[tanadrin]

would be fun if language acquisition echoed language evolution a la recapitulation theory. kids going through an indo european phase.

[jadagul]

https://xkcd.com/2567/

[tanadrin]

fuuuuuck there really is an xkcd for everything

[bigscaryd]

Quick put an animal book in front of him and ask him what this guy is

[nordenflycht]

there's an xkcd for that also

[keepcalmandcarriefischer]

[pisshandkerchief]

there are corners of this website where the year is still 2013. and sometimes, on beautiful nights when the veil is thin, you can find them . if you know where to look

[robotginkgo]

sometimes it’s not just corners it’s the whole dang sky

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Black Legion Chaos Champion by John Blanche

[robotginkgo]

Warhammer is at it best when it gets close to this.

[moociao-after-dark]

Rest in peace, John Blanche

The father of Warhammer 40k art direction and the man that has inspired me as an artist, down to inspiring my current artstyle (and I am sure will continue to inspire me, even in death). 40k just wouldn't be 40k had it not been for the foundation of grimdark sci-fi that he laid.

Farewell, you absolute legend.

[muntzerism-diggerism]

[robotginkgo]

Tag your favourite team!

ants

[slowlikehoney1996]

If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earthquake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

[world-heritage-posts]

what if people made human versions of iconic tumblr posts and shipped them

no. no no no

[practicalsolutions]

Someone please draw the color of the sky as a very tall twink.

[practicalsolutions]

Oh shit, I'm an artist. Hold up.

Personally, I like his shoe laces. I bet you'd never guess where he got them.

[raspbrrytea]

Dunno if anyone’s done this yet but…

[mrdyketator]

i love how this is so uniquely Tumblr™ that no one from any other website would get this.

[tassjis]

Im... Im not sorry

[tassjis]

I decided to make it worse 

[tassjis]

Sexy Leg Einstein Post

Gradient Zone Post

and MishaPocolypse join the group

[anon-fire-rat-supporter]

color theory hospital post

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I want you all to know that I despise every single one of you.

[sepdet]

Can I interest you in some fine copper ingots

[kindlingnorah]

[flamingfoxninja]

He has survived Plinko Hell and back with a vengeance

[ianquish-deactivated20250806]

where is spiders georg guys

[thepoolisdead]

Dw I gotchu

[icecream-noodle]

Australia's latest Federal Anti-trans bill

On Monday Nationals MP Alison Penfold introduce this private bill to federal parliament in an attempt to reshape the Sex Discrimination Act to target trans people while claiming not to target trans people

Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sex-based Rights) Bill 2026

Helpful information Text of bill First reading: Text of the bill as introduced into the Parliament Third reading: Prepared if the

Transcript of second reading

[icecream-noodle]

Please help spread this petition far and wide for visibility The above reactionary bill was made in retaliation towards a trans woman winning a case in federal court against transphobes so now they're accellerating to hurt us all (Giggle Vs Tickle)

Hands off our protections

Hands off our Protections Our communities are facing some of the most serious attacks on our rights and protections in many years.  Right no

[cerisery]

Please sign that petition if you can, this bill is worse than it seems. Its primary purpose is to exclude trans women from women's spaces, including bathrooms, prisons, homeless shelters, and sports. It also cements transphobic, intersexist, and acephobic beliefs that are already somewhat present in Australia's law.

It is worth noting that this bill is being pushed by the National party, one of Australia's main right-wing parties. The party currently in power is the Labour party, our biggest left-wing/centrist party. The party pushing for this bill does not have the votes needed to pass it, and thus either needs to convince centrists to agree with them or are doing this to curry favour for the next election or some other goal.

When it comes to the bill itself, they are defining anything relating to one's sex in terms of the sex binary in a way which excludes intersex people in many ways. They also are changing the definition of sexual attraction, and the main change this makes is an exclusion of non-binary people in attraction. However, it is also worded so a trans woman lesbian is considered straight, and their definition also doesn't properly include asexual people. Those wording issues are already present in the original law, however.

They are also explicitly stating that it's okay to discriminate against transfems in women's spaces of any kind, including prisons, bathrooms, homeless shelters, and sports. That is the main change being pushed for.

[icecream-noodle]

(Source) and (Source) ^ This

[icecream-noodle]

Keep reblogging this please to help gain attention to the issue! Labor, the majority government, have been especially quiet about this issue while right wing media has pumped out tons of anti-trans political puff pieces while only one Greens member and one Independant member have spoken up!

Email or call your local MP if you can and tell them they need to publically push back and press them on the harm this bills mere existence is causing! Lately Labors silence on issues is not a good one and they are far from being functional enough for the people since doubling down on right wing policy. A simple reminder: Labor is not your friend, they're bought out and working for someone else

[justmaghookit]

You can also email and call your state member, not just your federal one as if they get enough complaints they may additionally bother the federal MP on your behalf! Make noise at all levels of government!

If you don't know who your member is you can use this link to look up both state and federal members, just use your postcode or suburb to check.

https://www.reignitedemocracyaustralia.com.au/findmymp/

[leidensygdom]

me of late

[robotginkgo]

cronanamonmt

[buggbuzz]

it is bird time once again!! only 6 more orders left to go :)

also my mentor helped reintroduce peregrine falcons to the NY/NJ area after we lost our subspecies to DDT so i want everyone to say "thank you peter"

[bestiolin]

nakkusu

[robotginkgo]

Biiiiiiig

[lovely-v]

I’m gonna propose “I guess you haven’t read the silmarillion then :/” as a default response to anyone not understanding a reference to something obscure. even if it’s not remotely Tolkien related. I want to build up a perception that perhaps the sum total of human knowledge is contained in the silmarillion

[lovely-v]

[10-4ward]

This is the polar opposite of this:

[froginakettle]

[myonlypen]

[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.

[medaknight4]

Here's a link to the paper

And a link to the Wikipedia entry for the phenomenon the paper covers

[dovesick]

various types of pigeons

[megacarapa]

ok so this is another long shot but a few years ago there was a twitter post (in japanese i think?) that had measurememts for how to make this book stand thing out of cardboard that you could use to double up books and use up more space on shelves

back then i made a bunch of these but by now i lost the pic and dont know how to find the original post anymore

if it comes down to it i can just take one apart and get the measurements from there but i would be very grateful if anyone happens to have the original post or something similar??

[megacarapa]

don't mind how long it's been since i made this post, anyway i realized that i don't even need to take one apart to get the measurements when i can literally just unfold it and refold it /FACEPALM

so anyway here is the diagram for anyone else who is interested!!

this requires pretty big carboard pieces, if you have a really big box or something you can make it from one piece, but if you don't, you can also just make each of the pieces individually and then tape them together

and then in the end you put it together like this!!

and then when you make a bunch you can put them all next to each other and stack your books like crazy

EVERYONE START GETTING MORE USE OUT OF YOUR SPACE NOW!!!!

[crippledgiraff]

Vraks? Badab? Angstrom? All these shitholes look the same after a while...

[crippledgiraff]

No...

No...

No...

Angstrom... Angstrom was something else. Hunting and being hunted by the machine men through their factory labyrinths...

[robotginkgo]

Sometimes warhammer is kinda cool, it is unfortunate.

[smoreofbabylon]

he’s just like me fr

[robotginkgo]

The only good poster