#kenyan models

[lesafricainescharmantetfraises]

Slim Kenyan in short, soft lilac dress !

[nthflower]

Sometimes I remember sense8 made a white police main character and have him help a black kid who was shot and his partner (who was racially ambitious) were against it. And then he brought kid to hospital and a black nurse said she can't help him in a rude way because idk kid was injured in gang fight and she doesn't care. And white police somehow helped kid to take help and then kid helped him to do police shit against some black group.

Then white trans girl got insulted by a terf who is also black. And her girlfriend who is also black was nothing but her extremely supportive girlfriend no other personality.

Or characters having some shared visions and see some slurs again their own community written on the wall and police characters slur was pig. And German one was nazi. While gay one was faggot and Kenyan one was n-word.

Or one Indian main character having her main storyline her being in love with German guy instead of her fiancé and it was also very tasteless to me.

Or Korean one is good at martial arts and her brother and father is evil and stole her carrier and brother made her go to jail and it's so misogynistic there in Korea.

Like American characters get very detailed and many faced storylines while poc ones get the most basic Stories based on stereotypes and 2d written side characters. .

Anyways and then I became angry out of no reason. It can be such a good show except it wasn't. It was weirdly full of copaganda and racism. And like I see no race style writing.

And then it weirdly became fantasy racism story like X-Men.

[a4astudios]

Character model sheet for the character toothy. Glad with the design of the character one of the few chatacters that I created from scratch coming to life slowly excited for the opportunity to be it's creator.

[riding-with-the-wild-hunt]

"In 2509 Celebrían wife of Elrond was journeying to Lórien when she was waylaid in the Redhorn Pass, and her escort being scattered by the sudden assault of the Orcs, she was seized and carried off. She was pursued and rescued by Elladan and Elrohir, but not before she had suffered torment and received a poisoned wound. She was brought back to Imladris, and though healed in body by Elrond, lost all delight in Middle-earth, and the next year went to the Havens and passed over Sea." - J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, "Appendix A: Eriador, Arnor, and the Heirs of Isildur"

@arafinwean-week day 6 ⇢ CELEBRÍAN; VALINOR & RE-EMBODIMENT, LEGACY

[ID: an edit comprised of six posters in shades of soft grey. All text is white.

1: Michele Opiyo, a kenyan model with dark skin and close-cropped dark hair. She is shown from the shoulders up against a pale background, smiling with her eyes closed and her head turned slightly to the side. She wears a silver necklace and earrings. White cursive text in the center of the image reads "Celebrían," with smaller serif text below reading "silver queen" / 2: Bare trees with white bark. Cursive text at the bottom of the image reads "Princess of Lothlórien," with serif text beneath reading "Born S.A. 300" / 3: A simple family tree on a grey background, showing Celebrían, her husband Elrond, and their children Elladan, Elrohir, and Arwen. Cursive text above the graphic reads "Mother & Wife," and below it is a rectangular image of small white flowers / 4: Michele Opiyo, shown from the shoulders down with her back to the viewer. She is wearing white clothes and has one hand on her back. Same text as Image 1 / 5: Michele Opiyo, shown from the front with her head turned to the right and a neutral expression. She wears different silvery jewelry. Same text as Images 1 and 4 / 6: Same format as Image 2, but the picture is of birds standing in the shallows of a lake with forested banks. Text reads "Suffered torment," and underneath "Sailed T.A. 2510" //End ID]

[mariacallous]

Georgians are in the streets fighting for their democracy. The Georgian Dream party, which is working to align Tbilisi with Moscow’s interests, declared victory in the country’s Oct. 26 election before the votes were even counted. Voters and election observers were harassed by Russian-funded gangs and mobsters; just after the election, protesters holding European Union flags were sprayed with water from high-powered hoses. And the person who has the iron will necessary to lead the charge against Russian-inspired authoritarianism in Georgia? A woman: President Salome Zourabichvili.

This is no accident. Across the world, women have, and are, playing incredible roles as bulwarks against the rise of authoritarianism. Moldovan President Maia Sandu is standing up to a tsunami of Russian disinformation. In Poland, women played a critical role in the effort to oust the right-wing populist Law and Justice (PiS) party. In Hong Kong, women continue to be the practical and normative face of resistance to Chinese authoritarian rule.

