Covid affecting my sense of smell had an impact on this.

Apart from not being able to taste coffee, I also could not taste freshly ground black pepper, fresh spicy peppers, nor Tabasco sauce.

I could only feel the effects of the capsaicin at the back of my throat after having swallowed.

I think that back-of-the-throat feeling is what I’m talking about actually. Pain vs flavour. I feel like this guy supposedly saying he could eat VERY spicy curries and not notice means that either 1) burning from spicy food uses the same mechanism as taste, so the gum restoring it makes sense or 2) they’re separate but the gum works on both pathways.

I’m thinking that burning feeling has a different route to get to your brain vs taste/scent, so I guess this gum does more than I thought originally. Though based on other accounts here, it sounds like how connected pain and flavour are varies quite a bit!

The flaw with that article, it being the Beeb showing their bias, is that it mainly applies to the English Home Counties.

So it is a southern English habit, not a British one. The other parts of England are more direct, and will use more obvious phrasing. Similarly the other parts of Britain will be more direct.

Indeed. I've lived in the UK my entire life, and I've only ever heard "sorry" used to mean "excuse me, can I get past please?" in and around London. It still sounds weird to me. Where I come from (further from London), you'd just say "excuse me".

Not quite. If you had to get off a packed bus with a large rucksack I'd certainly be saying sorry and I'm from Yorkshire.

Glaswegian here, I would use sorry as an "can I get past" also.

I understand it works _if_ you declare p as being volatile, or explicitly tag it as _Atomic.

i.e., either of these forms:

    foo * volatile p;
    foo * _Atomic p;

Or at least it did when I was performing a similar experiment.

Sure. Or use a mutex, or use any of the other zillion concurrency-safe constructs out there. Still, Fil-C is memory-safe only up to data-race freedom. This bound is still a plenty useful, but Pizlo shouldn't be going around saying Fil-C is memory-safe in general when it ain't.

A section? All of Northumberland, as Wallsend is in Tyne and Wear.

The task of walking (or measuring) the whole of England's coastline is made a bit more difficult by the existence of various islands classed as part of England.

e.g. Isle of Wight, St. Mary's Island, Coquet Island, Lindisfarne, the other Farne islands, etc.

The volume of UK and US fluid ounces being different also doesn't help.

The UK pint is 568ml, apparently a US pint is 473 ml.

Attribute (qualifier), or storage class?

https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/428

The use of 'const' in C is very much a mixed blessing; I certainly have experience of the 'const poisoning' issue. Possibly it would have been better as a storage class.

For bool, yes it was a useful addition. Especially for the cases where old code would have something like:

    #define FLAG_A 1u
    #define FLAG_B 2u
    int has_flag_B (something *some) { return some->field & FLAG_B; }

and that was then combined with logic expecting 'true' to be 1; which could sneak in over time.

Alef [1], [2], [3] can in part be viewed as C where methods are available.

An 'aggr' is equivalent to C 'struct' combined with 'typedef', and an 'adt' is an 'aggr' having methods.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alef_(programming_language)

[2] http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/2nd_edition/papers/alef/ref

[3] http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/2nd_edition/papers/alef/ug

I had my first go at using it (Github Copilot) last week, for a simple refactoring task. I'd have to say I reasonably specified it, yet it still managed to to fail to delete a closing brace when it removed the opening block as specified.

That was using the Claude Sonnet 4.5 model, I wonder if using the Opus 4.5 model would have managed to avoid that.

It is London - hardly surprising.

Nothing will improve as long as Khan is Mayor, and may not even if he is replaced.

Anyway, MI6 (SIS) is the overseas spies, MI5 is the domestic spy agency.

Yes, it totally makes sense to blame Khan for what foreign intelligence services are doing in London. This is completely reasonable.

Someone being beaten up on the streets is domestic policing issue.

That the perpetrators may turn out to be foreign agents is neither here nor there, only if they were diplomatic staff would it not be a domestic policing issue. However the UK police have largely withdrawn from certain areas, and this would simply be another symptom.

High Court action suggests there was a civil case pursuing the perpetrators (or their principals), rather than a criminal case. With a properly functioning police system, that should not be necessary.

Kahn is the PCC for London, he sets their priorities.

Doesn’t matter if it’s people being poisoned with polonium or getting beaten up, preventing the activities of foreign intelligence services is generally not the job of the PCC.

It is the job of the British intelligence services to blow someone up in Riyadh to deter these activities.

Say you were the Mayor of London, and being a great mayor you have your priorities 100% correct.

Can you guarantee that something like this will never happen on your watch?

London just had the lowest annual murders for 11 years.

>Homicide rate now 1.1 per 100,000 people, lower than any other UK city and major global cities including New York (2.8), Berlin (3.2) and Toronto (1.6)

I guess you'll praise Khan, as PCC, for that?

Not within a mayor’s control

Lockdown mode allows one to optionally disable 2g, maybe it is also the default there. One can turn 2g back on in said mode if desired.

As to 3g, it is largely switched off here, and I understand most of the rest of the world is also disabling it.

However it does not remove images from messages, it just disables certain automatic helpers - e.g. link previews etc.

One can still send photos, etc without any issue.

This doesn’t mitigate the issue that a malicious base station poses by downgrading a phone.

It doesn’t matter what the network supports. It matters what the phone supports