Backhanded Compliment

Why you worship sweetness? What virtue's there in weakness? Being pushed about is nothing much to shout about... Everything But the Girl - Bittersweet

[ostdrossel]

Curious babies everywhere! The House Finches are exploring more of their surroundings and are loving the hummer feeders for whatever reason. Same for the Orioles, even when there are oranges, jelly and flowers around. And I am still surprised to see both male and female hummingbirds right now. That has not been the case in my yard for a couple of years. This is so nice.

[xio2mara]

International Prospect Cup (2008) — Regina, Saskatchewan

[miamaimania]

“Envelope” (2014) ⊞ Caetano de Almeida · hand-drawn intersecting line grid on paper

[themidcenturyscene]

Grace Kelly

[spiny-ant]

If you notice there's less lightning bugs around then there was when you were young, you aren't going crazy. Lightning bugs/fireflies are becoming endangered!

Above is a video from one of my favorite youtubers, Ze Frank, that goes into more detail.

Lightning bug conservation is not being funded, so the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation requires donations to further their research. The aim is to establish lighting bug sanctuaries and begin habitat restoration efforts.

Studying these little guys has done so much for us in many different fields including medicine! It's important that lightning bugs are protected so future generations can experience that magical feeling of sitting in a field surrounded by little lights.

Firefly Conservation | Xerces Society

Fireflies are cherished, but they are also declining. Based on assessments published on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s

Please consider donating! Every bit helps🐝

Reblogs are appreciated!

[spiny-ant]

Summertime is approaching, prime lightning bug season. Bringing this post back because there's still work to be done! The Xerces Society does more then just protect lightning bugs, but butterflies and bees too!

They also have a free PDF guide on how to make your yard/property/garden as firefly safe as possible!

Conserving the Jewels of the Night | Xerces Society

Fireflies are some of our most celebrated insects. They have immense cultural, biological, and economic importance and are important compone

Long live the fireflies!

[totallynotalich]

I think knowing that Robert Jordan was a Vietnam veteran and had the nickname Iceman really puts a lot of the Wheel of time in new context. He was reportedly cool under pressure and didn't show much emotion so I wonder if he was like Rand just trying to make himself hard to the horrors that he witnessed there. How much of the internal turmoil is from personal experience.

[graysedai]

I had two nicknames in 'Nam. First up was Ganesha, after the Hindu god called the Remover of Obstacles. He's the one with the elephant head. That one stuck with me, but I gained another that I didn't like so much. The Iceman.

One day, we had what the Aussies called a bit of a brass-up. Just our ship alone, but we caught an NVA battalion crossing a river, and wonder of wonders, we got permission to fire before they finished. The gunner had a round explode in the chamber, jamming his 60, and the fool had left his barrel bag, with spares, back in the revetment.

So while he was frantically rummaging under my seat for my barrel bag, it was over to me, young and crazy, standing on the skid, singing something by the Stones at the of my lungs with the mike keyed so the others could listen in, and Lord, Lord, I rode that 60. 3000 rounds, an empty ammo box, and a smoking barrel that I had burned out because I didn't want to take the time to change. We got ordered out right after I went dry, so the artillery could open up, and of course, the arty took credit for every body recovered, but we could count how many bodies were floating in the river when we pulled out.

The next day in the orderly room an officer with a literary bent announced my entrance with "Behold, the Iceman cometh." For those of you unfamiliar with Eugene O'Neil, the Iceman was Death. I hated that name, but I couldn't shake it. And, to tell you the truth, by that time maybe it fit.

I have, or used to have, a photo of a young man sitting on a log eating C-rations with a pair of chopsticks. There are three dead NVA laid out in a line just beside him. He didn't kill them. He didn't choose to sit there because of the bodies. It was just the most convenient place to sit. The bodies don't bother him. He doesn't care. They're just part of the landscape.

The young man is glancing at the camera, and you know in one look that you aren't going to take this guy home to meet your parents. Back in the world, you wouldn't want him in your neighborhood, because he is cold, cold, cold. I strangled that SOB, drove a stake through his heart, and buried him face down under a crossroad outside Saigon before coming home, because I knew that guy wasn't made to survive in a civilian environment.

I think he's gone. All of him. I hope so. I much prefer being remembered as Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles.

Robert Jordan via Theoryland, 2001

[takiki16]

#the things that most explain WoT are that its author 1) killed a lot of people in a very traumatic colonial war#and 2) went to a rigidly hierarchical single-sex military academy FULL of men sleeping with each other#and then was like. what if I write a book where women are in charge because men are cursed to destroy things and go mad#like...yeah#the author is dead but sometimes the author's trauma is not so much (via @sixth-light)

[wakemewmut]

I forgot to take a "before" picture, but i just covered up the vendor logo and stupid slogan on this really nice and spacious beach/pool bag that i got at my last conference. I had almost enough of rhe orange and gold to cover the whole pocket, but i kind of like that odd corner. The poppy fabric makes for a nice pop of contrast and ties in nicely with the black bag. Might add a border later, but for now I'm pleased with the results.

