jonty

These were definitely schoolkids - I translated some of the posts and the majority were gossiping about boys.

Back in ~2001 I ran a fairly popular blog commenting system - back then most blogs didn't have built-in comments, so I offered javascript embeds to add them to posts.

One day performance started to go down rapidly, and within a few days my host got in touch about unusual CPU usage.

I tracked it down to a series of random blogger.com blog posts with colossal comment threads measuring in the thousands. Each post only got comments for a single day, and all of the comments were in Japanese. The blog owners seemed very confused.

Turns out Japanese schoolkids figured this trick out 25 years ago.

If you want to play around with slit scanning, I made this little toy a number of years ago and frequently find myself using it on trains:

https://slitscan.space

Press and hold your phone screen to switch between the front/back cameras, or hit "c" on a computer. Tapping the screen saves the image, as does "s".

This is mine! Built it quickly in 2024 for the US eclipse [1] and finished minutes before totality started.

I completely forgot about it until a friend asked this morning. Coordinating a DDOS on cameras across Iceland and Spain was not on my to-do list for today.

Fingers crossed it doesn't break for you all - I will be watching it with my own eyes this time.

[1] https://jonty.github.io/2024_eclipse_webcams/

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!

I am so, so sorry for doing this again chaos.social. The hacker news DDOS is real.

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

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

> 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.”

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.

Regret to inform you that it almost certainly isn't a bug - the flash died. It's unrecoverable.

Large numbers of pixel 3/3xl's have started dying in the last year and it looks like it's the flash wearing out on all the early adopter/heavy user devices. This happened to me too.

Actually I use FAST keypoint detection, which is used to repeatably find "good" points for tracking using computer vision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_from_accelerated_segm...

https://opencv-python-tutroals.readthedocs.io/en/latest/py_t...

I made something similar that runs in the browser using your webcam, mostly to visualise tracking keypoints.

It works best if you're in a well-lit place.

* https://github.com/Jonty/triangulator

* https://jonty.github.io/triangulator/

If you're interested in this, you may enjoy "Building Git" by James Coglan - a comprehensive book that takes you through reimplementing git in Ruby.

https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/

That is exactly what IRCCloud does.

You're looking for https://www.irccloud.com

I believe MusixMatch has timing data (it's what the Shazam karaoke mode uses), however I'm unsure if the free API allows access to it. Worth a look though. https://developer.musixmatch.com

I actually had a version using force-directed layout very similar to yours, took me a while to decide on this version!

Each colour is a verse, fading through the spectrum.

An unfilled arrowhead shows a transition between words in a line of a verse, a filled arrowhead shows a transition between lines.

Hah, I did something similar around ~2007 when I was at Last.fm and never got around to publishing it. Nice work!

This is the only example I can find lying around in my backups: http://jonty.co.uk/bits/radiohead_creep_lyricviz.png

You should try Spotify's "Discover Weekly" personalised autogenerated playlist, it's been built by the Echo Nest team and learns directly from what you listen to.

https://press.spotify.com/uk/2015/07/20/introducing-discover...

IRCCloud staffer here!

Glad you like it, this year is going to be a big one for us - we're actively looking at how we can better serve large open communities, and I would suspect that will result in some nice changes to both free accounts and the pricing of paid accounts.

If anybody is interested in making IRC suck less, we've got a designer-shaped hole that needs filling... https://www.irccloud.com/jobs

Mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but IRCCloud.com almost exactly fills these use cases (search will launch soon).

Disclosure: I work for IRCCloud :P