I am a bookworm, a history geek and a hopeless romantic. Proud citizen of Puerto Rico, die hard fan of Star Wars but unapologetic hater of The Last Jedi movie
đ I am a father of five, and I live with my wife and children in extremely harsh conditions. We are seven people trying to survive day after day amidst the ongoing war in Gaza.
Hussam is a father, a husband and a survivor.
đď¸ Many people think the war is over, but for us, it hasn't. It may have disappeared from the news screens, but the truth is that the danger persists, displacement and forced migration are still a part of our lives, and fear is our constant companion.
đ¨âđŠâđ§âđŚ I cannot go to work or provide for my family's needs because I stay in the tent to protect and care for my children in these difficult circumstances.
đź My youngest daughter desperately needs milk. đś She also needs diapers and clothes. đ I am unable to provide these basic necessities for her.
đ I am writing these words and appealing to anyone who can help. Any support, no matter how small, can make a huge difference in my children's lives and give us hope during these difficult times.
đ If you are unable to donate, sharing this post may help our story reach people who can help.
𤲠We ask for nothing more than the opportunity to live with dignity and provide for our children's basic needs.
â¤ď¸ A heartfelt thank you to everyone who reads, shares, or offers any kind of support. Every little bit of help means the world to us.
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đ I am a father of five, and I live with my wife and children in extremely harsh conditions. We are seven people trying to survive day after day amidst the ongoing war in Gaza.
Hussam is a father, a husband and a survivor.
đď¸ Many people think the war is over, but for us, it hasn't. It may have disappeared from the news screens, but the truth is that the danger persists, displacement and forced migration are still a part of our lives, and fear is our constant companion.
đ¨âđŠâđ§âđŚ I cannot go to work or provide for my family's needs because I stay in the tent to protect and care for my children in these difficult circumstances.
đź My youngest daughter desperately needs milk. đś She also needs diapers and clothes. đ I am unable to provide these basic necessities for her.
đ I am writing these words and appealing to anyone who can help. Any support, no matter how small, can make a huge difference in my children's lives and give us hope during these difficult times.
đ If you are unable to donate, sharing this post may help our story reach people who can help.
𤲠We ask for nothing more than the opportunity to live with dignity and provide for our children's basic needs.
â¤ď¸ A heartfelt thank you to everyone who reads, shares, or offers any kind of support. Every little bit of help means the world to us.
med people are so annoying "This family's 8 year old child who was about to go through a major surgery and kept crying that she was hungry so they pitied her and gave her food, she then had a heart attack in the surgery. They're so stupid đ" girl they didn't know that could happen or why it happens. it takes so little time to explain to them that will happen instead of telling them "no food" with no explanation 10 times
"Before surgery, your bodyâs reflexes that protect your airway are relaxed by anesthesia. If thereâs food or liquid in your stomach, it will near certainly come back up and go into your lungs, which can cause choking, a severe lung / heart infection or even a heart attack. Thatâs called aspiration, and it is life-threatening. It's hard, but it's only a single day to prevent near certain death. Not eating or drinking beforehand massively lowers the risk and helps prevent these life threatening situations under anesthesia." <- TIP: patients have brains which allows them to receive information just like you
I have four kids. Iâve had one or another of them need some kind of surgical procedure that requires anesthesia four or five times over the past 15 years.
This Tumblr post is the first time someone has explained to me *why* I couldnât feed them before those instances.
Iâm not stupid. I understood that just fine. Hell, my kids would have understood that just fine. But no one bothered to tell us.
i did know this before having kids (i have six). we have a kid that's needed multiple procedures requiring anesthesia. and every single time, i am asked multiple times if i'm sure he was not given any food or water after a certain point.
every single time i have had to say, "i understand that if he had food or water, he could aspirate it into his lungs under anesthesia. i am not lying to you." THEN someone would make a little note and i would stop being repeatedly asked.
not a single time was that risk explained to me. the only reason it came up was because i already knew. i still don't understand why it isn't standard pre-op counseling or pre-op check information, when me as a parent acknowledging the actual risk also put THE MEDICAL STAFF at ease because i conveyed that i had informed understanding as reason to not lie about giving my kid food.
"maybe some people will get nervous and refuse surgery" okay so they need more counseling about risks and anxiety, not less information in a way that actually does endanger their child or themselves!
Remembering Peter Cushing, star of scores of Hammer horror classics and so much more besides, born 26th of May, 1913. Here he is in a 1989 interview, spilling the beans about secretly wearing fluffy footwear while storming around as Grand Moff Tarkin on The Death Star
Jonathan Joss was an Indigenous, gay man who was murdered on the first day of Pride month as well as Indigenous History Month. He died protecting his trans husband. Homophobia and racism arenât marks of the past, and this is a heart breaking reminder of that.
