fidzu : computers

Canada's cultural-content rules have become a flashpoint in its trade fight with the U.S., after American negotiators reportedly demanded that Ottawa drop requirements for streaming services to promote Canadian and French-language content. Canada refused, even as it has already backed away from some financial levies on streamers. "We were not prepared to compromise on our sovereignty, the protection of the French language, and our culture," Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a speech on Saturday after trade talks collapsed. CBC.ca reports: Ottawa has long required broadcasters to promote and support Canadian content (Cancon), all the way back to song quotas for AM radio stations. In 1991, the government brought in the Broadcasting Act. The law states that "the Canadian broadcasting system shall be effectively owned and controlled by Canadians" and that the Canadian broadcasting system should "serve to safeguard, enrich and strengthen the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of Canada." But decades later, the rising popularity in Canada of streaming platforms such as Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime and Spotify raised questions about Cancon and broadcasting rules. Video and audio streaming services were not, for example, required to support and promote Cancon, but their TV and radio counterparts were. Looking to address the imbalance, the former Trudeau government brought forward a bill in 2022 to update the Broadcasting Act, called the Online Streaming Act. "Canadian broadcasters have invested in and introduced us to the incredible Canadian programs that so many of us love. We are updating our laws so online streamers have to contribute in a similar and equitable way," a 2022 government news release said. The legislation was controversial from the start, with the government and supporters saying it was a necessary evolution of Canada's media laws in the digital age, while opponents expressed concerns that it was overreach and an attempt to regulate the internet. American streamers and digital media companies opposed the legislation fiercely. The bill passed with amendments and became law in April 2023, but the government delegated much of its interpretation -- including how much money streamers would have to contribute to Cancon -- to Canada's broadcast regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). But getting streaming companies to pay up has been a long and confusing saga. [...]. As for why the U.S. government is so invested in the issue? Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte, a postdoctoral fellow in the communication studies and media arts department at McMaster University in Hamilton, said it could be about power. "The Americans have had, since after World War II, a very strong cultural policy of pushing out American content into the world," Bourcheix-Laporte, who has worked with the CRTC, said. "This has been a strategy -- a soft-power strategy -- for the American government, in parallel to their military strategies and political alliances strategies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

25 Aug 2026 8:00pm GMT

Perplexity and Nvidia have launched "Portable Computer," a local-first version of Perplexity's agent platform that runs AI models, files, tools, and workflows directly on Nvidia-powered Linux hardware. Local tasks incur no token charges and keep data on-device by default, with users asked for permission before the system escalates a step to a cloud model. VentureBeat reports: For Nvidia, which has spent the past two years selling the world on trillion-dollar AI data centers, the announcement signals something subtler but strategically important: the chipmaker believes local AI has crossed a threshold from hobbyist curiosity to practical tool -- and it wants to sell the hardware that runs it. "Local AI reached an inflection point," said Nader, Nvidia's director of developer technology, who focuses on developer tooling and open source. "For the longest time, it was hobbyists and enthusiasts, and they were running these quantized models that were quantized down to be super tiny... And while that's cool, it's not super practical. But all that changed with a lot of these new open source models that have come out that are super useful." [...] Portable Computer arrives today for Pro, Max, Enterprise Pro, and Enterprise Max subscribers on Linux, with Windows support following in September. Any RTX GPU with at least 24GB of VRAM -- roughly a GeForce RTX 3090 or newer -- clears the bar, a threshold Nate called "sort of the floor where we really want to make sure that we can deliver a great experience, but balance that with making it broadly available."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

