@bloor I believe we're about the same age, so I suspect you're probably old.

@bloor If you're old then I must be, too.

Sadly for you, I think I am.

@bloor I’d say it was pretty antiquated when we picked it up. They’ve just lost touch with the ancient custom of nodding along then looking it up.

@bloor It's archaic terminology, I'll say that much.

@bloor I understood it perfectly, I'm old.

I did a search for the phrase with duckduckgo and the first result contains a fake version of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55. AI slop is really killing the internet.

https://thetechylife.com/what-does-i-will-see-you-anon-mean/

@Edent ouch. "Software bad enough the *british* government thought it was worth rewriting in house"?!

Damn

@Edent Thanks for the kind words Terence! Hoping to put more code open soon...

@Edent at first reading your headline I thought a desperate Starmer finally made a sane decision to save his job, but they only kicked out in one small place Palantir probably forgot they even had, and it wasn’t a ministerial decision. Palantir are still gorging on the NHS and intelligence services like a tick. The level of corruption involving Mandelson, and the fact their local office is run by Oswald Mosley’s grandson is just staggering.

Not to minimize the achievement, of course. Every bit of rebuilding state capacity helps and compounds over time.

Also discussed on HackerNews.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48145144

@Edent as to your footnotes, but I love the blog

1) the civil service’s distaste for Palantir is an open secret, only you don’t get the SCS (or equivalent) opining pseudo-anonymously about how much they hate it
2) I often stumble over MHCLG and often just end up with “the department formally known as deeluck.”
3) MHCLG understands the benefits of federation very well recently despite abandoning W3C-standards backed approaches to dissemination. I’m not surprised they managed this, regardless.

@Edent 😁 at least some good news for the morning, thank you. But is it true what Fazal Majid states; "Palantir are still gorging on the NHS and intelligence services like a tick. The level of corruption involving Mandelson, and the fact their local office is run by Oswald Mosley’s grandson is just staggering."?

@Edent Oh, classic! The Internet is basically a giant, chaotic playground for information, cat videos, and arguments you never knew you wanted to have. More seriously, it’s for connecting people, sharing knowledge, entertainment, work, and, occasionally, helping you remember why you walked into a theatre in the first place.

@Edent Pr0n!

@Edent my favourite show, and I'm unrepentant in that.

@Edent Just slightly jealous! A fabulous show!

@Edent Enjoy! Love that show!

@neil hah

/actual way back when #PhonePhreak checking in

Dialing from one floor to another routing the call via Japan gave a nice two second delay.

@neil
all yes, does this make me old?

@neil Yep. Every one of them.

@neil I've done all of those though there's an obvious reason for that 🙂

@neil I grew up in a house with a rotary phone long after most people already had button phones. It confused the heck out of my friends when they tried to use it. :D

@neil yes to 1,4,5 and 7 but i am 75 (nearly 76 ) so i grew up with these things.

@neil

New Mastodon Poll Reveals 87% of Mastodonians Are Old AF

@neil

What I’m learning is that I am likely to crumble to dust soon.

@neil

I not only spoke to a telephone operator, I WAS one (at a car dealership). So was my wife - that's where we met.

@neil all but the phone card and exchange

@neil You could just have asked how old we are 😂

@neil I did all, Am I so old 🤔😱🤪😂😂

@neil Most of these. Not sure about the phone card. I don't *think* so, but I'm not entirely sure.

I've talked to operators but I don't think been routed from one system to another, unless this includes dialling 9 to dial out, or being forwarded by a receptionist?

Never received a phone call in a phone booth, but used to use them regularly to call parents as a child and teenager.

@neil all of the above

@neil
My auntie was a switchboard operator on a joint operations air base during The War, she had to speak English AND American.

@neil ha unfortunately I still remember my ATT phone card number

@neil I have also used a pay phone on a train.

@neil used a telephone book for which purpose?

@neil I am curious what it means to dial from one exchange to another.

I probably only called local numbers as a kid and dialing other areas when I was older was always just preceding the number with a 4 or 5 digit area code, did it work differently before?

@neil Yes to all, plus for a summer I actually was a (human) telephone operator. Those overnight shifts were something else.

@neil

if you said yes to more than two of these, you're overdue to schedule your next colonoscopy... :)

(which reminds me...)

@neil Most I'm not sure what "Dialled from one exchange to another" means specifically, maybe a UK thing?

I did buy this bad boy new in box from my local thrift store last week. I have a Bluetooth dongle in my house so that I can make calls with it. Fake dialtone and everything!

Alt...

an old beige AT&T Trimline phone with manual. It has a curly cord and everything.

@neil and made free international calls, by a number of methods.

@neil "Were you alive 40 years ago?" :)

@neil I've done all but two (reversed charges & dialed from one exchange to another).

I am an old.

