Right now I can access it. They seem to have a status page https://fhf-lemmyworld.instatus.com/ that says that earlier today there were some problems for approximately an hour? I don’t have more information than that.

If we’re going to wildly speculate, hey, isn’t this what we have AI for nowadays?

I asked ChatGPT: “give me ideas what the abbreviation WLBR might stand for if that is the name of a piece of image editing software”. Here’s the result:

🧠 Professional / technical-sounding

• Wide Layer Blending & Rendering
• Workflow Layer-Based Retoucher
• Weighted Light Balance Renderer
• Wavelet-Based Light & Blur Reconstruction
• White-Level Balance & Retouch

🎨 Creative / artistic branding

• We Love Better Retouching
• Wild Light & Bold Retouch
• Wavelength Brush
• Wonder Lens: Blur & Refine
• Whitelight Brush

⚡ Modern / software-product style

• WizLayer Build & Render
• WarpLab: Blend & Refine
• Web-Level Bitmap Renderer
• Workflow Lens & Brush Renderer
• WLB Renderer (treat WLBR as a stylized acronym)

🧩 Slightly abstract (like many real apps)

• Wavelength-Based Rasterizer
• Layered Bitmask Refinement
• Light Balance Reconstruction Engine
• Wideband Luminosity Brush & Retouch

🧠 If you want it to feel like real software naming

Most image tools (like Photoshop, GIMP, etc.) don’t strictly spell out acronyms anymore—they use:

• suggestive tech words (Layer, Light, Render, Brush)
• or abstract brand terms

So something like:

WLBR = “WaveLight Brush & Render”

feels believable without being overly literal.

(end of ChatGPT response)

Out of these, I think “Workflow Layer-Based Retoucher” works best. But interesting that ChatGPT thinks “GIMP” doesn’t “strictly spell out” an acronym anymore, or that “Photoshop” ever did?!

ok, “Kurzsichtigkeit” in German definitely has both meanings without this causing confusion in practice

Is WLBR supposed to be an abbreviation for something? I realize it is a reference to the mascot Wilber, but apart from that?

I remember once meeting someone (a woman) on IRC who was over 40 or even 50, I don’t remember the exact age. I remember just being surprised that someone that age would be on the same part of the Internet I was hanging out on. But I don’t think that person was there for any bad purposes.

Mid 2000s. Web forums based on UBB, WBB, vBulletin, phpBB, etc.

Went on to discover wikis at age 11, IRC at age 12, most of my social contacts in my teen years were with people I met online because they were generally a lot nicer than people I met IRL.

I would see nothing wrong with people born after me doing the same, although admittedly those years would have been a lot better if my school hadn’t been full of people I had nothing in common with and I hadn’t needed to use the Internet to socialize.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myopia says that both terms exist in English? Not a native speaker; I think I have seen “nearsightedness” more often in English but my first language’s term for it translates to “shortsightedness”. 🤷‍♂️

I think it was after Diamond/Pearl that they were forced to remove the game corner so they could be deemed suitable for children…

The thing is that I remember playing the game corner, especially the one in gen 3. It taught me that casinos are very boring and frustrating places which I’ll inevitably get tired of after a few minutes. I’ve never used a real-life casino in part because, if it’s anything like it was portrayed in Pokémon, why would that be a fun activity?

Most people I communicated with at the time were also minors, maybe a few young adults, and it happened almost entirely in public forums, not private conversations.

I first became active on web forums at the age of 10 and didn’t keep my age secret at the time. Not once (!) did I encounter anyone who appeared to be a child predator or anything like that. So forgive me if I don’t see a lot wrong with “kids talking to strangers online” although it certainly depends on the kid’s age and maturity level and also what kind of online space it is.

We shouldn’t do either nor do we need to. Billionaire-owned social media can continue to exist if people want it. The important thing is that there must be alternatives to it.

And the result of literally any new government regulation of “social media” (I still don’t like that term, but if everyone is using it, so am I) at all, including but not limited to age verification, is to make that harder.

because they made friends through social media and have no other communication channels with those friends?

That is the central problem with all of this.

Oh, you want the government to regulate “social media”, like requiring age verification and such things? Because you are noticing young people being “addicted” (what you mean is having a habit, or hobby, that you don’t like) to TikTok or Instagram or what?

OK, have fun without wikis, public git repos, public tech support forums that aren’t financially able to comply with any of these regulations. What do you mean that’s not what you meant! You said social media, social media is any website that allows the general public to publish information and read information published on it, so clearly that’s exactly what you meant!

This https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence needs to be widely remembered again, and quickly before it’s too late to undo the damage.

Compiled code ought to be too then tbh.

OSM is just a geographical database. It by itself doesn’t have any user-facing features at all. If there are such features somewhere, they are features of a specific frontend to that database.

I don’t think there’s a way to do what you want directly on openstreetmap.org but you can achieve your goal with https://overpass-turbo.eu/ for example.

No, why would that be different? (…is what I in any case would argue if I were the lawyer for a distributor of operating systems, which I am not)

Free speech is the right to distribute any kind of information, including software code in either source or compiled form.

That’s what the legal analysis should be anyway. Whether it will be…

Certainly an improvement.

Courts should still find it unconstitutional because software is free speech. I am all for advancing open source and giving people good reasons to switch to it, but not by setting precedents that governments have any business deciding what features software is allowed or required to have.

not what the article says, the article specifically says:

The age-verification process will be implemented globally,

Why would you expect routing software to route somewhere that no path is mapped?

As for public transport routing, I explained this here https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/50719308/22594280 a while ago.