leomonae

[leomonae]

[leomonae]

(Description in alt)

‼️heads up‼️

The Starbucks Union has voted to strike December 20-24th, 2024!

Source

[leomonae]

[leomonae]

does anyone know wtf word-stream.com is or where to send them a takedown request? i just found a bunch of fics, including my own, hosted on this AI slop site—apparently offering what I assume are AI-generated audiobook versions & (equally AI-generated) ratings and reviews. i can’t take a closer look without signing up, which, no thank you, but it looks like they’re hosting the full fics and are peddling a paid subscription for the trouble of hosting them. can someone more knowledgeable than me explain what our options are in this situation?

[leomonae]

Hey so fun new scam just dropped! I got a call earlier today from someone spoofing the local police department's desk number, asking me if there was a reason I'd missed my jury summons this morning.

Friends, I had not received a jury summons for this month. Which I told him, at which point his previously clear diction suddenly turned into a rapid mumble, only becoming clear for scary words like 'federal' and then asking to confirm my address, at which point I hung up and decided to call the police department later.

When I called the police department the desk officer sounded so tired y'all. All I had to say was "Hey I got a call earlier saying I missed jury duty this morning?" and she immediately sighed and told me that yes it was a scam that was going around and thanked me for calling to confirm.

So this is your periodic reminder that law enforcement agencies will not call you to tell you that you're in trouble. If you need to pay a fine of some sort they will mail you a physical invoice. Anyone calling you saying they're from the police or any other law enforcement organization (up to the CIA and yes I have heard of scammers attempting to impersonate CIA agents over the phone) who then tries to get financial information from you over the phone is a scammer.

I know I actually bang on about this a weird amount, but it is my fervent hope that the information will stick in peoples' brains if they get randomly selected for the adrenaline spike lottery. Scammers use scary words to get you to panic in order to shut down your critical thinking, and if even one person's brain spits out "Tumblr user waterhobbit said the cops/CIA/federal marshalls don't call about this shit" before their bank account routing number is in the hands of assholes I will consider it a job well done.

[leomonae]

[Billionaire Owned News Media Voice]

Is getting enough sleep actually harming you in the long run? We spoke to an Economics Expert who says: Yes!

Eating! The newest luxury fad you should be skipping out on.

What's it like for the working class? We spoke to Three Trust Fund Kids to find out!

Feeling burned out? Our sources suggest the answer is working more!

10 Reasons why an Equitable Humanitarian Utopia would actually be a total bummer!

This billionaire CEO is just like you! His bones definitely do not taste delicious.

[leomonae]

this goes so hard

[leomonae]

When I was in hospital in Scotland with pretty bad anemia for then-unknown reasons, getting transfusions, and a CT scan, and a colonoscopy and endoscopy, and an x-ray and ultrasound and mammogram, and assorted specialist consultations, and like 6 different medicines on top of the IV antibiotics, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting too - oh yeah ambulance ride too because my GP didn't want to risk my partner driving me to the nearest hospital, in case I passed out again on the way, and sure why not, if he thought that was for the best no reason for me not to go along with it, right? - just for "fun" I chatted to a friend of mine back in the US who worked in a hospital, and we tried to work out what this would've cost me if I still lived there. I think we hit $50k a few days into my totally free ten day stay and stopped counting.

That particular hospital had free parking, too! Though even if it hadn't, since I'm low income I'm entitled to claim back my travel expenses from NHS hospitals.

Blogging this tweet because this explains SO MUCH about the mindset of pretty much all the folks I’ve known who’re against single-payer, it’s not even funny…

[leomonae]

Christopher: A woman? Kirk: A crewman.

[leomonae]

Wow i just found two new articles with headers that fucking completely misrepresent that wat Michael Moore's recent open letter said:

what the fuck man, are you expecting people not to actually read the rest of the article?

do you think people aren't going to read this part?

fuck off with that, the man is 100% cool with Luigi

[leomonae]

5 simple exercises to awaken dormant muscles

{source}

[leomonae]

Trans and intersex people in the UK need you to be loud and angry about the new "deception as to sex" guidance released which makes trans and intersex people legally guilty of rape if we don't disclose our gender identity and/or the sex we were assigned at birth to sexual partners.

This is particularly going to harm trans and intersex sex workers, who often have a higher number of sexual partners who we might keep our trans or intersex identity from for our safety.

"To summarize this guidance in the simplest terms, it treats a trans or intersex person not disclosing their gender identity and/or the sex they were assigned at birth as a form of deception which negates consent."

"This interpretation of part of the existing Sexual Offences Act (2003) places an unreasonable burden on trans and intersex people to inform our sexual partners of our medical history, while no such burden is placed on cis perisex people who are allowed to rely on assumption."

[leomonae]

"When Ellen Kaphamtengo felt a sharp pain in her lower abdomen, she thought she might be in labour. It was the ninth month of her first pregnancy and she wasn’t taking any chances. With the help of her mother, the 18-year-old climbed on to a motorcycle taxi and rushed to a hospital in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, a 20-minute ride away.

