It’s kind of funny reading this blog announcement as a corporate product announcement, because I’ve been actually playing with nreal’s air 2 ultra glasses. They are absolutely perfect for open XR work, I love them. You get the cameras, buttons, accelerometer, all over the cable without fuss, and they show up in Linux as just a regular DRM device. Literally by default most window managers just see them as another display. It was such a nice experience getting a 3d engine hooked up to them and adding 6DoF tracking working with visua slam (two fisheye cameras gives you instant depth, a luxury compared to the usual monocular focus). Honestly these glasses are good enough that I use them with a pinephone as my primary computing device these days. And this was on the side executed by an agentic harness while I focusing on other things! I guess I’m also now competing with Google, and so could you too.

Had to look up "DRM" to see you meant "Direct Rendering Manager" and not "Digital Rights Management".

Ugh. I've never heard that use of "DRM" before and I work with this stuff day to day. Be responsible in your uses of TLAs, people.

is the pinephone powerful enough to manage the rendering AND use it? or do you mean a pinephone pro?

Countdown to Zero Day probably! Super good book, technical without being unfriendly to casuals or inaccurate for pros.

Just to be able to gauge what you say, which one are you, casual or pro?

Yes, this is it.

I think generative content will get good enough that people simply don’t trust what they read online. Humans might still generate content, but I predict over time they will be crowded out and worse blatantly copied to the point of discouragement. AI-powered miscreants will outpace enforcement efforts.

Personally I’m betting that we will see a major comeback in local radio and print media, as global network effects regress local with collective trust.

> But what got those engineers in the same room in the first place?

The interest in a shared problem and the passion to solve it?

> A patent is the best thing we’ve collectively come up with

I think that’s a bold claim in the face of the numerous contributions from e.g. universities, open source communities, single-person projects, etc that have pushed the world forward. We simply do not know a world free of the oppression of patents, the institution sustains itself.

> If you don’t like the game, get better at it.

I don’t think people will be playing this game much longer in the face of generative AI, unless ofc the ruling classes succeed in locking down access to that tech, gobally.

How can price discovery work if everyone’s price is different? What downward pressure would even exist on surveillance-derived prices besides resale black markets? Societally, do we really want to further monetize the expansion of the mass surveillance state?

> In July, Meta announced that it would push an update to detect when an LED has been “physically tampered with or destroyed” and stop people from being able to film

Would love to know how they plan to do this, sounds like a patch that is bypassed with a $0.01 resistor.

Train a detector for reflections of recording glasses. Cluster into "led illuminated" and "led dark" detections. Ban accounts above threshold.

Hard to find better solutions when we have no agency to enact them. The “arrangement” was one-sided from the start.

Any tips on measuring the impact of not having swap? I never use it on my machines for similar reasons.

Worst thing that's ever happened to me is having processes randomly killed by the OOM killer. Could be unpleasant if you're writing an email or document that suddenly disappears because your app got killed.

The OOM killer usually kills the process that's using the most memory, which is the reason the system is OOM. Sometimes this can be adjusted. When I'm OOM it's almost always because some runaway loop used 50GB and it makes no sense to kill any other process.

If it's killing your email editor then your email editor is bloated or you just need more RAM - or swap.

Web browsers are most people's email editor.. and yes those things do use a lot of RAM.

It highly depends on your specific workload, but freeing up RAM by paging out rarely or downright unused pages to swap can definitely give a performance advantage.

In consequence, I always give swap. Even on the off-chance it ends up unused, disk space is orders of magnitude cheaper than RAM, so I don't mind sacrificing it for potential gains.

I feel a similar fate will befall engineers too. Your predictions anre quite interesting from that perspective.

Markets defined entirely by law have distorted our collective understanding of what can actually be built with the knowledge our species has accumulated thus far. How will traditional shields that have protected capital accumulation in tech to survive in a world where governments now realize control of technology is a national priority? Especially as we see its impact on modern warfare, and that such conflict looks like it’s only escalating over time.

Mathematicians appear to me (as an outsider) to exist in a field without such distortions, and I think offer engineers a preview of what’s to come. I certainly have completely ceased sharing original ideas online at this point.

Engineers are needed to build real things. AI isn't there yet.