if your animal is lying on the floor, furniture etc, it’s important to take a picture of them. then, if they move or shift in any way, it’s important to take another picture. with this technique, you can take many pictures of your animal
Everywhere I go I'm reminded how much the desire to punish homelessness and migration and other Undesirablenesses make society markedly worse for everyone
like why is the park locked after 5pm so I can't go and sit under a tree after work? to punish rough sleepers for the terrible crime of being homeless and alive
why do I have to buy a drink, beg for a code and fuck around with an awkward keypad for 5 minutes in order to take a piss? because fuck homeless people
why do I need to provide proof of address and photo ID to do everything? because we had to create a really hostile environment for migrants
why can't you sit anywhere? well because god forbid people sleep when they're pushed out of shelter. can't risk that.
every day governments, councils and businesses make your life worse as a side effect of making vulnerable people's lives WAY worse. if you're ok with that you're a fucking idiot and if you're in favour of it you're a vindictive cunt cause again literally the ONLY payoff for your life getting worse is other people's lives getting worser.
not every mutual fits neatly into an archetypal medievalism but there are some mutuals that im like yeah addressing you as “my liege” would come strangely naturally
Scientists have developed a breakthrough “superfood” for honeybees by engineering yeast to produce the essential nutrients normally found in
TLDR- Modern agriculture pollen is low in nutrients, and there aren’t enough wildflowers. Science has to develop vitamins to supplement the diets of agricultural bees. So plant some wildflowers for the wild bees near you.
Longtime readers may be aware of how much I relish an excuse to bully a company, so I'm sharing the wealth;
Clothing company Patagonia is currently sueing drag queen Pattie Gonia for "irreparable” harm to their brand.
To be clear; Pattie named herself after the region in South America.
So Pattie is asking people to politely ask Patagonia to drop the lawsuit.
I'm extending the invitation to all of you, because sueing a drag queen for 'infringement' in the current political cultural landscape is vile.
Especially a drag queen who has raised millions of dollars for non-profits, uses her platform to raise awareness for climate activism, and fully aligns with Patagonia's apparent climate-conscious mission statement.
They're claiming they're sueing for $1. They're actually asking her to stop using her name, and pay over $1 million in legal fees. They're straight up harassing her.
In contrast, drag queen Jan Sport has a Jansport bag line. It's that easy to just... work with a queen.
Anyway. Be respectful(ish), but feel free to be annoying on Patagnoia's socials, asking them to 'DROP THE LAWSUIT'
This is being discussed heavily on Bluesky, such as here.
Patagonia is suing specifically for trademark infringement, and they're suing for the sum of $1. If they don't sue, then that means they could lose the trademark.
They aren't trying to "silence" them or prevent them from using the name, they're specifically protecting their company trademark. They'd have to sue *anyone* who was using such an obvious knockoff of their logo; in this case it happens to be a drag queen.
Go nuts.
The point is that this isn't a company trying to dogpile on a drag queen, it's a company following a standard legal practice to protect its trademark. Disney does it all the time.
If you get a soda out of a vending machine and it has a Coca-Cola label but it's actually a knockoff made with ditchwater, that's obviously okay because Coca-Cola is a huge corporation and it's thus fine for someone to violate their trademark.
You can hate Patagonia all you want, but the lawsuit is about anodyne trademark law, not specifically that a drag queen is involved.
if Patagonia loses their trademark, which they would if they didn't sue and win (again for one dollar), there would be no assurance against people putting a Patagonia label on amy dogshit
Oh my fucking god y’all bootlickers are driving me crazy.
I’m a law student specializing in Intellectual Property, which includes Copyright and Trademark. I’ve studied these subjects and the law is clear that everything y’all said about Patagonia “losing the trademark” if they don’t sue Ms. Pattie is absolute bullshit.
Trademarks are only lost if they are abandoned by the user or if the product made by the company becomes so ubiquitous, everyday, and common that people start calling all types of that product by the trademark name. This is called genericide, because the trademark has become so generic, it is no longer an indicator of one singular source. Think Band-Aid or Thermos; we use those terms to refer to the generic products they’re associated with. We call pretty much all sticky bandages Band-Aids and all containers used to keep things warm in Thermoses.
What Patagonia is doing is actually closer to suing for trademark infringement based on tarnishment, which means the infringer is using the trademark name in a way that makes the company look bad or associates the company with things like drugs or pornography. Queen Pattie Gonia is someone who raises awareness for climate and environmental activism. Nothing about Miss Gonia’s use of the name tarnishes Patagonia’s brand.