@neil

7 out of 8 boxes ticked. <sigh>

@neil when I was a teenager, we all used to hang around at a park on a corner by a phone box. Our mums all had the phone number of that phone box so they could ring us and let us know when it was time to come home for tea.

@neil I've received a call on a pay phone exactly once. It wasn't for me, the box was just ringing so I answered it. The caller asked for Sarah. I said "sorry, nobody carried Sarah lives here" and they rather surprised me by asking "are you sure?"

@neil I still have the last phone book that was delivered here, maybe 15 years ago now. Probably not much good for anything other than holding up a potted plant.

@neil Yes I know, I'm feeling old!

@neil Stop reminding me I'm old, will ya?

All but one of the above. I never did the exchange thingy. But the rest, yeah, in my early teens.

And only reverse charged my parents, with their agreement in advance!

@neil I'm still using a rotary dial phone. Its in daily use.

@neil It used to be expensive to make calls outside your area code!

@neil All of the above!

I'd also throw in "Used a payphone for free using a tone generator" and "avoided long distance fees using a DISA system" 😀

@neil
Never reversed charges because always had emergency 2p/5p/10p/BT phonecard to use. #BePrepared

@neil Proud to say yes to every single one. ***And*** made long distance calls when they could only be connected by a human operator!!

Bonus points - a two-party phone line!!

@neil

I feel like I occupy the demographic category "dust" when I read this. I've done most of them.

@neil We had no phone for quite a while. When the phone line came through the valley, we were on party line with a few households on it. The phone was a big black thing; no dial, just a crank on the side. We were two longs and a short. Anyone (or everyone) in the group could listen to any conversation. For numbers outside the group, we did one long ring and asked Mona Ingram to connect us...

@neil
I actually worked a switchboard for the military. One of my favourite jobs.

@neil Why yes, I am GenX. Why do you ask? Also, you missed "made a collect call from a pay phone."

@neil
Hey, I'm older than the internet 😉😂

@neil Trying to make me feel old. Must try harder.

@neil Yeah, 100% =)

@neil phone books are boring. Have you ever used a Criss-Cross or City Directory?

@neil There's a bell-curve graph here with age as the X-axis. The younger you are, the fewer of these things you've done. As you get to older folks, there's more and more things they've done. And then as you approach even older folks who can't remember which of them they've actually done, the graph curves back down towards 0.

@neil My grand parents refused to stop using their rotary dial phone untill the Dutch telecom operator (the now defunct PTT) gave them a dial tone phone because they kept crashing the local exchange that couldn’t handle the ticking anymore. Resulting in a cascading failure.

@neil ~ In the US, we could dial 555-1212 and get the correct time

@neil None of the above.
I feel like I've been wasting my life...

@neil

- [X] Bypassed having to pay at a pay-phone by shorting out the receiver

@neil

I remember that I had this plastic card with information from a phone operator

I could go to a pay phone and
* Call a central
* Input a long customer number
* Input a code
* Input a phone number I wanted to call

And the charge of the call was sent to my parents phone bill.

@neil Full house! What do I win?

@neil Full house!

@neil This is just another way of saying 'Are you old?'

@neil “I have a collect call from Bob We’adababieetsaboi.”

@neil Also, I’ve used Mondex to withdraw cash onto a cash smart card using a pay phone.

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

And I’ve made a call TO a pay phone/phone box.

@neil

Are you trying to implement an age certification procedure ?

🤪

@neil Okay, this poll has made me feel REALLY old.

@neil Got my first STD* in a phone box...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subscriber_trunk_dialling

@neil HOUSE!

@neil

Real life story: I was a student and on my way for a job interview. I got lost and ended up in at the bus terminal. There was a phone box there so I tried to call the potential employer but when I put a coin in the hole, about 30$ in 25cents went out! 😆

I'll never forget the winning sensation... 🤣✌️

@neil The Olympic marathoner Don Kardong, in his later career as a reporter, once failed to gain access to the press truck at the Boston Marathon. He compensated by going out the day before the marathon and writing down the numbers of a series of phone booths along the course, then calling them from his hotel room during the race and, if anyone picked up, asking them to describe what was going on. The resulting article was titled "Thirty Phone Booths To Boston".

@neil I dislike how hold this makes me feel

@neil never done any of those... So i cant vote :D

@neil I learned Spin Physics by learning rotary phone, by rote.

@neil We could often lift up the receiver and hear somebody else's conversation. Exciting times (sort of). Crossed lines innit.

@neil Tell me your relative age without telling me your relative age.

