own branch of study because it just spans such a long space of time and between burying a lot of stuff themselves, constant looting (Worst modern offenders were the British, but they placed so many of their resources into burials that tomb raiding kind of propped up their economy by putting valuables back into circulation. The abundance of concern about tombs being disturbed, despite being a massive taboo to do so, was because it happened regularly), and tearing down older structures for their materials in order to make new structures there's so much to keep track of.

Which makes it even more insulting that instead of bothering to learn anything about this massive and complex culture racists on the internet try to argue that people stacking big bricks in a pile is not only unimaginable but also the most impressive thing they did.

[vex-verlain]

“I have a beautiful and alluring partner.”

Sherlock Holmes: “We solve mysteries and fight crime.”

Harold Finch: “We solve mysteries and stop crimes before they start.”

Sherlock Holmes: “We use deductive logic.”

Harold Finch: “We use cutting-edge technology.”

Sherlock Holmes: “I have a beautiful and alluring partner.”

Harold Finch: “…So do I.”

John Reese: *looks startled*

Everybody: *stares at Harold*

Joan Watson: “Awkward.”

Elementary/Person of Interest promo for WGN America’s fall 2015 “Prime Crime” lineup.

[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]

[ariaste]

Ok since i saw this yesterday I have grown fascinated and gone on a deep dive. First of all, Kim Beaton invented that concrete-and-rubber-fibers stuff she mentions. It is called Pal Tiya Premium, and there is a whole youtube channel with all the information about how to mix it and use it. https://www.youtube.com/@PalTiya She makes a giant sculpture of The Great A'Tuin and Discworld with it!!!

Secondly, it cures in air alone, no oven or kiln required, and unlike clay it has microscopic shrinkage between wet and dry, so you can pack it around glass or whatever. When she says you can stand on this stuff, yes, you can (though for very large sculptures or very narrow sections of a sculpture, she recommends adding a metal armature for extra strength). It is impervious to water, so it can go outside in any weather, and any metal armature encased inside it won't rust

Additionally, Pal Tiya Premium can be added to at any point in the curing process, even weeks or months later, so you can make a sculpture in several pieces and, like with a mold, remove the foil core you sculpted on so you can use it again and again (though you have to add a sacrificial layer of foil between the core foil-sculpture and the Pal Tiya (see the videos on the youtube channel about it). You can color it with oxides, concrete stain, inks, or acrylics, including exterior-grade house paint so your sculptures can go outside.

Holy crap. My only question now is what am I going to make with this stuff, what do i need to have in my garden, aaaaaaa