The only possible argument the company has is that Miss Gonia’s queer identity could be seen as not “adult-friendly” but that very quickly slides into homophobic and moralistic territory that will absolutely be shot down by the court based on First Amendment rights. People are allowed to use “not safe for work names,” based on caselaw that states that “labels that are disparaging or morally offensive” are a violation of free speech because it’s people’s choice to say and use those names. For example, an all-Asian band applied for the trademark name “The Chinks” because they were taking the racially disparaging name and reclaiming it. The Trademark Office attempted to refuse to grant the band’s trademark, and when the band sued, the Supreme Court sided with the band.
That got off on a little bit of a tangent, but the long and short of it is this: Patagonia has absolutely no basis for a trademark name. Any IP lawyer would say the same. The reason Patagonia is getting away with a frivolous suit like this is because they know their target is a member of a vulnerable minority. Miss Gonia is 100% correct that they are trying to bully her because they know she doesn’t have the money to withstand a years-long expensive lawsuit.
It’s because of idiotic bootlickers who kiss companies’ asses like this that big corporations can get away with hurting independent creators. Patagonia does not have any chance at winning, but they know that just by filing and announcing their lawsuit against Miss Gonia, they are putting pressure on her to give up. If this lawsuit goes on, even if it doesn’t make it to court and just goes to a judge for a quick summary judgment, Miss Gonia would still have to pay for a lawyer to defend her and lawyers cost more money than the average person has. Miss Gonia would win, but because Patagonia set the damages for $1, even if she did win, she’d still end up in debt because in America, the typical rule is that each party pays for the cost of their own attorney’s fees. The only time the opposing side would pay your lawyer’s fees is if you have a contract with them that says so, and that’s usually only used in contracts between businesses or high profile individuals.
What Patagonia is doing is capitalizing on society’s hatred for queer people and anyone resembling a trans woman. Miss Gonia is a drag queen, not trans as far as I’m aware (though please do correct me if I’m wrong) but it’s not like a big company cares to differentiate; they’re just mad that a queer person is using their name in a way they don’t like. Patagonia knows that this particular population has been facing harsh discrimination in society currently. By siding with them, people are actively harming the queer community. Don’t pretend to hide behind trademark law to cover up your prejudices.
Ok so my kid had an ear infection, right? As kids often do.
The doctor scraped out a bit of earwax to have a better look inside.
I was sent a bill for $200 PER EAR for this 5 second procedure which I did not give permission for them to do.
That was key- they did not ASK me if they could do this "procedure". And, as I OWN a medical practice (it's me. The medical practice is me, sitting in my house on video calls) I knew to call them when this bill came in to be like "You did not obtain informed consent for this procedure, and it was not en emergency procedure. You had full ability to gain my consent and didn't. I'm not paying."
And the massive hospital who owned the bill said "yuh-huh you do have to pay."
And I said "I own a practice. I know these laws. I do not owe you money for this."
And they conducted an "internal review" and SURPRISE! Decided I totally owed them money and they had never done anything wrong ever.
And so I called my state's Attorney General office, and explained the situation because, as I mentioned, I know the law. The AG got in touch within a couple days to say they were taking the case and would send the massive hospital conglomerate a knock it off, guys letter.
Lo and Behold, today I have a letter where said hospital graciously has agreed to forfeit the payment.
"How not to get screwed over by companies" should be part of civics class.
Know your rights and know who to call when they're infringed on. This whole process cost me $0 and honestly less effort than I would have expected.
May this knowledge find its way to someone else who can use it.
This post is super cute and all but like.... This isn't practical advice. I called the AG???? And they got involved over a $200 bill. Maybe because you yourself are a medical practitioner. Not just your knowledge but also your status.
Civics class wouldn't help most people in this case because the AG will not take on all these cases and most people cannot afford an attorney in this instance or more importantly, the hit to their credit.
The issue is not education over the system, it is the system
I agree the system is a mess but I think education does matter because people seem not to know that this is actually perfectly routine AG office stuff. I’m not the only person who’s done this- this is just what they do?
Were they going to get into a lawsuit over my $400 bill? No obviously not. But they printed up a letter on fancy letterhead to say to stop and it worked. They followed up with me the next day to be sure, and so ask how much money they had saved me.
They use dinky cases like mine to track habitual misbehavior of large scale companies to build cases they could actually go to court over.
And because people are shocked- I never spoke to the AG of my state directly. He operates mainly by overseeing a whole crew of people. And this is what those people do.
This didn’t happen because I’m special because of my tiny therapy practice.
This happened because this is what the AG office is for.
“The problem is systemic” doesn’t mean “and there’s nothing you can do”.
This is a systemic problem but that doesn’t mean there are no resources to help.
