We had Boris Johnson and Liz Truss; the fact they happened at all demonstrates our system still has vulnerabilities.

I’m no fan of venerating a written constitution either, but I have an anxiety about parliamentary-sovereignty: events like Brexit and BoJo demonstrate a need for something to bind parliament, lest we get a 21st century Oswald Mosley. Right now we have… decorum and monarchy: a firewall made of damp serviettes.

Prior to Brexit, I feel there was some (if vague) kind of accountability from parliament to the EU - which is why/how Brexit revealed the fault-line in the Tories that split the proto-fash types from the amoral-business types to give us Reform/Restore today, and they’re uncomfortably popular. So what I’m saying is that Brexit weakened our accountability mechanisms more than people realize as the national-conversation focused only on economic impact and immigration.

In summary: do not convince yourself that “it cannot happen here”; nor that current safeguards (if any) are sufficient.

Difficulty: QoL features added to undo the effects of bad design changes in Win11 don’t count, such as “compact view” in Windows 11 File Explorer.

…but I think the author meant “named arguments”, like we have in C#, Swift, and Objective-C.

It is when you consider the personality currently occupying the office of US SecDef.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48261120

Points: 67

# Comments: 31

...or even just from recent middle-eastern history: an outrageous death-cult militant faction like ISIS.

She wasn't dismissive of digital-airbrushing; instead, the reasons for us not doing any digital-art in art class are the ones you'd reasonably expect:

1. The #1 reason is cost: in money, time, training, et cetera: physical hardware purchases, Photoshop or Painter licenses - and needing to keep those renewed - sending all the art teaching staff away for training on the software and digital-painting technique themselves - and more besides.

2. Art, as taught in middle-schools/lower-secondary-schools to children - not working professional adults - is concerned with breadth, not depth: digital-painting is a specific and narrow technique when compared to the applicability of teaching art-theory things like perspective, shading, etc.

3. The practical and technical aspects of producing visual-arts, including on a computer, are already taught in the elective graphic-design class in upper-secondary (while our lower-secondary art class was mandatory); she could probably tell that I was motivated more by my ego-driven need to demonstrate my own 1337 Photoshop skillz to others than any actual belief I had that everyone in the British economy needs exposure to Wacom and Photoshop and receives training so they can all have their own DeviantArt account.

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So now, in the event that some kids' art teachers or others are being broadly dismissive of digital-painting then they're likely pointing to the impracticality of it being a taught subject in mandatory education in public schools - and not that it's any "less" of an artform. Instead, I think it's worth comparing digital-painting to its own predecessor in (real-life) airbrush painting: just like digital-painting it requires its own hardware (think: expensive); while it can produce unique eye-catching results doing-so requires extensive practice; and is just as impractical to teach to large (25-30+) sized groups of kids en-masse; and won't help you appreciate a Monet or Renoir any more than a semester learning Photoshop would.

I had 2 main fridge-logic issues which made it very difficult for me to suspend disbelief and limited my enjoyment of the film:

First: Colossus' is only able to implement its plan because the US, and US-aligned nuclear powers, agree to subordinate their entire nuclear arsenals to Colossus' full-authority defence control, with no means of overriding it; and with its computing hardware sealed in an impenetrable fortress (no maintenance access?).

Second: Colossus' plan - and its ultimate actions - assume everyone else on earth is a nuclear-disarmed-rational-actor, all solely interested in not-dying-at-Colossus's-hand - which is an unworkable assumption.

Unfortunately, the story is driven by these 2 points - without either then the film's story would just be yet-another-cliché-movie where the plucky humans beat the advanced AI overlord, the end.

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I still like _Colossus_ because it's "different" to all the other 20th century films with an AI character (c.f. tripe like Will Smith's _I, Robot_ or the Matrix sequels).

Can you elaborate? I’m honestly unsure what you’re suggesting she said, because I can imagine entirely contradictory scenarios.

I'm hoping for a const-reference joke.

It reminds me of when Adobe ended perpetual licensing and switched to cloud(TM)-only, subscription licensing for Photoshop, et al: many of us (myself included) assumed that Adobe was surely making a foolish mistake to abandon perpetual-license customers, but it turns out[1] that was the plan all along: those customers are a vocal minority who can demonstrably afford to pay more, the rest of the customer-base doesn't care enough to switch to a competitor. Over 10 years later (2013), we haven't seen any of Photoshop's then-promising upstart competitors come close.

...on that basis, I don't think MSFT's recent backpedalling on Windows 11's disrespect for its own users is in any way a response to us power-users complaining online - or even because any number of us did fully migrate off Windows and onto Linux, but instead because of all the recent talk overseas from foreign governments (France, Germany) taking active steps to secure their digital-sovereignty and deploying more Linux desktops; and a good way to get people (and decision-makers in government and large businesses) personally interested in digital-sovereignty is by pointing out how shitty their own corporate desktop UX has gotten.

I'll gladly eat my hat when/if MS graciously allows regular retail consumers, and not just large organizations - and those of us with a $2000/yr MSDN Subscription - the privilege of paying for an OS without advertising built-in to the shell and having hard dependencies on proprietary online services.

[1] (This article has some hallmarks of LLM "assistance" but gets the point across; and cites sources at the bottom): https://secondactsbiz.substack.com/p/adobe-the-transformatio...

[1] https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/book-movie-titl...

Potentially... supposing the criminal investigation into this uncovers a hitherto unknown organ harvesting scheme operating within the global music records industry; the subsequent police dragnet implicates significant proportion of the world's music stars and record labels and generates continual major headlines and criminal convictions - with all their lurid details - all for multiple decades from now on.

It's quite ridiculous when I put it that way, but this is basically the same thing as Epstein's network, just with a different crime; and Epstein was already in the news almost 20 years ago from his first conviction.

...so back in 2009, back when everyone was building their own social-network websites and online dating services, and supposing your real-name was also Epstein, so you called it "EpsteinLoveIsland.com" - would you have changed the name back then?

I hate to say it, but the only applications I can think of can be best categorized as illegitimate, likely clandestine, distributed computing tasks.

It's a recurring headline on the rolling news channels on broadcast TV right now - and it's on the front-page of Reddit for me as well.

He doesn't.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/09/grok-u...

On Windows 10, the Photos app package is about ~140MB on my computer. A good chunk of that is because the package includes a lot of dependencies - including platform deps that I'd expect would be part of the UWP runtime in the OS - kinda like how since the introduction of Swift/UIKit/etc in iOS the IPA packages all bundle their platform dependencies, even though they're demonstrably redundant, because UIKit isn't an OS-provided framework anymore... I'm not up-to-date in the iOS dev scene so I'm unsure why Apple went with that approach.