When the White House appointed conspiracy theorist Gregg Phillips (previously) to a top job in the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that was not his most interesting sudden movement. Phillips claimed to have experienced teleportation on multiple occasions, including into the Waffle House in Rome, Georgia. — Read the rest
The post FEMA official who teleported to Waffle House teleports out of…
A court has determined that the US DOJ cannot force Apple and Google to hand over the information of around 100,000 users of the EZ Lynk app.
The White House has insisted that acquiring Greenland is necessary for America’s national security—but it seems that some Trump officials believe it would primarily benefit American seafood buffets.
A Trump official and Texas venture capitalist, Thomas Dans, was identified by the Danish government as one of three Americans running private “influence operations” in Greenland, according to _The…
WhatsApp claims they detected and stopped an NSO spyware campaign against its users.
Stella (previously) sends us a much elided snippet. The original code is several thousand lines contained in a single try block. But the WTF is pretty clear without seeing all of that:
try:
# the whole business logic without any exception handling
except:
print("Fudge")
They didn't really say fudge of course, but we mostly try to keep profanity off our main page.…
Turn off the DAW and put down the tablet. David Hilowitz (previously) got his thumbs on the Bastl Kalimba, a peculiar and extremely fun-looking handheld that's currently live on Kickstarter. From the company's pitch: "Treat it like an acoustic Instrument, it will answer like one." — Read the rest
The post Bastl Kalimba synthesizer is really thumbsing appeared first on Boing Boing.
Frequent submitter Argle (previously), sends us a short little representative line. The good news is that this line of code came across Argle's screen during a code review: it was being removed. The bad news is that it was sitting in the code base for ages.
_ = len / 8.0f;
Argle writes:
In a code review today. A co-worker wisely removed the line. Dunno the logic that made…
Russell F (previously) sends us a small one today. It's not just a representative line, it's a representative comment. More than that, it's a true confession. Russell wrote some code, you see, and the logic was confusing. So, a co-worker added a comment to explain what the code was doing:
'This is *supposed* to fail. If it fails to fail, it throws a failure message
Russell writes:
…
Henrik H (previously) sends us a simple representative C# line:
static void GenerateCommercilaInvoice()
This is a static method which takes no parameters and returns nothing. Henrik didn't share the implementation, but this static function likely does something that involves side effects, maybe manipulating the database (to generate that invoice?). Or, possibly worse, it could be…
Progress on Flint has been going incredibly well! I'm recently back home from a great trip to Japan and with the release of Claude Opus 4.5 I've kinda been going beast mode on Flint development. Here's a roundup of all the features I've managed to ship in the past couple of weeks.
First up though, the Flint beta is now open to anyone who wants to kick the tires.…
Candice (previously) has another WTF to share for us.
We're going to start by just looking at one fragment of a class defined in this C++ code: TLAflaList.
Every type and variable has a three-letter-acronym buried in its name. The specific meaning of most of the acronyms are mostly lost to time, so "TLA" is as good as any other three random letters. No one knows what "fla" is.
What drew…
Tim (previously) supports a relatively ancient C++ application. And that creates some interesting conundrums, as the way you wrote C++ in 2003 is not the way you would write it even a few years later. The standard matured quickly.
Way back in 2003, it was still common to use C-style strings, instead of the C++ std::string type. It seems silly, but people had Strong Opinions™ about using…
Update: Trump fires staunch defender Pam Bondi
Even amid reports of her impending ouster as attorney general, Pam Bondi’s Justice Department has opened a new front against transgender athletes in Minnesota.
Keep up with the latest in LGBTQ**+ news and politics.** Sign up for The Advocate's email newsletter.
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division filed a federal lawsuit against…
Sandra from InitAg (previously) works with Bjørn, and Bjørn has some ideas about how database schemas should be organized.
First, users should never see an auto-incrementing ID. That means you need to use UUIDs. But UUIDs are large and expensive, so they should never be your primary key, use an auto-incrementing ID for that.
This is not, in and of itself, a radical or ridiculous statement.…
When we set out to understand Rust's challenges, we expected to hear about the borrow checker learning curve and maybe some ecosystem gaps. Of course, we did. A lot. But, of course, it's more nuanced.
The conventional wisdom is that Rust has a steep learning curve, but once you "get it," smooth sailing awaits. We found that while some challenges disappear with experience, they are replaced with…
On March 27, 2025, somewhere in the Panamanian rainforest, the evolutionary biologist Zeke Rowe was looking for a snack. While walking outside the research station's cafeteria, Rowe noticed a strange insect summoned by a floodlight. The insect was a katydid, a close relative of crickets famous for their mimicry of leaves. Katydids have veined bodies that are often bright green like a new leaf or…
The latest OpenAI and Anthropic rounds drill it home...
Neil Sedaka (_previously at Boing Boing_), among America's most prolific and enduring singer-songwriters, died Friday in Los Angeles. He was 86.
"Our family is devastated by the sudden passing of our beloved husband, father and grandfather," his family said in a statement. — Read the rest
The post Neil Sedaka dead at 86 appeared first on Boing Boing.
GOP senator Bernie Moreno’s purported federal “ban” on corporate landlords buying up single-family homes could carve out exemptions…
ChatGPT has added Lockdown Mode, "an optional, advanced security setting designed for a small set of highly security-conscious users—such as executives or security teams at prominent organizations—who require increased protection against advanced threats."