Happy Pride Month! Please don't buy pride merch from box stores or Amazon. Please buy from queer owned shops, and if you are on a strict budget please check depop or DIY before you turn to big box stores
If you're a queer owned business who makes pride merch (or know of some) PLEASE feel free to comment or reblog under this post and promote yourself
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Israel systematically targets the health of pregnant mothers and infants in Gaza. This is a reality every parent in Gaza knows. It has also been confirmed repeatedly by others. Pediatric healthcare professionals in Gaza have been bravely speaking out about how Israel is currently using restrictions of formula into Gaza to torture and kill Palestinian babies.
My friend Nader recently became an uncle to his newborn baby niece, Masa. Due to the traumatic stress and malnutrition experienced under genocidal conditions, many mothers cannot produce breast-milk. Masa, like tens of thousands of other babies in Gaza, relies on formula to survive. Today, Nader told me that this little girl is in the hospital now due to a severe chest infection. She is only 8 days old. Please help her.
I woke up today to the tears of my brother's wife, the mother of little Masa, who is suffering from a severe chest infection and is currently in the hospital under medical care. We implore you, friends, to help us get out of this situation and donate to buy milk and other necessary baby supplies for this child so we can leave Gaza. Please don't hesitate to donate.
Nader's fundraising is vetted (gazavetters #4) and supports his large family of nine people, including small children of which little Masa is the youngest. Israel's systematic targeting of children means that the price of formula, diapers, medicine, and other basic supplies are extremely expensive. Please help him raise the funds needed to help innocent Masa survive genocidal conditions.
While a newborn baby girl is fighting for her life, I'm pleading for donations. With over 300 posts and no donations or help, it's truly disheartening. Please, save us and save this baby. Please donate.
Please continue sharing this post and don't stop helping us. I thank everyone who has donated before. Thank you all, but our lives depend on these donations. Please donate now so we can survive, get treatment, and provide healthcare for this child. Please donate.
The child is still in the hospital under observation, and her exact condition is unknown. Doctors are giving her intravenous injections and feeding her milk from the hospital. All of this is very costly to keep this child alive. Please donate now and help us.
If the trash pickup people stop doing their job for two weeks you'd be throwing a fucking tantrum. Same for the janitors who keep your office spaces and bathrooms clean. (And that's before the various illnesses start to spread all over your city from the build up of pathogens.)
The people responsible keeping our spaces clean (and thus, mostly disease-free) should both be paid more AND thanked more.
My office computer has automatically updated and the damn company sent out an e-mail telling us about *wonderful new* copilot now installed and UNREMOVABLE. STUPID USELESS PIECE OF SHIT TECH POPPING UP ON EVERY PROGRAM. CAN'T GET RID OF IT.
PISSING ME OFF.
But yeah, at least I could access and disable this feature.
For anyone who hasn't seen them before, Hidden Search Operators are handy tricks you can use when you're either searching or filtering AO3.
summary: string is a generic way of explaining that you can search AO3 for a specific word that appears in a summary. You can do this from the search bar in the header, from the Any Field box at the top of the Advanced Search form, or from the Search Within Results box at the bottom of the filter menu.
Examples:
summary: Bruce
summary: "Bruce Banner"
summary: Bruce OR summary: Banner OR summary: Hulk
You need to put quotation marks around your search term if it is more than one word. The quotes make sure that the site searches for those two words together.
The other two operators listed work best in the Search Within Results box.
expected_number_of_chapters: 1 will return results where every fic has only 1 chapter currently posted.
You can use expected_number_of_chapters: -1 if you want results where every fic has more than 1 chapter currently posted.
otp:true will return results where there is only 1 relationship tag on the fic. If you want results where there are 2+ relationship tags (and no fics with only 1 relationship tag) then you can use otp:false
This page is so beautiful and honestly I hope it reaches and helps any new people that are just starting out on Ao3 because it's helping me and Iâve been using the site for 5+ years now
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Although not going by the term "asexual" yet, asexuality was spoken about alongside homosexuality as far back as the 1890s. Asexual history is just as vital to queer history as any other term and I'm so tired of watching us being treated like a new thing
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
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like theyâre gone. itâs the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
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.
Just a quick grab for some of what's being discussed:
"4. UNFATHOMABLE TRAINING DATA
The size of data available on the web has enabled deep learning
models to achieve high accuracy on specific benchmarks in NLP
and computer vision applications. However, in both application
areas, the training data has been shown to have problematic characteristics [18, 38, 42, 47, 61] resulting in models that encode stereotypical and derogatory associations along gender, race, ethnicity, and disability status [11, 12, 69, 69, 132, 132, 157]. In this section, we discuss how large, uncurated, Internet-based datasets encode the dominant/hegemonic view, which further harms people at the margins, and recommend significant resource allocation towards dataset curation and documentation practices."
