Aggregator

If you're a fan of buying a snack on your flight, there are a few airlines you might want to avoid.

Police are hunting other suspected occupants of the vehicle which has been involved in a collision with a house

Hosts Lauren Laverne and JB Gill announced a recipient of the BBC show's One Big Thank You, who had sadly passed away.

As one of the glamorous Spencer twins, alongside her sister Lady Eliza, Amelia has seamlessly woven her own path while paying homage to the people's princess.

Company director Allen McKenna, 47, died in mysterious circumstances during a break with his wife Majda Mjaoual two months ago and he was buried in a cemetery in Casablanca.

When faced with an information system lacking sufficient richness to permit its users to express all of the necessary data states, human beings will innovate. In other words, they will find creative ways to bend the system to their will, usually (but not always) inconsequentially.

In the early days of information systems, even before electronic computers, we found users choosing to insert various out-of-bounds values into data fields to represent states such as "I don't know the true value for this item" or "It is impossible accurately state the true value of this item because of faulty constraint being applied to the input mechanism" or other such notions.

This practice carried on into the computing age, so that now, numeric fields will often contain values of 9999 or 99999999. Taxpayer numbers will be listed as 000-00-0000 or any other repetition of the same digit or simple sequences. Requirements to enter names collected John Does. Now we also see a fair share of Disney characters.

Programmers then try to make their systems idiot-proof, with the obvious and entirely predictable results.

The mere fact that these inventions exist at all is entirely due to the ommission of mechanisms for the metacommentary that we all know perfectly well is sometimes necessary. But rather than provide those, it's easier to wave our hands and pretend that these unwanted states won't exist, can be ignored, can be glossed over. "Relax" they'll tell you. "It probably won't ever happen." "If it does happen, it won't matter." "Don't lose your head over it."

The Beast in Black certainly isn't inclined to cover up an errant sentinel. "For that price, it had better be a genuine Louis XVI pillow from 21-January-1793." A La Lanterne!

 

Daniel D. doubled up on Error'ds for us. "Do you need the error details? Yes, please."

 

And again with an alert notification oopsie. "Google Analytics 4 never stops surprising us any given day with how bugged it is. I call it an "Exclamation point undefined". You want more info? Just Google it... Oh wait." I do appreciate knowing who is responsible for the various bodges we are sent. Thank you, Daniel.

 

"Dark pattern or dumb pattern?" wonders an anonymous reader. I don't think it's very dark.

 

Finally, Ian Campbell found a data error that doesn't look like an intentional sentinel. But I'm not sure what this number represents. It is not an integral power of 2. Says Ian, "SendGrid has a pretty good free plan now with a daily limit of nine quadrillion seven trillion one hundred ninety-nine billion two hundred fifty-four million seven hundred forty thousand nine hundred ninety-two."

 

[Advertisement] Plan Your .NET 9 Migration with Confidence
Your journey to .NET 9 is more than just one decision.Avoid migration migraines with the advice in this free guide. Download Free Guide Now!

A new alternative for those pondering what to do when vSphere 7.x goes end of life in October

VMware has revealed another big upgrade is on the way, this time for its vSphere Foundation suite.…

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper faced calls to stop West Yorkshire Police 's recruitment drive, which gives members of 'under-represented' ethnic groups priority to apply to be PCs.

It is understood the UK will join most European nations to back proposals at the Council of Europe to put Russians on trial for 'crimes of aggression' during the invasion of Ukraine.

Scott Shriner spoke outside their Los Angeles home on Thursday morning.

Insiders exclusively revealed to DailyMail.com that Kim has been 'forced to file a cease and desist' against her ex-husband Kanye West amid the endless tirade of offensive social media posts.

African mobile penetration will break the 50 per cent mark this year, propelled by the liberalisation of the telecoms sector and competition to drive prices lower.

The building seems low-maintenance, so I am not sure why the charge is so high. Is it a red flag?

A new EV Check Plus aims to help second-hand EV buyers feel confident snapping as it gives feedback on battery issues, performance and vehicle history.

Khloe Kardashian has been celibate since her final breakup with ex-boyfriend Tristan Thompson in October 2021,

The pilot of the tour helicopter that crashed into New York City 's Hudson River and killed a Spanish family of five warned that they were out of fuel just before the tragedy.

Blake Lively is continuing to slam It Ends With Us director Justin Baldoni amid their raging legal war.

Some of the best AI models today still struggle to resolve software bugs that wouldn't trip up experienced devs. TechCrunch: A new study from Microsoft Research, Microsoft's R&D division, reveals that models, including Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet and OpenAI's o3-mini, fail to debug many issues in a software development benchmark called SWE-bench Lite. The results are a sobering reminder that, despite bold pronouncements from companies like OpenAI, AI is still no match for human experts in domains such as coding. The study's co-authors tested nine different models as the backbone for a "single prompt-based agent" that had access to a number of debugging tools, including a Python debugger. They tasked this agent with solving a curated set of 300 software debugging tasks from SWE-bench Lite. According to the co-authors, even when equipped with stronger and more recent models, their agent rarely completed more than half of the debugging tasks successfully. Claude 3.7 Sonnet had the highest average success rate (48.4%), followed by OpenAI's o1 (30.2%), and o3-mini (22.1%).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Along with Celine Dion and Elton John - plus some good music too

The Brian-Eno-composed sound played by Windows 95 when booted has been added to the US Library of Congress’s list of nationally significant recordings.…

Concerns raised about impact on listed buildings and surrounding areas