Welcome to my sideblog of weird and interesting stuff. I go here whenever I just don't feel like roleplaying. I follow back from thenewgamemaster-moved.
Every day I wake up hoping my mother will feel better. Every day I see the same pain, the same exhaustion, and the same struggle to breathe.
Her illness does not wait. Time does not wait. But we are still waiting for the help she desperately needs.
7 days have passed without a single donation, and we are still only β¬1,260 away from our goal.
Please, do not let our story disappear. If you can donate, even a small amount helps. If you cannot, please reblog and share. One person seeing this post could change my motherβs .
My mother suffers from a severely enlarged thyroid gland. The swelling has become so large that it affects her breathing and makes everyday activities difficult.
The enlarged thyroid causes my mother constant discomfort, exhaustion, and difficulty breathing. Her condition has continued to worsen over time. please donate
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Digital de-aging is bad not just because it always looks creepy as fuck no matter how much money they pour into it, but because it deprives me of getting to see the fucking black magic of a) the casting director somehow finding someone who looks unnervingly like the original actor despite not being related at all and b) the actors completely convincing me that they are, in fact, the same person at different times in their life.
One of my absolute favorite things about Metroid Dread isn't just the story or the gameplay - but Samus' body language. There's one scene in particular:
This still comes from a scene near the start, where Samus has just survived an event which has (once again) disabled most of her powers so the 'Metroidvania' part of the game can take place.
She's originally on the floor, comes to after having passed out, and then props herself up using her gun, first, instead of her left arm.
This is someone so used to being in her suit that she effortlessly uses her right arm - which is "only" a gun - as a means to hold herself up or clobber things with rather than its intended purpose.
They specifically chose to animate that.
This, to me, is a small but very important detail that shows how much thought MercurySteam has put into Samus and the way she moves in-game and during cutscenes.
(It also makes me wonder if Samus is ambidextrous, but that's not something I'm going to explore here - I just wanted to yell about this detail.)
One of my favorite moments of Samus and body language in Dread is in a later cutscene. Samus has just fallen to the floor after being held captive by an enemy, so she's still in Battle Ready Mode.
And something approaches from behind.
Immediately twists to point her gun at the intruder, shot aligned perfectly (the camera is not aligned with the head of the target.)
The next camera shot we have of her is after she fully turned around -- not standing mind you, still sitting on the ground -- the gun still pointed at the newcomer, but this time with her left hand on it for more precise targeting.
There is silence and the two stare at each other for a few seconds. And then...
...Samus drops the gun (AND HER GUARD) and props up her arm on her knee in the most casual I have ever seen her, giving the newcomer her full attention.
I adore how the studio managed to convey so much with close to 0 facial expressions of Samus over the course of Dread. Body language is so important and they nailed Samus' perfectly.
(yes the reply to this was just an excuse to share how much i love samus' casual sit)
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I've pleaded so much... and waited so long... and with each passing day, I feel hope slipping away from my heart, little by little, until I feel I've lost faith in humanity itself.
This might be the last time I ask for help.
I want nothing more than to return to my pharmacy, to the profession I loved, to the life that was stolen from me unjustly. I'm not looking for luxury or wealth, but for a chance to live with dignity and feed my family with my work, as I always have. And I say this sincerely: I will always feel a deep pain towards everyone who was able to lend a helping hand, even a little, and then chose to turn their back on my suffering .. ππ
If you have compassion in your heart, or if you can help with any amount, or even just by sharing this message, please don't hesitate. You might be the reason I can get my life back after I thought all doors had closed πππβ£οΈ
I donβt think people truly understand the scope of the damage Sony is about to do to physical media. They literally invented the compact disc. They are the reason why Blu-ray as a format won the HD wars over HD-DVD. They have gargantuan influence over manufacturing disc-based media. If Sony as a company stops making physical media for their next gen gaming consoles, this is going to affect movies and music as well. If you buy CDs, DVDs, or Blu-rays, those are next on the chopping block.
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.
