Regulation. Where I’m at, a device capable of making phone calls, must allow emergency calls by any user. Data is all you can get

You can’t win, unless you delete their social media. There is nothing you can say or do that won’t be erased by their next Facebook visit. They are also co-dependent and will not divert from their course individualy

Someone like the secretary of health or the president, as it currently stands

On desktop, using testing + manufacturer repos is fine. Don’t use repos intended for other distributions.

That’s a good point, and I don’t really have enough insights to properly respond to that. I did think about Peertube, and I believe that a site like TikTok is different, because it relies on the ability to broadcast a large number of short videos, specifically with lots of skips.

Streaming one video for several minutes, and skipping between numerous videos every couple of seconds, is orders of magnitude more expensive. Video compression works on the idea that you store entire pictures rarely, and then just encode the difference between each frame. When you constantly need the start of videos, you constantly need the full picture of the first frame. This induces a much higher bandwidth requirement than with video that streams for several minutes continuously. Also consider the response time that is required to make the TikTok experience work. Then also consider that you need to attract enough content contributors to make this work. You can’t just upload some ancient archive of 45 minute videos. You need to drive the machine.

So, to produce a TikTok experience, you also need to design for an attractive ingress of free content.

This is just not replicable in a free environment.

Nobody pays for that much bandwidth without the ability to manipulate you through profiling and impressions. You are the product. The product is not sharing videos. There is no fediverse platform that makes you its whore. If you were to make a video sharing platform, it would never work, because that is not the product, it’s only a feature of what makes up the dopamine machine.

Lemmy will also never outgrow commercial platforms, because the commercial platforms also never were about content.

I heard this phrase once: Trying to save the ecosystem with domesticated bees is like trying to save biodiversity by putting up another cattle ranch.

Technically speaking, there was an insurgence when Trump lost the election

Hopefully Chivas Regal and cocaine

You don’t realize a 500km route you take once is shit. It’s when the software sends you on a shit route across town every single day when you measure quality.

Kittensgame

Explaining my job is trivial compared to the insanity I cook up in my spare time.

Oh, so you like gaming? No, I’m actually not playing the game. I’m building a mod for it. Erm, okay, so this is for other players then? No, I’m mostly building it for myself. Ah, so you haven’t put a lot of time into it yet? Roughly 12 years. What? So what does the mod do then? It plays the game for me, and publishes in-game metrics to a monitoring application, so that I can see the progress of the game in an abstract form while I’m on the couch, thinking about how to optimize the automation further.

Regular fun stuff.

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

The CCTV tapes from Epstein’s island

It would require me to visit Reddit and log in. Disgusting thought

Borderlands to me felt a lot more linear than Fallout. Especially this heavy focus on loot in BL makes it so bland. I’m surprised someone thought this would even be a good universe to tell another story in. The comic book esthetic is fun, but always keeps the emergence at bay.