Rebecca Promitzer

I’ve met rock stars, movie stars, millionaires, academics, models, surgeons. None of them have impressed me more than people who have been kind. Kindness trumps all talents, status and attributes. Kindness is love in action. #kindness #BeKind ❤️

Dear restaurant owners: We all hate the QR code menus. Stop. -everyone

This is how a child loses trust in their parents; - Asks a genuine question. Gets dismissed. - Shares excitement about something. Gets mocked. - Comes home with a problem. Gets lectured instead of heard. - Cries. Gets told to stop being dramatic. - Fails at something. Gets compared to someone else. - Achieves something. Parents barely look up. - Tries to talk. Parent is on the phone. - Learns that home is not a safe place to be honest. - Starts hiding things. - No quality time. Only correction. - No "I'm proud of you" without a condition attached. - No listening without an agenda. - No apology when the parent is wrong. - No curiosity about who the child actually is. - Child raises themselves emotionally. - Grows up. Moves away as fast as possible. - Calls home out of obligation, not love. - Becomes a stranger who shares blood. And the parent wonders why their child never opens up. To raise a child who actually trusts you, do this; - Put the phone down and look them in the eyes when they talk. - Ask questions about their world without judging the answers. - Apologize when you're wrong. They're watching everything. - Celebrate who they are, not just what they achieve. - Make home the safest place they know. - Listen to understand, not to respond. - Show up to the small moments. Those are the big ones. - Tell them you love them without them having to earn it. - Be the person they run to, not from. NON-NEGOTIABLE.

Last year the Duchy of Cornwall paid William £23m. The Duchy of Lancaster paid Charles £27m. That's money that should be spent on local communities and public services. It's time to ditch the duchies. #NotMyKing #AbolishTheMonarchy #DitchTheDuchies republic.org.uk/duchies

There are many reasons to resist AI (e.g. environmental harm, the power it gives to states/corporations, intellectual theft), but perhaps the biggest one for me is that, despite it all, I still believe that the human intellect is miraculous, irreplicable, & worth fighting for.

Sometimes it’s best to turn your back on the world and focus on the small things that you can change. So today I spent outside, surrounded by birdsong and the first warm day in the garden Planting 100 lily of the valley in pots by the kitchen door.

My therapist told me “Anger is the part of yourself that loves you the most. It knows when you are being mistreated, neglected, disrespected. It signals that you have to take a step out of a place that doesn't do you justice. It makes you aware that you need to leave a room, a job, a relationship, old patterns that don't work for you anymore. Learn to listen to your anger and make it your best friend. Then it'll leave.” And that stuck with me forever.

I've decided that not a single acre of mountain land, agricultural land, forest, or wild desert is worth sacrificing for AI data centers. No river, no lake, no reservoir should be touched to maintain them.

Anonymous I run a small bakery. Woman came in every Friday morning. Same order. Two blueberry muffins. One coffee. Always sat at the corner table. Read her book. Stayed an hour. Did this for three years. Then she stopped coming. After two months I got worried. Found her number in our loyalty program. Called. She answered. Voice weak. “Oh. Hi. I’ve been meaning to cancel that.” “Are you okay? You haven’t been in.” Long pause. “I have cancer. Stage four. I’m in hospice now. Those Friday mornings were my favorite part of the week. But I can’t make it anymore.” My heart broke. “What if I brought Friday to you?” Silence. Then crying. “You’d do that?” “Every Friday. Same time. Same order.” Showed up that Friday. She was in a hospital bed in her living room. So thin. But she smiled when she saw those muffins. We sat. She told me about her week. Her family. Her life. I listened. Just like at the bakery. Did this for six weeks. Every Friday. Last Friday she could barely stay awake. But she held that muffin. Took one bite. “Best thing I’ve tasted all week.” She passed on Monday. Her daughter called. “Mom’s last words were about you. She said ‘tell the baker thank you. Fridays kept me human until the end.’” Went to her funeral. Her daughter hugged me. “You gave her normal when everything else was hospitals and pain. You gave her Fridays.” Now I deliver to three hospice patients. Every Friday. Because sometimes a muffin isn’t just a muffin. It’s dignity. It’s routine. It’s proof that someone still sees you as you. Not as sick. Just as you.

