MSFT_Edging (u/MSFT_Edging)

MSFT_Edging commented on Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act bbc.com/news/articles/cjr... · Posted by u/phlummox

account42 · 12 days ago

Minors can have unfettered access to the web once grown up and yes the parents should be able to decide when that is to some point (that point being the 18th birthday). There is really no reason kids need to be able to "explore their sexuality" any earlier than that.

MSFT_Edging · 10 days ago

Okay Pastor touchems.

Sexuality is part of the human condition that doesn't start on one's 18th birthday just because over-protective parents want complete control of their child.

It's weird that parents believe they need to control every facet of their child's life, down to being able to learn about why they feel the way they do. It's a form of abuse and coercion.

MSFT_Edging commented on Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act bbc.com/news/articles/cjr... · Posted by u/phlummox

yupyupyups · 13 days ago

>parents

You do understand that there are creeps out there grooming children, right? Parents definitely do need to have oversight over their own kids.

Children should absolutely not have privacy on the internet.

The ID requirement is terrible, but saying that children need privacy to explore their sexuality on the internet is very problematic.

If this is the position the UK government holds then that brings into question their desire to protect children online in the first place.

MSFT_Edging · 13 days ago

Minors are still humans who deserve rights. They should not be considered property of parents, regardless of fear mongering about grooming. Teenagers should have the right to access information without their parents knowing, as their parents can be just as, if not more dangerous to their health and well being as a hypothetical groomer. Many teens face real abuse from their parents over their sexuality. They should not be forced to live in the shadows or face abuse due to a "protect the kids" narrative.

MSFT_Edging commented on Encryption made for police and military radios may be easily cracked wired.com/story/encryptio... · Posted by u/mikece

zdragnar · 17 days ago

Now replace "kids" with gangs and other organized crime, and it makes a little more sense why they'd want to encrypt it.

MSFT_Edging · 16 days ago

uh huh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

MSFT_Edging commented on GPT-5 openai.com/gpt-5/... · Posted by u/rd

gizajob · 16 days ago

I’m not sure I agree with this - it took humans about a month to go from “wow this AI generated art is amazing” to “zzzz it’s just AI art”.

MSFT_Edging · 16 days ago

To be fair, it was more a "wow look what the computer did". The AI "art" was always bad. At first it was just bad because it was visually incongruous. Then they improved the finger counting kernel, and now it's bad because it's a shallow cultural average.

AI producing visual art has only flooded the internet with "slop", the commonly accepted term. It's something that meets the bare criteria, but falls short in producing anything actually enjoyable or worth anyone's time.

MSFT_Edging commented on The Amaranth hardware description language amaranth-lang.org/docs/am... · Posted by u/pabs3

cushychicken · 18 days ago

I find myself deeply skeptical of much of the open source FPGA movement.

Most of those efforts stem from the underlying notion that “…this is all a problem with the tooling!”

This approaches the problem space from a very software-centric lens. Fundamentally, gateware design isn’t software. It’s wiring together logic gates if you really boil it down to fundamentals. Treating it as a tooling problem is to misconstrue how much you know. Plainly: no open source toolchain is going to have insight into Xilinx’s internal fanout or propagation delay specs. You’re reliant on Xilinx to encode these into their tools for you.

As a result: “Vendor tools are God in FPGA land. You don’t go against God.” (Quoted from the staff FPGA engineer on my team.)

MSFT_Edging · 18 days ago

I've found there's a fundamentally different attitude among FPGA engineers compared to software engineers for better or worse.

I think the "vendor tools are god" attitude is overall negative. The vendor tools ARE leagues better than the open source alternatives, but it doesn't mean the open source stuff is just for toy projects.

For example, Vivado is a monolithic pain in the ass. If I want to use an FPGA as electrical super glue for a project, I don't want to be downloading 150GB onto my machine. I think the open source tooling is particularly useful for smaller projects, and the general attitude towards the tooling is really frustrating.

The research that has gone into the RE the bitstream structure and the overall structure of FPGA fabric is extremely impressive. Vendor IPs are often bloated to get you to buy the bigger chip, where open source IPs take up much less of the fabric.

There's give and take but from my perspective a big problem is the tooling.

MSFT_Edging commented on I dumped Google for Kagi arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/thimabi

BlindEyeHalo · 18 days ago

Search will fold into AI. ChatGPT already searches for answers on given prompts.

