Spit out a random e-mail address and record which e-mail address was given to each IP.

The author mentions it’s a violation of GDPR to record visitors’ IP addresses. I’m not sure that’s correct, but even so, it could be possible to make a custom encoding of literally every ipv4 address through some kind of lookup table with 256 entries, and just string together 4 of those random words to represent the entire 32-bit address space, such that “correct horse battery staple” corresponds to 192.168.1.100 or whatever.

Base64 encoding of a text representation of an IP address and date seems inefficient.

There are 4 octets in a ipv4 address, where each octet is one of 2^8 possible integers. The entire 32-bit ipv4 address space should therefore be possible to encode in 6 characters in base64.

Similarly, a timestamp with a precision/resolution in seconds can generally be represented by a 32-bit integer, at least up through 2038. So that can be represented by another 6 characters.

Or, if you know you’re always going to be encoding these two numbers together, you can put together a 64-bit number and encode that in base64, in just 11 characters. Maybe even use some kind of custom timestamp format that uses fewer bits and counts from a more recent epoch, as an unsigned integer (since you’re not going to have site visitors from the past), and get that down to even fewer characters.

That seems to run less risk of the email address getting cut off at some arbitrary length as it gets passed around.

The use of a “+” convention is just a convention popularized by Gmail and the other major providers. If you have your own domain, you should be able to do this with any arbitrary text schema, and encode some information in the address itself, especially if you don’t care about sending email from those aliases: set up your email service to have a catchall inbox that can further be filtered/forwarded based on other rules.

It can be cumbersome but I could see it working at getting the information you’re looking for.

Thompson’s Teeth: The only teeth strong enough to eat other teeth!

Dental printers are a pretty standard way to make these things. There’s a whole regulatory process for testing and certifying the printers and their resins for continued contact with gums/skin/teeth for toxicity, infection, irritation, etc.

But there are still significant drawbacks to using dead synthetic stuff as a replacement for living tissue.

Slang term for ejaculating, usually with some projectile distance implied. Very popular term in the mid-2000’s, see Get Low by Lil Jon.

Why the focus on white people? What are non-black, non-white people supposed to take away from this?

And if we’re just picking up language from others around us, we can acknowledge that pretty much every word, every phrase, every syntactical or grammatical construct we use, we learned by observing others. And we don’t always have the ability to specifically attribute sources for where we learned what, so trying to gatekeep who can and can’t use particular phrases or words is going to be prone to errors. And ultimately futile.

thinking they are entitled to everything

This is a FOSS-focused community. The core idea here is that publishing and sharing ideas releases it out to the world, where the creator no longer controls who may use it, or how they may use it.

That’s why your position on who can or can’t use certain types of language seems so foreign. It’s directly contradicting some of the core values that this community is organized around.

Linguists dropped the “Vernacular” because it is not a slang language

Since when does “vernacular” apply only to slang? It’s just everyday language, which can include slang but includes plenty of non-slang.

I’m giving 1-star ratings to weather apps because it’s too cold outside.

Oh this line of comments was serious? I thought we were making jokes.

I’m just trying to extrapolate to being supportive of government surveillance, and proving that other commenter right.

If they go and follow 200 users on 20 different instances, then they’ll most likely get followed back by someone on 90% of those instances. It’s not that much effort.

I don’t know, this sounds like an unnatural way to interact with a service. Following 4000 accounts and trying to spread it out evenly between servers sounds like a terrible way to curate one’s own feed and consume content on a service like this. I rarely follow more than 100 on any given service, and think it’s weird when people follow more than 500.

Following back seems like a pretty foreign concept to me on this type of service, and seems to me to be inconsistent with how people actually use Twitter or Bluesky. To me, these hiccups in user experience as either a lurker (can’t find anyone in-band who another person on your instance doesn’t already follow) or publisher (can’t be found easily from anyone off of your server unless you actively go try to spam follows in the hopes that some will follow back) would be a dealbreaker for anything less than the biggest server.

But do the naked gay men have an exhibition fetish, especially by government agents?

So if you set up on small server A, and want to be discoverable by users on server B, C, D, and E, you have to do this for many different users and hope that they follow you back just so that those servers’ users can find you.

And it basically defeats the main use case for where I actually understand microblogging, which is one-way announcements by semi-automated accounts that are widely followed that do not actually follow anyone else back.

It just sounds like a bad arrangement for discoverability and search.

hashtags are big on Mastodon

But I can’t view the posts of any users by hashtag if those users aren’t already being followed by someone from my server, right? That means I’d never want to join a small server if I’m just a lurker who doesn’t really want to actively interact with others, because my own feed would be limited.

there’s no algorithm

Sounds like an algorithm that’s just more complicated and has unintuitive human inputs in it.

Follow people and hashtags and interact with them and you’ll get followers.

That sounds like a convoluted method of self promotion, almost like SEO fake engagement, just to be discoverable. And if everyone on the network had to do this to be discoverable, how can I trust the discovery methods to find people worth following?

And if the cross instance discoverability has these kinds of hurdles, then the promise of federation isn’t going to pan out.

At least with Lemmy the nature of the platforms, users following a smaller universe of potential communities, makes each community much more easily discoverable for people who don’t necessarily want to be active posters. Mastodon’s user-focused follow is much more limited in seamless federation.

You can crossover any Dinosaur Comic by setting the butiwouldratherbereading variable to xkcd at the end of the URL.

For example:

https://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=4264&butiwouldratherbereading=xkcd

There’s a whole list of them I remember from like 10 years ago but I don’t know where to find them.

James Cameron has a history of making great things happen with a low budget, and spending millions responsibly to actually make a positive difference in big budget films.

is a “B-movie” now?

Did you not read the article? It was regarded as a B-movie when it came out: a low-budget sci-fi slasher/horror film. Arnold referred to it as a B-movie when asked about it on the set of Conan the Barbarian (which had 3 times the budget as Terminator). The New York Times referred to it as a B-movie in its review, as discussed by this article, which is also why the headline uses quotes around “B-movie.”

Yeah, I understand the article to be saying that the Hitachi contract is for the train control system, including the software and equipment necessary for the operation of the train underground. The broader system upgrades include communications systems between trains and stations. At least how I read it.

No, the $212 million includes the entire upgrade (and 20 years of support) of the automatic train control system. The full $700 million plus is for the overall modernization of multiple systems.