Sounds like you have some aspect of synaesthesia, but there’s no way to be completely sure about that. Numbers usually come with attached context, which may even be specific to the individual, and can affect how people feel about them whether they have crossed senses or not.

As for me, uh. I like numbers, but I think if I had any feelings about specific ones, practical concerns have long since overridden any of that, so my feelings can’t have been that strong in the first place.

Practical concerns like a preferred number being too quiet or too loud on a volume setting, for example, which people often cite as having to be on certain values with certain properties. Likewise, temperature settings, where that’s even possible to control in the first place.

I see I’ve forgotten to put on my head net today. You know the one. Looks like a volleyball net. C shape. Attaches at the back. Catches things that go woosh.

Those “almost completely forgotten” characters were important when ASCII was invented, and a lot of that data is still around in some form or another. There’s also that, since they’re there, they’re still available for the use for which they were designed. You can be sure that someone would want to re-invent them if they weren’t already there.

Some operating systems did assign symbols to those characters anyway. MS-DOS being notable for this. Other standards also had code pages where different languages had different meanings for the byte ranges beyond ASCII. One language might have “é” in one place and another language in another. This caused problems.

Unicode is an extension of ASCII that covers all bases and has all the necessary symbols in fixed places.

That languages X, Y and Z don’t happen to have their alphabets in contiguous runs because they’re extended Latin is a problem, but not something that much can be done about.

It’s understandable that anyone would want their alphabet to be the base language, but one has to be or you end up in code page hell again. English happened to get there first.

If you want a fun exercise (for various interpretations of “fun”), design your own standard. Do you put the digits 0-9 as code points 0-9 or do you start with your preferred alphabet there? What about upper and lower case? Which goes first? Where do you put Chinese?

It’s a “joke” because it comes from an era when memory was at a premium and, for better or worse, the English-speaking world was at the forefront of technology.

The fact that English has an alphabet of length just shy of a power of two probably helped spur on technological advancement that would have otherwise quickly been bogged down in trying to represent all the necessary glyphs and squeeze them into available RAM.

… Or ROM for that matter. In the ROM, you’d need bit patterns or vector lists that describe each and every character and that’s necessarily an order of magnitude bigger than what’s needed to store a value per glyph. ROM is an order of magnitude cheaper, but those two orders of magnitude basically cancel out and you have a ROM that costs as much to make as the RAM.

And when you look at ASCII’s contemporary EBCDIC, you’ll realise what a marvel ASCII is by comparison. Things could have been much, much worse.

Flag Admiral Stabby earned that knife.

If you have a grasp on distance rather than speed, you could figure out how quickly that speed would get you across that distance, assuming straight-line travel.

Let’s say I live 10km from a relative (about 6 miles) and I know it takes them about 20 minutes to get here when the road’s clear, that means I know they’re doing about 30km/h (18.6mph) on average to get here. Pretty standard for urban driving. At an average speed of 300km/h that journey would take 2 minutes.

Equivalently, a 2 minute journey now takes 12 seconds. This ignores the fact that there’d have to be one heck of an acceleration and deceleration at either end to get that average, but nonetheless, 300km/h is scary speed.

Or to put it another way, one accidental twitch of the steering wheel at that sort of speed and even the best downforce in the world isn’t going to stop you turning into a break-neck, sideways, tumbling disaster.

You could watch car disaster videos online if that helps. Or if you don’t like the idea of potentially watching people die, seek out people playing sandbox games like BeamNG where they set up horrifying scenarios, but no-one gets hurt.

As long as it’s free-range, organic, low cannabinoid hemp, I can get with this, man. Most stoners will be too stoned to notice it’s the clean-livin’ hippie kind of hemp, and hey, it’ll be great for the environment too.

I bet it works great with my SATA mulch bin.

Somewhat ironically, it was about 10 years ago that I had to quit, and that was because of my mental health.

In my case, I’m a vanilla cis-het male, but if you go out along that other axis, the one that’s neurodivergence, well, that’s where years of trying to get by in a world heavily geared to neurotypicals finally took its toll and my brain just couldn’t take it any more.

This must be the new landscape. Before I had to quit, the male-dominated IT landscape I worked in had no apparent cross-dressers. Or furries for that matter. Admittedly, the companies were relatively small so maybe they didn’t hit the threshold for there necessarily being someone who didn’t present as cis male.

A handful of gay dudes, sure, but pretty sure none of them dressed this way. Even if one of them hit some level of stereotype and did drag in their spare time - which I have no evidence of - that’s not the same as whatever this is.

I’m surprised that got through the vetting process, which I thought existed in most places.

Here in the UK, potentially offensive plates are altered or just plain skipped. There was a sitcom in the '90s that used one such “illegal” plate as an end-of-episode visual punchline, which had, up to that point, only been referred to as a “pornographic number plate”. There’s no way it would have made it onto the road in reality. P one five five OLE as I recall.