"6. STOCHASTIC PARROTS
In this section, we explore the ways in which the factors laid out in
§4 and §5 â the tendency of training data ingested from the Internet to encode hegemonic worldviews, the tendency of LMs to amplify biases and other issues in the training data, and the tendency of researchers and other people to mistake LM-driven performance gains for actual natural language understanding â present real-world risks of harm, as these technologies are deployed. After exploring some reasons why humans mistake LM output for meaningful text, we turn to the risks and harms from deploying such a model at scale. We find that the mix of human biases and seemingly coherent language heightens the potential for automation bias, deliberate misuse, and amplification of a hegemonic worldview."
Unpopular opinion but if you don't enjoy the process you should find a different thing to do.
And I think this is true in general but now I'm talking about it in the context of AI.
If you don't enjoy making art and only care about the end piece and how it'll look and how much traction it"lol get online then making art is not something for you, find something you enjoy from start to finish.
Same goes for writing: if you do not enjoy writing and rewriting and then some more and instead want AI to write for you, being a writer is not something you should pursue.
Sure, not every part of creative process is going to be equally enjoyable but you should get satisfaction from solving the problems along the way and you should get a sense of accomplishment on your way of "making the piece yours" and you should have a sense of ownership once you are done.
None of these things will come from typing in a prompt into chatGPT. And I am sad to see so many people are missing on the opportunity to experience the joy of making something with their own hands and brains.
#this is so true#i know writers like to joke about hating writing#but like if you're serious?#if you actually hate the process of writing?#why is this what you've chosen to pursue#just do something else
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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. Iâm not the only person whoâs 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 didnât happen because Iâm special because of my tiny therapy practice.
This happened because this is what the AG office is for.
âThe problem is systemicâ doesnât mean âand thereâs nothing you can doâ.
This is a systemic problem but that doesnât 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 youâre 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.
Hello! this is my OSNT au masterpost where i shall organize my chaos! to anyone who is just finding this, ill give u a little overveiw of the universe ive created:
Leonardo is supposed to be dead. the rest of his family is dead. His brothers, his father, his sister... He failed over and over and they were the ones who paid for it. so he did the right thing, sending Casey back to that dreaded day to stop the Kraang invasion with leo staying behind to be sure his kid got through. and to maybe finally find some sort of peace away from the broken world he created.
But Leonardo is not dead. He wakes up in the hidden city of all places, untouched by the kraang and full of life he never thought he'd have the privilege to see again. and on top of that, he happens to stumble across four small turtle mutants. And maybe hes just finally lost it, but hes preeetty sure he somehow transported himself to an alternate reality of his world where some things are the same while others a vastly different. This is what happens when you listen to enough of Donnie's theoretical monologues, you start to think up some crazy conclusions.
Arc 1: "We adopted some old guy from off the street"
EPISODE 1:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
EPISODE 2
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12 (coming soon-ish)
ďżź
Other stuff that is related
Sensei
Donnie's crutch
um, source to children's trauma?
High score
Sick days
Sick days 2.0
CHRISTMAS SPECIAL #1: Ding Dong!
CHRISTMAS SPECIAL #2: cookie gift <3
CHRISTMAS SPECIAL #3 (last one i swear lmao)
"Go, do a crime"
Splinter? Q&A
haha the kids are dumb dumbs <3 plus a fan comic to prove it :3
ânever kill yourselfâ is such a funny phrase to me that i think itâs accidently started working. its like an affrimation. say ânever kill yourselfâ enough times as a joke and maybe you wonât try to kill yourself over minor inconviences anymore
text: [ âSome of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we canât do things weâve been doing for 5000 years.â ]
And they're absolutely specifically pushing it, make no mistake. It's not just a matter of "it's there, it's convenient, so people are going to take the path of the least resistance", but it is a legitimate and concerted effort on the part of these companies to get people to outsource all these things to their models.
They're preying on insecurities to do it. Yes, you can write an essay - but can you write a good essay, they ask you. Do you not want to improve your output? Do you not want people to think of you as competent and very clever? Why go through the mortifying process of failing and failing and failing until you succeed if you can just skip the "learning" part of doing, and simply generate a ready-made product?
I'm preaching to the choir here obviously but it's a concerning thing to witness nonetheless. My kid is 6 next week and I've been teaching her that failing at things is morally neutral and in fact necessary even before the advent of AI, but it's becoming ever more important that we teach the kids that criticism and failure and discomfort aren't necessarily bad things, but just a part of the growth process.
AI companies are heavily invested in making themselves relevant. They want people to believe they can't do the things they have done unaided before and make them become reliant on the AI models, so the AI models' existence is artificially justified.
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how about this: when i was 9 and my stepdad beat me until i passed out and i told my friends at school, my teacher over heard and i was interviewed by cps. they also went to my house when i was at school. when i got home, my step father was waiting on the couch, and told me who visited him that day. he told me if i ever snitched again he would beat me to within an inch of my life.
how about this: my mother locked me out of the house when i was 14 and when i cried so loud the neighbors called the cops, the cop told me i should have been respectful of my mother who was trying to sleep.
how about this. the demon you know is less scary than the demon you donât.
children in abused households are raised to fear the idea of being taken away. children in abusive households see that help makes things worse.
dont you ever blame an abuse victim for not going to the authorities.