In recent years, after being impressed by a few local nonprofit BigORG branches (branches of national BigORGs) and finding that they claim to need/want volunteers (even to the point of desperation if you take their appeals seriously), I've approached them to find out about volunteering. As expected, they want to do a background check (almost certainly through the state police - it's cheap and easy here) and want you to release them of liability for physical injury and all that sort of thing. Neither are a big deal to me. But what IS a big deal is my privacy, and I've found a few of these orgs have volunteer waivers such as

"PHOTOGRAPH PERMISSION: I give permission for the BigORG to use, without limitation or obligation, photographs or other media that may include my image or voice to promote or interpret BigORG programs."

and

I hereby grant and convey unto BigORG2 all right, title and interest in any and all photographs and video/audio/electronic recordings of me, including as to my name, image and voice, made by or on behalf of BigORG2 during my Activities with BigORG2, including, but not limited to, the right to use such materials for any purpose and to any royalties, proceeds or other benefits derived from them. I understand that I will not have any ownership interest in or to such photographs, images and/or recordings, I have not been provided or promised any compensation to me, and I hereby waive any rights, privileges or claims based on any right of publicity, privacy, ownership or any other rights arising, relating to or resulting from the photographs, images and/or recordings.

This is highly infuriating. It's mindblowing to me that BigORGs think that for the "privilege" of providing free labor in order to assist them in carrying out their charitable "mission", that volunteers should also allow large quantities of their PII to be captured by the BigORG and exposed to the public in any manner the BigORG may choose, for as long as it may choose, and further, without recourse or compensation of any kind.

In the cases of the two BigORGs I've quoted above, I've tried to negotiate with them, have asked "how about we just strike that one paragraph, the rest of the waiver is fine, and we'll be good to go". The response is a big fat "No" and they show me, a perfectly capable, reliable and generous volunteer, to the door. Only spineless volunteers are needed apparently, ones who will give anything to volunteer at BigORG and won't make even the slightest pro-privacy waves when doing so.

SmallORGs I've volunteered with have not yet reached this level of entitlement, at least not here. Sure they may want to take some pics for social media posts from time to time, but so far have just warned us in advance to get out of the picture (which I have done) and it's all been fine. I don't know how long they will remain well-behaved with regard to PII and public disclosure thereof. I'm not paying for the "opportunity" to volunteer, either with cash or with personal info to be used for marketing, and the more these orgs demand it the less I'll be volunteering.

(I might add that I'm not talking about any kind of community-service mandatory volunteering, though these BigORGs may take that kind of volunteer as well from time to time.)

From Billionaire Sean Parker:

The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, ... was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'

"And that means that we need to sort of give you a dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you more likes and more comments."

It's a social-validation feedback loop ... This is exactly the kind of thing that hacker like myself would come up with, because it's exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. the inventors, creators — me, Mark, Kevin Systrom of Instagram, all of these people — we understood this consciously. And we did it anyway

God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7jar4KgKxs

In New York City, parking & camera violations are public.

Not only did Taco Bell give me way to many sauce packets as usual. I received them in individual little bags. Fucking environmental waste. Especially frustrating when I said No sauces. They never listen.

Not sure who is doing this exactly, if it's DDG or Reddit or someone else. I was looking for a comparison of epic vs steam and noticed that the description of the search result is AI-generated, instead of actually showing anything from the thread.

A user asks why they should buy games on Steam rather than Epic, and gets various answers from other users. Some of the reasons include Steam's features, performance, community, and exclusivity.

• Original source

Other sources:

• Naples News

• Washington Post

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/02/03/metro/josh-kraft-announce-mayor-boston/

Shout out to businesses that email tracking information and link to their own systems instead of the package delivery service's tracking system. These third party tracking site plug-ins often lag behind the information provided to them by the delivery service's site.

Special shout out to those who hide tracking information behind a required account login when they could simply provide the tracking number in the email.

Most special shout out to sites that do not allow you to know anything about a particular order unless you click through to their site and log in. It makes tracking past orders a nightmare.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/15800457

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/31694909

Remember the "I want a white one" video? That's the first video I clearly remember having a text-to-speech voice-over. It was really bad TTS, and it was awesome. Lately, though, I find myself wishing video hosting services like Youtube and Peertube (to a lesser degree) had a filter so that I could filter out any videos with TTS voice overs. Does this bother anyone else?

