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You've read the headlines and heard our experts' opinions - but what do YOU think?

Emotions ran high in the paddock after the opening Turners Novices Hurdle on day two. No Drama This End, who went off a remarkably short price at 9/4 favourite, was never comfortable.

GFiber (a.k.a. Google Fiber) and Astound Broadband announced that they plan to merge into a deal backed by infrastructure investor Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners. The resulting company will be majority owned by Stonepeak, with Alphabet becoming a "significant minority shareholder." Light Reading reports: Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners teamed with Patriot Media to acquire Astound in November 2020 for $8.1 billion. Stonepeak is Astound's largest investor. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026. The combined business will be led by the existing GFiber executive team. GFiber is currently led by CEO Dinni Jain. Jain, a former Time Warner Cable and Insight Communications exec, took the helm of what was then called Google Fiber in 2018. "This agreement advances GFiber's mission of redefining internet connectivity and represents a major step toward its goal of operational and financial independence," the companies said. "GFiber will have the external capital and strategic focus needed to accelerate its next phase of growth, expanding its customer-first approach and pioneering fiber technology across the country." GFiber's combination with Astound represents "a strategic opportunity to scale our customer-focused approach to connect more households to a truly different type of internet service," Jain said in a statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As many as 100,000 records and messages are believed to have been gathered about the Labour grandee's appointment as US Ambassador and his sacking over his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Today's Anonymous submitter sends us some React code. We'll look at the code and then talk about the WTF:

// inside a function for updating checkboxes on a page if (!e.target.checked) { const removeIndex = await checkedlist.findIndex( (sel) => sel.Id == selected.Id, ) const removeRowIndex = await RowValue.findIndex( (sel) => sel == Index, ) // checkedlist and RowValue are both useState instances.... they should never be modified directly await checkedlist.splice(removeIndex, 1) await RowValue.splice(removeRowIndex, 1) // so instead of doing above logic in the set state, they dont setCheckedlist(checkedlist) setRow(RowValue) } else { if (checkedlist.findIndex((sel) => sel.Id == selected.Id) == -1) { await checkedlist.push(selected) } // same, instead of just doing a set state call, we do awaits and self updates await RowValue.push(Index) setCheckedlist(checkedlist) setRow(RowValue) }

Comments were added by our submitter.

This code works. It's the wrong approach for doing things in React: modifying objects controlled by react, instead of using the provided methods, it's doing asynchronous push calls. Without the broader context, it's hard to point out all the other ways to do this, but honestly, that's not the interesting part.

I'll let our submitter explain:

This code is black magic, because if I update it, it breaks everything. Somehow, this is working in perfect tandem with the rest of the horrible page, but if I clean it up, it breaks the checkboxes; they're no longer able to be clicked. Its forcing React somehow to update asynchronously so it can use these updated values correctly, but thats the neat part, they aren't even being used anywhere else, but somehow the re-rendering page only accepts awaits. I've tried refactoring it 5 different ways to no avail

That's what makes truly bad code. Code so bad that you can't even fix it without breaking a thousand other things. Code that you have to carefully, slowly, pick through and gently refactor, discovering all sorts of random side-effects that are hidden. The code so bad that you actually have to live with it, at least for awhile.

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Three-year-old Woflie, formerly Fox, is searching for a new home in the UK after being ignored in a rescue shelter - do you have a space in your home and heart for him?

Residents raised concerns ahead of the bin rollout

Nicole Kidman has named the actor she liked kissing the least onscreen.

Deploying them by the gigawatt but still can’t flag obvious AI slop

Social networking giant Meta has revealed details of four previously unknown custom chips powering its AI services.…

The soothing blue façade of The Vine Inn in Black Notley is a particularly welcoming site to its new landlords.

Property group Rightmove has published its latest Most Expensive Streets report, with one in Sussex making the list.

More than 70,000 potholes have been reported and repaired since 2022, seeing Essex County Council pay out over £400,000 for vehicle damage.

The soothing blue façade of The Vine Inn in Black Notley is a particularly welcoming site to its new landlords.

Property group Rightmove has published its latest Most Expensive Streets report, with one in Sussex making the list.

More than 70,000 potholes have been reported and repaired since 2022, seeing Essex County Council pay out over £400,000 for vehicle damage.

Campaigners fear for the town's future of sewage, hospitals and roads that are 'bursting at the seams'

René Redzepi, founder of the Danish restaurant Noma, tendered his resignation on Wednesday amid abuse allegations.

In the final draft guidance published today, NICE recommended the fezolinetant 45mg tablet for women experiencing moderate to severe hot flushes and night sweats.

Dylan Phelan, from Morley in West Yorkshire, pleaded guilty to encouraging the suicide of Travis Dyer (pictured) in Louisiana on October 30, 2024.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: In a paper, published last month in the journal The Anatomical Record, researchers offered a novel take on falling felines. Their evidence suggests new insights into the so-called falling cat problem, particularly that cats have a very flexible segment of their spines that allows them to correct their orientation midair. [...] People have been curious about falling cats perhaps as long as the animals have been living with humans, but the method to their acrobatic abilities remains enigmatic. Part of the difficulty is that the anatomy of the cat has not been studied in detail, explains Yasuo Higurashi, a physiologist at Yamaguchi University in Japan and lead author of the study. [...] Modern research has split the falling cat problem into two competing models. The first, "legs in, legs out," suggests that cats correct their falling trajectory by first extending their hind limbs before retracting them, using a sequential twist of their upper and then lower trunk to gain the proper posture while in free fall. The second model, "tuck and turn," suggests that cats turn their upper and lower bodies in simultaneous juxtaposed movements. [...] The researchers found that the feline spine was extremely flexible in the upper thoracic vertebrae, but stiffer and heavier in the lower lumbar vertebrae. The discovery matches video evidence showing the cats first turn their front legs, and then their lower legs. The results suggest the cat quickly spins its flexible upper torso to face the ground, allowing it to see so that it can correctly twist the rest of its body to match. "The thoracic spine of the cat can rotate like our neck," Dr. Higurashi said. Experiments on the spine show the upper vertebrae can twist an astounding 360 degrees, he says, which helps cats make these correcting movements with ease. The results are consistent with the "legs in, legs out" model, but definitively determining which model is correct will take more work, Dr. Higurashi says. The results also yielded another discovery: Cats, like many animals, appear to have a right-side bias. One of the dropped cats corrected itself by turning to the right eight out of eight times, while the other turned right six out of eight times.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.