gencha @ gencha @lemm.ee

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Joined

2 yr. ago

I'm calling bullshit on any user count they release. The site was filled with bots even when I still used it. People kept complaining about "karma farmers" as if there were users who repost popular content. It has always been largely Reddit's own bots too keep new users entertained and recycle popular content so that it reaches as many users as possible. They turned this up to 11 before going public.

Now that they no longer provide an API, they are free to make up any fake metric they want to try to pump up their worthless stock.

So if I watch all Star Wars movies, and then get a crew together to make a couple of identical movies that were inspired by my earlier watching, and then sell the movies, then this is actually completely legal.

It doesn't matter if they stole the source material. They are selling a machine that can create copyright infringements at a click of a button, and that's a problem.

This is not the same as an artist looking at every single piece of art in the world and being able to replicate it to hang it in the living room. This is an army of artists that are enslaved by a single company to sell any copy of any artwork they want. That army works as long as you feed it electricity and free labor of actual artists.

Theft actually seems like a great word for what these scammers are doing.

If you run some open source model on your own machine, that's a different story.

https://discord.com/terms#5 is pretty permissive

Your content is yours, but you give us a license to it when you use Discord. Your content may be protected by certain intellectual property rights. We don’t own those. But by using our services, you grant us a license—which is a form of permission—to do the following with your content, in accordance with applicable legal requirements, in connection with operating, developing, and improving our services:

        Use, copy, store, distribute, and communicate your content in manners consistent with your use of the services. (For example, so we can store and display your content.)
    Publish, publicly perform, or publicly display your content if you’ve chosen to make it visible to others. (For example, so we can display your messages if you post them in certain servers or recommend that content to others.)
    Monitor, modify, translate, and reformat your content. (For example, so we can resize an image you post to fit on a mobile device.)
    Sublicense your content, to allow our services to work as intended. (For example, so we can store your content with our cloud service providers.)
  

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.

I'm going to claim he was detected by automated money laundering prevention systems when he collected the cash. Spotify learned about it from the feds, or their payment processor.

Besides that, in the indictment it says clearly that he was using the thousands of generated titles and bot accounts specifically to work around new anti-fraud systems. This is a classic cat and mouse game.

Yes and no:

For example, on or about December 26, 2018, SMITH emailed two coconspirators that, “We need to get a TON of songs fast to make this work around the anti-fraud policies these guys are all using now.”

To obtain the necessary number of songs for his scheme to succeed, SMITH eventually turned to artificial intelligence. In or about 2018, SMITH began working with the Chief Executive Officer of an AI music company (“CC-3”) and a music promoter (“CC-4”) to create hundreds of thousands of songs using artificial intelligence that SMITH could then fraudulently stream. CC-3 soon began providing SMITH with thousands of songs each week that SMITH could upload to the Streaming Platforms and manipulate the streams for.

I wanted to read who the stockholders of this garbage actually are. It's a great rabbit hole. This one is pure gold https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_World_Acquisition_Corp.

It's just shady shit at every level. The people who bought the SPAC didn't even know the money would go towards Trump and pulled out more than half of the capital.

Then they propped that garbage stock up Musk-style and sold it to their fan base.

The dude who ran the SPAC als has amazing stories tied to his name https://eu.heraldtribune.com/story/opinion/columns/2022/11/16/patrick-orlando-truth-social-you-light-up-my-life-connection/10698187002/

https://www.reuters.com/business/trump-deal-delivers-420-mln-windfall-wondering-dealmaker-2021-10-21/

He was already working on mergers in China, but couldn't close the deal because he didn't have the money. All sounds like typical escalating scams.

It's clear why Trump would run a con with this guy.

They increased to 25 to encourage media uploads to train their own models with. They now have collected enough metrics to realize, most valuable content is below 10MB. Now they are optimizing. They won't lose anything valuable to them and the users who are impacted might even buy Nitro now. Win-win for them

"JD Vance is what would happen if Boss Baby grew a beard,” quipped one person in 2021.

“Just shave JD Vance’s beard and he’ll lose all support,” commented a self-described center-right Republican account in April. “He literally looks like a reddit user.”

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/jd-vance-beard-vice-president-donald-trump/?amp

Didn't even know this was an actual hot topic...

I can relate. Being 13 would pair really bad with my drunk driving

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 have heard of studies 🤔

AI is great, what OpenAI does is blockchain-level idiocy.

Okay. But where's the cost analysis for me giving them respect? I doubt it is worth a mere 53% performance increase in the common ranks.

The CCTV tapes from Epstein's island

Easy. Come up with some insane pet feeding scenario, and then assume you saw someone on YouTube vouch for it. Enter discourse. Ensure to present your theory by first saying "I don't know what a cat actually is, but...". Then slowly slide your audience into your scenario about how people in Florida have kept alligators alive by feeding them rotten boat parts with just the right algae and moss on it.

Saw this picture. Instant reaction: Ah, that's why he has the beard. Also explains why his beard looks like a transplant