I'm a little torn about it. There are legitimate reasons for people to use them; I've seen commentary from posters about social anxiety that makes even recording audio difficult, and TTS must be fantastic for mute folks. Non-native English speakers may be more comfortable with it. I'm sure the platform doesn't help... how many videos do you have to post where the peanut gallery mocks your verbal mistakes before you give up and just have an engine read your written text? I've also noticed that the use of TTS is far, far worse on Youtube -- I have yet to come across a single video on any Peertub site that uses it, although it must exist.

Like a lot of technology, generated speech is getting abused, and since TTS has valid uses, I put it in the "enshittification" category. It's used on every bulk, low-effort "N greatest/funniest/random-adjective" videos; I hear it in increasingly in those suspiciously AI-smelling, ad-ish "reviews" that just read specs and make an odd comment about how cool it is; and there's so much more low-quality, low-information content that feels AI generated uses it -- or maybe it feels AI generated because it uses it. It's almost always on just awful content.

TTS on video content is a perfect example of "this is why we can't have nice things." I am starting to hate it so much, I abort whatever I'm starting to watch as soon as I hear the absurd cadence and mispronunciations -- I'd rather hear an honest non-native speaker making mistakes than that terrible TTS crap.

Whatever the reason, the use of TTS is a trend I'm putting firmly in the "enshittification" category, but am I overreacting here? Do you have a way of dodging or identifying content that uses TTS, in advance?

This was for querying package delivery status. I finally got one right after many attempts. The layout, layers, colors change after every attempt so good luck on figuring out which letters count.

"Come make friends on Reddit"

This is a local story, but then again it isn't. The same thing is playing out across WA state and no doubt across the country too. Weird how they (the people interviewed from the org) are tippy-toeing around the fact that Trump's and fElon's cuts are at the bottom of all this.

“United Way of Spokane County will be concluding its operations following a thoughtful evaluation by our board of directors,” she said as part of the statement. “This decision reflects the combined impact of ongoing economic challenges, affecting campaigns, donor giving and grant support, alongside an unexpected leadership transition.”

In April, AmeriCorps announced cuts to about 41% of its grant funding and placed 85% of its staff on leave. All told, Washington state officials expected to lose out on $21.6 million in program funding.

Included in that figure was a $50,000 grant to United Way of Spokane, which served as an intermediary agency for Volunteers in Service to America, or VISTA.

other United Way agencies in Washington also have decided to shutter, although they declined to say where.

One of the most popular recent programs was the Dolly Parton Imagination Library.

“We relied on state grants for that program,” Bluff said. “VISTA from AmeriCorps is going away. That was another big program. We just kept losing funding.”

United Way also supported Spokane Immigrants Rights, YWCA, YMCA, American Indian Community Center, Girl Scouts, SNAP Financial and Feast World Kitchen to name a few.

Ah, there you have it, the United Way was trying to help poor and darker-skinned people among other things. Naturally the Regime had to strangle them.

Not only are the countries he is saying have "fine" refugees don't even speak English as an official language, Africa as a continent has the largest amount of countries that speak English:

Most other African countries speak French, Spanish or another European language as an official language. So what is the issue here? Many Africans have immigrated to Western countries and have integrated fine. It's insane that Twitch is allowing this kind of rhetoric to be displayed in full velocity on this platform.

Brokerage login now requiring I answer these questions. Not a single one of these has a single answer I'd actually remember. They all have problems regarding what would actually count or multiple possible answers to choose from, or these are not things people would remember or they just don't apply to most people.

"Be Ready for Today" They're so supportive and enthusiastic, and because of this they're killing off most of (maybe all?) of their WeMo line:

But hey, at least we know that they're very appreciative of us, and that they wanted to provide us with simple to use accessories, and that they're proud. Their empty corporate words make up for the pieces of ewaste we now have.

I believe WeMo with a lot of hacking can be controlled locally via a direct IP connection if set up through Home Assistant. It's a pain, and it still requires their app, so maybe try to set it up now before they officially end support. Even without this workaround, it's pure enshittification and Belkin is back on the "Don't ever buy" list.

He's always wore sketchers. Like since he was 4. Recently, he got really emotionally taking about shoes he wanted for middle school. He said if he doesn't get Nikes he's going to get teased. Great fucking marketing work Nike.