Probably most of us here have never heard of that clothing brand, and would never know if they made one.

Oops yes, in trying to give a realistic example I forgot to use the actual feature in question. The extension is that the internal struct or union may have a tag, and indeed may be declared elsewhere. So it could be "union {struct cons; double number;}".

No operating system kernel - or even a non-trivial user program - is ever a strictly conforming C program; that term is so rigidly defined as to be almost useless (https://c-faq.com/ansi/compliance.html). But apart from that the Linux kernel already uses many gcc extensions, so adding another is not an issue.

Example:

struct object {
      enum object_type type;
      union {
              struct { struct object *car; struct object *cdr; };
              double number;
      };
};

struct object *foo;

Now we can say foo->cdr instead of (say) foo->value.cons.cdr.

The kernel was written in PDP-11 assembler.

They introduce a feature that excites the designers but makes it harder to use, then have to tone it down to make it usable again. I'd hoped that this sort of thing would stop with the departure of thinness-fetishist Jonathan Ive ("you can put your macbook air in a large envelope because it's thin at the edges"), but apparently not.

There is no quantum threat yet, but if someday there is there will be hoards of stolen pre-quantum data to decrypt, some of which will contain information that still matters. For example, the encrypted data of a well-known password manager was stolen last year; no-one can decrypt it now, but perhaps they will be able to in the future.

We see a post about some German government area converting to FOSS... it never seems to last, or at least catch on. The solutions rarely deliver real value causing massive integration issues when people can't just load a Word document used by just about everyone else in the world. They are trumpeted as Pioneers - nobody has ever done this before! You know - that should be a red flag in 2025... We've had these solutions for almost 20 years now. Nobody much is using them. Perhaps it's just time to realize linux on the desktop is just not going to happen without some major shift.

"People are used to giving consent for everything" - are there really people who accept non-essential cookies?

"So in order to teach an LLM Taarof you have to teach it to lie". No, just as we don't currently teach them the truth. LLMs are models of text, not the world. They say things that resemble what they have been trained on, without any connection to the facts of the world.

Yours perhaps. I have never even considered my protein intake.

What does this word mean in the Microsoft world?

.. of the IBM Microdrive, which fit in a Compact Flash slot and contained an actual spinning magnetic disk.

"300C, less than half the usual operating temperature"

If you're going to add editorial comments, get an editor who knows some physics.

... that they put an AirTag in the packaging.