Praying for a safe journey back to the spirit world, Uncle â¤ď¸âđŠšđŚ
Today is the anniversary of the death of Jonathan Joss (King of the Hill, Parks and Rec). Jonathan Joss was an Indigenous, gay man who died protecting his transgender husband, on the first day of Pride month. Today we remember him and how he protected his family.
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This song may be one of the most beautiful anthems in the world, in my opinion.
La Balanguera. Inspired on a traditional Mallorcan song, the lyrics are a poem by Joan Alcover (1854-1926) to which Amadeu Vives added music to in 1926. It became so popular and significant for Mallorcan people -especially in the 1960s when Mallorcans and other Catalans were using music as an instrument in their fight against fascism which has persecuted our culture and language- that in 1996 it was recognised as the official anthem of Mallorca.
It talks about a woman referred to as the âbalangueraâ. The Balanguera is a character from a traditional Mallorcan song who spins and weaves. The name comes from a confusion of the word âbolangeraâ (âbakerâ, a figure that appears in different folk dances of Catalonia and the Valencian Country) and âBerengueraâ (the name of some dances of the Mallorcan âcossiersâ folk dance).
Here are the lyrics in Catalan and the translation of each stanza to English.
La balanguera, misteriosa,
com una aranya d'art subtil,
buida que buida sa filosa,
de nostra vida treu el fil.
Com un parca bÊ cavil¡la,
teixint la tela per a demĂ .
La balanguera fila, filaâŚ
La balanguera filarĂ .
The mysterious Balanguera,
like a spider of subtle art,
empties, oh, empties her spinning wheel
and pulls off the thread of our lives.
Like a Parca she ponders well,
weaving the cloth for tomorrow.
The Balanguera spins, spinsâŚ
the Balanguera will spin.
Girant l'ullada cap enrere,
guaita les ombres de l'avior,
i de la nova primavera
sap on s'amaga la llavor.
Sap que la soca mĂŠs s'enfila
com mĂŠs endins pot arrelar.
La balanguera fila, fila.
La balanguera filarĂ .
Turning her glance to the past,
she guards the shades of ancestry
and of the new spring
she knows where the seed is hidden.
She knows that the vine-stock climbs up higher
the deeper its roots can go.
The Balanguera spins, spins,
the Balanguera will spin.
De tradicions i d'esperances
tix la senyera pel jovent,
com qui fa un vel de nuviances
amb cabelleres d'or i argent.
De la infantesa qui s'enfila,
de la vellura qui se'n va.
La balanguera fila, fila.
La balanguera filarĂ .
From traditions and from hopes
she weaves the flag for the youth [note: the word for âflagâ used here is the word that refers to the flag of the Catalans]
as one who prepares a wedding veil
with hairs of gold and silver.
Of the childhood that climbs up,
of the old age who goes away.
The Balanguera spins, spins,
the Balanguera will spin.
"The No Kings rallies don't REALLY do anything" Cool. Do you know what message it sends to the people in power if less and less people are showing up to protest their actions? Cause let me tell you, it's not "More people are going to do other things instead". It's "the American public is slowly getting used to our regime and we should keep it up until they wear out".
Because if you can't stand next to people for a couple of hours chanting and waving signs, you aren't gonna be doing anything that would actually disrupt the regime. Protests aren't "permitted dissent". They're that ankle bar that you have to step over where it's not impressive if you do it, but it's really indicative if you can't even manage that much.
if you're anything like me and you don't feel heat like you should, or you live in a normally not-hot area that's currently experiencing a heat wave, and/or you've been sipping plain water for hours and wondering why your throat is still dry and you're inexplicably exhausted, you probably need electrolytes.
in this situation your best line of defense is gatorade or some form of electrolyte tablet or powder. if you like those things, go get those things, this post is over.
BUT maybe you're also like me and you find gatorade unbearably sweet (it also gives me a headache, no idea why), and maybe you can't afford the fancy tablets or powders
if that describes you, I just did the following right here in my kitchen:
grab a big ol thermos/cold cup/giant glass of your choosing (i think mine holds 2 cups of liquid)
throw a pinch of salt in there and dissolve it in a lil bit of warm water
squeeze half a lemon in (or 1-2 tablespoons of store bought lemon juice. or lime, or orange, any citrus works tbh)
add 1-2 tablespoons of real maple syrup OR honey (maple syrup dissolves easier, honey will need a bit more warm water to melt it)
fill the rest with cold water
boom. poor man's gatorade, not too sweet, and within 20 minutes of sipping it my "mysterious" exhaustion is gone. i am very annoyed it was this easy to feel good again after languishing for hours wondering why the hell I was so tired and shaky. it was the electrolytes. it's 90 degrees out and I don't feel hot so I forgot. don't make my mistake. now go forth and hydrate!
