A Small Selection of the Oystercatchers at Snettisham
About a few hundred Oystercatchers are sitting, sleeping, and walking around on a bank. Some are foraging at the shore.
#photography #Birds #BirdPhotography #BirdsOfFediverse #NaturePhotography #wildlife #Norfolk #RSPB
This in The Onion was six months ago ...
https://theonion.com/doj-to-bring-back-firing-squad-as-means-of-entertainment/
Ok mensen. Het is zover. ICC strafhof is op een sanctielijst geplaatst. Wij zijn nog ons position paper hierover aan het schrijven, maar gezien de actualiteit doen we even een tussentijdse mastodon-draad over dit onderwerp.
Moet ICC en ICC-rechters zich zorgen maken? Juridisch niet, feitelijk wel. En vooral zorgen over bange banken en betaaldienstaanbieders. Niet over het basisrecht.
Daar gaan we. Stoelriemen vast. We beginnen bij VS.
I've warned before that any FOSS project incorporating AI output is doing so at their peril.
Previously people leaned on a federal circuit ruling that was *declined to be taken up by the supreme court* interpreting it as a free-for-all to LLM license-wash any project in translation, or really to incorporate any such materials and they would be public domain.
But that doesn't mean we have an answer! We've yet to see!
Annnnnnnnnd: I think we're likely to have that perspective upended soon.
The third circuit issued a recent ruling in the *opposite direction* of the previously well cited federal ruling, that AI training on copyrighted material is NOT fair use: https://www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-of-copyrighted-material-not-fair-use-third-circuit/
Annnnndddddd.... with a bunch of people trying to make LLM-generated decompilation replacements for Adobe's entire suite, we're likely to suddenly see corporations rear up angrily.
Just wait till someone tries to vibewash a Nintendo game decompilation. Hey, what do you think is gonna happen?
I understand that Anthropic thinks they're doing open source projects a favor here, but what they're actually doing is creating an enormous amount of work for people that they are not paying.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/launching-opt-in-vuln-finding-service-for-open-source
True to form, the trump regime today imposed sweeping new sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Rubio: "We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling their ability to operate against us. Because our message is clear: the U.S. and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC. We don’t need that court and we don’t want it.”
This has been in the works for a while.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/09/sanctions-icc-trump
#UsPol
3/n
Brown Hare
Altough we were looking for birds, we couldn't not observe this lovely hare munching away in the grass. It had clearly seen us, but didn't seem to be bothered.
A hip place in Covent Garden. We were a little early, and while waiting had a good overview of the place: A big kitchen area in the middle, with a coal fire, and around that a horseshoe of bar stools.
We started our meal with a naan, made right in front of us in a tandoori from a bundle of though. It was fluffy and crispy, and the cod's roe with spring onions was an excellent dip.
After this followed the starters, a trio of croquettes, with a dip. It's a weird number for a sharing-style restaurant catering for mostly couples.
For our mains, we shared a mushroom kebab, coffee rubbed chicken, and a poached and grilled trout. The Mushroom kebab was underwhelming, and the portion size was small. The trout was still very moist, and the crisply skin added flavour; some pickled meaty tomatoes and onion slices accompanied it. Our favourite was the coffee rub chicken. Moist, juicy, and with a proper splash of heat from the topping and tasty pickled courgette.
We enjoyed the atmosphere was good, even though it was fairly noisy. But it wasn't so bad so we could not near each other. The flames from the grill made it on the warmer side — we were seated less than 3 metres from it. The extraction was excellent and hence it wasn't smokey — not even when one of the chefs refilled the fuel.
The downside of the Barbary were the cramped seating arrangements with fixed backless bar stools by the counter. Long legs made it necessary to man-spread, which isn't great for the unknown customers sitting next to you having to do the same. The restaurant is also not accessible, but this is made clear on their website when you use their booking tool. There is a terrace across/around the corner which would be better for seating, but it was too cold for that to be pleasant.
GenAI is eating everything, across every industry. It's wealth transfer to a small number of techbros.
Putin’s winter campaign will hit hard – but won’t decide the war
Redshank Strolling On The Mud
This lovely bird was mooching about white close by on the mudflat at Brancaster Staithe. Picking through the puddles and mud to find something to eat.
#photography #Birds #BirdPhotography #BirdsOfFediverse #NaturePhotography #wildlife #Norfolk
Redshank Strolling On The Mud
This lovely bird was mooching about white close by on the mudflat at Brancaster Staithe. Picking through the puddles and mud to find something to eat.
