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Keep Our Servers Running

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Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#221

Post by nnyx »

John7878781 wrote: post #63
theletterf wrote: post #53

Be careful: paying with Google Pay is extremely easy and the default setting is monthly recurrence. If you're not logged in, the only way to cancel (as far as I know) is by sending an email, which is incredibly precarious.

in those situations, especially if the business is unresponsive, i just keep charging back until they stop. if i can subscribe easily, i should be able to cancel just as easily :)

I take advantage of all the temporary card options my credit card provides.

There's one for subscriptions where you give it a monthly limit and if you want to end your subscription and they're being difficult you can just cancel the card.

It's great to basically never be beholden to anyone holding my payment info hostage. I know charge backs exist but while I've never had problems, I would imagine the more you end up having to go down that avenue the more likely you are to have problems using it.

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#222

Post by Barbing »

justin66 wrote: post #182
ndriscoll wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can use an online service in the middle of the night, but as a citizen, I'd be upset if I learned my public library were paging someone in the middle of the night if it weren't working. That's incredibly inappropriate. It can wait. Like I said in another comment, computers generally don't just randomly stop working, but no, a library worker doesn't need their computer at 9am so badly that they need an on-call IT…

> a library worker doesn't need their computer at 9am so badly that they need an on-call IT worker (and presumably some kind of middle-of-the-night monitoring) to ensure it before they get in. A single worker probably doesn't, yes. In contrast, hundreds of people being unable to do anything when they come to work in the morning is not a terrible reason to call someone and have them login for a few minutes. Back to th…

This is really interesting to me. I wonder how many more hours of downtime The Archive would have experienced in 2025 if no one was ever woken up out of bed to fix it. (If anyone was)

I also wonder the cost differential.

Got me thinking about these incredible beautiful museums that are closed all night long… you’d still want someone there early enough to catch if the roof leaked so nobody missed their opening-hour tours. Back to libraries, bummer if I can’t renew my book online one night but would set reminder to try again later. Could affect my perception of my library’s tech prowess! That’s a risk for TIA! (Though I experience many a delay and downtime… perhaps my fault for using iCloud Private Relay like I bet scrapers sometimes abuse… but a few more hours overnight here and there wouldn’t be catastrophic for my current perception.)

Mainly would want overnight support to be cheap since stuff’s donation run. - Love TIA! An internet-billionaire should make history becoming a billionaire donor today (hope one’s reading this :) ).

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#223

Post by clcaev »

The 1:2 match scheme is helpful for a foundation to (a) accept large gift and (b) meet 501c3 1/3rd "public support" requirements.

To keep favorable charity taxation status, a large donation can only be accepted if there are sufficient small donors who also contribute. It's complex and indirect, but the matching is quite real as a $100 contribution from a small donor enables the charity to accept a corresponding amount from large donor pledges.

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#224

Post by raybb »

I have been volunteering with the Internet Archive via Open Library for about half a decade now. Sending money is awesome and they're also always looking for volunteers! There are so many projects going on for Open Library and staff has quite a few volunteers but right now especially I think it would be awesome to have a few more experienced folks joining to help (many volunteers are students).

Here's just a few things we could use more experienced folks to help on:

- Solr performance, it currently gets quite slow under load and there are two read replicas but we think there may be some ways to improve it besides adding more replicas. You can run a full production copy of solr based on the dumps... But the current workflow to do this is kinda broke so I had AI fix it up but we haven't been able to verify if it's a fully working/good solution.

- We're doing big redesigns of major parts of the frontend. If your down to help for that Lokesh had many tickets open and guidelines and welcomes PRs.

- I'm currently migrating us from web.py to fastapi and could certainly use more experienced help for trickier ones.

Anyway, if you're actually willing to help all you gotta do is join our community call tomorrow at 9am PST and share your interests. We'll you on to something you like quickly :)

https://docs.openlibrary.org/everyone/community-call.html#co...