These are the freedom fighters of the 21st century. And yet, the U.S. national security community tends to view women’s issues as a domestic concern, frivolous, or irrelevant to “hard” security matters. For example, in 2003, discussions of securing Iraq excluded women, with a top U.S. general stating, “When we get the place secure, then we’ll be able to talk about women’s issues.” More recently, the role of women in the military has been reduced to discussions of diversity, equity, and inclusion, rather than a focus on how women have been vital to solving the United States’ most wicked national security problems—from serving on the front lines in combat to providing essential intelligence analysis. But if the overall aim of U.S. national strategy is to shore up democracy and democratic freedoms, the treatment of women and girls cannot be ignored.

Globally, women’s rights are often eroding in both policy and practice, from the struggles of the Iranian and Afghan women who exist under gender apartheid to the Kenyan women experiencing the harsh backlash of the rise of the manosphere. In tandem, there’s been a sharp rise in reports of online harassment and misogyny worldwide.

National security analysts explore issues and psychologies through any number of prisms, but Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) remains an underutilized one. One of the national security community’s core tasks is discerning signals from noise in the global strategic environment, and regressive ideas on gender and gender equality can be a useful proxy metric for democratic backsliding and authoritarian rise.

The United States’ 2023 Strategy and National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security provides the backbone for the United States to leverage WPS to counter authoritarianism. It highlights that displays of misogyny online are linked to violent action. The plan also points out that formally incorporating gendered perspectives is essential for maintaining democratic institutions at home and modeling them aboard. This includes recognizing misogyny—online or in policy—as an early indicator of authoritarian rise.

Unfortunately, WPS is often misread as simply including more women in the national security workforce. But it is more than that. It offers a framework for understanding why it is useful to take gendered perspectives into account when assessing how the actions of individuals or groups enhance national security, which is especially important at a time when authoritarian regimes are weaponizing gender in ways that strengthen their grip on power domestically and justify their aggression abroad.

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin has argued that he is the guardian of traditional Christian values, telling women that they should be back at home raising children, and has been rolling back domestic violence laws at the same time. Days before invading Ukraine in February 2022, Putin said, “Like it or don’t like it, it’s your duty, my beauty,” which was widely interpreted within Russia as a reference to martial rape. Russia’s own army is built on a foundation of hierarchical hazing in which “inferior” men are degraded by their comrades. With that kind of rhetoric from the top, is it any wonder that Russian soldiers’ war crimes have included the rapes of women and children?

But Putin isn’t alone. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has consolidated media outlets to censor women’s voices, in the name of protecting traditional values. He has also used coercive financial practices to push women out of the workforce and positions of political power and into more traditional roles of wife and mother. In Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko attempted to force the deportation of the most prominent woman opposition leader and imprisoned her after she tore up her passport to prevent it. In China, where women were once told they “hold up half the sky,” President Xi Jinping has worked to undo decades of Chinese Communist Party policy on gender equality. Chinese women are now being encouraged to return home and become mothers, while feminists have been targeted legally and socially.

The WPS agenda provides the U.S. national security community with three opportunities to recognize, understand, and counter early-stage authoritarianism.

First, the United States can do a much better job of supporting women’s groups around the world as a central aspect of its national security strategy. Women’s groups are often a bellwether for authoritarian rise and democratic backsliding—as currently on display in Russia, China, Hungary, Georgia, and Belarus, where women inside and outside their respective regimes have been specifically targeted or attacked.

Women have also found innovative ways to resist the rise of authoritarian norms. In places like Moldova, women have acted as bulwarks against authoritarianism despite vicious disinformation campaigns targeting women leaders. Yet when it comes to formulating and executing strategies on national security, women’s groups are often left in the margins and their concerns dismissed.

Second, gender perspectives are essential to more fulsome intelligence gathering and analysis. The U.S. intelligence community can do a much better job of integrating gender—particularly as it relates to the treatment of the most vulnerable—as an indicator of societal and democratic health. This includes understanding how both masculinities and femininities influence decision-making and how, in turn, lived experiences act as necessary analytical tools. Training collectors and analysts of intelligence to recognize gendered indicators will provide a more robust view of the geopolitical landscape and fill critical holes in national security decision-making.

