That is good news…

So, uh, I assume the Dutch government will heavily push back against any ideas to ban social media for young people in the EU? After all, a public forgejo instance is also “social media”, and surely they will find it too costly to implement an age check there? Riiiight?

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?!

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

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.

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.

Woah, did the media learn something from the California bill? That was only reported very much on after it had already passed. Now this is getting significant coverage when nothing except introduction has happened yet (and let us hope it stays that way).

As long as Google is doing a better job maintaining AOSP than a nonprofit would, what’s the point?

If they ever stop doing so, then this might be an option.

It’s a fairly widespread Internet meme, I think in order to make fun of France, though I’m not sure exactly where it originated.

The regulatory gap has created uncertainty for big tech companies, because while scanning for harms on their platforms is now illegal, they still remain liable to remove any illegal content hosted on their platforms under a different law, the Digital Services Act.

That is plainly false. The DSA only requires that they remove illegal content when they become aware of it and specifically disallows general monitoring obligations. They do not scan means they aren’t aware of it means they aren’t liable to remove anything.

The problem is that “human freedom” and “human rights” are very general and somewhat vague terms and some people’s freedoms and rights are sometimes in conflict with each other. So it’s also often meaningless to say that you support “human freedom” and “human rights” without asking what freedoms and rights and for whom.

FOSS is a very specific subset of human freedom and human rights, it’s the right to control, modify and distribute the software one uses. All other parts of human freedom and human rights aren’t something that the free software movement necessarily has a position on. (Free software can certainly be used to, at least arguably, violate human rights, for example armed forces can use free software too, and should be able to!)

wait wait wait reddit is against AI bots? news to me… https://documentingourdecline.substack.com/p/ai-bots-appeared-after-reddit-partnered

(Why exactly would anyone believe that face ID verification can stop AI bots? Have they seen how well generative AI can generate videos of humans?)

https://xkcd.com/810/ was oddly prophetic

I miss the days when making money from posting things on the Internet wasn’t really a (widespread) thing. In the earliest days of YouTube there was no partner program, everyone who uploaded anything there did so out of enthusiasm; if we still had that, maybe we’d have fewer videos overall, but no one would have a reason to post AI slop or other low-quality videos just for profit.

unfortunately this is mostly an instance of https://xkcd.com/1102/