At the Area 25 health centre, they told her it was a false alarm and took her to the maternity ward. But things escalated quickly when a routine ultrasound revealed that her baby was much smaller than expected for her pregnancy stage, which can cause asphyxia – a condition that limits blood flow and oxygen to the baby.

In Malawi, about 19 out of 1,000 babies die during delivery or in the first month of life. Birth asphyxia is a leading cause of neonatal mortality in the country, and can mean newborns suffering brain damage, with long-term effects including developmental delays and cerebral palsy.

Doctors reclassified Kaphamtengo, who had been anticipating a normal delivery, as a high-risk patient. Using AI-enabled foetal monitoring software, further testing found that the baby’s heart rate was dropping. A stress test showed that the baby would not survive labour.

The hospital’s head of maternal care, Chikondi Chiweza, knew she had less than 30 minutes to deliver Kaphamtengo’s baby by caesarean section. Having delivered thousands of babies at some of the busiest public hospitals in the city, she was familiar with how quickly a baby’s odds of survival can change during labour.

Chiweza, who delivered Kaphamtengo’s baby in good health, says the foetal monitoring programme has been a gamechanger for deliveries at the hospital.

“[In Kaphamtengo’s case], we would have only discovered what we did either later on, or with the baby as a stillbirth,” she says.

The software, donated by the childbirth safety technology company PeriGen through a partnership with Malawi’s health ministry and Texas children’s hospital, tracks the baby’s vital signs during labour, giving clinicians early warning of any abnormalities. Since they began using it three years ago, the number of stillbirths and neonatal deaths at the centre has fallen by 82%. It is the only hospital in the country using the technology.

“The time around delivery is the most dangerous for mother and baby,” says Jeffrey Wilkinson, an obstetrician with Texas children’s hospital, who is leading the programme. “You can prevent most deaths by making sure the baby is safe during the delivery process.”

The AI monitoring system needs less time, equipment and fewer skilled staff than traditional foetal monitoring methods, which is critical in hospitals in low-income countries such as Malawi, which face severe shortages of health workers. Regular foetal observation often relies on doctors performing periodic checks, meaning that critical information can be missed during intervals, while AI-supported programs do continuous, real-time monitoring. Traditional checks also require physicians to interpret raw data from various devices, which can be time consuming and subject to error.

Area 25’s maternity ward handles about 8,000 deliveries a year with a team of around 80 midwives and doctors. While only about 10% are trained to perform traditional electronic monitoring, most can use the AI software to detect anomalies, so doctors are aware of any riskier or more complex births. Hospital staff also say that using AI has standardised important aspects of maternity care at the clinic, such as interpretations on foetal wellbeing and decisions on when to intervene.

Kaphamtengo, who is excited to be a new mother, believes the doctor’s interventions may have saved her baby’s life. “They were able to discover that my baby was distressed early enough to act,” she says, holding her son, Justice.

Doctors at the hospital hope to see the technology introduced in other hospitals in Malawi, and across Africa.

“AI technology is being used in many fields, and saving babies’ lives should not be an exception,” says Chiweza. “It can really bridge the gap in the quality of care that underserved populations can access.”"

-via The Guardian, December 26, 2024

[leomonae]

If the only valid queer rep is explicit queer rep, that's a huge problem. There are lots of old books that simply could not include explicit rep. There are lots of new books that it wouldn't make sense for the rep to be explicit. There are a lots of settings where they're not going to take a moment and go "by the way, I'm bi, not gay."

There has to be room for subtextual and interpretative queerness, even when discussing a canon where queerness is never acknowledged as existing.

There also has to be room for people to disagree with those interpretations, and of course some interpretations will be more supportable, canonically, than others, and sometimes we simply won't be able to say "this character is that rep (as opposed to some other rep)" conclusively.

There has to be space in our readings of books to be comfortable with this ambiguity, and there has to be a minimum good-faith acceptance that if someone says "that book was queer to me," even if the book isn't explicit queer and doesn't read queer to someone else... that doesn't change the nature of the queerness.

Some of y'all really need to accept that there's not only one way to read a book, and there never will be, and that's okay.

[leomonae]

Thanks for the advice, Mr FB of I! That's the same thing my very good friend the Nigerian prince told me, too, so our MUST be true!

[leomonae]

The UK Government have launched a consultation on whether AI should be allowed to scrape content online with complete disregard for copyright.

The consultation is stuffed to the brim with technobabble buzzwords and jargon that frames AI as wonderful and that this is a foregone conclusion.

You can submit a response via the link above and tell them what you really think.

[leomonae]

The artist Paweł Ponichtera seems to have inexplicably dedicated a massive amount of time and effort to hyper-detailed and hyper-accurate illustrations of chinchillas engaged in historical fencing, many with clear and specific reference to particular historical treatises. So, I give you:

Hans Talhoffer Chinchillas

Harnisfechten Chinchillas

Joachim Meyer Longsword Chinchillas

Fantastical Snail Marginalia Chinchillas

Olympic Epee Chinchillas

Salvator Fabris Rapier-in-the-Nude Chinchillas

Napoleonic Saber Chinchillas

Arabic Shamshir Chinchillas

18th Century Smallsword Chinchillas

I.33 Sword and Buckler Chinchillas