Finally, the United States must improve the participation of its national security community in WPS and feminist foreign-policy discussions. For too long, the “hard” security sector has distanced itself from more “human” security-focused endeavors and treated women’s rights as something that’s just nice to have.

Yet national security is an essentially human endeavor, and gender is a central component of what it means to be human. This is something that needs to be appreciated to better understand the many dimensions of the conflict—disinformation, online influence campaigns, and lawfare—that authoritarian regimes are waging against the United States and its allies.

[chacolatepocky]

Twisted wonderland nationality headcanons

BTW NONE OF THIS IS CANON I DON'T THINK AND IT'S ALL MY OPINION FEEL FREE TO AGREE OR DISAGREE JUST DON'T HATE ON ME 💔💔💔💔💔

Heartslabyul:

Riddle rosehearts: British

Trey clover: British

Cater diamond: American

Deuce spade: British

Ace trappola: British

__________________________________________

Savanaclaw:

Leona kingscholar: Kenyan

Ruggie bucchi: Kenyan

Jack howl: American

__________________________________________

Octavinelle:

Azul ashengrotto: Danish

Jade leech: Danish

Floyd Leech: Danish

__________________________________________

Scarabia:

Kalim Al asim: Moroccan

Jamil viper: Moroccan

__________________________________________

Pomfiore:

Vil Schonenheit: German

Rook hunt: Ivory coast

Epel felmier: Sámi / Finnish

__________________________________________

Ignihyde:

Idia shroud: Greek

Ortho shroud: Greek

__________________________________________

Diasomnia:

Malleus Draconia: French

Lilia vanrouge: French

Silver: French

Sebek zigvolt: French

__________________________________________

Staff:

Crewel: British

Trein: French

Vargas: Italian

Crowley: French

__________________________________________

other characters:

Neige: Belgian / French

Chenya: British

Rollo: French

__________________________________________

Now for brief explanations:

I hc Most of heartslabyul as British because of Alice in wonderland (Set in Britain) and most of the characters are from the Queendom of roses. I Hc Cater as American because it just fits tbh.

I hc Leona and Ruggie from Kenya because that (allegedly) where the lion king is set in. I hc Jack as american because it fits (x2)

I hc all of octavinelle as Danish because of the little mermaid statue in Copenhagen and the little mermaid movie itself is set in Denmark.

i hc Scarabia as Moroccan because Aladdin is set in a Arabian country (Not said which one specifically) but i chose Morocco because it just felt like it fit.

I hc Vil as German because 1( The evil queen is German 2( Schonenheit is a German name. I hc Rook from ivory Coast because he's canonically from sunset Savanna but I wanted to choose a African country that speaks French as the main language so I picked that. I Hc Epel as Sámi, because I saw a post about how his hometown models a lot after Sámi culture, I hc that he is Sámi from Finland.

I feel like ignihyde is very self explanatory, Idia is based off Hades (Greek god of the underworld) and the Isle of woe resembles Greece

I hc Diasomnia is French only because Sleeping beauty takes place in france.

I hc Neige as Belgian mostly because He's supposed to be snow White (German princess) but his name is in French, And Belgiums main three languages are German, French and dutch.

I hc Crewel as British because he's from the Queendom of roses

I hc Trein as French because it feels right idk

I hc Vargas as Italian because Vargas is a Italian last name (i think)

I hc Crowley as French because im pretty sure he's a fae and probably from briar valley

The others are pretty explanatory I think...?

[elitesheepi]

Maybe a hot take (or cold dependin) but I’m over Ororo constantly being associated with anything Wakandan. I want her to explore her Kenyan side more, yknow. She’s still Kenyan, but it feels like a lot of Storm fans only want her associated with Wakanda—she has to be their queen, she should be a black Panther character, etc etc. and it’s starting to feel reductive to her character to only focus on the Wakanda part of her life and not her heritage and everything else.

Going off that, previews for the next books said she’s gonna get Wakandan armor modeled after the DM and ii… don’t care.

It’s like everyone is deadset on attaching her to Wakanda and by extension T’Challa when her relationship with them is like… not good at all after the X of Swords event and some moments after where it’s clear they aren’t on good terms.