#photography #Birds #BirdPhotography #BirdsOfFediverse #NaturePhotography #wildlife #Norfolk
Coworker found a very interesting #PHP bug
The result of min(0,null) varies depending on if xdebug is turned on or not…
The behaviour also seems to have changed in 8.4.1 moving forward?
@NormanDunbar @StarkRG @kibcol1049 It’s never made sense to me, but here’s the mechanism:
In this update I explain what happened with Xdebug development in the last months. Support through Patreon and GitHub has been continuing to decline, and now covers about 13 hours a month only. If you can help, that'd be greatly appreciated.
In the last few months I have been working on getting Xdebug ready for PHP 8.6. However, there have also been a few notable changes that warrants highlighting.
Code Coverage
First, I have rewritten Xdebug's code coverage. In earlier versions, Xdebug would analyse PHP code during execution, and at the same time, and in the same data structures, collect code coverage information. Now, these tasks are split.
This results in more accurate coverage information, fixing bugs such as Inconsistent output of branch/path data when running under Opcache. It also means that some behaviour changed. I would welcome further testing during the alpha and beta releases of Xdebug 3.6.
Unfortunately, the changes also has a cost associated with it. The new approach uses more memory and adds an additional performance penalty.
To alleviate some of this impact, I have started a branch implementing a few optimisations. This has not been merged yet, but you can track the changes in this experimental GitHub branch. Right now, these two changes reduce the number of instructions by about 6%, but I have only just started this project.
Windows
Secondly, failing to make a debugging connection on Windows now fails faster. I wrote a blog post about this, Fail Faster, where I explain in detail what the cause is, how I found out about it, and what I changed. In short, on Windows, if Xdebug now tries to make a connection to an IDE that isn't listening on the port, the connection attempt will break off immediately, instead of waiting for the 200ms time-out. This was not a bug in Xdebug, but rather something that Windows does in an odd way.
FrankenPHP
Lastly, a contribution by Xavier Leune makes Xdebug work better with FrankenPHP's worker mode. This feature makes sure that upon the first function call in a new worker request, Xdebug tries to connect to the IDE, just as it would do for normal PHP requests. Unlike "normal" PHP, FrankenPHP's worker mode reuses the same PHP "request" multiple times.
Contributions
Starting with Xavier's contribution and Pull Request, I have decided to approach contributions in a more personal way. Any substantial contribution now not only needs a ticket and pull request, but I will insist on having a face-to-face (online) conversation with you where you explain me how the new feature works. This is both to teach me, as I need to maintain it, but it also is useful for the contributors as they will learn how I approach development. While going over the feature with Xavier, we found several problems that are now addressed. I think this was a really good experiment which I will now put into practise.
Dealing with Bots
Scraper bots have also been a problem, and it is unfortunately now necessary that you need to ask me before you can get access to signing up for the issue tracker, and applying filters.
There were two different attacks in fact. The first one had bots signing up a lot of new accounts. A second badly behaved AI scraping bot was trashing the server with so many new expensive search requests (making use of filters), that it was taking the server down constantly. I don't like having to do this, but I can also not see a way out.
What's Next?
Before the next release, I would still like to make a few additions for native path mapping, namely issues #2399 and #2400.
For now, I would hope that you could try out Xdebug 3.6.0alpha1, with the latest version of PHP (8.6). Let me know if you find any issues, or if you have any questions.
Xdebug Cloud
I have reworking Xdebug Cloud, the Proxy As A Service platform to allow for debugging in complex networking scenarios.
Packages will start at £16/month for one-developer companies.
Black-faced Spoonbill. October 6, 2026. This one walked into the viewfinder while I was photographing a small shorebird. According to eBird, they often gathers in large flocks but I only saw one at the beach.
Conservation Status: Vulnerable.
#birds #wildlife #wildlifephotography #birdphotography #photography
Oh no!
"Margaret Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT during NASA’s Apollo program, died on Sep. 30. She was 90.
A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline."
We all remember her from these iconic pictures.
https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007
https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apollo-code-0817
1/n
Oh no, RIP Margaret Hamilton
https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007
Black-tailed Godwit Smooching About
At RSPB Titchwell Marsh, there are many different habitats. This one has many muddy flats, and different species.
This bird was being chased by a fellow bird, and landed almost straight in front of the hide, with the light just being right.
#photography #Birds #BirdPhotography #BirdsOfFediverse #NaturePhotography #wildlife #Norfolk #RSPB #TitchwellMarsh
PIE 1.5 has been released, with new installation and upgrading features to make your life easier. 💙🥧 https://thephp.foundation/blog/2026/10/07/pie-1-5-released/