Thank you for clapping back on this. I'm here to reinforce. Yes, you CAN call your state Attorney General office when an entity is doing something illegal, even if it's "only" for $400. You think they don't care a hospital is doing a crime because it's not a big enough crime?
Then you've been trained well by "The System".
Yes, that System you say can't be fought? Where did you get that idea, huh? Who taught you that "small" acts of illegality don't matter? Who made you think that there's no point in fighting back because it will all come to nothing?
Might it be the same entities that benefit if you believe all that?
Gonna pause and let you ponder.
Never. Ever. EVER.
EVER.
Let companies or corporations or hospitals or organizations or any business big or small get away with screwing you over without a fight. Maybe you personally don't win every fight, but you lose 100% of the time you don't try. You'll win more often than you think you will. I know cuz I've done it.
So have others. Attorneys General offices bring lawsuits against businesses all the time. They do so because citizens contacted them to say "someone is doing a crime" and the crime doers did not stop when told and got into way more trouble than if they'd just stopped. FAFO. The Find Out can't happen if you don't even bother to report the Fucking Around.
On that note, as OP said, please know your rights! And, in a situation where you don't but suspect something is hinky, ask! The people of the internet can help! So can librarians! So can many others. Find out what is and is not okay for them to do. If it's not okay, report them! See something, say something.
Additionally, pay attention to State Attorney elections! Here in Minnesota, our AG Keith Ellison has made it a POINT to go after slumlords, has created an entire UNIT in the AG office dedicated to wage theft, and gone after debt relief for people who were conned by those scummy fake universities. And despite MN being a blue state, one of his elections was a fucking NAIL-BITER.
Absolutely fight the system, absolutely go to your AG office if you’re being screwed over, and also pay attention to the people running for AG in the first place.
Government of the people, by the people, and for the people only works if the people make it work. That's you! You're the people.
"Don't bother doing anything because nothing will happen" confused cause with effect: it's really "Nothing will happen if you don't bother doing anything." Yeah, I know, it's a travesty that they don't hand you psychic powers when you take your oath as a civil servant, but until we fix that clear defect in our democracy: you're serving the public, too, when you report fuckers like this.
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.
that pistachio completely sealed in its shell is scared and alone, like a miner trapped by rubble. you need to free it by any means necessary. get the gun from your dad's cabinet
“In the circumstances, Sergeant, I think we should set our sights a little higher —'
'Well, yes, we could,' said Vimes, coming down the steps. He glanced at the sheets of papers in front of Reg. The man cared. He really did. And he was serious. He really was. 'But...well, Reg, tomorrow the sun will come up again, and I'm pretty sure that whatever happens we won't have found Freedom, and there won't be a whole lot of Justice, and I'm damn sure we won't have found Truth. But it's just possible that I might get a hard-boiled egg.“
Pre-menstrual depression is always depicted as like "He He! I had a box of icecream bars and cried while watching the Titanic!" But in reality, it's more like, "I'm standing the edge of an abyss. There is nothing good inside of me, I'm filled with rage and desperation."
It's crazy that being told how to deal with that is never a part of anyone's menstrual sex education.
This has already been said in the notes, but if PMS causes extreme depression and even suicidal ideation, that is in fact something that most people do not experience and it can be treated
Like for the majority it really is "oh i'm hungrier and moodier than usual"
^this should be a part of sex education so the point still stands
I went to my doctor after I was walking to work one morning and saw a bus coming and actually took a step to throw myself in front of it before I pulled myself together. Later that day I started bleeding and was literally like someone flipped a switch and I didn't feel suicidal anymore. Which made me feel like I was loosing my mind because who goes from 'I want to throw myself in front of a bus' to 'I'm perfectly fine' just like that? I did some research, I went to the doctor and described my feelings, he looked me in the eye and gently asked what I thought it was, I said I'd read about PMDD and I thought it might be that, he said 'I think so too' and wrote a prescription.
If, before you get your period, you feel furiously angry, suicidal, irritated by every tiny thing to the point you want to murder someone, stuck in a black hole you'll never escape from. If you are experiencing extreme emotions for what seems like no good reason, especially if you get your period and those extreme emotions just go away. You're probably not just PMSing , you may have PMS's feral big sister PMDD and it's treatable.
Also this is something that can develop as you get older. So if you used to get normal PMS but what I wrote above sounds more like your norm now then don't just write it off as regular PMS.
I realize this is an animal crossing meme but as an astrophysicist I was really excited for a second that someone was finally seeing the light on how fricking difficult and a huge waste of time it would be to try to terraform Mars
theartofmadeline
germansingergirl
kaledo-art
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
blakekathryn
snowghoul
origamiaround
dededos