I wish the armor was more like something given to her by Eternity, something involving her Eternal Storm. Make her more magic focused since they wanna look into her more mystical family side

Just let Storm be Storm, not the ex-Queen of Wakanda

[snowbunnywatching]

White man here. I was not right wing and actually welcoming of immigrants but I did not look positively on IR because I wanted future Europeans to keep our features. I wanted to have a white girlfriend and wife and kids one day. Then, curiosity pushed me to experiment with women of different ethnicities, some Asians, most Black, and to my utter surprise I found out I have a strong preference for Black women. I never had much luck with the ladies, but I had some success with Black women. Not the model-esque ones but the mid, average Black girls without a pretty face and a hourglass figure still stir something deep in me. Their full lips, afro hair, dark legs, the way they walk. Heck, I'd rather date a mid Kenyan girl than a pretty blonde Swede at this point. But I still fight against this. I tell myself it's just a phase. Even though it's been 6 years since I last kissed a white woman. Some of the Black women I dated mentioned having kids. I am afraid of sealing the fate of my offspring by having mixed kids. Kids that would connect more with Black culture. But the next time I get asked, being older and more realistic, I might just give in. Help me!

It sounds like your heart is already made up. You're obviously more attracted to Black women than to white girls, and you sound like you also want to have kids.

And what's so bad with your kids connecting more with Black culture? Or exclusively with Black culture? Is your white culture even bringing all that much to the table?

[cclowneryy]

𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐩𝐲𝐩𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐚 𝐄𝐭𝐡𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐧𝐬

!! Disclaimer: these are just *my* head-canons on these characters. The only one that is canon is Ticci-Toby !!

*Also Sally and Eyeless Lulu but they will be on the reblog*

Slender Man- French

Jeff the Killer - Mexican

Ticci Toby - German

Ben/BEN Drowned - South Korean

Laughing Jack - British Columbian Indigenous

Eyeless Jack - Kenyan

Jane the Killer - Zimbabwe

Nina the Killer - Afro-Mexican

Laughing Jill - First Nation Canadian Indigenous

Clockwork - El Salvadorian

**mmd models belong to their original creators**

[airsllides]

airsLLide No. 4442: HB-IBF, McDonnell Douglas DC-8-63, ASA African Safari Airways, Basel/Mulhouse, April 1, 1990.

Founded in 1967 by a local tour operator with the travel club business model in mind, African Safari Airways was set up to offer year-round beach and safari packages to its members. Operating under a Kenyan AOC with the quite matching radio-callsign «Zebra», but having its base at Basel/Mulhouse airport, the carrier first started with a pair of Bristol Britannia aircraft and turned to operating single DC-8 jets - regularly acquired from KLM surplus stock - from 1973 onwards: First a DC-8-33 that was later replaced by a turbofan-powered DC-8-53. In 1982, the latter was replaced by a first DC-8-63 (5Y-ZEB ex PH-DEL). At the same time, the travel agency decided to expand its business model to the Seychelles for which it initially used the now surplus DC-8-53, but then acquired a second DC-8-63 (S7-SIS ex PH-DEM) in the following year.

The competition on the route to the indian ocean by other, established carriers was however stiff, and African Safari decided to discontinue its subsidiary in the Seychelles. The second DC-8-63 acquired for that venture was registered as HB-IBF with a newly formed Swiss subsidiary (ASA Air Starline) under a Swiss AOC to enable African Safari to also operate ad-hoc charters from its European base to third countries.

In 1994, both DC-8s were sold and converted to freighters on behalf of ABX Airborne Express, with a single DC-10-30 - from KLM stock, of course - replacing them (5Y-MBA, ex PH-DTL). Before the small carrier closed its doors for good in 2008, it again changed its fleet in 2002 by swapping the DC-10 (that had turned out to be too big to fill) with a single Airbus A310-300, for once not acquired from KLM, but from German leisure airline Hapag-Lloyd (5Y-VIP, ex D-AHLC).

[pyxilatezero]

An Honest Review of Mean Girls (2024)

I have seen so many negative reviews of this movie, and I have to say one thing to you guys: you obviously weren’t the target audience if you hated this movie.