25 Aug 2026 7:00pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years, AI industry watchers of all stripes have been warning of a coming jobs apocalypse driven by ultra-intelligent AI systems that will be able to replicate most human tasks more cheaply. Now, newly updated research from Stanford University economists suggests AI seems to be causing significant entry-level job losses for younger workers in some fields, even as older workers appear largely unaffected so far. The August 2026 edition of "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence" updates and revises a paper of the same name published last year with fresh data and refined statistics. In that update, the Stanford researchers find the employment trends they identified for entry-level workers last year are persisting and expanding. Specifically, employment levels for workers ages 22 to 25 in the most "AI-exposed" occupations are now 19 percent below those of their peers in fields less exposed to AI disruption. Last year, that gap measured just 13 percent. [...] Digging deeper into the data, the researchers found that this phenomenon is mainly manifesting itself through lower hiring rates for entry-level workers in AI-impacted fields, rather than increased firings or employees quitting. They also found that the labor market effects among this age group were mostly seen in lower overall employment, rather than reduced pay rates. But not all jobs that show potential for AI "disruption" are created equal, the researchers found. In its Economic Index, Anthropic differentiates between queries related to tasks that are "automative" (i.e., fully replacing work previously done by a human) or "augmentative" (i.e., helping human workers be more effective at tasks they are still needed for). By this measure, jobs like "accountants and auditors" and "receptionists and information clerks" were among those judged most susceptible to AI automation, while jobs like "chief executive" and "registered nurse" were among those using AI augmentation most often. Unsurprisingly, jobs where AI automation is prevalent are the ones showing the worst relative employment levels for entry-level workers these days. "The findings are consistent with automation-oriented uses of AI substituting for labor while complementary uses are associated with flat or rising employment," the researchers write. Interestingly, the researchers found that the impact is strongest in entry-level jobs built around "codified" knowledge, which is the formal, documented skills that AI can more easily replicate. Meanwhile, experienced workers in roles relying on tacit, practice-based knowledge have seen stronger employment growth.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

25 Aug 2026 6:00pm GMT

Young employment in AI-impacted fields down 19% compared to more AI-resistant occupations.

24 Aug 2026 9:45pm GMT

Solid-state transformers could also benefit EV charging and someday households.

24 Aug 2026 9:32pm GMT

There are currently 3 categories. Without reason, RFK Jr. is considering changes.

24 Aug 2026 9:04pm GMT

Motif is great, I love how it looks and feels, and I want it to be actively maintained. I want a healthy ecosystem of Motif applications and even window managers and desktop environments, so I can run a real Motif environment. Sadly, while Motif has been open source for a while, the project itself stalled years ago, with little to no activity from anyone involved. That may be changing, as a number of developers decided to take matters into their own hands last year. This fork of Motif was born of a desire to keep Motif (and other X11 technologies) alive and well. The original upstream Sourceforge project hasn't had any activity in over two years, none of the project admins have been active for at least that amount of time, the official bug tracker has disappeared into the void; and the user forum was closed way back in 2017. Sadly, it appears that the original upstream has abandoned the project. I've incorporated some fixes from upstream that have laid dormant for years, a few others from Gentoo, and made a few improvements of my own. I intend to maintain this fork, and in doing so advocate for the continued use of the user interface toolkit that defined an era, and influenced many of the user interfaces that came after it. ↫ Tim Hentenaar at the Motif fork's GitHub page Some of the people involved are people I know online, so I have a bit of faith in this fork being able to stand the test of time, but of course, managing a complex project like this is hard, so who knows how long the enthusiasm remains. Still, this fork has seen five releases since its inception a little over a year ago, which seems promising. It may seem weird for some to have a love for Motif, but I'm the kind of person who installs weird, outdated corporate and industrial software I don't understand on my HP c8000 dual PA-RISC workstation running HP-UX just to enjoy the Motif interfaces they sometimes ship. We all have our quirks. From my experiences talking to people online, I know there's actually a rather solid number of people like me, and I hope that at some point the developers in this group can gain enough critical mass to build something like a basic Linux distribution or desktop environment using the disparate, actively-maintained Motif projects out there that yes, still exist. It's a long shot, but in today's computing landscape, where more and more people feel uncomfortable with "modern" software, I really feel like there's a niche for something like this to exist. A really small niche, surely, but a niche all the same.

24 Aug 2026 8:15pm GMT

AROS, the open source Amiga OS-compatible operating system, now has images available for the Raspberry Pi 3 (although some people state it also works on the Pi 4), in both 32bit and 64bit versions. According to the AROS team, they are quite stable, but not yet complete, so do know what you're getting into. Dan Wood posted a YouTube video about these new images, providing much more insight into how well they work if you want more insight into how well they work. The images are, of course, the basic AROS operating system, so expect a rather barebones experience. If you're used to some of the AROS distributions for x86, which come loaded with software and customisations, these images will feel quite bare to you. It's going to take some time to port over all of these applications and customisations to the ARM version of AROS, but if and once that happens, I expect more complete images to appear as well. Great news for AROS and the Amiga community in general.

