I'm Huxley, it/any pronouns. 24. cats love me, cishets fear me. lately in my life i have been spending a lot of energy trying to figure out my symptom disorders Despite it all we stay sillay
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
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.
At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields
technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.
Free Harvard courses.
Free Courses from Stanford.
Free Courses from MIT.
Free courses from Yale.
Free courses from Princeton.
Free courses on Coursera.
Free Courses on EDx
Free Courses on Alison
For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.
When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses."
Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.
If ur rx drug is 1) common 2) ideally non-patented 3) ideally non-scheduled 4) doesn't have specific storage needs (a la insulin), you can get it from the same factories that sell raw chemicals to the local factories that sell it to the pharmacies that sell it to you -- this works for medications other than hrt & it is not illegal.
1. Look up your rx on Wikipedia and figure out whatever the chemical in it actually is. Navigate to that page.
2. Find the CAS #. This is a universal identifier that will help you overcome language barriers.
3. Go on madeinchina.com and search for ur drug by cas #. If you are very sketched by giving $$ to a company that can be hard to vet, you can also go on like reddit i guess and look for "hrt raw suppliers" with good reputations and see if they also carry what youre looking for but that can be less likely unless its a hormone med. Tbh i usually just trust companies that make a lot of pharmacueticals and that have a digital footprint going back at least five years. Very very common medications and especially things like cialis id be slightly more discerning about sources because theres more profit motive in scamming people over them; running a scam for random pharmacueticals is just...a strange thing to do with a low hit rate.
4. You'll need to actually email a human being to make an order :( confirm the CAS # to make sure ur talking about the right thing. Doing a buying pool with friends can give some insurance in case it ends up being weird
5. Optional IMHO but probably a good move: locate a drug checking service in ur general region. If its hard to find, find your nearest harm reduction group or street medic collective and ask them to shake the phone tree for you. If they're annoying about it find the second nearest. Etc. Ur looking for someplace that has a Mass Spectrometer and will check out a sample for you. Idk why some diy hrt guides tell you to pay for this out of pocket 💁
6. Dosingggg (for oral pills other stuff can get more complicated see note at end): you can get gel caps for cheap on like Amazon or whatever and use a tiny spoon (made with tinfoil) to measure each dose with a milligram scale. It's easier to put a whole pile of powder on the scale and take a little bit off into the scoop and measure by how much the weught goes Down, than it is to try to weigh and then cap each dose. +/-0.5MG is usually an ok tolerance. If ur stuff is dosed by MICROGRAMS look up thr 4theives miso card procedure
6a. I hate doing this so the other thing you can do is look up ur med on pubchem by CAS# and see what its soluble in. Graduated cylinders are cheap and accurate so if its water- or oil- soluble OR ethanol soluble in a reasonable amount (like your normal dose could be dissolved in <5mL of ethanol), you can do oral liquids! Oil solubility you might need to just test at home. Work out an appropriate mg/ML solution (you might need to do some hands-on testing with a small amount of ur powder to see what amount dissolves happily in what amount of solvent), figure out how many doses you want to make at once, mix that much powder and that much liquid together, and dose with an oral syringe. Water solutions you want to keep for no more than 1wk at a time or alternately, the max amount of time you wouldn't be sketched by drinking water left in an unsealed container, bc even tho drug raws & plain water arent the MOST microbe friendly itll grow Stuff eventually. Oral liquids WILL change metabolism, alcohol solutions will change it most, water will change it least. Metabolism is already super duper weird and variable by individual so for a lot of oral rx meds, adding a small variable is not going to drastically change the general variability of the population that that drug has been tested in. However: don't trust internet strangers to know everything about ur situation and do some reading on the pharmacology of ur specific meds and make decisions you think will be good.
7. Keep ur head up and stay thoughtfully engaged with this process. If the reason you take this med has some kind of metric you can test at home, like getting a BP cuff or something, you should be doing that and writing things down. Generally its a good idea to track ur own daily health situation in writing. Apps are bad for privacy, we know this. There are also really interesting consumer health metric items available like little patches that test ur blood sugar over the course of about 2wks.
If ur already financially ok and pay some amount out of pocket for ur rx I think you should strongly consider doing something like this because it is a gamble and if you can better afford to work out the kinks up front AND stop paying that bill every month in the future, congrats, chances are even a fraction of those savings put away for like, a year or less are enough to pay for someone else you know to do it again and snowball into a better situation for everyone.