Audiobook rec for an afternoon of hand stitching and applique work from the remnant pile: The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis, "a richly atmospheric parable of the pleasure and perils of female defiance", according to my library.

[partywithponies]

Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???

[urlocalpyshcopan]

as a black gay person real like where y'all be finding this stuff pass the name

[brainsforbabyjesus]

for real though, those DO NOT WATCH OR YOU'LL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN lists put out by conservative christian family groups is where I find all the stellar tv shows. Like, shit I didn't know half of those existed, thanks for finding them for me, gonna go watch 30 hours of gay tv now!

[infamousbrad]

I think I know how this works.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

Same as the journalists describing Black Rock City as all naked. Same as the right-wing religious culture warriors describing television as entirely mixed-race and gender non-conforming. Not because it's even vaguely true, we know that, but because they haven't gotten over their discomfort over the last one by the time the next one comes along. The anger, not the stimulus, is the part that's continuous, so their mind lies to them that it's "all" the thing they can't get over.

[kagedtiger]

Similar effect for the presence/proportion of women in things, by the way: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/how-17-equals-496-the-amazing-multiplying-women.htm

[luntfontanne]

everything is truly so terrible but i just remembered doreen ketchens playing clarinet for her infant grandson and then i was kind of okay again for 36 seconds

[1xtralmillz-deactivated20250209]

I have to reblog this when it comes back around.

[antoniabishop]

swimming

[transpondster]

Visit Original Link

Cowboy Junkies, covering The Velvet Underground's Sweet Jane

Anyone who’s ever had a dream

[classicmeevs]

dash is dead im teleporting to the past

https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard?max_post_id=606474489540042752

[classicmeevs]

2016 dash here

[cleonibbles]

2014 dash

2012 dash

2010 dash

[neververy4]

BEFORE YOU CLICK A LINK!

Reblog this post :) Especially if you’re on mobile, you’ll lose the post if you click the link without thinking. Take a note from your elders before you

[porcupine-girl]

Interesting note: It definitely uses whoever you're following now, not at that date. Even the 2020 one includes a lot of people I was absolutely not following yet in Feb 2020, which is actually kind of cool, I can see what they were reblogging from this fandom before I got into it.

[asongoftearsandfandoms]

Amazing how few of you there were in 2010 and 2012

[crowboy-bebop]

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

source: hellgate osprey cam

[curlicuecal]

[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.

[thewindowofthesummerhouse]

Joshua Striker

[fansplaining]

The Elation and Anxiety of Reading Fic in Your Native Tongue

For fans in Kenya, Nigeria, and Burundi, “uncringing” non-English fanfiction is an endeavor in decolonialism.

Our latest piece is live! The brilliant Soila Kenya writes about the dominance of English in fandom and especially fanfiction spaces, and why for her and the fellow fans she interviewed from Kenya, Nigeria, and Burundi, this is partly about the global dominance of English-language pop culture, but especially about the legacies of colonialism:

The deep psychological imprints of this language disparity remain. And therefore, when I encountered fanfiction, it didn’t even occur to me that there were fanfics written in any language but English, let alone Swahili or any of the 42 indigenous languages in Kenya.

Click through to read the whole piece or listen to a full audio version! And if you enjoy it, please consider becoming a (free) member or especially a paying subscriber—we want to commission more pieces from Soila and other smart writers and we need your help to pay them!

(As a reminder, we have a discount rate for anyone who wants it, no questions asked—if you're a student, educator, un/underemployed, have a lower income, or literally any other reason, just email [email protected] and we're happy to provide!)

[elizabethminkel]

This piece is SO good—absolutely worth your time to read or listen (I always love hearing the writers read their work, but since the focus of this piece is language, it was especially great hearing Soila read it). If you enjoy it, please share widely: I know what Soila writes here will resonate with so many people across fandom.

[bookshop]

Just seconding the love for this piece! It really is SO tremendously worth your time.

Soila was one of my favorite WorldCon panelists last year and here she's written a really thoughtful but also extremely enjoyable treatise on what can sometimes be the "cringe" effect of reading—let alone writing!—fics in your native tongue.

I found this piece so engrossing, delightfully wry, provocative, and educational. It makes me so happy and proud to be a part of this era of Fansplaining.

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

OP hand-drew hundreds of small cards (cr 小狐哥)