First, let me break down some of their complaints, and then I’ll give you the rundown of my personal opinion.

Common Complaint Number One: Renée Rapp’s acting was bad.

Do I need to explain to you why you’re stupid, or are you going to see yourself out the door? If her acting was bad, I’m the next Queen of England. Not only did she bring life to a different version of Regina George, she clearly put some effort into portraying that character. She was probably the second best actor in this movie.

Common Complaint Number Two: Angourie Rice was miscast as Cady Heron; Her singing is bad, her acting is flat, ect.

If I was someone who had just moved to America from another country, I would be reserved too. I would show my emotions less, and I would probably try and do things to fit in with other people I wouldn’t normally do. While I admit her performance can’t match up to Lindsay’s, I also say: can YOU act that well? No. These are professionals. If you think that you can act better, then I’d better see you when they make a musical version of Mean Girls 2. And your complaints with the singing are unfair. She’s Australian- do you know how hard it is to sing with an accent? Oh, well she could just keep the accent when singing- DO YOU KNOW HOW DIFFERENT AN AUSTRALIAN ACCENT IS FROM A KENYAN ONE? The door is to your right.

Common Complaint Number Three: The Fashion is bad. (WARNING: Long segment)

This is… wow. I’m disappointed. Honestly, I am. While some of the choices are questionable, do you know how much effort was put into these outfit designs? The first time we see Regina, for example, we see her in all black. Black can represent power, but it can also represent hatred, as another thing; a reference to Cady being told she should hate Regina by her friends. Later on, at the end of the movie, she wears black, all the way up until she gets hit by a bus (which, contrary to what some people say, was not left out of the movie). To show her hatred for Cady. While the outfits may not be perfect, they are quite fitting. To introduce Cady in school, she wears blue- colors associated with sadness, but also nerves. Throughout the movie, Cady is nervous- first to be at school, then to lose her friends, and then to topple Regina, take her place, and be in power. Just because the fashion isn’t perfect and doesn’t make the characters look like models doesn’t mean the acting is bad. (Also, Regina would never use ELF? I am friends with someone who is essentially Regina George but less mean and not as rich, but still pretty up there, and I assure you, she uses ELF)

Complaint Number Four: ALL OF THE SINGING IS AWFUL

…

Are you deaf? Actually, no. That’s insulting to the deaf people. If you seriously think that all of the songs are awful, you need to never listen to music ever again because you are a disgrace to this society. I will admit, not all of the songs were bangers, but I still have What-Ifs stuck in my head (I agree with one thing, Stupid With Love, both the movie and musical versions, can go with Regina by that bus through)

Complaint Number Five: It’s too much like the original movie but not close enough to the original movie

This is the most common thing I see. People stating that it’s ’trying too hard to be the original movie’ but that it ‘left out key details in the movie that would make it more like the original movie’. Seriously, SHUT UP. Nobody wants to hear you being all ambivalent about your fake reason for hating the movie because someone else told you it’s bad.

Common Complaint Number Six: The acting is bad.

Look me in the eyes and tell me the actors did not pour their heart and soul into this film. You can’t. There’s the door. Go outside. Touch grass.

Common Complaint Number Seven: It wasn’t marketed as a musical!!!

Do you… not see the music note? Okay, you’re blind. Got it 👍 But if you’re so blind, then almost none of the previous complaints are valid because you couldn’t see the movie.

But in all honesty, this one just legitimately pisses me off, because it just means that people can’t be bothered to pay attention to something that is made obvious to them. Sure, the first trailer didn’t include singing, but it was to get you hooked on the idea, not to advertise the movie. Wake up sheeple.

MY PERSONAL THOUGHTS:

I have my own flurry of complaints. Well, no I don’t. Just two or three. 1. Cady’s entire personality was liking Aaron. I’m sorry, I can’t like a main character who is, in effect, like half the people who dislike this movie, a sheep. And I will admit, there were a FEW times the emotion shown by Cady wasn’t as perfect as it could have been. But it’s not a movie killer. 2. I don’t think the movie addresses very well that Janis was also mean. The ‘At least me and Regina KNOW we’re mean’ gave Janis’s treatment of Cady more effect; made Cady come off less as a villain and more as a victim, whereas the new one completely glosses over it and makes it seem like Janis was the one in the right all along. And three, Cady should have kissed Regina at the beginning and none of this would have happened. If you’re going to give us gay Janis, GIVE US OUR CADINA DAMMNIT.

