Regnumveritatis

I am a bookworm, a history geek and a hopeless romantic. Proud citizen of Puerto Rico, die hard fan of Star Wars but unapologetic hater of The Last Jedi movie

[nkp1981]

Remembering Peter Cushing, star of scores of Hammer horror classics and so much more besides, born 26th of May, 1913. Here he is in a 1989 interview, spilling the beans about secretly wearing fluffy footwear while storming around as Grand Moff Tarkin on The Death Star

[felysha]

Jonathan Joss was an Indigenous, gay man who was murdered on the first day of Pride month as well as Indigenous History Month. He died protecting his trans husband. Homophobia and racism aren’t marks of the past, and this is a heart breaking reminder of that.

Praying for a safe journey back to the spirit world, Uncle ❤️‍🩹🦅

[felysha]

Today is the anniversary of the death of Jonathan Joss (King of the Hill, Parks and Rec). Jonathan Joss was an Indigenous, gay man who died protecting his transgender husband, on the first day of Pride month. Today we remember him and how he protected his family.

[useless-catalanfacts]

This song may be one of the most beautiful anthems in the world, in my opinion.

La Balanguera. Inspired on a traditional Mallorcan song, the lyrics are a poem by Joan Alcover (1854-1926) to which Amadeu Vives added music to in 1926. It became so popular and significant for Mallorcan people -especially in the 1960s when Mallorcans and other Catalans were using music as an instrument in their fight against fascism which has persecuted our culture and language- that in 1996 it was recognised as the official anthem of Mallorca.

It talks about a woman referred to as the “balanguera”. The Balanguera is a character from a traditional Mallorcan song who spins and weaves. The name comes from a confusion of the word “bolangera” (“baker”, a figure that appears in different folk dances of Catalonia and the Valencian Country) and “Berenguera” (the name of some dances of the Mallorcan “cossiers” folk dance).

Here are the lyrics in Catalan and the translation of each stanza to English.

La balanguera, misteriosa, com una aranya d'art subtil, buida que buida sa filosa, de nostra vida treu el fil. Com un parca bé cavil·la, teixint la tela per a demà. La balanguera fila, fila… La balanguera filarà.

The mysterious Balanguera, like a spider of subtle art, empties, oh, empties her spinning wheel and pulls off the thread of our lives. Like a Parca she ponders well, weaving the cloth for tomorrow. The Balanguera spins, spins… the Balanguera will spin.

Girant l'ullada cap enrere, guaita les ombres de l'avior, i de la nova primavera sap on s'amaga la llavor. Sap que la soca més s'enfila com més endins pot arrelar. La balanguera fila, fila. La balanguera filarà.

Turning her glance to the past, she guards the shades of ancestry and of the new spring she knows where the seed is hidden. She knows that the vine-stock climbs up higher the deeper its roots can go. The Balanguera spins, spins, the Balanguera will spin.

De tradicions i d'esperances tix la senyera pel jovent, com qui fa un vel de nuviances amb cabelleres d'or i argent. De la infantesa qui s'enfila, de la vellura qui se'n va. La balanguera fila, fila. La balanguera filarà.

From traditions and from hopes she weaves the flag for the youth [note: the word for “flag” used here is the word that refers to the flag of the Catalans] as one who prepares a wedding veil with hairs of gold and silver. Of the childhood that climbs up, of the old age who goes away. The Balanguera spins, spins, the Balanguera will spin.

[useless-catalanfacts]

Today, May 29th, marks 100 years since this beautiful song was played in public for the first time ❤️

Today at 8 pm, there are initiatives to sing this song all at the same time in every town and city of Mallorca.

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

"The No Kings rallies don't REALLY do anything" Cool. Do you know what message it sends to the people in power if less and less people are showing up to protest their actions? Cause let me tell you, it's not "More people are going to do other things instead". It's "the American public is slowly getting used to our regime and we should keep it up until they wear out".

Because if you can't stand next to people for a couple of hours chanting and waving signs, you aren't gonna be doing anything that would actually disrupt the regime. Protests aren't "permitted dissent". They're that ankle bar that you have to step over where it's not impressive if you do it, but it's really indicative if you can't even manage that much.

[ao3cassandraic]

Recommended, despite it being on *ugh* Substack:

How to View Protests like an Organizer by Tim Hjersted

For the sake of hope, by the way: each No Kings protest has been larger than the previous one. The organizing is working.

