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UK-based Maddy sparked strong reactions after she told her TikTok followers that a casual trip to B&M had turned into a festive haul - four months before Christmas.

The mothers of two British women left critically injured after being mown down by a speeding taxi in Ibiza have told of the horrifying scale of their daughters' injuries.

Police have ramped up patrols in the seaside town after a spate of 'extremely concerning' anti-Semitic attacks.

We're not even in hate-watch territory anymore. In a true feat of failure, Meghan Markle has leveled us all into indifference. Even she seems somewhat resigned to her fate.

Optional types are an attempt to patch the "billion dollar mistake". When you don't know if you have a value or not, you wrap it in an Optional, which ensures that there is a value (the Optional itself), thus avoiding null reference exceptions. Then you can query the Optional to see if there is a real value or not.

This is all fine and good, and can cut down on some bugs. Good implementations are loaded with convenience methods which make it easy to work on the optionals.

But then, you get code like Burgers found. Which just leaves us scratching our heads:

private static final Optional<Boolean> TRUE = Optional.of(Boolean.TRUE); private static final Optional<Boolean> FALSE = Optional.of(Boolean.FALSE);

Look, any time you're making constants for TRUE or FALSE, something has gone wrong, and yes, I'm including pre-1999 versions of C in this. It's especially telling when you do it in a language that already has such constants, though- at its core- these lines are saying TRUE = TRUE. Yes, we're wrapping the whole thing in an Optional here, which potentially is useful, but if it is useful, something else has gone wrong.

Burgers works for a large insurance company, and writes this about the code:

I was trying to track down a certain piece of code in a Spring web API application when I noticed something curious. It looked like there was a chunk of code implementing an application-specific request filter in business logic, totally ignoring the filter functions offered by the framework itself and while it was not related to the task I was working on, I followed the filter apply call to its declaration. While I cannot supply the entire custom request filter implementation, take these two static declarations as a demonstration of how awful the rest of the class is.

Ah, of course- deep down, someone saw a perfectly functional wheel and said, "I could make one of those myself!" and these lines are representative of the result.

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The second season of With Love, Meghan has been panned by critics since it landed on Netflix on Tuesday. The eight-part series features guests Chrissy Teigen and Tan France.

One year ago on this day, royal observers were shocked to hear that the estranged brothers, Prince William and Prince Harry, would both be attending the funeral of their uncle, Robert Fellowes.

A missing 12-year-old autistic boy was found to have been killed by an alligator in a canal new his home in New Orleans as police investigate his mother.

Bringing DBaaS back on board in face off with Oracle

It's less than two years since MariaDB spun out SkySQL, but it's already unspinning the database-as-a-service outfit, which has since been marinated in AI sauce.…

I've used the interim death certificate to sort out all his other financial affairs - but for some reason, it isn't good enough to cancel a ferry crossing.

Development set to include a new community centre and shop

It was meant to be your average royal photo call. That is, until Aussie-born royal Queen Mary broke an awkward silence moment by asking her husband a question

Those in cars will be paying an extra £1 per journey

There are several Essex RSPCA branches in the county, along with the affiliated Danaher Animal Home, all with pets looking for homes.

MP Priti Patel visited Witham manufacturing firm Jack Arnold UK to learn about challenges facing the industry.

Braintree Town Football Club’s brand-new mascot took part in an annual mascot race to raise funds for a children’s charity.

There are several Essex RSPCA branches in the county, along with the affiliated Danaher Animal Home, all with pets looking for homes.

Once a private playground for royalty, there were fears the dilapidated island fortress would be left to crumble.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: SpaceX has long marketed Starship as a fully and rapidly reusable rocket that's designed to deliver thousands of pounds of cargo to Mars and make life multiplanetary. But reusability at scale means a space vehicle that can tolerate mishaps and faults, so that a single failure doesn't spell a mission-ending catastrophe. The 10th test flight on Tuesday evening demonstrated SpaceX's focus on fault tolerance. In a post-flight update, SpaceX said the test stressed "the limits of vehicle capabilities." Understanding these edges will be critical for the company's plans to eventually use Starship to launch Starlink satellites, commercial payloads, and eventually astronauts. When the massive Starship rocket lifted off on its 10th test flight Tuesday evening, SpaceX did more than achieve new milestones. It purposefully introduced several faults to test the heat shield, propulsion redundancy, and the relighting of its Raptor engine. The heat shield is among the toughest engineering challenges facing SpaceX. As Elon Musk acknowledged on X in May 2024, a reusable orbital return heat shield is the "biggest remaining problem" to 100% rocket reusability. The belly of the upper stage, also called Starship, is covered in thousands of hexagonal ceramic and metallic tiles, which make up the heat shield. Flight 10 was all about learning how much damage the ship can accept and survive when it goes through atmospheric heating. During the tenth test, engineers intentionally removed tiles from some sections of the ship, and experimented with a new type of actively cooled tile, to gather real-world data and refine designs. [...] Propulsion redundancy was also put to the test. The Super Heavy booster's landing burn configuration appeared to be a rehearsal for engine failure. Engineers intentionally disabled one of the three center Raptor engines during the final phase of the burn and used a backup engine in its place. That was a successful rehearsal for an engine-out event. Finally, SpaceX reported the in-space relight of a Raptor engine, described on the launch broadcast as the second time SpaceX has pulled this off. Reliable engine restarts will be necessary for deep-space missions, propellant transfers, and possibly some payload deployment missions. [...] The next step is translating Flight 10 data into future hardware upgrades to move closer to routine operations and days when, as Musk envisioned, "Starship launches more than 24 times in 24 hours."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The First Lady, a passionate advocate for children, reacted to the tragedy with a detailed call for solutions to rooting out potential future threats on social media.