i've been trying my best to collect a bunch of links to other, more structured resources about the genocide in gaza, and what you, reading this, can do about it, that i'm going to compile here.
DON'T SCROLL PAST. LOOK THROUGH THE LINKS. REBLOG.
less and less people are talking about gaza every day, but it is still a very real crisis.
education, donations, speaking out, global links (masterpost)
links to contextual articles
for americans - state/congressional contacts
how you can help palestine - donations, petitions, campaigns, upcoming protests (masterpost)
non-politically motivated charity links
canary mission
petitions and congressional contact (masterpost)
education, current news, taking action, direct action and donations, current protests (masterpost)
small monetary actions
2700 ebooks on israel and palestine, available for free
thorough article by storiesfromgaza, dated 10/30/23
targeted boycott + bds
how to find state/congressional contacts, bds, email template, donation links
sudan and congo
egypt, us/uk/canada/europe congressional contacts
direct links to help palestine
educate yourself (twitter links)
translating gaza (instagram link)
bds/targeted boycott information
compilation of palestine info and how to support it (masterpost), dated 10/28/23
latest info as of 11/3/23 and large amounts of immediate action to take (masterpost)
history of palestine and israel - articles, books, films, social media (masterpost)
it’s crazy how when you’re 11 you think wow nationalism is the root of all evil and war is despicable and religion is the opiate of the masses and misogyny is everywhere and climate change is our most dire threat. and you start to grow up and you think well surely it will become more nuanced to me, surely there must be a reason adults arent breaking down wailing in the streets due to the cruelty of this world. and then you become an adult and you think wow nationalism is the root of all evil and war is despicable and religion is the opiate of the masses and misogyny is everywhere and climate change is our most dire threat
When I was a kid, I always refused to do the pledge of allegiance because I didn’t think the country deserved it after seeing the way my classmates and even teachers bullied the Indian kid who was always the top of the class. “Hit Rohit” was all the rage, and even as a kid it was obvious that the system was fucked up to allow it. He moved to a different school in 4th grade.
When I was a kid, I always complained about how I didn’t have rights and how I wasn’t allowed to ever make my own decisions. I had “therapists” who forced me to do things that hurt me and told my parents they couldn’t pick me up yet because I was crying and if I got to leave without calming down it would just make me Worse. They used their titles as “Experts” as leverage to abuse me, and my parents went along with it because surely an Expert would know better than a kid. I wasn’t allowed to say “I don’t want to see her anymore.”
When I was a kid, there was a Jewish girl who was allergic to everything. And I mean everything. Wheat, dairy, fish, shellfish, nuts, corn, certain food colorings, and more. One day, around Hanukkah, she brought homemade latkes for everyone to try. She loved them because they were part of her culture, but also because they were one of the only things she could eat without any worries. I remember how many kids made fun of the “weird name”, or called them gross even when they loved the awful fries the cafeteria served. She moved away that year.
The people who are saying kids don’t know what they’re talking about when they speak up against all this horrid shit are the same people who have a vested interest in making sure that kids can be controlled and taught to maintain the status quo above all else.
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
there are too many things happening this summer that i'm thinking we are going to need an extra 6-12 months of june and possibly another 3-4 months of july. probably no extra august as the problem should hopefully sort itself out by then. we are also looking into extending the day night cycle to 55 hours and extending the human lifespan to 10000 years.
I have a client who communicates exclusively via Microsoft Word.
If she has something to tell me, I’ll receive an email with nothing in the body, but a Word doc attached. That’s where she writes her message.
Whenever she wants to email me a photo, she does so via an empty Word doc with said photo set as its background.
But my favorite thing was the first time I witnessed her visiting a website. She had me spell the URL (“W… W… W… dot…”) and with my own two eyes I watched her type it into Word, made it a hyperlink, and Ctrl click it to go there.
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.
I saw an anonymous ask that got sent to an artist I follow that was along the lines of "I need an outlet for my stress, and being mean to people makes me feel good" and I would really like to say. to anyone who is mean to others for the thrill of it. I understand you completely and I was EXACTLY the same a few years ago. you're right!! it DOES feel good!!!!
and then you feel even worse than you did before. you're not "letting off steam", you're building a dependence on bullying, and you WILL end up with misery as your default emotional state. even if you don't behave this way to your loved ones, it WILL start showing.
