#Volunteer efforts

[andrewjbernhard]

Bringing Holiday Cheer: Bernhard Law Firm's Toy Drive Success

This holiday season, Bernhard Law Firm came together to support a local toy drive, delivering a trunk full of hundreds of toys to children in need. Thanks so much to the Miami community and Jackson Memorial for making this happen.

[godallaswriter]

Holiday Spirit: Honoring Veterans

[mcromwell]

Highly recommend joining a local political/community group that shares your ideals and values. If you don't know what you can do to help: don't worry, if you show up and be real, they'll tell you how you can help. And even if you can't help, at least you made their day brighter by showing up at all and reminded them (and yourself) that Yes, there are people out there who DO give a shit. Makes me feel a lot less freaked out about things.

[rainbow-femme]

I love reading definitions of Quiet Quitting

“An employee who is quiet quitting will come into work at their allotted start time, do tasks within their job description, leave at their allotted time, take their full lunch break, and fully use their paid time off and sick leave”

[chubbychiquita]

🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️ outgrown clothes try on video going up on loyalfans tonight

[boygirlswag]

modern au laios would 100% be a zookeeper. i feel like they'd start him with mucking out the monkey pits but hes so good with kids that they eventually just let him do shows and demonstrations. actually where's the dungeon meshi we bought a zoo au

[luvether]

Phainon’s genuinely so funny 😭 it’s either that or i just laugh at things so easily.

[anotherpjofan]

The fact that someone decided to hack ao3 is so wild to me like do you thrive off of destroying people's happiness???

[eskildit]

i keep getting annoyed at these little videos or infographics my irls like about 'steps to live a more political life' because they're always just about volunteering or creating some type of community organizing initiative which is i guess good and fine but 1) they often tell people to create new things rather than join anything ongoing and 2) feels like there should be at least some amount of reading or educating yourself somewhere in those steps but there usually isn't. perchance try a book.

[npd-vriska]

as much as posting about punching nazis is fun you do have to remember no matter how much you think you can do it, you don't actually know that until you meet an actual guy with a swastika on his jacket. maybe you think you can but are you ready to potentially lose that fight? or even just to do violence on another person? i've heard the human brain is weird and generally doesn't like doing that. if you for sure know you can that's good, i've fought a nazi before and you're welcome to join me, but your fantasy of being a hero to an imagined queer person or poc or muslim or jew getting harassed might never come true. but there are things you can do right now. if you like the idea of actively doing good things that can still get you arrested volunteering to feed the homeless is always an option.

[bi-writes]

ok i've done some light research. if you want a software engineer/fic writer's inital take on lore.fm, i'll keep it short and sweet.

my general understanding of lore.fm functionality:

they use OpenAI's public API. they take in the text from the URL provided and use it to spit out your AI-read fic. their API uses HTTP requests, meaning a connection is made to an OpenAI server over HTTP to do as lore.fm asks and then give back the audio. my concern is that i wasn't able to find out what exactly that means. does OpenAI just parse the data and spit out a response? is that data then stored somewhere to better their model (probably yes)? does OpenAI do anything to ensure that the data is being used the way it was intended (we know this probably isn't true because lore.fm exists)?

lore.fm stores the generated audio (i am almost certain of this because of the features described in this reddit post). meaning that someone's fic is sitting in a lore.fm database. what are they doing with that data? what can they do with it? how is it being stored? what is being stored, the text and the audio, or just the audio?

i find transparency a very difficult thing to ask for in tech. people are concerned with technological trade secrets and stifling innovation (hilarious when i think about lore.fm, because it doesn't take a genius to feed text into AI and display the response somewhere, sorry to say). and while i find the idea of AI being used to help further accessibility on apps that don't yet provide it promising, i find the method that lore.fm (and OpenAI) chooses to do this to be dangerous and pave a path for a harmful integration of AI (and also fanfiction in general -- we write to interact, and lore.fm removes that aspect of it entirely).

we already know that AI companies have been paying to scrape data from different sources for the purposes of bettering their models, and we already know that they've only started asking for permission to do this because users found out (and not from the goodness of their hearts, because more data means better models, and asking for permission adds overhead). but this way of using it allows AI to backdoor-scrape data that the original sources of the data didn't give consent to. maybe the author declined to have their fic scraped by AI on the site they posted it onto (if the site asked at all), but they didn't know a third-party app like lore.fm would feed it into an AI model anyways.

what's the point of writing fics if i have no control over my own content?

[theevilcactus]

if they vote Jess out instead of Jelinsky I’m gonna be so fucking annoyed y’all have no idea

[arlathen]

i made my little family tree and it ends in the character i want to be insane about, my LDB, but actually i can't stop thinking about her dad. man who followed every order and did everything right and is still losing everything. still married but soooo divorced. elf dilf. he's perfect for me.

[roguetaxidermyy]

the same chronically online leftists who talk about "building community" as a blanket solution to every issue, but always bitch about emotional labor or unpaid domestic labor don't realize that a foundational aspect of building community is volunteer work. lmfao.

[inkcurlsandknives]

Seriously did not expect to cry as hard as I did Abt being a biracial queer kid from Texas reading Red White and Royal Blue 🥲😭🥲 it was supposed to be a fun royal romp guys, I was promised breezy light romance with banter and puns and I'm weeping

[sunlight-shunlight]

"anarchist direct actions can be about handing out completely legal, nonobjectionable flyers about mental health on a college campus. i'm the most politically radical and bold person in my friend group btw 😌" gosh i missed this website. you cannot get that anywhere else. on twitter that would be like a blue checkmark take from a democratic party influencer but here they're doing it in 6 paragraphs purely for love of the game.