There will no longer be a reason to interact with a search engine directly for most people, AI will decide by itself if it retrieves from memory or performs a search.

MSFT_Edging · 18 days ago

Okay great so ChatGPT will give me 5 confidently incorrect search results.

What a colossally stupid waste of energy. We could have had our answers, with a decent search engine.

I actually look down on LLM hopefuls. Just so irredeemably up their own ass. When the bubble collapses they should be sent off to their own island where they can sell the same coconut back and forth between themselves.

MSFT_Edging commented on Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something? · Posted by u/paulwilsonn

al_borland · 22 days ago

I always just stick my Obsidian vault in iCloud and called it a day. No additional sync service required.

MSFT_Edging · 19 days ago

This gets complicated when you want your vault accessible across linux/windows/android/macos/ipad.

The ipad is the real stick in the mud and I don't want to deal with an icloud staging zone for everything else, or try to get icloud syncing on linux/android.

MSFT_Edging commented on I dumped Google for Kagi arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/thimabi

CalChris · 19 days ago

Search (Google) is dead.

Sure, it will live on as a zombie of sorts. AM radio still exists. OTA television still exists. But their key demographics have long left (and in the case of CBS, are being forced to leave even faster). They won't be back. Yahoo still exists but it's so dead that its last act of relevance was to have an ex-Google exec execute what was essentially a pump-and-dump for the board. Similarly, few people say Xerox any more and just say copy instead. I don't even know how to call a taxi. Uber/Lyft is orders of magnitude better than taxis ever were.

The author is just a key demographic leaving Google. I left for Perplexity. My brother sent me a ChatGPT conversation which I asked some follow up questions to. AI is really good, now.

So I rarely search anymore. Search was always just a component in me trying to find an answer. Today, it's just a noisy inaccurate distraction.

The author won't be going back. I won't be going back. But Google has plenty of money. Like AM, OTA and Yahoo, it will continue to exist and you shouldn't feel too sorry for their ex-McKinsey CEO.

MSFT_Edging · 19 days ago

How can search(the utility, not the business model) possibly be dead?

AI models can't possibly contain everything to the depth one might require on a niche topic. Additionally, the less training data available, the more egregious the hallucinations become.

I've worked on some pretty niche things where the only way to get actual info is painstaking manual search queries based on a tree of keyword combinations. Those barely come up because search is (practically) dead, but when I'd ask AI the same questions or to find the same queries, it would simply make up confident answers.

AI is only truly helpful for the common denominator of very well documented and often discussed topics.

MSFT_Edging commented on I dumped Google for Kagi arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/thimabi

galleywest200 · 19 days ago

I was an early adopter of Kagi, and paid for about two years. But somehow I missed that they give money to Yandex, and I felt too guilty continuing to give them money because I want to support the people of Ukraine. So I cancelled recently.

If Kagi stopped using Yandex, or somehow allowed accounts to configure a way so that their funds do not go to Yandex (unsure if this is even possible to split accounts this way) then I would sign back up immediately.

MSFT_Edging · 19 days ago

Google has a 1.2Bn cloud contract with the Israeli gov/military.

There isn't really an escape from helping despotic, genocidal regimes.

MSFT_Edging commented on Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn? · Posted by u/unsupp0rted

razorfen · 19 days ago

This has become a personal debate for me recently, ever since I learned that there are several software luminaries who eschew debuggers (the equivalent of taking an oscilliscope probe to a piece of electronics).

I’ve always fallen on the side of debugging being about “isolate as narrowly as possible” and “don’t guess what’s happening when you can KNOW what’s happening”.

The arguments against this approach is that speculation and statically analyzing a system reinforces that system in your mind and makes you more effective overall in the long run, even if it may take longer to isolate a single defect.

I’ll stick with my debuggers, but I do agree that you can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The modern extreme is asking Cursor’s AI agent “why is this broken?” I recently saw a relatively senior engineer joining a new company lean too heavily on Cursor to understand a company’s systems. They burned a lot of cycles getting poor answers. I think this is a far worse extreme.

MSFT_Edging · 19 days ago

To me, it's the method for deciding where I put the oscilloscope/debugger.

Without the speculation, where do you know where to put your breakpoint? If you have a crash, cool, start at the stack trace. If you don't crash but something is wrong, you have a far broader scope.

The speculation makes you think about what could logically cause the issue. Sometimes you can skip the actual debugging and logic your way to the exact line without much wasted time.