I made it and here's some thoughts from me (days after first reblogging this) so: Its way better than gatorade, but I may have put in too much lemon(i love lemon) taste wise the first 1/3 reminded me of unsweetened, but well watered lemonadeâ then the honey, which didn't dissolve as well nicely as I wanted to it kicked in (the honey and lemon smell together were very lovely tho,,) was a bit of a chore to drink due to the sweet&sour not mixing well enough in my try but I think that's user failure
Overall, I feel a lot better after drinking this, there's no bad sensory feel to it, it didn't give me the icky sticky feeling that things like gatorade usually give meâ solid 10/10( maybe 9.5 but it was my fault I added too much lemon/didnt stir well enough)
I never saw this addition til now, but I'm glad to see someone tried this in the wild and liked it!
while I'm here and it's currently the month of March and still cold weather season in a lot of places, I'd like to add that hot water with lemon and honey is also very hydrating and not just for when you're sick! particularly if you have heat running in your house, it can suck moisture out and quietly dehydrate you as well.
personally, it turns out I'm chronically low on electrolytes for medical reasons so I've continued to drink maple-lemon-salt water year round - more concentrated in summer, more diluted in winter. I get way less headaches/migraines now. if I'm ever stuck with plain water or even bubbly flavoured water, I get a headache again within hours. bodies are weird! stay hydrated however you need to folks!
we've been having a bit of a heatwave, here in scotland, so i uncovered this from my 'to keep for later' draft posts and made this.
life saver! super easy to make and actually tastes good. and resolves the pesky electrolytes issues....!
and since i am chronically dehydrated (remembering to drink, esp water, is hard okay) this might become part of my daily routine, as, for once, i actually managed to drink it all in a normal amount of time (instead of taking all day to drink the one glass).
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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.
Meet the Edelweiss, symbol of the Pyrenees.
The Leontopodium alpinum, known in Catalan as the Snow Flower, grows above the altitude of 1.800 above sea level.
Its woolly petals protect it from the cold and from UV radiation, growing in limestone and rocky soils, defying extreme conditions. It can live up to 10 years in its natural habitat, and it's a symbol of resistance and purity in the Pyrenees.
Let's protect it! It's a protected species in the National Park of AigĂźestortes and Estany de Sant Maurici. Don't pick it: admiring it is the best way of taking care of it.
Video by National Park of AigĂźestortes and Estany de Sant Maurici (High Pyrenees, Catalonia).
I will reblog this EVERY GODDAMN TIME so people can understand how the US government taking more and more land from Natives is nothing new (even the land originally promised after being kicked off their original, sacred lands) and they NEED to be fucking stopped. They need to be held accountable for the destruction of our people not just then but also now.
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The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed.
âMore than fifty research and development facilities across thirty-one states. Gone. Consolidated into a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado. And âconsolidatedâ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because what it actually means is that decades of place-based, long-term ecological researchâthe kind that literally cannot exist anywhere else because it depends on specific forests, specific watersheds, specific ecosystems studied over generationsâwill be snuffed out.
You cannot move a thirty-year watershed study. You cannot relocate a decades-long old-growth monitoring program. You cannot box up a forest and ship it to Colorado. When these facilities close, the experiments die. The datasets end. The partnerships with universities that took generations to build collapse. And the institutional knowledge of the scientists who ran those programs walks out the door, because the administration damn well knows most of them wonât follow a forced relocation to a single consolidated office that has nothing to do with the ecosystems theyâve spent their careers studying.â
Call your senators. Both of them. Tell them the Forest Service reorganization is proceeding without the congressional approval required by Section 716 of the Agriculture Appropriations Act and Section 421 of the Interior Appropriations Act. Use those numbers. Say them out loud. Staffers write down what they donât recognize, and these are the provisions their bosses voted for.
If your senator is a Republican, the question is simple: you voted for a law that requires USDA to get committee approval before reorganizing or relocating any office. USDA didnât get that approval. Their own lawyers declared your law unconstitutional. What are you going to do about it?
If your senator is a Democrat, the question is just as simple: the legal basis for stopping this already exists. Where are the subpoenas? Where are the hearings? Why is USDAâs general counsel allowed to declare a duly enacted law unconstitutional by internal memo and face no consequences?
Make them answer. Make their staff write it down. Call back next week and ask what happened.