Otherwise, this movie was amazing! I am a lesbian tho so maybe that’s not objective :P

FINAL RATING: 9/10

LESBIAN O’ METER: 6/10 (Kinda Gay, NGL)

[emptyanddark]

what's actually wrong with 'AI'

it's become impossible to ignore the discourse around so-called 'AI'. but while the bulk of the discourse is saturated with nonsense such as, i wanted to pool some resources to get a good sense of what this technology actually is, its limitations and its broad consequences. 

what is 'AI'

the best essay to learn about what i mentioned above is On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? this essay cost two of its collaborators to be fired from Google. it frames what large-language models are, what they can and cannot do and the actual risks they entail: not some 'super-intelligence' that we keep hearing about but concrete dangers: from climate, the quality of the training data and biases - both from the training data and from us, the users. 

The problem with artificial intelligence? It’s neither artificial nor intelligent

How the machine ‘thinks’: Understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms

The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research

Troubling Trends in Machine Learning Scholarship: Some ML papers suffer from flaws that could mislead the public and stymie future research

AI Now Institute 2023 Landscape report (discussions of the power imbalance in Big Tech)

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

Can we truly benefit from AI?

Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart

The Steep Cost of Capture

labor

'AI' champions the facade of non-human involvement. but the truth is that this is a myth that serves employers by underpaying the hidden workers, denying them labor rights and social benefits - as well as hyping-up their product. the effects on workers are not only economic but detrimental to their health - both mental and physical.

OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic

also from the Times: Inside Facebook's African Sweatshop

The platform as factory: Crowdwork and the hidden labour behind artificial intelligence

The humans behind Mechanical Turk’s artificial intelligence

The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work

The real aim of big tech's layoffs: bringing workers to heel

The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence

workers surveillance

5 ways Amazon monitors its employees, from AI cameras to hiring a spy agency

Computer monitoring software is helping companies spy on their employees to measure their productivity – often without their consent

theft of art and content

Artists say AI image generators are copying their style to make thousands of new images — and it's completely out of their control  (what gives me most hope about regulators dealing with theft is Getty images' lawsuit - unfortunately individuals simply don't have the same power as the corporation)

Copyright won't solve creators' Generative AI problem

The real aim of big tech's layoffs: bringing workers to heel

The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence

AI is already taking video game illustrators’ jobs in China

Microsoft lays off team that taught employees how to make AI tools responsibly/As the company accelerates its push into AI products, the ethics and society team is gone

150 African Workers for ChatGPT, TikTok and Facebook Vote to Unionize at Landmark Nairobi Meeting

Inside the AI Factory: the Humans that Make Tech Seem Human

Refugees help power machine learning advances at Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon

Amazon’s AI Cameras Are Punishing Drivers for Mistakes They Didn’t Make

China’s AI boom depends on an army of exploited student interns

political, social, ethical consequences

Afraid of AI? The startups selling it want you to be

An Indigenous Perspective on Generative AI

“Computers enable fantasies” – On the continued relevance of Weizenbaum’s warnings

‘Utopia for Whom?’: Timnit Gebru on the dangers of Artificial General Intelligence

Machine Bias

HUMAN_FALLBACK

AI Ethics Are in Danger. Funding Independent Research Could Help

AI Is Tearing Wikipedia Apart  

AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are

The Great A.I. Hallucination (podcast)

“Sorry in Advance!” Rapid Rush to Deploy Generative A.I. Risks a Wide Array of Automated Harms

The promise and peril of generative AI

ChatGPT Users Report Being Able to See Random People's Chat Histories

Benedetta Brevini on the AI sublime bubble – and how to pop it   

Eating Disorder Helpline Disables Chatbot for 'Harmful' Responses After Firing Human Staff

AI moderation is no match for hate speech in Ethiopian languages

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and other tech companies are in a 'frenzy' to help ICE build its own data-mining tool for targeting unauthorized workers