@neil specifically, I made many calls *to* public phone boxes, because it was the only way to make a call to my girlfriend, who was living in a student home in eastern Germany end of the 90s. They didn’t have phones in the student home, but two public phone boxes that could be called in front of the building. For roughly 150 students. Fun times! We often scheduled for past midnight because that was a „low traffic“ time…

@neil The only rotary phone I remember using was at the YMCA . This was long after we had push button phones but those black rotary phones were indestructible

@neil Yes 😂

@neil I remember when we were camping in France with a boy scouts group and made reverse-charge calls home to Germany from a phone booth in Bretagne. We were half a dozen boys in a row and there was a single operator I think and at some point she asked how many more of us are still waiting in line 😁
#80sKid

@neil Oh boy, do I have an audio clip for you! https://othermindsrecords.bandcamp.com/track/border-dissolve-in-audiospace #LiamOGallagher (not to be confused with Liam Gallagher)

@neil In other news... I am _very_ old...

@neil "Used the collect call trick to tell someone it's time to pick you up, for free"

@neil

[×] Did literal cut and paste work to make camera ready telephone books ("yellow pages")
[×] Can "dial" rotary using the hook button when faced with a dial lock

@neil Ugh. 6 out of 8.

@neil You missed one - have you ever used a phone that had NO dial, where an operator connected all calls? Yes, I have.

@neil
I got ⅞ and I think I'll never have the opportunity to get that last ⅛. 💔

I was unsure about "Dialed from one exchange to another…", so I looked it up and I've definitely done it.

@neil I was born in 1975, so yeah.

@neil

Extra points: placed an international trunk call.

@neil Should have added Used a party line to the list. Each house had its own special ring so you knew if it was for you or not.

@neil my friend used to make collect calls to her mom (which her mom would decline) to let her know it was time to pick us up after school.

#BobWeottababyeetzaboy

https://youtu.be/9JxhTnWrKYs

@neil
I still have a rotary phone 😲

@neil Here (Belgium) you couldn't call pay phones AFAIK, they didn't have numbers printed on them and didn't show any caller ID. So it was always surprising to me as a kid to see people calling payphones in movies.

@neil The old (western) german railway telephone network had exchanges you could call into via a prefix. Once the prefix was dialled, you could hear an automatic announcement of the location, like "Hamburg! Hamburg! Hamburg!", before being able to dial on.

@neil Yes to everything except the thing with routing and multiple exchanges.

@neil Why, yes, I AM old, thank you.

@neil apologies if someone already said this, but I remember dialing "popcorn" to find out what time it was. (US thing)

@neil These results make no sense; seems that the only respondents are old gits who seldomly needed to get in touch with their electricity or gas providers.

@neil
I wonder if I used a phone card and I don't remember it. I never had a cellphone, so it seems likely.

@neil I'm ticking ⅞

@neil
Oh, shit. I'm old, aren't I?

@neil

What does "Dialed from one exchange to another to route a call" mean ?

Until a teenager, there was only 5 numbers to dial. To dial out of town we had to prepend a 2 digit area code. Out of State I have no idea what was needed. If that area-code is "another exchange", then I should have said yes on that one too.

@neil The real question is, have you ever, when you where ten, decided to do prank calls on random numbers in the phone book based on their names, and then crossed out the entries you'd pranked with your frie^Wno, that was me on my own.

And then got discovered by your parents because of your meticulous prank call records.

Note: this was in the late seventies.

@neil none of the above

@neil I'm 60. Like others here, I'm not entirely sure what "Dialled from one exchange to another to route a call" even means... but I've done all the others.

Thanks for making me feel twenty years older than I am. :-|

@neil

Been a (human) telephone operator

@neil 97% used a telephone book!? Are there no people under 30 here?

@neil Alright, I don't feel old :) (because I marked options with high percentage; or maybe that means I'm old) anyway, good pool 👍

@neil everyone is old here

@neil do I get a bonus point for (sort of) owning a whole phone switchboard?

@neil not 100% sure about the operator call but think I must have. 70s U.K. kid.

@neil All of the above.

Alt...

cartoon of old person who is just spinal cord with a head using a wheelchair.

@neil Occasionally I'd hear a pay phone ringing with no one nearby. I'd pick up the phone and say "Hello, Frank?" Usually I'd just hear a click.

@neil

You forgot getting calls for free by tapping out the number on the receiver rest of the old black public phones with buttons A and B.

@neil when I was a teenager living in Luxembourg, I got locked out of my house. I walked to the big shipping arcade to find the French-English dictionaries, and looked up "locksmith" in it. Then I walked home, and asked our neighbour to borrow their phone book, so I could call a locksmith on my Nokia 3210.

@neil
Yo.

That's a lot of questions to call me old.

@neil I don't think I ever had a need for reversed charges, but I used to do price required calls weekly to my girlfriend when working away and staying in a small town hotel.

@neil Heck, I've used a payphone like a month ago. They still exist here, though not as numerous as in the past. Is that unusual?

@neil All of the above, plus phreaking with a blue box and its ilk. Jeebus, I'm soooooo old!

@neil I did them all and I'm "only" 45, WTF!?