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See my comment elsewhere in this thread...

We actually ran something similar in the UK a couple of years ago but had to shut it down due high costs.

However we recently figured out how to do it in a way that won't bankrupt us, so keep your eyes peeled over the next few weeks...

https://payphone.team


Courtsdesk are rather misrepresenting this situation.

Quoting from an urgent question in the House of Lords a few days ago:

> HMCTS was working to expand and improve the service by creating a new data licence agreement with Courtsdesk and others to expand access to justice. It was in the course of making that arrangement with Courtsdesk that data protection issues came to light. What has arisen is that this private company has been sharing private, personal and legally sensitive information with a third-party AI company, including potentially the addresses and dates of birth of defendants and victims. That is a direct breach of our agreement with Courtsdesk, which the Conservatives negotiated.

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-02-10/debates/037...


Iain Sharp has built two physical Lunar Lander games, one of which is on permanent exhibition at the Under The Pier Show in Southwold, UK: https://www.underthepier.com

* 2009: https://lushprojects.com/lunarlander/

* 2022: https://lushprojects.com/lunarlandermk2/

He just built an absolutely beautiful mechanical version of Flappy Bird: https://lushprojects.com/appybird/

Unfortunately I can't find any video of it running, but there's a picture here: https://oldbytes.space/@rc2014/112557511719828847


I've always been a fan of the https://everytimezone.com interface, which seems like it may have been acquired at some point. Still works brilliantly though!


Yes! I've been looking for this one and couldn't find it! Thank you. Google is useless for finding stuff like this now.


"Every" -- Why no Alaska or Hawaii?


This is the second time one of my posts has caused issues for the chaos.social admins. I am so, so sorry.

The hacker news DDOS is real.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34691489


The interesting thing to consider is that someone who is popular to read may well be as much of a headache for the local sysop as someone who is a frequent target for attacks. How long until they have a 'bot that just 429s all of your posts on sight, do you think? (-:


On a more serious note: Given that many user communities in the FediVerse are people conscious of their privacy and of suffering pile-ons by large majorities of outsiders, I wonder how many more examples of this there will be before people start asking the developers for out-of-the-box defaults that simply blacklist all requests that come in with referrer headers containing news.ycombinator.com and other similar "Slashdotting" sites.

It's not beyond the bounds of possibility. Compare https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/15431 .


Everything has happened before and will happen again: https://www.wired.com/2015/11/how-instagram-solved-its-justi...


Sorry for what, offering a free lesson in cache optimization? :)


This is my toot, but the credit (and possibly the link) should be to @gigabecquerel: https://chaos.social/@gigabecquerel/109818433760462038

There are other stations on the U-Bahn with uranium tiles too, you can find them with the crowdsourced Safecast radiation map: https://map.safecast.org/?y=52.5002&x=13.4852&z=13&l=0&m=9


First I've heard of a 'toot'!

It's pretty funny due to it's usage in UK slang. It can mean everything from smoking a cigarette, to snorting cocaine, to oral sex.


That's true, but those uses of the word are pretty obscure. I would say the most common meaning of "toot" in the UK is the noise a horn makes, especially a bicycle/car/train horn.

It's much more of a friendly word for toddlers than it is a slang word for debauchery. (Example: "Toot! Toot! Packed full of fun and games, it's the Thomas & Friends Annual 2022!", https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thomas-Friends-Annual-Packed-games/...)


https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16080

They officially switched from "toot" to "post" a few months ago.


Mastodon Renaming “Toots” to “Posts”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26882318


In my particular American-English dialect, it means flatulence.


Thus the school-boy doggerel, "Beans, beans, the wonderful fruit..."


I learned it as "the musical fruit" or "good for the heart"


Some of us who have been on Mastodon for a few years now insist on calling them toots, despite the official renaming in the original Mastodon repo. A toot is the sound elephant friend (our mascot) makes with their trunk.

Also it's silly and all of the other silly associations you have with it are a plus. "Twitter", "tweet", "google", "facebook", "amazon", "apple", "mac", "tumblr", "kindle" are all also pretty stupid names we've just gotten used to, but "toot" is OUR stupid name, and we made it ours, and if its silliness delays the corporate takeover of Mastodon, that's a huge plus.


