[wheelie-sick]

sometimes people experiencing psychosis and/or mania will come up to you on the street and talk in confusing or upsetting ways. your job is to either have a regular human-to-human conversation with that person or politely leave. your job is not to call 911. do not call 911. you might kill that person if you call 911.

[wheelie-sick]

I don't even have the energy to screenshot and respond to your tags- what the actual fuck is wrong with you? "the cops are scared and rightfully so" "mental health calls are the scariest for cops" OH so this isn't about the safety of psychotic & manic people this is about piggy feelings?

and no, actually, this is not USA specific and no, actually, people from other countries should not ignore this post. police violence and sanism weren't invented in the US and they are certainly not unique to here. if you (or anyone) thinks that this bullshit doesn't happen elsewhere then you are not listening.

[headspace-hotel]

cops r Some Guy with a Gun

do we want Some Guy with a Gun in this situation? answer is usually "NO"

[uncivilliberties]

This is legitimately useful reframing. A while ago I started replacing the word "cop" in my vocabulary with "a man with a gun." It really puts things into perspective.

This homeless person is making me uncomfortable. Should I call [a man with a gun]?

My neighbor is having a loud party. Should I get [a man with a gun] involved?

There are some teenagers skateboarding. Do you think [a man with a gun] would get rid of them for me?

It makes it very clear what you're saying. I can call a man with a gun to threaten or hurt someone mildly inconveniencing me. You're not calling the cops, you're calling A MAN WITH A GUN into a situation that does not warrant a firearm handled by a volatile lunatic who will not be held accountable for his actions.

[headspace-hotel]

^ ^ ^

[parthenogene]

as the economy in iran is rapidly collapsing under the weight of amerisraeli war, worsening sanctions, and indefinite internet blackout, queer and trans friends of mine are facing increasingly dire economic conditions. some friends and I are trying to raise funds to keep them afloat, particularly trans women facing acute housing insecurity

if you are able to spare anything at all, it would go a really long way. inflation and currency exchange is so bad that $50 could pay someone’s rent in tehran for an entire month, so every little bit counts

please write ‘donation’, and please don’t put any country or city names in the description 🙏 we are endlessly grateful for your generosity, it truly saves lives

Paypal: @nojin

Revolut: @nojanv

[victusinveritas]

CeCe Rogers on Facebook writes: "Two Black Tennessee lawmakers were physically escorted out of chambers this week while Republicans quietly held a hearing to approve gerrymandered maps that would eliminate the state's only majority-Black congressional district.

No referendum. No special election. No public vote.

Because they know what happens when voters actually get a say — just look at Virginia, where the people spoke so loudly that Republicans had to drag the courts in to override them.

This isn't new. During Reconstruction, Black Americans held more congressional seats than at any point in the prior 90 years of American history. And white supremacists spent the next several decades tearing that down, through gerrymandering, poll taxes, and voter intimidation.

150 years later, the same tools. Different suits.

The audacity of escorting Black lawmakers out of their own chambers while dismantling Black political representation, and then telling us the courts aren't political, is breathtaking. These are the same courts they're counting on to make it stick.

This is a coordinated, multi-front assault on Black Americans. And we need to say it exactly that plainly."

[fluoresensitives]

Personally I hate AI because it uses slave labor, is killing the planet and is making people stupid, but that's just me. The soulless art aspect is just one little piece of my grander disdain.

[castrolle]

wait how does AI use slave labor? Do you mean the human works that are stolen and not credited or compensated? Because technically under capitalism everything is exploited but there are varying degrees

[postillfastill]

Aside from the scraping, AI tech companies, including openAI/chatGPT, have outsourced training their models to countries in the global south, specifically Kenya in openAI's case. These workers are working in sweatshop conditions for less than 2 bucks USD per hour. I'm on mobile, but if you search 'openAI Kenya slave labor' and related keywords, you can find multiple articles about it.

[almostdefinitelydying]

Kenyan workers with AI jobs thought they had tickets to the future until the grim reality set in

Training AI takes a heavy toll on Kenyan workers, who say they earned $2 an hour to label and sift through gruesome content for American com

[danieyells]

I think about this so goddamn often. Even the good uses are trained on slave labor.

Wambalo and other digital workers spent eight hours a day in front of a screen studying photos and videos, drawing boxes around objects and labeling them, teaching AI algorithms to recognize them. Human labelers tag cars and pedestrians to teach autonomous vehicles not to hit them. Humans circle abnormalities in CTs, MRIs and X-rays to teach AI to recognize diseases. Even as AI gets smarter, humans in the loop will always be needed because there will always be new devices and inventions that'll need labeling.

 Humans in the loop are found not only in Kenya, but also in India, the Philippines and Venezuela. They're often countries with low wages but large populations — well educated, but unemployed.

The pay for humans in the loop is $1.50-2 an hour.  "And that is gross, before tax," Wambalo said.  Wambalo, Nathan Nkunzimana and Fasica Berhane Gebrekidan were employed by SAMA, an American outsourcing company that hired for Meta and OpenAI. SAMA, based in the California Bay Area, employed over 3,000 workers in Kenya. Documents reviewed by 60 Minutes show OpenAI agreed to pay SAMA $12.50 an hour per worker, much more than the $2 the workers actually got, though SAMA says what it paid is a fair wage for the region.

