I'd been donating $5 for a long time and I just bumped it to $25. These posts are great reminders for passive donators like myself.
Keep Our Servers Running
231–240 of 292 posts
Re: Keep Our Servers Running
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even when their matching donation is anonymous and the direct influence is zero, the orphan crushing facility wants the orphanage to be successful. The orphanage's rising success serves to limit the supply of orphans. This means that there aren't as many free-roaming orphans available for crushing as more of them get taken off of the market. This improves the supply-and-demand ratio for orphan-derived products. A suc…
Maybe I misunderstand the analogy, but in this scenario it seems that the orphan crushing facility's donations to the orphanage are an unalloyed good. Their motives are bad, and they are bad, but their donations to the orphanage are causing more orphans to be taken care of and fewer orphans to be crushed. Personally, my worry about anonymous donation matching would be that the anonymous (to me) funder is influencing…
Oh. Right. You just introduced the concept of non-anonymous (to the orphanage) matching funds. I didn't think of that.
More money for the orphanage means more orphans can be taken in. That's good, right? But since the extra funds are not anonymous (to the orphanage), then it can come with influence on policies.
Policies like: All orphans are now accepted up to a certain age regardless of circumstance, and all orphans now get kicked out at age 12 regardless of ongoing need.
The stated reason is that the orphanage only has so many resources, and little kids need a lot more care than 12-year-olds do. So a line must be drawn somewhere, and that line is at age 12.
It's a popular policy: After all, when given binary choice, everyone would rather see a 3-year-old be taken good care of than a 12-year-old. Think of the little children!
For the orphan crushing facility that helped to impart this policy with their very generous policy-adjustment matching funds, that's a solid win: The orphanage now acts as a livestock kennel where orphans grow in size. There's still fewer of them coming out the far end, but they're bigger than they were before and are now much easier to process in bulk.
People know about the orphan crushing facility. They know they can't do anything about it; it just looms over there like any other dark fact of life. But the streets aren't full of roaming herds of abandoned kids anymore at all, so folks logically conclude that the 12-and-out policy must be working.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Re: Keep Our Servers Running
#233I 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.
former Tory minister spotted
Re: Keep Our Servers Running
#234Re: Keep Our Servers Running
#235Re: Keep Our Servers Running
#236I read that Internet Archive keeps 2 copies of all their data. Storj, the decentralized storage service, is currently in Chap 11 bankruptcy, mostly IMO because of incompetent management. They pay their node operators, the guys that actually maintain the hard drive space, $1.35/TB/mo to store data. (However it costs Storj 1.8x that because of erasure coding). They still have way more available capacity going unused, s…
The major problem with the (low) payout on Storj is that 29/54 node requirement is still too high for reliable long-term data retention. Also, even if you live in the least-expensive electricity places in the world, residentially it will cost you more in electricity to keep those platters spinning 24/7 [than the payout]. ---- It is popular in the hobby cryptomining community to replace your under-desk spaceheater wit…
How many BTUs or kJs is that?
Re: Keep Our Servers Running
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
At this point I think you’re just committed to the bit but you cannot possibly believe what you’re writing, as it’s a blinkered analysis and truly misanthropic in its effect. A metropolitan library system employs hundreds of people in a variety of roles and if we can prevent them from having a frustrating and wasteful start to their day, it’s worth an on-call person’s time. > and on-call has a human cost. In the cont…
No, I quite strongly believe it actually. I likewise find it hard to believe you're serious, so I'll raise my question again: if not even a municipal library (which, I'll remind you, aren't even open the majority of the time and we all get by just fine), what is an example of a non-critical service in your mind? Maybe the online checkin for a specific Great Clips? It depends on what? Pointing out that "it depends on…
> a municipal library (which, I'll remind you, aren't even open the majority of the time and we all get by just fine),
At least half of a modern library's lending happens digitally. But let's put aside the example of the library.
> what is an example of a non-critical service in your mind?
I thought the example above of hundreds of people being unable to start their work day until someone solves an especially serious IT problem was universal, not unique to a library system's network. It's relevant to the Internet Archive, and even relevant to...
> Maybe the online checkin for a specific Great Clips?
Maybe not? Their entire WAN being down, affecting dozens of stores, possibly yes?
I'm not sure what's difficult here. Paying a person to be available to deal with a problem serious enough to justify the call makes sense. Sending trivial, less serious problems that can easily wait until business hours their way at night makes less sense.
Taking those calls isn't necessarily a bad job, but somehow that assumption is baked into what you're saying.
> Misanthropic to me is making every IT job require getting up in the middle of the night
Let's not do that, then.
Re: Keep Our Servers Running
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 to…
World class art museums have some staff on site 24/7, FWIW.
> 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)
Wasn't 2025 the year a kooky pro-Palestinian hacker collective decided IA was a good target for their idiocy? There was a great deal of overtime involved there.
Re: Keep Our Servers Running
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the fact they are known to have changed the content of archived pages is way worse than the DDoS incident, since it makes them untrustworthy even as a source of information. Wikipedia decided to ban all archive.today (and aliases) links because of that
Do you have an example of such cases happening?
this is from the wikipedia discussion that led to the decision of banning it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
Re: Keep Our Servers Running
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Big, successful grocery stores operate on a 3% margin. It’s mostly a commodities business. Doing all that alone could entirely wipe their profit.
And my local grocery store sponsors Indycar racing and has a track they sponsor. They also throw away produce that looks bad, although it is perfectly edible. I am not going to cry because the CEO cannot afford a yacht payment next month.
Yes, they advertise. And they discard things that will not sell. That is what businesses do. Most of them try to sell it for a lower price first.