Or “fart”, don’t forget that one!


Thanks! I parsed that toot wrongly, should've submitted the other URL. Maybe dang can update it.

(Wish we had quote-posts on Mastodon, would make it more obvious)


I don't like the idea of Twitter-like quoting. Linking to the original toot is fine, it's clear that there's a link.

The Twitter-like quoting was used way too much for abuse. It had legitimate uses, but the abuse it generates does not warrant the legitimate uses.

Plus, it always made things so weird to read.

   2. The reply

       1. The original

   3. The replies to the reply
You say you find linking confusing right now, but it's just a matter of getting used again to the idea that links exist and can be followed, without always having a link preview. I find Twitter-quoting confusing because it messes up the order of the conversation.


This has been discussed to death on mastodon already. However recently the mastodon devs added this feature to their short list of what they are working on. (I think they said they are “exploring” it.)

Quote toots offer a functionality not offered by other functions, which is the ability to show two toots at once as well as notify the original toot owner of this activity. Linking another toot has a pretty horrible UX in comparison. Last time I clicked on a linked toot, it opened a new tab to view it, and then in order to click like on that toot I was instructed by the UI to copy the toot address to yet another mastodon window in to the search bar. An absolute mess.

Quote toots allow side discussions while allowing everyone to see what is being discussed. And they’re great when someone has a long thread and you want to pull out one piece to share with your followers and add context like “this piece of the puzzle is particularly important.”

The fact that it changes the order of the conversation is the point. Conversations fork in ways not always conducive to a reply-only view.

I primarily want quote toots so I can quote myself to start fresh threads that build on old ones. I did this all the time on Twitter where I posted a thread of updates for every evening that I worked on a project, with a new thread quoting the last one for each new evening. Since replies and links don’t show the other posts, it’s not as clear what I’m talking about when I link to an old toot and say “I made progress on this project tonight” given the awful UX on link toots.


The recent wave of Twitter immigration has reignited the quote-toot discussion. People mostly want a silly copy of a half-baked Twitter feature. If we get something like it in Mastodon, I hope it's better thought-out. For example, editing toots was done in an entirely sane way: it's just plain possible to edit toots, and if someone edits a toot you boosted, you get notified, so people can't fool you initially and then insert a completely different idea in your timeline.


Can we just call them "posts" instead of "toot"?


You can! I love calling them toots but it’s perfectly fine to call them posts.

For anyone unfamiliar, “toot” is the sound an elephant makes and a mastodon is a prehistoric elephant. Just like a bird tweets, a mastodon toots.



Don’t want to start a side discussion here, but what I like about quote tweets is that I can see the quoted content without having to click out to another tab and go back and forth. Could probably handled with some auto-expanding by clients though.


Looking at this Safecast map, do you know how these values are collected? From the path it looks like it's some kind of mobile collection where user submit data? Are there people walking around with Geiger counters every day?


Safecast is the most interesting part of this.


Can you tell me how to find other stations with the Safecast map? Rosenthaler Platz station is just blue all-around on that map - maybe I'm doing something wrong?


> you can find them with the crowdsourced Safecast radiation map: https://map.safecast.org/?y=52.5002&x=13.4852&z=13&l=0&m=9

Oooh that's nice. I wish they'd have those kits in sale again. Would buy one instantly but no time for fiddling myself this year unfortunately...


Any idea why is Kaskelstraße so high ? Could it be the cobblestone ?


> Liz Upton, Raspberry Pi’s cofounder and chief marketing officer, told BuzzFeed she believes that much of the issue stems not from the hiring of the former police officer who admitted to using Raspberry Pis for covert surveillance, but instead from a picture the account posted to Mastodon a day earlier showing pigs in blankets. “We didn’t put a content warning on it, because we don’t put a content warning on meat,” Upton said. “There were quite a few people who tried to start dogpiling on that.”


That is so drastically out of touch with the situation it's absurd.


Acquisition was 2007, radio shut down in 2014. CBS was hands-off for a long time but you know how this story goes.


I wrote this! Of all the easter eggs I've hidden its still my favourite.

Wired even wrote an awful article about it at the time: https://www.wired.com/2010/08/robot-laws/

Absolutely delighted people remember it 12 years later.


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