Finally: compounded medications, like epinephrine injections, are a bit more complicated than all this. You will need to look up the compounding information including preservatives and stuff, which by law have to be publicly available for all medications (this is what's on those box inserts for ur drugs). You'll probably also need to read some compounding pharmacy industry publications and do some other weird research to find a version that seems safe and is achivable in ur situation. This is still a process anyone can do but if you've never done it before, it will be a higher gamble/learning curve.
Just for reference you can do this for a lot of medications for under $20-$40 per person per year depending on what it is so even if your meds are ten bucks a month it can be incredibly worth it. Injectable hrt is even cheaper even with needing to buy extra conpounding chemicals but bc of bioavailability you need a lot less of it than oral meds
Another thing to do is look up how the meds you use expire. A lot of dry pills maintain >90% efficacy for a very long time past their expiration dates (the us military did a huge long ass study about this). Syntheroid specifically can be notably worse in 6mos past exp. A few drugs decompose into actually harmful compounds but the only ones I know about are antibiotics, you should check tho
One weird fact is that acutely lifesaving drugs like narcan and epi are a lot safer to use past the expiration date (*as long as they arent super discolored) because "use them until they work" is immediately obvious and built into how theyre administered; this is also true of misoprostel (the abortion pill/plan c). Navigating expiration with ur meds is a case by case sitch; a lot of stuff like hrt or a lot of psych meds you can monitor how ur doing and take slightly more if it seems neccesary. Maybe dont rely on expired birth control unless you have a good stash of miso or a similar backup plan. Make ur own decision abt ur own health condition how much of a risk it is for ur dose to go down slightly and plan how many years youll buy for accordingly. <3
After the earthquake/hurricane/attack etc every day people organically form loose mutual aid networks to feed, shelter, rescue, and assist. The rich and those in power get uncomfortable with this shift and come in to exert control. Often with violence or at least a strong threat of violence.
Rebecca Solnit - A Paradise Built in Hell for more on this
May 14, 2026 - Unions in Bolivia have called a general strike to demand the resignation of right-wing president Rodrigo Paz, saying: “Resign or we will kick you out – those are your options.”
The president's neoliberal reforms, anti-indigenous land reforms, plans to sell of Bolivia's industries and natural resources to foreign companies, and an economc and fuel crisis are the main sources of anger.
Workers have set up road blocks, shutting down all major highways. Workers from rural indigenous communities are marching on the capital La Paz. They say the long march is "in repudiation of the government that wants to turn us into a US colony". [video]
Just so you all know, my tumblr glitched egregiously so now every time someone reblogs this from me, tumblr takes me off of my dashboard or search results and forces me to see this post again
Living in Australia, I'm kinda always at the mercy of my posts lining up with crappy timezones, so when I came back to Tumblr and realised there was a fully in-built post scheduling system, I was very excited...only to happily realise that even with that in mind, Tumblr has a much more 'time-blind' and relaxing approach to posts.
It lifts my spirits whenever I see that somebody's gone through my catalogue or liked a post that had been put out days or even weeks ago, and it appears that that's a far more prevalent phenomenon on this site compared to anywhere else. A guy could get used to this more easygoing posting experience, although of course that's all thanks to folks like you! Thank you all.
BONUS:
I love this because like 99% of this kind of paleoart is patriarchal Man the Hunter type fantasies but these guys are just like “fuck it we’re outta here”
The best piece of advice I ever got was not meant as advice, but as an edict. If I was going to threaten people as a joke, it had to be so far out of proportion with what happened that it would be obvious I was joking. This changed how I expressed frustration with others. It then changed how I expressed frustration with myself.
Not “I’m going to hit you” but “I am going to buy a tuna sub from the gas station and hide it under the seat of your car”
Not “I’m going to kill myself” but “I am going to walk into the desert and let the scarabs take me”
The other side then happened. When I mess something up, instead of saying it’s bad and perpetuating negative thoughts, swing hard the other way.
Not “this art is terrible” but “this shall be framed and mounted on the wall in my museum exhibition as testament to the suffering I had to overcome”
Have been doing this since high school. It was my drama teacher who asked me to please stop scaring the actors. The other half of the edict was that I had to say it in a polite tone, and end it with either please or thank you.
Life changing. 10/10 Mr Muëller. Highly reccomend.
Which means you saw this, could have told me, but instead, you chose this course. You chose violence. I'll be adding you to the list of traitors to be embroidered in the tapestry of my throne room.
izzy806
discoholicmusic
kaledo-art
dededos
