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.

wtf…

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

Turn the lights on. Purple is not a good look

The CCTV tapes from Epstein’s island

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.

We have some pretty amazing drugs today. Both commercial and recreational.

I’m happy you like your scooter, but it’ll soon be a piece of toxic garbage like most outdated technology.

Money was already spent. The hype companies were backed by big capital in their early days. Now the people who provided that capital want to cash out and they want their winnings. So you will have AI shoved down your throat on every piece of media channel those people also own. AI is a hype term that appears periodically since before the 2000s. This is nothing new. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

LLMs are toys that sparkle for a brief moment. Their value is laughable compared to their cost.

Oh look, a chainsaw. Now I just have to find gas…