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#225

Post by conformist »

miki123211 wrote: post #152
conformist wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Value judgment aside: Probably because it works well empirically. If you’re a larger scale donor and you’re interested in maximising impact, you may agree to a matching program type setup to crowd in more donors. Also you feel smart because you crowded in more donors and the donors feel like they got a good deal. So several people feel they can attribute the same counterfactual impact to themselves ;)

If you're a charity, you aren't optimizing for max(value_generated) in an immediate way. If your mission is to help children with cancer, you don't want to spend 100% of your funding on chemotherapy and drug development, because that way, you eventually run out of money (donors die and their cards expire, and you aren't spending on marketing to bring in new ones). You may spend some of it on buying a fancy yacht and…

Yeah, iterating that a bit further is why paying for political lobbying can be worth it compared to direct donations. However, the less direct your theory of change, the harder to quantify impact and the wider the posterior distribution tends to get. Some of the most impactful things I’ve donated to (imo) have a chance of moving some large scale donations (think Gates) into a marginally more impactful direction.

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#226

Post by 0x0000F8 »

The internet archive is the last bastion of hope for any future independent training data, not to mention archived media in all forms somewhat slows down bias introduction inf information and archives freedom of thought/speech to an extent.

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#227

Post by grogers »

clcaev wrote: post #223

The 1:2 match scheme is helpful for a foundation to (a) accept large gift and (b) meet 501c3 1/3rd "public support" requirements. To keep favorable charity taxation status, a large donation can only be accepted if there are sufficient small donors who also contribute. It's complex and indirect, but the matching is quite real as a $100 contribution from a small donor enables the charity to accept a corresponding amoun…

I was always confused about why charities did this type of matching gifts, it always seemed a bit odd just to trick people to giving right now and not whenever. Interesting that there's a structural reason for it, TIL, thank you

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#228

Post by loremm »

nnyx wrote: post #221
John7878781 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in those situations, especially if the business is unresponsive, i just keep charging back until they stop. if i can subscribe easily, i should be able to cancel just as easily :)

I take advantage of all the temporary card options my credit card provides. There's one for subscriptions where you give it a monthly limit and if you want to end your subscription and they're being difficult you can just cancel the card. It's great to basically never be beholden to anyone holding my payment info hostage. I know charge backs exist but while I've never had problems, I would imagine the more you end up…

yeah I do the same, very helpful and easy

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#229

Post by wolvoleo »

bee_rider wrote: post #209
zetanor wrote: post #32

I like the theory of the IA enough that I have a reoccurring donation, but I've thought a few times about e-mailing them to cancel (they have to halt your monthly donation charges manually). There's plenty of things I can overlook, like having to compete with scrapers to get a single page to load, or a myriad of longstanding technical issues (my favorite being that the collection upload system silently and irrevocabl…

Have they pulled many other “stunts” like the COVID library? It was a pretty crazy time, I think we shouldn’t judge things done then too harshly.

I don't think they have.

I also hated that stunt. It undermined their mission, damaged all their goodwill and caused legal hassle. And all the while all these books were readily available to anyone who wanted them via Anna's etc.

They should have stayed on the right side of that line.

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#230

Post by wolvoleo »

zikduruqe wrote: post #117
tossandthrow wrote: post #109

2:1 by who? That is not written. These types of schemes ring very poorly in my head for charity. If someone has the ability to give 2$ for every 1$ I give, why are they only giving on contingence? Just give the money!

Just like my local grocery store. They'll ask me to round up my purchase to help feed the hungry. Why can't they not invest in all the infrastructure and systems to support this, and just donate a few nickels and quarters themselves. Plus they have the food to give.

Yeah but just don't do it at all then. If I want to sponsor a good cause I'll do so when I want to. I'm also annoyed with having to decline that shit. Besides, I live in Europe. If something is important enough the government should subsidize them, that's what they're there for. We don't do this capitalist small government stuff.

PayPal and Stripe are doing it too now.

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