To give you some idea of how stringent it is here, back in 2007, one region had one of their region codes temporarily changed to TN from SN so that their plates wouldn’t start with “SN07”, i.e. “snot”. Something similar almost certainly happened in 2017 for the SH region code, but I don’t remember any news stories about that.

If the pricing is itemised, you could price the impossible feature at an exorbitant rate.

Either way, has your company previously sold this feature or is this just a mistaken belief about the existence of the feature that the customer has somehow invented themselves?

If the feature isn’t on any of the customer’s previous itemisations and they’re the ones who made it up accidentally, suddenly seeing it on a new itemisation with a sky-high price tag might make them realise without explicitly telling them, which may or may not be what you (as the individual) want. I assume your boss will get wind of this one way or the other, so you could get them on-side by suggesting this idea.

Is this feature something one of your company’s rivals might be able to implement or is this one of those situations where the feature would literally break the laws of physics? (Or mathematics, etc.) If the latter, it might be easier to come clean to the customer with a full explanation. If the former, your company needs to get on R&D immediately. Consult experts in the field. And that’s where the exorbitant rate comes in.

How much of this your company shares with the customer is down to your chain of command. How much you share with the customer is down to how much it will affect you personally one way or the other.

Lots of ifs, buts and maybes here. Good luck. I think you need it.

Technically, if you ignore the inherent contradiction in the name, some languages treat NaN as a falsy number and the IEEE standards admit trillions of possible NaNs.

FWIW, I’ve a relative who dislikes fish, but who often makes an exception for local fish & chips. Locally the preference is for haddock which is what’s generally served, and what that relative gets.

The same relative is less fond of cod, so I guess the advice there, if any, is if you try cod and don’t like it, try haddock. Or vice versa.

Ada is a language that leaves a lot of things “implementation dependent” as it’s not supposed to grant easy access to underlying data types like those you’ll find in C, or literally on the silicon. You’re supposed to be able to declare your own integer type of any size and the compiler is supposed to figure it out. If it chooses to use a native data type, then so be it.

This doesn’t guarantee the correctness of the compiler nor the programmer who absolutely has to work with native types because it’s an embedded system though.

This has ended in disaster at least once: https://itsfoss.com/a-floating-point-error-that-caused-a-damage-worth-half-a-billion/

ELI5

paradigm

You must know some terrifying five-year-olds.

Where I live, most stops have been in place for decades if not a century at this point. No-one remembers why the all ones that exist now exist where they do, only that they exist there. Some actually migrate over time due to new construction and other factors.

But to guess how they got where they are, at least generally speaking, someone would have designed routes for public transport around main roads and important industrial areas mainly so that workers could get to work in a morning. Businesses may have even lobbied local government or bus companies for a stop near where they were if one wasn’t already planned to be there.

Anecdotally, I know a stop near where my parents live was deliberately placed at the far side of a road junction so that factory workers who wanted to get off there were getting off past a fare boundary. That meant that if they caught the bus closer to work rather than a quarter mile up the road, they’d have to pay extra money. Actually, it’s so old a thoroughfare it might have been a horse-drawn tram stop originally. Same fare shenanigans though.

That stop migrated to the “cheaper” side of the road junction nearly 30 years ago, but as far as I know, it’s still treated as though the fare boundary occurs before it.

Anecdote 2: There have been embarrassing stories of workmen upgrading bus stop shelters only for locals to tell them, and the local news, that the bus service that would have stopped at it has long since been cancelled due to budget cuts. Bureaucracy is a wonderful thing.

I tend to use right shift for pretty much everything. The arrow glyph has worn off the key I use it so much.

Important factors:

1. British English keyboards, like the one I have, tend to be ISO, with a larger shift key on the right. Bigger target. Easier to hit.

2. I have at least a couple of passwords that each have at least one shifted character from the left side of the keyboard and it’s much easier to use both hands when I need to type those.

3. It might even go back to the fact that most of my early typing was on a Commodore 64C and the positions of surrounding keys. Hitting shift-lock or run/stop by mistake would have been a nuisance. Caps lock isn’t quite as annoying because it’s not a literal mechanical toggle, but even so, the right shift avoids that particular error.

From what I understood on the recent "live"stream, it can be turned off.

But as others have said, there are many performance mods that don’t change the core game experience. Getting those set up can be a bit of a chore, even if you choose a different launcher that manages them for you, but it can be worth it.

Until very recently I had Minecraft Java running smoothly on a PC that was 13 years old. 1st gen i7 with a similarly aged Nvidia card.

…and I still run the same mods on the new PC. Saves energy, and reduces fan noise a bit, so might as well.

$ man woman 
No manual entry for woman

Linux knows the importance of consent / If you’re not one already, Linux can’t help you understand / <Your own interpretation here>

In this instance, I think there was some suggestion to write code in mostly lower case, including all user variables, or at least inCamelCaseLikeThis with a leading lower case letter, and so to make True and False stand out, they’ve got to be capitalised.

I mean. They could have been TRUE and FALSE. Would that have been preferable? Or how about a slightly more Pythonic style: __true__ and __false__