Hacker News: fidotron

CRTC to require streamers pay 15% of annual rev to support Canadian content

fidotron — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:30:01 +0000

Article URL: https://nationalpost.com/news/crtc-to-require-online-streamers-to-pay-15-of-annual-revenues-to-support-canadian-content

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238865

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by fidotron in "The first British person in space"

fidotron — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:58:54 +0000

As others have pointed out at the time she absolutely did get attention. What the modern UK has memory holed is just how bonkersly pro-Russian it was in the 90s; everything from Tetris, Newton handwriting recognition, software generally, rockets, materials, nanotech, new gas supplies, having Abramovich buy Chelsea and the result being practically all the upper middle class exploring Russian (and ex Soviet) connections for investment. The former USSR was then what Qatar etc. are today. It does seem plausible that she fell into that hole along with everything else.

Fairlight CVI (Computer Video Instrument) Demo Video (1984)

fidotron — Fri, 22 May 2026 11:37:40 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_B1Zk-CQP0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234488

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by fidotron in "Get your passwords out of Bitwarden while you still can"

fidotron — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:06:33 +0000

Surely they have their reasons, but if they made Linux support work I suspect a lot of the dev community would jump. This household certainly would.

New comment by fidotron in "Flipper One – we need your help"

fidotron — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:50:24 +0000

AI apes that because it's been status signaling american corpospeak for a while.

Almost like they're trained on LinkedIn or something.

New comment by fidotron in "Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?"

fidotron — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:44:01 +0000

It's entirely plausible Google won't tell Railway without an NDA to prevent them disclosing exactly what set it all off.

The bigger point though is Google really need to flag any business account as not subject to these suspensions until checked into by several humans. Back when I had a team that used a lot of App Engine they would even call us when we caused all their pagers to go off, and then conspire to keep the lights on while things got fixed. It's sad they have ended up like this.

New comment by fidotron in "Google changes its search box"

fidotron — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:08:46 +0000

> I disagree, Alta Vista had excellent an excellent search UI with Boolean logic. Google discarded that because it thought it 'knew better' in terms of Page Rank.

This is precisely what all the extreme LLM haters have memory holed.

New comment by fidotron in "RISC-V and Floating-Point"

fidotron — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:12:53 +0000

From the point of view of the RISC-V architects the "users" are the chip designers who are engaged in a sort of build-your-own-instruction-set situation, and this kind of makes sense, but does contribute to it being a mess.

They are absolutely in denial as to the downstream effects of this on the software ecosystem. Android, for example, for native support had enough fun dealing with relatively few ARM variants (and x86/MIPS etc), and identifying chip features at run time was reliant on the board support software getting it right (hint: it didn't).

New comment by fidotron in "Google changes its search box"

fidotron — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:50:34 +0000

Objecting to this from the user end seems a bit like complaining the original Google was trying to be too magic when what you wanted was AltaVista. This has been the inevitable direction the whole time.

The real problem here is assuming this takes off what incentives will anyone have to provide the information to feed the beast?

New comment by fidotron in "US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI"

fidotron — Sun, 17 May 2026 00:02:03 +0000

At FAANG it has been huge. Whole departments/products/divisions level, including many of the most expensive employees.

There are reasons so many products get made to go precisely nowhere, because no one ever seriously intended for them to do otherwise. There are even cases where things succeeded by accident which were not supposed to and then have to be redone properly.

As observed in another (more eloquent) comment here making the same point

> In the new AI world, denying resources doesn’t slow competitors down anymore because AI raises the productivity floor. Now that over-employment brings no competitive advantage, we’re seeing huge cuts.

This is completely right.

New comment by fidotron in "US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI"

fidotron — Sat, 16 May 2026 20:17:46 +0000

For a long time this was compounded by a "better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in" strategy, where you hired people to deny them to your competition and then invented things for them to do. If it turns out whole segments are in fact pointless then the endgame could be truly nuts.

New comment by fidotron in "London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time"

fidotron — Sat, 16 May 2026 14:44:09 +0000

> There isn’t the resources to watch all of this cctv. Sure someone could spend weeks watching all the feeds in the city to track the thief down. But the cost quickly exceeds the value of the bike.

Precisely. So why exactly did they deploy so much of it when they had no way of using it? This isn't new, it's been the case since like 2005 that people walking around London generate more CCTV footage time than real time.

There was another farce when they had that second round of attempted bombings on the Underground and despite having very clear video of it happening they absolutely struggled to deal with it ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_July_2005_London_attempted_... "described by the Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair as "the greatest operational challenge ever faced" by the Met"), leading to the whole shooting of the Brazilian at Stockwell incident.

All this surveillance demonstrably isn't a deterrent to actual criminals or would be terrorists in the slightest.

New comment by fidotron in "London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time"

fidotron — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:29:01 +0000

I'm old enough to remember when my colleagues were vigourously expressing concern about the potential for Oyster cards to be used to track who was protesting where.

What remains astounding about the UK is how few people benefit from this enormous scale privacy invasion. David Cameron, while leader of the opposition, managed to get his bike stolen twice, and neither time did CCTV being literally everywhere help to find who did it. Given things like that you really have to wonder what is all the surveillance for exactly?

New comment by fidotron in "Computer Hobby Movement in Canada"

fidotron — Thu, 14 May 2026 15:54:09 +0000

> That being said, I understand that in most cases, "central" is referring to population, industry, finance (not fashion - that's Montrėal).

And that shift of centrality from Montreal to Toronto was surprisingly recent too, very much post war.

Montreal, and Quebec, absolutely feel like a separate country from the rest.

(Canada) Facing backlash, Anandasangaree says tech cos 'misinterpreting' bill

fidotron — Wed, 13 May 2026 17:21:05 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/facing-mounting-backlash-anandasangaree-says-u-s-tech-companies-are-misinterpreting-his-lawful-access-bill-9.7198017

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48124784

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by fidotron in "Canada’s Bill C-22 Is a Repackaged Version of Last Year’s Surveillance Nightmare"

fidotron — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:46:38 +0000

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9q3x19ddl7o is perhaps an unintentionally good summary of this situation.

New comment by fidotron in "Canada’s Bill C-22 Is a Repackaged Version of Last Year’s Surveillance Nightmare"

fidotron — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:27:05 +0000

Because we've removed the ability for anyone non-evil to succeed politically.

New comment by fidotron in "Unitree GD01: China's $537k rideable transformer robot is now in production"

fidotron — Tue, 12 May 2026 11:33:08 +0000

That we're all looking at a bipedal walking robot you can sit in and ride around and no one here seems remotely impressed by this is a sure sign we're in the future.

New comment by fidotron in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

fidotron — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:04:49 +0000

The fact they can't capitalize on the current trainwreck of GitHub speaks volumes. If they had the right product people would be throwing money at them.

New comment by fidotron in "I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now training AI"

fidotron — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:08:54 +0000

This really depends. The author may know the maid well and appreciate that the maid needs the money, or that the trouble of finding a good one if/when the economic situation improves for them is worse than the temporary problems.