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hi happy 4th of pride π₯Ίπ₯³π³οΈβππ³οΈββ§οΈπ iβm a Black nonbinary Haitian-Senegalese lesbian artist from Brooklyn in recovery for some p severe trauma <3 pls can i get some help with soup so i can take my meds π«Άπ½π c4$h4pp v3nm0 p4yp4l k0fi
/* I would be more enthusiastic about today if it wasn't for this country's awful history, bullcrap behind the scenes, and the orange monster in the big chair */
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Abdul Rahman's mother has died after a battle with cancer...
Yesterday, Abdul Rahman's mother passed away.
He [@abdulrahman-family1] is beyond devastated, and this is his greatest loss. The earth feels heavy, the tears won't stop falling... Imagine losing somebody who is everything to you. This is how Abdul Rahman felt about his dear mother. He said he can't imagine life without her. Imagine the empty bed next to him, where she used to be...
A few days ago, she was hospitalized. They gave her sedatives, and Abdul Rahman was told that "she doesn't need to be awake now." After that, they discovered that the cancer had spread to her bones, and she never woke up again. Imagine not even being able to say the last "I love you, and goodbye"... I am angry that they didn't tell him that there is nothing they can do and this is the last time he sees her awake!
I am also angry with all of the states and institutions like the World Health Organization that have failed her and him, and did not evacuate her as promised. The doctors promised she would be among the first patients evacuated. We literally begged institutions and states all over the world to evacuate her. They just let her die, knowingly...
And this hurts, this is the deepest betrayal by the world.
They let her die slowly in inhumane conditions... because of insufficient treatment in Gaza, she went through agonizing pain, unimaginable to you and me. My heart hurts so much, and is grieving together with Abdul Rahman's.
This is not just another fundraiser, I'm not going to ask you to share anything. I'm just asking you to read this and feel Abdul Rahman's pain and loss.
Because that pain and loss is not just his, but it is our loss. Our world is losing by letting kind hearts like them suffer in silence, our world has failed humanity, not just Gaza.
And let me add something...Abdul Rahman's mother didn't just die of cancer, but she was, I believe, murdered by Israel. In the recent independent study, uranium was found in Palestinian soil because of the forbidden type of weapons Israel has used. Because of that, there is a rise in aggressive cancers in Gaza, such as the gallbladder cancer she had.
For those who want to keep on supporting the family, here is the link to their fundraiser:
Keti Jovanovski Needs Your Help | A letter from Abdul Rahman: Dear friends and kind hearts, My name is Abdul Rahman, and I write to you from
Campaign Vetted by @gazavetters, number ( #642 ) @90-ghost
_____________________________________
IMPORTANT UPDATE: Abdul Rahman's story is published in a well-known newspaper
We, activists from the Slovenian movement for Palestinian rights, have published Abdul Rahman's plea for evacuation in one of the most well-known newspapers in our country. With this, we aim to put political pressure on our leaders to evacuate students like Abdul Rahman from Gaza. In the article, we also described the failed medical evacuation of his mother, and we warned against repeating the same mistake again with Abdul Rahman's evacuation.
We keep fighting for his evacuation with hope in our hearts.π€Please keep supporting Abdul Rahman and his family. π
Link to the article (you can read it with a translator).
Abdul Rahman says that he doesn't want to live in a world like this and that nobody understands what they're experiencing in Gaza.
So! This is a perfect case study in situations where you should be wary of misinformation.
Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?
The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!
This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.
Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:
Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or
Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.
The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.
The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).
Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.
So yeah, there's actually quite a lot of places that would like these. Lots of people currently breathing in terrible quality air would much rather have their boring city benches replaced with really fucking cool algae tanks that clean the air and can be used to help create + sustain future green spaces in cities. I dunno about you, but I'd take that over a dumb metal bench any day. Put these at every bus stop and I'd be delighted.
Serbian here living in Belgrade! This is all true and I've actually seen some of these around the city a few times. They're amazing at what they do and really cool to watch up close because you can see pretty swirling inside them. It's not only functional but aesthetically pretty nice as well!
Pull up a chair and pick a controller! @tngmpersonal - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook
