Hacker News Reader

soundson The issue of anti-cheat on Linux (2024)

About halfway in the article, there's a brief nod to CS:GO. It uses a tick system and the server controls what is possible, such as physics or awarding kills. Fighting genre games use the same server-based game logic.

Cheating is a big draw to Windows for semi-pro gamers and mid streamers. What else is there to do except grind? Windows gives the illusion of "kernel level anti-cheat," which filters out the simplest ones, and fools most people some of the time.

soundson 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report

At this rate, how is it better than pure random chance?

The article mentions 19-20 year old founders, focused on solving single user problems, were the successes.

The sample size is 300 public AI deployments and an undisclosed number of private in-house AI projects. And the survey seems to only consider business applications, as compared with end-user applications like media and software. That's significant but not definitive.

Isn't it more likely that existing problems with low hanging fruit, perhaps unpopular answers, that could be solved by leaning on "AI". And perhaps "AI" wasn't the key to success?

soundson Steve Wozniak: Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about happiness

Many of us live this way.

Why would I tell you my secrets?

soundson NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

Have you ever tried to run a model from huggingface on an AMD GPU?

Semiconductor fabrication is a high risk business.

Nvidia invested heavily in CUDA and out-competed AMD (and Intel). They are working hard to keep their edge in developer mindshare, while chasing hardware profits at the same time.

soundson NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

Nvidia is interested in commoditizing their complements. It's a business strategy to decrease the power of OpenAI (for instance).

Nvidia dreams of a world where there are lots of "open" alternatives to OpenAI, like there are lots of open game engines and lots open software in general. All buying closed Nvidia chips.

soundson Ashet Home Computer

Agree. Most computers that are a joy to learn have a handful of controllers that operate in parallel. That is, multiple cores

The Apple II had a really cool disk drive because of how it did what it did with so little hardware. By relying on the single CPU for everything it was elegant, advanced, interesting... but perhaps not so easy to program.

https://www.bigmessowires.com/2021/11/12/the-amazing-disk-ii...

soundson Blow Up Gold with Giant Lasers, Accidentally Disprove Renowned Physics Model

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15445637

soundson College baseball, venture capital, and the long maybe

Adding the college men's basketball numbers, from [1]:

1. Duke University $45.1M

2. Syracuse University $34.2M

3. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill $32.0M

[1] https://www.2adays.com/blog/top-10-division-i-basketball-pro...

soundson Improving performance of rav1d video decoder

He came from the aarch64 perspective on an Apple device. I often experience someone spotting an "obvious in hindsight" gap because they come from a different background.

soundson Retailers will soon have only about 7 weeks of full inventories left

Hard to argue with that. If I can inject a random thought, might not even be worth a reply.

What if the goal is to deepen income inequality? Opening up low income jobs by deportation. Impoverishing households whose primary savings were in stocks, not business ownership or real estate. Hurting consumers, especially those whose disposable income is lower.

soundson An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

What I see happening soon is a deeper transition from playful whimsy to real applications with contractual obligations.

Right now it's an unencumbered exploration with only a few requirements. The general public isn't too upset even if it blatantly feeds on copyrighted data [1] or attacks wikipedia with its AI crawlers [2].

The end state once legislation has had a chance to catch is breath looks more like Apple being forced to implement USB type C.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/why-the-new-york...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/04/ai-bo...

soundson US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU

> sectors like the military, construction and the automotive industry each have 100K+ positions that they are unable to fill. A return to manufacturing adds to that shortage.

Feel free to offer higher wages than the previous stagnant wages.

soundson LibreOffice downloads on the rise as users look to avoid subscription costs

The professionals who still use unstable platforms are forced to rent their tools, sharecropper style. What about professionals like me who made the leap to a stable platform? "Exact binary you downloaded" hasn't been in my toolbox for a long time now.

I don't know many people left who pay for their OS these days.

soundson AMC Theatres will screen a Swedish movie 'visually dubbed' with the help of AI

I think this is gaining a lot of awareness, for example Derbauer (English channel) used Visual AI translation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlZWiLc0p80

soundson Framework's first desktop is a strange–but unique–mini ITX gaming PC

The desktop is fascinating if AMD can pull off Rocm this round. 128GB of unified memory for only $1,999, but you get an AMD GPU.

soundson Nuclear fusion: WEST beats the world record for plasma duration

The current ramp in the central solenoid is used to set the plasma rotation direction. Theoretically this is more like Alternating Current, since there is not a fundamental reason the central solenoid couldn't ramp back down (and then proceed to ramp up in the opposite polarization). The existing plasma would need to be cooled and removed first, or some similar mechanism of stabilizing the torus again in the opposite direction.