It's destroying the environment. It's taking advantage of people who're desperate. It's traumatizing them for dollars an hour--if they're lucky and they aren't denied their pay for no reason. I think about this a lot, that these people were made to look at awful and disgusting and illegal things for the sake of training these stupid AI.

"I looked at people being slaughtered," Wambalo said. "People engaging in sexual activity with animals. People abusing children physically, sexually. People committing suicide." Berhane Gebrekidan thought she'd been hired for a translation job, but she said what she ended up doing was reviewing content featuring dismembered bodies and drone attack victims. 

[...]

SAMA says mental health counseling was provided by "fully-licensed professionals." Workers say it was woefully inadequate.

It's just absurd and disgusting and infuriating. Yes the good applications are worth humans working on. It's not a bad thing--if the people employed to do the work are compensated appropriately and cared for. But so many of the uses are just unnecessary.

It just. Sucks. And all they'd have to do to make it suck just a litte bit less would be to pay people appropriately, give them access to the counseling needs they have, treat them like human beings worthy of respect and care on a basic fucking level. It wouldn't resolve the environmental issues or the fact that people are thinking less and less for themselves in the name of getting all of their answers from gen AI but at least they could do one thing to make it a little less The Worst Thing Ever.

[theroguefeminist]

I feel like every day I learn a new reason why AI is terrible

[circusheart]

cant stop thinking about this this was sooo crazyyyyy

[curtwilde]

Bisan says that among all the aid organisations working in North Gaza right now, Ele Elna Elak is one of the most effective, geared towards resolving the water scarcity and making clean water and vegetables available to Gazans.

Donate if you can and share.

[fragments-of-happiness]

My father always told me: "If you want to go for a run, go for a run, don't look for company. Sooner or later, on your fifth run or your twentieth, like-minded people will find you themselves." And only recently have I realized that this principle works everywhere.

[sioltach]

Terre de Monaco

[savagedefectives]

thin places

[smashingorpassing]

some organizations working on the ground in gaza right now

gaza soup kitchen

the sameer project

salam charity

watermelon relief

[uninfected]

[sustentavelimaginario]

You could write me someday, and I think you will We could see the sadness as a gift and still Feel too heavy to hold

[chanafehs]

every time massive wildfires break out in Israel, I just remember that the JNF (Jewish National Fund) has been planting non-native pine trees in Palestine for decades now. The JNF has been using greenwashing to disguise the colonial origins and aims of its organization. Sometimes, the trees are planted directly on top of depopulated Palestinian villages. These pine trees, being non-native to Palestine's environment, are very flammable. Just a couple things to think about while we look at the news of these wildfires.

[anarchistmemedistro]

Settler colonialism destroys to replace. As Theodor Herzl, founding father of Zionism, observed in his allegorical manifesto/novel, “If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct.”In a kind of realization that took place half a century later, one-time deputy-mayor of West Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti recalled, “As a member of a pioneering youth movement, I myself ‘made the desert bloom’ by uprooting the ancient olive trees of al-Bassa to clear the ground for a banana grove, as required by the ‘planned farming’ principles of my kibbutz,

settler colonialism and the elimination of the native

[dogrotpdf]

how’s that house that raised you?

[draconym]

The reason this makes the rhubarb plant sweeter is because all the glucose that would be spent growing the plant's inedible leaves is instead kept in the edible stalk. Omelas ass gardening technique.

[um-jammer-tranny]

rhubarb is a transmisogyny allegory

[vjeranski]

HILMA AF KLINT | Karlberg Palace, Solna 1862 - Danderyd 1944 | TREE OF KNOWLEDGE No. 1 1913-15

[raddagher]

Idgaf if you don't want to write essays for school. I don't care if you don't want to write corporate emails yourself. I don't care if you can't draw well, I don't care if you can't write well, I don't care if you just really really want to talk to your favorite fictional character but don't want to RP with a real person because you have social anxiety or whatever

If you're still regularly using generative ai, chatgpt or midjourney or character.ai or literally whatever the fuck, im personally blaming you when my utility prices start going up.

[jay-wasreblogging]

Why would utility prices go up because of ai?

(I am not defending the usage of generative AI/ChatGPT/Character.ai etc etc i am very much against it - I am just curious as to the correlation between using it and utility price surge please don't come at me this is a genuine question)

[raddagher]

Happy to help.

ChatGPT uses so much energy that the US is literally reversing course on coal and gas usage to make up for it. In Santa Clara, for example, data centers used 60% of the ENTIRE CITY'S electricity.

ChatGPT uses 1-3 bottles of water for cooling for every query you put into it. This is FRESH WATER, which is evaporated and eventually mostly returns to the ocean, effectively removing a lot of it from our already dwindling fresh water supply on the planet. It also consumes 17 THOUSAND TIMES more electricity than the average American home.

The AI boom wastes so much electricity that we are very immediately risking US cities having to have rolling blackouts just to keep up with the energy demands, as early as NEXT YEAR

Gen AI's water usage is projected to hit 6.6 BILLION meters cubed by 2027

More AI use = more data centers = power drain on local cities = gas, electricity, and water utility prices rise because all of our resources are being funneled into a machine that makes garbage

[sanstoitniloi]

"You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less."

- James Baldwin, The Artist's Struggle for Integrity