Great.
Next stage in the enshitification-process. 😒

Ok, which one?
(No way I’d follow a Clickbait heading link to the Bild Zeitung…)

Can anybody tell me the background to this?

They are not that common here in Germany in general, but my city has in the past years put up a dozen or so, mainly in public parks.
They are maintained by our municipal utility service and are basically always in perfect condition.
At least during summer. Being outdoor installations they are shut down (actually completely removed) during the winter months.

Other than that I only had one in elementary school 30 years ago, which also worked and a lot of actual natural springs with drinking outlets that are often maintained by rural communities.

Our city also has one of those natural water drinking fountains, but as it is the (still maintained and monitored) remains of a thermal baths project from a hundred years ago, it is not so suitable for actually quenching your thirst. Full of crazy salts and minerals with a faintly sulfuric aroma on top - but supposed to be healthy :-)

So, in general: no complaints where I live.

That is different to Germany. Here they are basically exclusively mounted facing the crosswalks in some way. I think I have never seen them mounted in parallel…
This might explain why we don’t have similar arrows, as in this configuration they might be less helpful…

Nicely written, though! I like it! :-)

This is a fantastic read that seems to come straight out of a Dirk Gently novel… But I am completely confused and have the feeling that I am missing some crucial information?

I would recommend “The mote in God’s eye”.
Fantastic premise with one of the most convincing and fascinating alien races (don’t look it up, there are some plot-twists!) as well as some action parts and space battles. AI free and the military is kind of a quaint feudalistic kind of style.

Came here to recommend that, but then realized that AIs often play major roles in this books…
So while definitely one of the greatest space opera books series, it does not quite fit OPs preference.

Hello everyone! Is this the experiment here? Has it started yet? Can I bring my own drinks?

Ok, similar to the ones we have here in Germany at many crossroads.
They are colloquially called “Bettelampel” which translates to something like “beggar’s traffic light”, as you are kind of a second class traffic participant at this place and have to “beg” to get a timeslot allocated.

Well, I think it actually makes sense if you read the arrow like you would on a map. Up is straight ahead, down is backwards and left and right are… well, left and right. Are the buttons usually mount differently, i.e. on the side of the pole instead of the front as it is the case here?

Ok, I guessed something like that.
Makes sense and seems like a good idea. Would be a nice thing to have here also.
I know of several crossings with multiple installations on the same post where it is not always clear which push-button belongs to which crossing (although it is usually the one in front of you or the one behind you, not left or right).
I also suppose you have to push the arrow to “reserve” the next traffic light phase for crossing?

Curious as our pedestrian crossings don’t have arrows at all:
Where is it supposed to point and how does it work?

I’m using openrouter.ai which is a service that allows the use of a wide range of models and you can easily switch between them on the fly.

Besides the major players I can also use cloud hosted instances of open models. These are often incredibly cheap and and you can select the ones that don’t use your data for training.

Typical use cases include language learning and copilot stuff for programming.