I look at it as a large optimization problem at this point. Each part of the machine is workable but not yet sufficiently optimized to achieve profitable operation.

soundson Google Fiber is coming to Las Vegas

A common complaint I hear at defcon and other cons in vegas is that the hotel internet is terrible.

Hopefully good internet service comes as a result of this?

soundson All-Optical Computer Unveiled with 100 GHz Clock Speed

It's currently impractical to get optical waveguides to perform comparable to the state of the art for electronics. Optical waveguides are the equivalent of a wire on a chip.

Intel 4 "fin and minimum metal pitch of 30 nm" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process - keep in mind, the actual channel is about half that. 15 nm photons are at the extreme end of UV, which is hard enough. But what really kills photonics miniaturization is the diffraction limit. The photons scatter in every direction.

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-semiconductor-technology-not-sh...

soundson Hacker gains access to the RP2350 OTP secret by glitching the RISC-V cores

Aedan desoldered the RP2350 and physically cut the copper trace feeding voltage to a pin. Then he proceeded to use voltage glitching and was pretty open about how lucky he was, or in other words how unlucky Rasperry Pi Ltd. was for the attack to work.

Doesn't this sound like the RP2350 is "secure enough"? Like you mention, if the attacker can send a unit to an MCU Break service, it's game over already.

soundson Hacker gains access to the RP2350 OTP secret by glitching the RISC-V cores

This is a repost of the 38C3 talk by Aedan Cullen:

https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-hacking-the-rp2350

Aedan references a presentation earlier on Day 1 of 38C3 about hardware fault injection of the ACE3 USB-C controller in Apple hardware: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-ace-up-the-sleeve-hacking-into-a...

soundson Show HN: WebGPU Tech Demo

Firefox 133.0.3 fails with:

Uncaught (in promise) ReferenceError: GPUShaderStage is not defined

    <anonymous> https://gnikoloff.github.io/webgpu-sponza-demo/assets/index-BeB41sTJ.js:422

    <anonymous> https://gnikoloff.github.io/webgpu-sponza-demo/assets/index-BeB41sTJ.js:2288

soundson Pat Gelsinger and Linus Torvalds talk Linux, open source, technology and more [video]

If Gelsinger is no longer at Intel, will Intel no longer be as enthusiastic about rebuilding dev relations?

soundson Intel’s board, and an example of when boards and short-termism fail

Grandparent said:

> it simply cannot bring itself to make a product that people want

It sure looks like you know exactly how Intel manages to bury their hand in the sand, not making any products people want.

soundson Intel’s board, and an example of when boards and short-termism fail

Grandparent said:

> it simply cannot bring itself to make a product that people want

To which you responded:

> You do realize that it takes at least 5 years

Intel could lower the price on their HEDT chips tomorrow.

Intel could enable AVX-512 tomorrow.

Intel could more fully open up their fabs to other companies tomorrow.

Intel could publicly commit to producing silicon with no Management Engine tomorrow.

What would you do, if you were Intel CEO?

soundson My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback

I am impressed and excited to see where this goes. Please continue, young man! The internet is in love with you right now, but after the spotlight moves on, this is still a worthwhile thing to be working on.

soundson Please ban data caps, Internet users tell FCC

Have you tried intentionally griefing their gerrymandering?

soundson Please ban data caps, Internet users tell FCC

Can you move? I know many can't.

Since the ISPs collude to gain a local monopoly over entire apartments, sometimes cities, sometimes states [1], ideally your response would be to de-occupy them, the same as if state police decided to disproportionately shoot at you because of your race.

[1] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

soundson AI PCs Aren't Good at AI: The CPU Beats the NPU

Apple Silicon is surprisingly a good approach here -

   * On CPU: SIMD NEON
   * On CPU: custom matrix multiply accelerator, separate from SIMD unit
   * On CPU package: NPU
   * GPU

Then they go and hide it all in proprietary undocumented features and force you to use their framework to access it :c

soundson Deep space radio signal reaches Earth after 8B years

https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2317/ is another decent writeup

soundson The Cheating Device (ChatGPT on a TI-84) [video]

Much easier - collect all student TI-84s, neatly labeled for return after the test. Hand out stock ones that already had a full reset completed. Don't bother to announce it until the student shows up for the test.

Students get the reassurance that their TI-84 won't go through a reset.

Schools have extra TI-84s in the back rooms.