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 However the UK police have largely withdrawn from certain areas, and this would simply be another symptom.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

An interesting theory, however I rather suspect it is basically because Limbo had a similar concept for pseudo-enums.

I allowed (e.g.) a syntax like:

    M0, M1, M2, M3, M4: con (1<<iota);

That was taken from one of the Limbo papers.

Actually lots is still on C89.

I'm trying to drag one program at $employer up to C99 (plus C11 _Generic), so I can then subsequently drag it to the bits of C23 which GCC 13 supports.

This all takes times, and having to convince colleagues during code reviews.

What C23 has done is authorise some of the extensions which GCC has had for some time as legitimate things (typeof, etc).

However the ability to adopt is also limited by what third party linters in use at $employer may also support.

Nah - more that a lot of commercial code is written in it; and it doesn't make sense to replace (or rewrite) it at this time.

For example, I'm maintaining some 20 year old C code, which the employer adopted around 10 years ago. It will likely stay in use at least until the current product is replaced, whenever that may be.

Let me rephrase that: I feel myself addressed by "some people will never move beyond C, no matter what" and I prefer C over C++, because it is a much simpler language. Each time I am leaving the cozy world of C and write C++ I am annoyed and miss things.

Well his "Normal Functions" (benchmarks/closures/source/normal_functions.cpp in his repo) looks quite similar to what I had with my GNU nested functions using a stand in "wide pointer", and hence no generated trampoline.

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46243298)

Which rather suggests to me that such a scheme, but generated by the compiler, should have a similar performance to said "Normal Functions" and hence similar to his preferred lambda form.

Since his benchmark environment is so unwieldy, I may have a go at extracting those two code sets to a standalone environment, and measure them so see...

So here are my preliminary benchmarks with my own implementation on an AMD EPYC 9334 32-Core processo. I need to double checks things - so take this with a grain of salt for now. Time is in seconds for 100000 iterations of manorboy(10). So far, the only implementation which clearly sucks is std::function<>. Even trampolines are suprisingly good (but I can imagine that they are much worse on other CPUs / architectures)

  xgcc (GCC) 16.0.0 20260103 (experimental)
  1.50 gcc -ftrampoline-impl=stack -Wl,-no-warn-execstack
  1.11 gcc -ftrampoline-impl=stack -Wl,-no-warn-execstack -DREFARG
  7.21 gcc -ftrampoline-impl=heap
  7.34 gcc -ftrampoline-impl=heap -DREFARG
  0.93 gcc -DWIDEPTR
  1.38 gcc -DWIDEPTR -DREFARG
  1.40 gcc -DDIRECT
  1.05 gcc -xc++ -std=c++26 -DFUNCREF -DDEDUCING
  19.68 gcc -xc++ -std=c++26 -DDEDUCING
  20.73 gcc -xc++ -std=c++26
  6.31 gcc -xc++ -std=c++26 -DDEDUCING -DREFARG
  6.31 gcc -xc++ -std=c++26 -DREFARG
  Debian clang version 16.0.6 (15~deb12u1)
  21.11 clang -xc++
  6.16 clang -xc++ -DREFARG
  1.66 clang -fblocks
  1.70 clang -fblocks -DREFARG

Here some more bechmarking: https://codeberg.org/uecker/nested-functions-benchmarking

Ah - thanks. I'll have a play with some of my systems, and see what it shows.

Remember that English also suffers from digraphs.

e.g. ch, th, sh, wr, oo; etc

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)#English

That page lists 15 such over and above the doubled letters.

The Latin alphabet is also a poor match for English. We make do.

Yes.

All through middle and high school, so for 7 years from around 10 to 16. It did become one eventually in primary school, so probably the last 2 or 3 years there.