Hacker News: sudosysgen

New comment by sudosysgen in "The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility"

sudosysgen — Mon, 04 May 2026 01:17:43 +0000

They are very useful when working on remote servers, VMs and containers. Much much more convenient and robust than, say, X forwarding.

New comment by sudosysgen in "TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues"

sudosysgen — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 18:19:42 +0000

Social media platforms have been doing that for years to keep advertisers happy, so yes.

New comment by sudosysgen in "TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues"

sudosysgen — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 18:19:11 +0000

Every large social network has fairly advanced mass screening setups for advertiser-sensitive topics. They just need to change the configs. On YouTube for example they will transcribe audio and run OCR on text to flag sensitive topics using MLP in order to flag certain topics (ex: Palestine/Israel), and prevent most ads from being shown (and demonetize and down rank).

Basically every large advertiser requires this so it's pretty trivial to turn on.

New comment by sudosysgen in "BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal"

sudosysgen — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 05:26:37 +0000

That's only for the US, not the West writ large.

New comment by sudosysgen in "Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges"

sudosysgen — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 04:40:30 +0000

As far as I can tell cheapish 2D lidar for mapping and robot navigation were a bit earlier than the XV-11; they were made by Hokuyo in 2006. I remember that their lidar module was made by some other (American?) company that in turn competed with Hokuyo, people would take them out and use for their own projects.

It's ultimately not very complicated - it's a laser rangefinder that you spin on a motor. It's such a simple - and old! - technology which would obviously get significantly cheaper with time, it was definitely the right horse to bet on. I never understood iRobot's vision strategy.

New comment by sudosysgen in "Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges"

sudosysgen — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 04:19:57 +0000

> Binocular vision ought to be good enough for a vacuum.

It could be, but it just is not. VSLAM robots were practically significant worse. There are a lot of limitations to multi-ocular vision for a robot vacuum, for example the relatively featureless walls and few features across the horizontal binocular axis.

Neato was never as big as iRobot. They didn't fail from commanding heights, they never were that successful to begin with, for entirely different reasons. If they had managed to get to iRobot's level of ubiquity and distribution they would have had a much better shot of still being around nowadays.

New comment by sudosysgen in "Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges"

sudosysgen — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 04:17:33 +0000

There is not that much more to it than lidar and 2D slam as far as the core technology. There are a lot more features yes but they are not nearly as valuable. I agree they are better, but that's for reason of execution and non-enshitiffication, not core tech.

New comment by sudosysgen in "Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges"

sudosysgen — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 01:45:12 +0000

There is not much tech to steal here. 2D lidar mapping is something a high schooler could do 10+ years ago, and that was their core tech. The value was in executing earlier and better, and applying existing tech to robovacuums. If they could have sued they likely would, this is a valuable market.

New comment by sudosysgen in "Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges"

sudosysgen — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 01:36:17 +0000

iRobot's failure is that they made a bet to use CV instead of Lidar for their mapping robots for a long time until it was too late. That made their affordable, non-mapping robots far far worse than only slightly higher priced lidar robots, while their mapping robots were too expensive for mass appeal and were still worse at navigation than up-market lidar based robots. Ultimately they were simply outcompeted.

New comment by sudosysgen in "Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon"

sudosysgen — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 02:40:16 +0000

Hezbollah operates hospitals and medical services. It's not just a political party.

New comment by sudosysgen in "CATL expects oceanic electric ships in three years"

sudosysgen — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 14:17:54 +0000

If it's rare enough it may well be cost efficient to just fly people into the ship if and when that happens.

New comment by sudosysgen in "Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton"

sudosysgen — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 15:37:47 +0000

Yeah, but DDR4 is very very common.

Also, you don't need a lot of performance for these games. Even 3000MT/s DDR5 is fine for competitive shooters especially in CPUs with big caches

New comment by sudosysgen in "Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton"

sudosysgen — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 03:47:01 +0000

Why do you need to handle DDR5? You can use DDR3 to play the vast majority of competitive video games. It's not hard to find an FPGA that can handle DDR3 or DDR4.

You also don't need to sniff the entirety of the traffic. You just need to introduce aliasing. That is much harder to do for DDR5 but you don't need it to be reliable or stable for a long time, because you won't be sniffing for very long. And you don't need to do 6000+MT/s either.

New comment by sudosysgen in "Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton"

sudosysgen — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 03:38:05 +0000

There are DDR4 interposers you can buy for 50$. The basic thing is that you don't need all of the ram all of the time, you just need to find an address which you can then rewrite to make two valid references to the same physical memory (see: badRAM/battering ram). Then you can use an IOMMU compliant DMA to access that memory.

Or you can use an FPGA to interpose the RAM and intercept the network traffic for a couple hundred bucks.

New comment by sudosysgen in "Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton"

sudosysgen — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 03:33:52 +0000

This hasn't been true for a very long time. The kind of cheats that can survive even very basic anticheat for a long time cost a decent amount of money on subscription basis. Most cheaters by volume pay quite a chunk of change to cheat.

New comment by sudosysgen in "Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton"

sudosysgen — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 11:37:48 +0000

You can still do DMA cheating with IOMMU enabled. There are quite a few relatively widespread bugs with IOMMU that allow you to bypass it, for example https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/fuzzing-pci-expre.... So to be able to actually do IOMMU DMA protection you need to be willing to ban many popular devices. That may be viable for FACEIT and ESEA but it won't be for 99.9% of anticheat deployments.

The detection for DMA cheating is based on the DMA engines being unable to emulate 1:1 the actual behavior the hardware ID would be expected to have. This can be fixed by simply doing that properly.

But even besides that, DMA through PCIe is just one hardware cheat that fits a separate thread model and therefore has some countermeasures.

There are much more robust methods you can use, for example a PCIe interposer between the OS and GPU, or simply direct memory interposes if you want to do DMA without the protections afforded by the PCIe implementation. There are interposets along with machinery to get along memory encryption and other obfuscations that can be made for around 100$.

New comment by sudosysgen in "Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton"

sudosysgen — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 11:11:54 +0000

It's not just theoretically possible, you can buy kits that do this already.

New comment by sudosysgen in "IQ differences of identical twins reared apart are influenced by education"

sudosysgen — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 22:39:43 +0000

It would be relevant to twin studies. Specifically, separated twin studies, where shared environment is assumed to be negligible. If the developmental impact of epigenetics is significant that won't be true.

New comment by sudosysgen in "IQ differences of identical twins reared apart are influenced by education"

sudosysgen — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 22:31:47 +0000

They can also simply get picked up in a correlated manner between twins due to the shared womb environment even if those correlated epigenetic traits are completely different from those of the parents.

New comment by sudosysgen in "IQ differences of identical twins reared apart are influenced by education"

sudosysgen — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 22:28:39 +0000

These are twin studies, you don't need to get into heritable epigenitics. The expression of the shared environment in the womb would be reasonably expected to lead to epigenetic correlations in twins at a crucial stage of development where they would have the highest impact, without them being heritable.

Put simply, the common epigenetics between twins need not be held in common with the parents.