[mothric]

PSA: quick at home electrolyte drink

if you're anything like me and you don't feel heat like you should, or you live in a normally not-hot area that's currently experiencing a heat wave, and/or you've been sipping plain water for hours and wondering why your throat is still dry and you're inexplicably exhausted, you probably need electrolytes.

in this situation your best line of defense is gatorade or some form of electrolyte tablet or powder. if you like those things, go get those things, this post is over.

BUT maybe you're also like me and you find gatorade unbearably sweet (it also gives me a headache, no idea why), and maybe you can't afford the fancy tablets or powders

if that describes you, I just did the following right here in my kitchen:

grab a big ol thermos/cold cup/giant glass of your choosing (i think mine holds 2 cups of liquid)

throw a pinch of salt in there and dissolve it in a lil bit of warm water

squeeze half a lemon in (or 1-2 tablespoons of store bought lemon juice. or lime, or orange, any citrus works tbh)

add 1-2 tablespoons of real maple syrup OR honey (maple syrup dissolves easier, honey will need a bit more warm water to melt it)

fill the rest with cold water

boom. poor man's gatorade, not too sweet, and within 20 minutes of sipping it my "mysterious" exhaustion is gone. i am very annoyed it was this easy to feel good again after languishing for hours wondering why the hell I was so tired and shaky. it was the electrolytes. it's 90 degrees out and I don't feel hot so I forgot. don't make my mistake. now go forth and hydrate!

[hauntedsuns]

I made it and here's some thoughts from me (days after first reblogging this) so: Its way better than gatorade, but I may have put in too much lemon(i love lemon) taste wise the first 1/3 reminded me of unsweetened, but well watered lemonade– then the honey, which didn't dissolve as well nicely as I wanted to it kicked in (the honey and lemon smell together were very lovely tho,,) was a bit of a chore to drink due to the sweet&sour not mixing well enough in my try but I think that's user failure

Overall, I feel a lot better after drinking this, there's no bad sensory feel to it, it didn't give me the icky sticky feeling that things like gatorade usually give me– solid 10/10( maybe 9.5 but it was my fault I added too much lemon/didnt stir well enough)

[mothric]

I never saw this addition til now, but I'm glad to see someone tried this in the wild and liked it!

while I'm here and it's currently the month of March and still cold weather season in a lot of places, I'd like to add that hot water with lemon and honey is also very hydrating and not just for when you're sick! particularly if you have heat running in your house, it can suck moisture out and quietly dehydrate you as well.

personally, it turns out I'm chronically low on electrolytes for medical reasons so I've continued to drink maple-lemon-salt water year round - more concentrated in summer, more diluted in winter. I get way less headaches/migraines now. if I'm ever stuck with plain water or even bubbly flavoured water, I get a headache again within hours. bodies are weird! stay hydrated however you need to folks!

[thegoblinwitch]

we've been having a bit of a heatwave, here in scotland, so i uncovered this from my 'to keep for later' draft posts and made this.

life saver! super easy to make and actually tastes good. and resolves the pesky electrolytes issues....!

and since i am chronically dehydrated (remembering to drink, esp water, is hard okay) this might become part of my daily routine, as, for once, i actually managed to drink it all in a normal amount of time (instead of taking all day to drink the one glass).

thank you for sharing this op!

[regnumveritatis]

Coconut water is also a good electrolyte provider. It's used a lot to mitigate heatstroke

[depsidase]

[8nin]

"There's millions of Tumblr users" to you. To me There's only about 12 and we all reblog the same five posts from each other

[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.

[paddysnuffles]

Antoni Gaudí’s Last Original Residence at Casa Batlló Opens Following Three-Year Restoration

Discover Casa Batlló's newly restored Third Floor, a glimpse into Gaudí's original domestic architecture and design innovations.

Hi @useless-catalanfacts, you probably already know this, but I saw this article and thought of you. :-)

[useless-catalanfacts]

Translation:

Meet the Edelweiss, symbol of the Pyrenees. The Leontopodium alpinum, known in Catalan as the Snow Flower, grows above the altitude of 1.800 above sea level. Its woolly petals protect it from the cold and from UV radiation, growing in limestone and rocky soils, defying extreme conditions. It can live up to 10 years in its natural habitat, and it's a symbol of resistance and purity in the Pyrenees. Let's protect it! It's a protected species in the National Park of Aigüestortes and Estany de Sant Maurici. Don't pick it: admiring it is the best way of taking care of it.