I've had to distance myself from friends whose main form of entertainment seemed to be upsetting strangers over harmless disagreements. play a stressful video game. join a sports team. get into media analysis and get angry at a shitty tv show. there are ways to blow off steam that won't make you a miserable person who has a hard time finding ways to relax.
if I got out of that "get angry -> take it out on people -> feel good -> feel worse and need an outlet -> repeat" cycle, that means it's possible.
as soon as my efforts to escape that cycle started paying off, I was NOTICEABLY less stressed, I was VISIBLY healthier, and the urge to fight with people died down.
these days, I'm quick to delight, I find it very easy to be kind to people, and I can calm myself down before jumping to conclusions. and I can tell you with absolute certainty that life feels IMMEASURABLY more enjoyable this way. my good days outnumber my bad days 10 to 1 despite the fact that I still deal with the same things I used to, and those bad days are much easier than they used to be anyway.
but how do you even escape? what's the first step?
the next time you find yourself itching to lash out at someone to get that good rush of anger, try taking it to private dms with a friend who gets you! this stops the person you're angry at from responding and continuing the argument, which helps that reward-response feeling fizzle out.
from there, try a high-focus-high-stress fun activity instead of talking about it AT ALL. like I said earlier! video games! horror movies! go for a bike ride at full speed! let the cortisol and adrenaline or whatever it might be course through you until you feel calmer.
once you've got that down as a skill, you could even try flipping that anger on its head. MAKE something out of it. someone's artstyle pisses you off? make your own art the way YOU think it should be. someone hates something you like? talk with your friends about how that same something brings you joy, and why!
best of luck. been there. this isn't meant to be patronising or condescending. I don't know better than you. I only know how good it feels, and how bad it can be for you and the people you care about.
NOTICE FOR PSYCHOTIC PEOPLES LIKE ME AND THE NEW TOMODACHI LIFE: Please please pretty pretty please be careful while playing Living the Dream, esp if you’re currently unmedicated!!!
The game treats the Miis like they’re real people and makes zero mention ever that they are not, and only ever refers to them and their POV as if they are real and you are their caretaker! While playing this honestly messed with my head pretty badly at times and made me worry a lot on if I was hurting real people/not doing enough for real people while I was playing!
I cannot imagine how much worse this would be for someone who’s unmedicated, non-dormant, or experiencing breakthrough symptoms! Do please be careful and PLEASE remember to have a way to reality check yourself while playing the game!!!
Also: If you’re not psychotic, please reblog this anyway!!! It may not seem like a big deal to you but these kinds of things are REALLY important to know for us psychotic folk in a world that is both hostile and negligent to us and our needs!!!
I would love to share this with everyone who may happen to see this post. Please support this wonderful human being. He spent nearly a half century in prison for a crime he never committed. And the only thing that kept him going was his artistic endeavors. He deserves the best life can offer anyone ❤️
We need to talk about tumblr's systematic fatphobia.
Posts of fat people are being marked as "sexual content" even more frequently than they used to, but now we have this fun little addition as brought to my attention by a friend;
That's right. Not just blatant kink-shaming, but now, if you make posts about or with fat people, you can now be flagged as "promoting disordered eating"! Multiple completely innocent posts of fat people literally just existing in their own bodies have already been flagged this way.
Raise hell about it. Reblog and share fat content more than ever. Don't let this shitty website tell you that your bodies are "wrong" or that you aren't allowed to exist publicly.
Tumblr staff, if you care about eating disorders (you fucking don't), stop promoting this sense of shame and fear and disgust towards the idea of weight gain. Stop shaming and censoring people for posting about their own bodies and experiences. Fatphobia kills. Fatphobia causes disordered eating. Fatphobia is the disease you should be worried about.
This has also been disproportionately affecting fat trans people, because of course it has.
Don't stop talking about it. Don't let this bullshit ceo silence you.
Reminder, if you ever pay someone for a commission on Paypal (NSFW OR NOT) you SHUT THE FUCK UP in any text box it gives you.
(No this does not mean try to be a snarky comedian and say it was "bomb materials" or "fuck u" or whatever. Don't play with people's livelihoods, just shut the fuck up and don't type anything at all, it's not that hard.)
5. It’s hard to be offended when white people jokes involve bland food/tourist dads in socks and sandals/white girls in yoga pants obsessed with pumpkin spice/suburban PTA moms and other harmless and mostly true stereotypes while jokes about POC involve them being called thugs/criminals/slurs/uneducated/illegal immigrants.
6. They’re usually really fucking funny and don’t perpetuate stereotypes that will ever affect me economically, politically, or cause me any true harm, let alone create risks that “justify” my murder and/or death
