OCI

the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day,

Gotcha. Millions of harmful posts every day. That really does sound like a great place.

I get that, I really do, and I honestly believe you have exactly the right idea.

But on the other hand, you have to realize that not all of the money purely goes to enabling knowledge sharing with Wikimedia. This is not an election, it’s a company, non-profit or for-profit doesn’t really matter. There are still people paying off business expenses from your donations.

I fully understand the necessity of this, but you might just feel better if your $5 literally bought someone a meal or if it paid for a fraction of a business flight to promote Wikimedia.

I do give in small streams and I do large annual contributions. I’m entirely not opposed to sharing.

I prefer to keep the small donations to individuals who also prefer a reliable stream of goodwill. Larger organizations also prefer reliable streams, but they also receive millions in donations overall, usually with significant large donors.

If you look long enough, you’ll find enough material to not want to contribute to Wikimedia. If your contribution was only a drop in the pool to begin with, maybe this is one of the expenses that is not for you to carry.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goes/ might be a good starting point.

https://www.wikimedia.de/2022/en/finances/ has some clear numbers up front, but I’m not sure if these only relate to Germany. I haven’t been following the sources recently.

Makes sense. If you’re contributing less than $1000 monthly to anything, you’re not making a difference. If you want dedicated people to be on the receiving end, who also do a great job, every single person will cost thousands each month. Wikimedia is literally spending millions each year.

Honestly, don’t try to hunt for the “best” spot to contribute your exact amount of spare money to, with the hope of having the largest possible impact. It won’t happen. Treat a good friend to some food instead.

If you really feel like you already got some value out of a service in the past, give what you can, without limiting yourself financially in the process. If you feel like you don’t have the $1 to spend for Wikipedia, don’t spend it. Don’t guilt trip yourself into donations ever. Your donation today will not prevent a service from turning into shit tomorrow. Pay for what you got

I’ve been a funding member of the Wikimedia Foundation for over a decade. I have looked at their finances several times before and during financing them.

As with a lot of similar non-profits, a considerable amount of donations does not go into “running the servers”. You have to judge this by yourself, but they don’t embezzle any money and there is a reasonable bottom line. Wikipedia continuously helps tons of people, and the people who run the operation enable that.

You can download a full dump of Wikipedia any day. Compared to other lying companies, they have been true on their promises for some time.

Of all the $1 I could spend in a year, the one I give to Wikipedia is probably the least wrong invested, and that $1 actually already makes a difference

I’d be more worried about media than the ability to pirate it.

Music has adapted to generate plays. Platforms are already being polluted with genAI music.

TV was replaced by streaming services. Series come and go and are very specifically tailored to get people to subscribe. Exclusives are the standard. Single season productions are not uncommon. People are also already investigating ways to pollute this pool with genAI as well.

Movies are a stream of Marvel and Disney garbage that was already more CGI than acting. Now genAI and upscaled classics are on the menu.

Piracy will not go away. People used to record movies with camcorders in the cinema, now they pull raw files from CDN nodes. There is always the scene. The platforms that try to profit from the scene come and go.

People who used left-pad deserved everything that happened to them. But, very valid point.

There is no honor system. If your code is open for commercial reuse, that’s it. If you have any expectations that are not in line with that, then yes pick a different license.

I guess I agree with you, I’m just phrasing it from a different perspective.

I feel like the time to hide information behind YouTube links is over. Feels like a link to a paywall article at this point.

5 nines imply a downtime of 6 minutes a year, or every 100,000th operation failing. That’s not great for a file system. I assume you picked the number arbitrarily, but still think about it.

And has been for so long, they already went through it once

Numbers give the wrong impression that one version follows another. Debian release channels exit alongside each other individually. Giving the release channels names helps to make that distinction. It also makes for an easy layout of packages in APT repositories.

Sid is and always has been Sid. If you were to assign numbers, what number should replace that name? There are perfectly working labels for release channels and there is no reasonable replacement.

I feel like most people base their decision on license purely on anecdotes of a handful of cases where the outcome was not how they would have wanted it. Yet, most people will never be in that spot, because they don’t have anything that anyone would want to consume.

If I had produced something of value I want to protect, I wouldn’t make it open in the first place. Every piece of your code will be used to feed LLMs, regardless of your license.

It is perfectly fine to slap MIT on your JavaScript widget and let some junior in some shop use it to get their project done. Makes people’s life easier, and you don’t want to sue anyone anyway in case of license violations.

If you’re building a kernel module for a TCP reimplementation which dramatically outperforms the current implementation, yeah, probably a different story

That is some next-level Minecraft you are playing over there

GitHub is a place you can use to easily put a copy of your code online. Many people just want to build a working solution and move on. Building a useful GitHub project, with fancy stuff like releases, is work that isn’t really solving any issues. Many people don’t like doing it. Many people especially don’t want to invest time in proprietary solutions like GitHub. They might not even accept pull requests on GitHub.

Quality assessment though 😄

Okay, maybe I read you wrong. I agree that nobody will try to acquire details through mullvad to prosecute this.

I read the comment like downloading music is so irrelevant, you could skip the VPN, which I would disagree with.

I once downloaded an album I had already pre-ordered, but didn’t want to wait, no VPN. Got a letter from a media lawyer within the month. Felt pretty stupid.

Valid. I never had anyone do my assignments for free and in few minute though. It seems unreasonable to assume that this has no multiplying effect. After all, I have no hard numbers either

Now this is some horrible advice. Bravo

What exactly was the tool we cheated with in the past that was equivalent to LLMs? What is your certainty based on?