TikTok’s “sleepy girl mocktails” remind us how important magnesium is for sleep and health

Rod-shaped fragments of RNA called “obelisks” were discovered in gut and mouth bacteria for the first time

A long-awaited study of people with ME/CFS revealed differences in their immune and nervous system. The findings may offer clues about long COVID

Golden slices of summer squash and kernels of corn are baked in a creamy sauce and topped with bread crumbs in this Southern-style vegan squash casserole. It’s the perfect summer side dish. Hi, my name is Susan, and I’m a vegan. It’s been so long since I updated this blog that I only half-humorously feel...

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The post Vegan Yellow Squash and Corn Casserole appeared first on FatFree Vegan Kitchen.

The Hard Quartet “Six Deaf Rats” I’ve been enjoying The Hard Quartet’s debut record, but was having trouble digesting it as anything more than a late-period Stephen Malkmus album that happened to include some other songs by Matt Sweeney and Emmett Kelly. Seeing the band perform at Webster Hall last night made it all click […]

There's the potential for endless installments of "programmers not understanding how UUIDs work." Frankly, I think the fact that we represent them as human readable strings is part of the problem; sure, it's readable, but conceals the fact that it's just a large integer.

Which brings us to this snippet, from Capybara James.

    if (!StringUtils.hasLength(uuid) || uuid.length() != 36) {
        throw new RequestParameterNotFoundException(ErrorCodeCostants.UUID_MANDATORY_OR_FORMAT);
    }

StringUtils.hasLength comes from the Spring library, and it's a simple "is not null or empty" check. So- we're testing to see if a string is null or empty, or isn't exactly 36 characters long. That tells us the input is bad, so we throw a RequestParameterNotFoundException, along with an error code.

So, as already pointed out, a UUID is just a large integer that we render as a 36 character string, and there are better ways to validate a UUID. But this also will accept any 36 character string- as long as you've got 36 characters, we'll call it a UUID. "This is valid, really valid, dumbass" is now a valid UUID.

With that in mind, I also like the bonus of it not distinguishing between whether or not the input was missing or invalid, because that'll make it real easy for users to understand why their input is getting rejected.

Amateur physicist B.J. is going on vacation, but he likes to plan things right down to the zeptosecond. "Assume the flight accelerates at a constant speed for the first half of the flight, and decelerates at the same rate for the second half. 1) What speed does the plane need to reach to have that level of time dilation? 2) What is the distance between the airports?"

Contrarily, Eddie R. was tired of vacation so got a new job, but right away he's having second thoughts. "Doing my onboarding, but they seem to have trouble with the idea of optional."

"Forget UTF-8! Have you heard about the new, hot encoding standard for 2024?!" exclaimed Daniel , kvetching "Well, if you haven't then Gravity Forms co. is going to change your mind: URLEncode everything now! Specially if you need to display some diacritics on your website. Throw away the old, forgotten UTF-8. Be a cool guy, just use that urlencode!"

Immediately afterward, Daniel also sent us another good example, this time from Hetzner. He complains "Hetzner says the value is invalid. Of course they won't say what is or isn't allowed. It wasn't the slash character, it was... a character with diacritics! Hetzner is clearly using US-ASCII created in 1960's."

Finally this week, we pulled something out of the archive from Boule de Berlin who wrote "Telekom, the biggest German ISP, shows email address validation is hard. They use a regex that limits the TLD part of an email address to 4 chars." Old but timeless.

It’s one thing to just be a reporter who covered The LOTR Trilogy during it’s lengthy production —...

Special series of Topolinos mini-cars by FIAT

Amazing showreel as always...

Андрей Бычков. Антропологическое письмо. Курс лекций и семинаров с выпускниками Московской школы нового кино и Литературных курсов им. А.П. и М.А. Чеховых, Москва, студия doku_meta, 2021-2022 гг. / А.С. Бычков. — СПб.: Алетейя, 2024. — 378 с. «…сделайте мне комбинацию этих ароматов». Коко Шанель [12] Литфокусник Беккет, посчитавший в какой-то момент слово «лишним пятном на […]

The upcoming US presidential election will determine how the country regulates tech, combats the climate crisis and decides on access to abortion

Animals that hibernate need a way to keep their blood flowing as their body temperature drops, and it seems that the mechanical properties of red blood cells may be key

In a wetland on the south coast of England, archaeologists dug up one of the oldest and most complete wooden tools ever found in Britain, which is around 3500 years old

Zapping the skin with electricity could stop bacteria that live there harmlessly from entering the body and causing blood poisoning

A lithium-ion battery made from three droplets of hydrogel is the smallest soft battery of its kind – and it could be used in biocompatible and biodegradable implants

Weaving tales of magical fruit and vegetables into your children's stories may encourage them to eat healthy snacks

The Sverris saga describes how castle invaders “took a dead man and cast him unto the well, and then filled it up with stones”, in what may have been an early act of biological warfare - and now researchers believe they have found the skeleton of the man in question

The largest and most ambitious Martian drone yet could carry kilograms of scientific equipment over great distances and set itself down on the Red Planet unassisted

Large language models can be used to scam humans, but AI is also susceptible to being scammed – and some models are more gullible than others

Single-celled organisms called archaea can become multicellular when compressed, highlighting the role of physical forces in evolution

A specialised algorithm could help autonomous vehicles track hidden objects, such as a pedestrian, a bicycle or another vehicle concealed behind a parked car

Scientists used AI to transform tourist photos into a 3D digital map of Antarctic penguin colonies – even as researchers debate whether to harness or discourage tourism in this remote region

The Renaissance artist Michelangelo had carried out human dissections, which may have led him to include women with breast cancer in some of his pieces

Radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis have revealed that a complete skeleton found in a 2nd-century cemetery is made up of bones from many people spanning thousands of years – but we don’t know who assembled it or why

Just under 5 per cent of the Wikipedia pages in English that have been published since ChatGPT's release seem to include AI-written content

Soil is full of an uncountable number of viruses, and scientists are only beginning to understand just how substantial their role in the carbon cycle may be

The brain pathway that causes hairy mammals like mice and dogs to shake themselves dry appears to have more to do with pressure than temperature

Asian elephants at Berlin Zoo show impressive skill when using a hose as a tool, and even appear to sabotage each other by stopping the flow of water

Four-legged robot dogs learned to perform new tricks by practising in a virtual platform that mimics real-world obstacles – a possible shortcut for training robots faster and more accurately

Reaching net-zero emissions is essential for halting climate change - but even after we achieve this goal, parts of the planet will continue to warm. Delaying net zero will worsen these effects

AI and Google Street View have created 'digital twins' of living trees in North American cities – part of a huge simulation that could help make urban tree planting and trimming decisions

Eurasian reed warblers don’t just get a sense of direction from Earth’s magnetic field – they can also calculate their coordinates on a mental map

An annual accounting of CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels and land use change finds no sign emissions will peak this year