Crime Prediction Software Promised to Be Free of Biases. New Data Shows It Perpetuates Them

The EU AI Act is full of Significance for Insurers

Proxy Discrimination in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data

Welfare surveillance system violates human rights, Dutch court rules

Federal use of A.I. in visa applications could breach human rights, report says

Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI

Generative AI Is Making Companies Even More Thirsty for Your Data

environment

The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

Black boxes, not green: Mythologizing artificial intelligence and omitting the environment

Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP

AINOW: Climate Justice & Labor Rights

militarism

The Growing Global Spyware Industry Must Be Reined In

AI: the key battleground for Cold War 2.0?

‘Machines set loose to slaughter’: the dangerous rise of military AI

AI: The New Frontier of the EU's Border Extranalisation Strategy

The A.I. Surveillance Tool DHS Uses to Detect ‘Sentiment and Emotion’

organizations

AI now

DAIR

podcast episodes

Pretty Heady Stuff: Dru Oja Jay & James Steinhoff guide us through the hype & hysteria around AI

Tech Won't Save Us: Why We Must Resist AI w/ Dan McQuillan, Why AI is a Threat to Artists w/ Molly Crabapple, ChatGPT is Not Intelligent w/ Emily M. Bender

SRSLY WRONG: Artificial Intelligence part 1, part 2

The Dig: AI Hype Machine w/ Meredith Whittaker, Ed Ongweso, and Sarah West

This Machine Kills: The Triforce of Corporate Power in AI w/ ft. Sarah Myers West

[afrotumble]

Sexy Kenyan model Bernice Nunah go karting

[the-world-annealing]

Law proposal vaguely inspired by Moderation Discourse: if a social media site presents you with anything other than posts from an account you explicitly subscribed to, it should be text-only.

A 'for you' tab disqualifies your site, a 'popular' tab disqualifies it, search functions disqualify it, comment sections disqualify it, notifications are frankly on thin ice. If it's got any of those, then no image uploads, no hotlinks, definitely no video.

A site model where users get to upload whatever they like, in whatever format they like, is fundamentally incompatible with a site where users get shown stuff they did not explicitly request, because the combination of those two gets you people stumbling across graphic abuse and phishing links under cat photos and a million spambots in every corner of your website, forever.

You still have to do moderation under this law, but you have to do much less of it, and the sites with the most reason to still do it (text-only algorithmic sites) at the very least won't be forcing their underpaid Kenyan workforce to look at beheading videos.

This system allows for old-school forums, it allows for mastodon, it allows for the parts of tumblr that people like, it allows for wordpress and substack and all the other blogging sites, it allows for neocities, but it doesn't allow for twitter or reddit or facebook or youtube or discord, and I think that's a good thing.

As a plus this would quiet down a lot of other fears around social media that've been floating around (elsagate type stuff, algorithmic radicalization, every panic about a site suppressing X term or demographic).

Sure, it'd mean the end of the internet as we know it, but have you seen the internet lately?

[mariacallous]

In literary and cultural studies, “tradition” is a word everyone uses but few address critically. In Reading Old Books, Peter Mack offers a wide-ranging exploration of the creative power of literary tradition, from the middle ages to the twenty-first century, revealing in new ways how it helps writers and readers make new works and meanings.

Reading Old Books argues that the best way to understand tradition is by examining the moments when a writer takes up an old text and writes something new out of a dialogue with that text and the promptings of the present situation. The book examines Petrarch as a user, instigator, and victim of tradition. It shows how Chaucer became the first great English writer by translating and adapting a minor poem by Boccaccio. It investigates how Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser made new epic meanings by playing with assumptions, episodes, and phrases translated from their predecessors. It analyzes how the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell drew on tradition to address the new problem of urban deprivation in Mary Barton. And, finally, it looks at how the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, in his 2004 novel Wizard of the Crow, reflects on biblical, English literary, and African traditions.

Drawing on key theorists, critics, historians, and sociologists, and stressing the international character of literary tradition, Reading Old Books illuminates the not entirely free choices readers and writers make to create meaning in collaboration and competition with their models.

[somaligovernment]

That Kenyan really is the worlds best individual to model audacity as a behaviour from