michaelolenick

It's inevitable there will be false positives, inevitable they'll do reputational or economic damage, and inevitable plaintiff attorneys will sue on the behalf of people damaged. Making it worse, it's product liability blended with defamation. Anthropic should've told the EU to pound sand and geofenced off Claude. If they don't want to live in the dark ages, elect smarter people.

Like the other reply, this is flat-out gaslighting.

First, it's a fallacy that executive rates for nonprofits should be set by the market based on others. Who would say their nonprofit CEO is in the bottom half? Nobody, or they wouldn't want that person to be CEO. Therefore, everybody reevaluates and pushes salaries up, up, up to the sky ... exactly like they do in for-profit businesses, an endless cycle of greed. Would you have done the job for $200K? If so, you should have. If not, you shouldn't have been at Wikimedia. It's really that simple. Interestingly, the techies do work for significantly less than market rates but the suits don't. You are (or were) very well paid.

As for the fundraising, the messages are self-evident and dishonest to the point they're arguably fraudulent. Like Jimmy Wales using the term "bankruptcy" when he said well, we'd never want that. Sure - it's like a mobster saying "it'd be shame if..." then denying the threat. Both of you know exactly what those messages were meant to and did imply. Stop gaslighting.

I'm sure the WMF will continue to fundraise because, let's face it, that's all the organization actually does. They fundraise and nothing else. Wikipedia is 100% volunteers. Have you even edited anything on Wikipedia? You were/are the PR person before your higher role.

As for the final piece, moving on... no. Absolutely not. Wikimedia exists to make money. You're/they're working on a project right now to charge Google, Amazon, Facebook and the rest (who, oh yeah, are colluding to support Wikipedia as a single-source of truth ... which is exactly a long-term goal. of the CFR - but I'm sure that's a total coincidence). This is a fundraising organization, barely tied to Wikipedia.

Wikimedia exists to pull in money. Nothing else. The messaging is questionable enough I believe it should be investigated by various consumer agencies. At most, 1/3rd of the money raised goes to support what people know of as Wikipedia - those are Lisa's numbers. I doubt the figure is even that high.

People: Wikipedia's server costs are about $2.5M per year. That's it. Figure admin fees about 3x that, $10M per year give or take. The rest ... you can sit until you're blue in the face wondering where the money goes because they're not saying.

I was in the middle of this way back when. Software I created (well, I prototyped and hired somebody else to create), won the very first Macromedia Rich Internet Application. It created name badges from a Flash app.

For those who don't remember -- and judging by the comments I think that'd be many -- there was no AJAX back then, and when I first saw AJAX I remember thinking that's the end of Flash.

It wasn't a love of Flash technology but a love of stateless UI that inspired our line of thinking. Stateless UI was possible with Java, and I first wrote the program that went on to win the award in Java, but Java looked even clunkier than Flash and ran worse. Flash looked nice, ran well, and was easy to install and maintain (back then it was already installed and enabled in all browsers).

Now I have lots of grey in my beard and have been working mainly on mobile tech lately. But those days -- not long before this PDF came out -- were great fun. We knew the web had to evolve and saw this type of user experience, if not this specific implementation, as the future. Today, that's AJAX and mobile apps. But Flash was a necessary stepping stone.

They've been doing exactly that for about 237 years.

I wish MBA's would knock it off with their everything is easy meme. Yes - software, including apps, can be created in two months. In fact we can write them in two hours, or take two years; it depends. Buried in your post is that your partner split so you spent 24x7 obsessed on coding which, IMO, is the right way to learn, and sometimes even the right way to work (in bursts at least; doing that for too long leads to -- in MBA speak -- massively diminishing ROI for your time). In any event congratulations on getting your app out, and welcome to unwritten secret society of computer programmers who have published software.

Yes - this is what I meant, though I think it's also what I wrote. It's not prior art; it's obviousness, and the USPTO defines non-obvious as published, co-mingling the two. So we see lots of patents for obvious tweaks from one platform to another. For example, the same functionality ported from local computer programs to web-based systems, client-server architecture, and now mobile all seems to qualify as non-obvious. In reality these ports are entirely obvious to anybody who understands that the underlying tech is basically the same.

If these weren't depressing they'd be funny. For those who don't know the patent & trademark office (PTO) defines "obvious" as described in a prior patent or, sometimes, an academic paper. Even if everybody in the field has been doing the same thing for years it isn't "non obvious" unless somebody wrote to the PTO about it. But since it's obvious in reality those nobody except crooks bother to.

The whole system is rigged in favor of "people" who write up patentable junk -- those who have the time to write it into patents -- whereas people who actually build things are busy perfecting the trade skills the patent system was made to protect.

OK - tirade over. Back to my new app. My wife dreamed it up and we're writing it together. When finished and released, if it does well, some fat slob -- who never wrote or programmed anything useful in his life -- will show up to shake us down.