The basic problem is that identifiers can be either types or variables, and without a keyword letting you know what kind of statement you’re dealing with, there’s no way of knowing without a complete identifier table. For example, what does this mean:

foo * bar;

If foo is a type, that is a pointer declaration. But if it’s a variable, that’s a multiplication expression. Here’s another simple one:

foo(bar);

Depending on how foo is defined, that could be a function call or a declaration of a variable bar of type foo, with some meaningless parentheses thrown in.

When you mix things together it gets even more crazy. Check this example from this article:

foo(*bar)();

Is bar a pointer to a function returning foo, or is foo a function that takes a bar and returns a function pointer?

let and fn keywords solve a lot of these ambiguity problems because they let the parser know what kind of statement it’s looking at, so it can know whether identifiers in certain positions refer to types or variables. That makes parsing easier to write and helps give nicer error messages.

Butter corn miso ramen is a thing in Sapporo. Probably invented to promote regional products (Hokkaido is famous for corn and dairy) to tourists.

Technically any Catholic male is eligible to become pope, it doesn’t even have to be a cardinal. But yeah cardinals are the only ones voting so they always elect one of their own (with a few historical exceptions)

As a European, the idea of a bank having a drive-through is just absolutely wild.

I think holding more helium in a smaller space is the opposite of what you want. The lifting force is equal to the weight of the air being displaced, so you want as little stuff as possible in as big a volume as possible.

Maybe if you went the other way round and compressed the atmosphere?

A system I work with gives all keys a string value of “Not_set” when the key is intended to be unset. The team decided to put this in because of a connection with a different, legacy system, whose developers (somehow) could not distinguish between a key being missing or being present but with a null value. So now every team that integrates with this system has to deal with these unset values.

Of course, it’s up to individual developers to never forget to set a key to “Not_Set”. Also, they forgot to standardise capitalisation and such so there are all sorts of variations “NOT_SET”, “Not_set”, “NotSet”, etc. floating around the API responses. Also null is still a possible value you need to handle as well, though what it means is context dependent (usually it means someone fucked up).

The US needs to do way more than invest into public transit. You need to completely rethink city planning to get something suitable for human travel. Suburban America is like the antithesis to public transportation (or god forbid, walking).

Skyrim is a totally different beast because the ingredient effects you know about don’t depend on your Alchemy skill anymore: instead you simply discover the effects by successfully making a potion with them. So there’s a sort of minigame of trying different ingredients together to discover what kind of effects they give to potions, which in my opinion is neat because it matches up with how you might do this in reality.

I think the developers didn’t like the “surprise” extra potion effects you could get in Morrowind, so they changed it in oblivion.

Can someone explain where the Y comes from? Is this something like, there exists a mother relation between this X and some Y?

I work at a large telecom company building customer support infrastructure, and you are by and large correct. It is a direct policy not to list our phone number on our website, which is supposed to “nudge the customer journey towards alternative solutions first.” That means AI chat, or user guided search on the website, or whatever.

The funny thing is, being the most customer friendly company is supposed to be one of our organisation’s goals. By and large actually, individuals working here (at least at the lower levels) all want to genuinely help customers. However the way incentives are set up and the organisation is structured, inevitably cost savings is what drives most of the work that gets done.

The planet’s gravity is not what is causing the time dilation, but rather the gravity of the supermassive black hole that it was orbiting. The black hole is somehow spinning extremely rapidly, causing frame dragging, which creates a particular stable orbit very close to the event horizon.

Apparently the energy requirements of the orbit would preclude ever reaching the planet except by slingshot manoeuvres around intermediate size black holes or neutron stars.

That’s true, because you use a 110V based system you have less power available to the kettle. It’s still a lot faster than an electric stove though. Not faster than an induction stove, probably.

Having played a lot of Dwarf fortress in ascii mode as well as with tilesets, I agree with you. It’s not especially difficult to make a successful fortress. However the game is definitely obtuse, even more so with the ascii graphics. Just figuring out what is happening on the screen and which combination of buttons to press to do what you want is quite difficult.

The steam release does some work to remedy the situation though.

Why is it weird? It’s just your butt. Are you scared of your butt?

It really depends on the sensor tech. The fingerprint reader in my pixel 7 pro is absolute dogshit. I’ve heard the pixel 9 line improves things though.

Pi Hole couldn’t block YouTube ads last time I tried it, which is one of the main things I want to have adblock for. So I went back to ublock origin.

I’m confused now, because espresso is also coffee? Like, it’s all made from coffee beans. I agree that Americano is espresso with water, but to me that is absolutely a kind of coffee.

I guess I’ve never really thought of “black” as a type of coffee. Where I live black usually just means you don’t want any milk in whatever type of coffee you ordered.

an Americano is not a black coffee.

It is however, coffee that is black,

Hold on now, I’m not getting this. What meaning could “black coffee” possibly have other than a coffee that is black?

So that’s hot water that went through pressed coffee powder.

The “pressed” doesn’t refer to the coffee powder but to the water: the water is pressed through the coffee grounds using high pressure (around 9 bars or so).