Video by National Park of Aigüestortes and Estany de Sant Maurici (High Pyrenees, Catalonia).

[tsulasgi]

More pieces from the Vinita Cultural Center from last year's basketry exhibit

[datarep]

Time Lapse of the Land Taken From Native Americans

via reddit

[jisdu-tsalagi]

I will reblog this EVERY GODDAMN TIME so people can understand how the US government taking more and more land from Natives is nothing new (even the land originally promised after being kicked off their original, sacred lands) and they NEED to be fucking stopped. They need to be held accountable for the destruction of our people not just then but also now.

[spontaneoussagittarius]

@i-add-sources do you know where we can read more about this? (Please and thank you!)

[i-add-sources]

Interactive Time-Lapse Map Shows How the U.S. Took More Than 1.5 Billion Acres From Native Americans

This interactive map, produced by University of Georgia historian Claudio Saunt to accompany his new book West of the Revolution: An Uncommo

Article linked in the source reddit post :)

Also in turn links to the individual maps used.

This is true

[moniquill]

Fact: The greyed out east coat was also taken from indigenous people. It just happened earlier than this time lapse starts.

/Wampanoag

/The apocalypse happened in 1620

[captainhaterade]

BREAKING: Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service

The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed.

“More than fifty research and development facilities across thirty-one states. Gone. Consolidated into a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado. And ‘consolidated’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because what it actually means is that decades of place-based, long-term ecological research—the kind that literally cannot exist anywhere else because it depends on specific forests, specific watersheds, specific ecosystems studied over generations—will be snuffed out.

You cannot move a thirty-year watershed study. You cannot relocate a decades-long old-growth monitoring program. You cannot box up a forest and ship it to Colorado. When these facilities close, the experiments die. The datasets end. The partnerships with universities that took generations to build collapse. And the institutional knowledge of the scientists who ran those programs walks out the door, because the administration damn well knows most of them won’t follow a forced relocation to a single consolidated office that has nothing to do with the ecosystems they’ve spent their careers studying.”

[arianaderalte]

The U.S. Forest Service, Dismantled

Nine regional offices. 57 research labs. 193 million acres. An interactive map of what was lost.

[aetherograph]

Call your senators. Both of them. Tell them the Forest Service reorganization is proceeding without the congressional approval required by Section 716 of the Agriculture Appropriations Act and Section 421 of the Interior Appropriations Act. Use those numbers. Say them out loud. Staffers write down what they don’t recognize, and these are the provisions their bosses voted for.

If your senator is a Republican, the question is simple: you voted for a law that requires USDA to get committee approval before reorganizing or relocating any office. USDA didn’t get that approval. Their own lawyers declared your law unconstitutional. What are you going to do about it?

If your senator is a Democrat, the question is just as simple: the legal basis for stopping this already exists. Where are the subpoenas? Where are the hearings? Why is USDA’s general counsel allowed to declare a duly enacted law unconstitutional by internal memo and face no consequences?

Make them answer. Make their staff write it down. Call back next week and ask what happened.

(source)

5 Calls

[jerico3193]

[frizz01percy]

this should be the most reblogged post on tumblr before it dies

[leatherfag]

btw if you’re fat and your partner doesn’t love you wholeheartedly, if they’re attracted to you “despite” your body, if they avoid touching you, if they look away from certain parts of you, you’re allowed to break up with that person. look at me. you can do better. you are not unloveable and you don’t have to settle i fucking promise.

[leatherfag]

[Image Description: tags by user biblicalhorror that read #also goes for physical disability btw. End ID.] ALSO GOES FOR DISABILITY, DISABILITY JUSTICE AND FAT LIBERATION INTERTWINED 4 FUCKING EVER I LOVE U FAT PEOPLE I LOVE U DISABLED PEOPLE I LOVE U FAT DISABLED PEOPLE YOUR BODY IS NOT A BURDEN ON THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE YOU !!!!

[tabris-the-seventeenth-angel]

HEARTBREAKING: friends who i should be going to the movies and playing dnd and watching anime and cosplaying and going to the mall and having sleepovers and exploring the woods with live one hundred trillion miles away

[000l]

[shrewreadings]

like to charge, reblog to cast.