Without question, this is one of the worst things I’ve read online in a while… I wish I could say don’t read it, but you really need to. I’m so tired of watching our labor be used to create horrifying conditions for humanity for the perverse enrichment of a handful of billionaires.

😍How adorable! In London, dozens of men gather in a pub to learn how to braid their daughters’ hair The meetings last about two and a half hours — they drink beer and, together with stylists, learn how to make ponytails and braids. The initiative is part of the Secret Life of Dads movement, where fathers discuss the challenges of raising children and support each other without judgment.

fuck the rat race i want my own veggie garden. I want a regulated nervous system. I want slow mornings and cups of tea. I want a job that doesn’t give me anxiety. I want a small circle of a friends and home cooked meals. I want to read books and sit in the sun. I want a soft, slow life.

Competitive anorexia promoted by Hollywood and GLP1 companies will lead to an eating disorder epidemic among teenage girls, and they know it. The choices you make do not exist in a vacuum.

Absolutely sick to death of hearing about how the new @louistheroux documentary has made people think about attitudes to women. Lots of MPs jumping on the bandwagon. I mean, no disrespect to Louis - I’m grateful for the highlight - but for God’s sake… Women get killed by their partner every week. Tiny Man Tate has been a thing for years. Domestic violence shelters are overwhelmed. Women have been waving the red flags about incels and attitudes for years. We’ve been begging for change. We’ve been highlighting the serious threat of anti-women social media. Then a MAN makes a documentary and suddenly everyone’s interested? Do you not all think that this might be part of the problem?

Fantastic news in the UK today - the government has apparently ditched its plan to force creatives to 'opt out' if they don't want AI companies training on their life's work. The opt-out proposal was unfair and unworkable. Many couldn't realistically have opted out at all, and it would have affected small rights holders disproportionately negatively. We should be grateful to the government for listening to reason on this, rather than just listening to the big tech lobby. They have done the right thing by putting opt-out behind us. They should now reaffirm what the law says - that AI companies must license people's work if they want to train on it - and commit not to change that law. thetimes.com/uk/technology-…

Distracted by the slaughter of children in Iran & Lebanon? Me too! But what better time could there be for govt to quietly relaunch its Digital ID plan? Missed it? Me too! But look who’s celebrating… The director of ‘govt innovation’ at the Tony Blair Institute! 1/

The Oscars have never felt more meaningless. The United States and Israel are relentlessly bombing Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza. Designer gowns and gold statues just seem irrelevant in a world being torn apart by U.S. imperialism.

This is wild. 143 million people thought they were catching Pokémon. They were actually building one of the largest real-world visual datasets in AI history. Niantic just disclosed that photos and AR scans collected through Pokémon Go have produced a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images. The company is now using that data to power visual navigation AI for delivery robots. Players didn't just walk around with their phones. They scanned landmarks, storefronts, parks, and sidewalks from every angle, at every time of day, in lighting and weather conditions that staged photography would never capture. They documented the physical world at a scale no mapping company with a fleet of vehicles could have replicated on the same timeline or budget. Niantic collected this systematically, data point by data point, across eight years, while users thought the only thing at stake was catching a rare Charizard. The most valuable AI training datasets in the world aren't being assembled in data centers. They're being built by people who have no idea they're building them.

Mini forest on a pine cone.

It’s so funny when incels say, “Men built everything.” Of course they did. Women were burned at the stake for being smart, banned from schools, married off at eight years old, and treated as unwanted in society. For centuries, women were barred from participating in the very areas that shaped society, and even when they did contribute, their work was often erased or credited to men. So how do you expect them to have built a society they weren’t allowed to participate in?

Anyone interested in Tarot? Pamela Colman Smith, the designer/illustrator of the most well known deck (the Rider-Waite) is brought out of the shadows in this article. It's right that she be known and celebrated for such a lovely, powerful and mythic contribution to art and mysticism. #tarot #riderwaite #divination #mysticism news.artnet.com/art-world/pame…