24 Aug 2026 7:57pm GMT

Ah, Japan's TRON project - every few years someone discovers it anew and it bubbles back up the surface, and deservedly so, as it's an incredibly interesting operating system project that, like so many others, deserved a better fate. There's a version of computing history where the desktop OS that won wasn't Windows. Not because the alternative was Unix-based or because Apple pulled off something different, but because an operating system designed at the University of Tokyo in 1984 was ambitious enough to try to replace the file system with a hypermedia document model, run on a custom Japanese CPU architecture, and encode 1.5 million characters, only to have a US trade report single it out as an unfair trade barrier in 1989. That project was TRON (The Real-time Operating system Nucleus), a real, government-backed Japanese computing initiative whose desktop variant, BTRON, was named in a US trade barrier report and effectively killed before it could reach schools nationwide. Meanwhile, its embedded counterpart, ITRON, quietly became one of the most deployed operating systems in history. TRON's history has since attracted some genuinely wild conspiracy theories, including one claiming that Japan Airlines Flight 123 was deliberately crashed in order to target the TRON developers on board, despite there being no evidence that any TRON developers were even on the flight. But the strangest part of the story isn't even a conspiracy theory: BTRON's hypermedia desktop was decades ahead of what the market could support, and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son may have helped sink it from the inside. ↫ Adam Conway at XDA The most interesting part of TRON for me was the different ways it treated files and documents compared to other operating systems. Instead of focusing on applications and files as the core interaction points for users, it focused on the document. While most operating systems associate specific files with specific applications, TRON associated individual components of documents with individual handlers. If you want to edit a Word document today, you open Word and do all your editing work inside Word, whether you're editing blocks of text or an image, or you open entirely different applications when Word's capabilities for a certain component in a document are too limited. In TRON, you'd open a document, and only once you wanted to edit specific components did it "open" an "application" to perform the editing, without actually leaving the document in question. Want to edit an image inside your document? In most operating systems, you'd have to open a separate image editor, load the relevant image file into it, make your edits, save the image file, and then paste said edited image file back into your document. There's a considerable amount of overhead here that shouldn't really exist; a computer is more than smart enough to open up just the editing controls from a different application if need be. In our current paradigm, applications often "solve" this by adding ever more features and controls and tools to cover every possible object or component you might have to deal with, but that just makes applications more complex, more bloated, and more difficult to use. TRON's approach has been tried in a variety of times and places, but it never caught on. My personal pet theory is that the application-first model is far better at wealth extraction and concentration than TRON's model, and as such, that's what we ended up with. If a user's document and all of its constituent parts are tied to and wrapped up into a single application from a single vendor, it's much easier to control said user and extract wealth from them than when that user can just pick and choose whatever handler they want to use for whatever object they happen to run into in a document, without having to open tons of different applications and move, copy, and paste stuff all the time. In fact, this is also why consistency in user interface design is now all but dead; application developers and vendors use their own weird, non-standard, custom user interfaces for branding purposes. Sticking to a platform's standards and conventions makes it harder to stand out and put your "brand" in people's faces. But I digress. Regardless, I'm not sure if all the stories about the US trying to bury TRON have any real value to them, as even the article itself notes (undoing its own clickbaity headline) that the project already seemed to be in dire straights even before it got a buried mention in some trade document. On top of that, ITRON, the embedded TRON variant, survived and thrives to this very day, powering untold numbers of devices. It seems to have done quite well for itself, supposed US government intervention or no. This article by Steven J. Searle also takes a look at the workstation-focused variant of TRON.

24 Aug 2026 3:29pm GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

This is just a short note on my blog that I have resigned from Arch Linux a package maintainer, developer and security team. I've spent around 10 years as an AUR maintainer, security team, Package Maintainer and then Developer. I implemented support for debug packages, did the initial POC work that would become the git migration and even somehow managed to pull of an online conference during The Plague with the help of others.

01 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT