malwrar

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.

Predicting it now that people will vibecode open source clones built from having bots play the closed game for training data.

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

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.

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.

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.

What about when the open models get to the point that you don’t need these fancy GPUs? It seems inevitable this will happen over time, we see cracks right now within even just GPT w/ expert streaming and flash attention. ASICs are coming soon too.

Is the fact that Nvidia is also massively financing the closed-models companies, which stand to lose when open model project(s) take off, a conflict of interest here? I can’t tell if this is nvidia hedging or planning to embrace & extinguish.

Don’t get me wrong, governments putting these things up for one purpose and then using them for another (my read on your use of “malicious”) is a major concern I have.

It is broader than that though, and is the distinction I sought to capture with “anyone with access” in my original post. They are connected to the internet, and to a cloud no less! Anyone could be the NSA now, from anywhere in the world. I bet we’ll see these used to collect marketing data too.

Perhaps a limiting principle can be that we simply do not use ALPRs or other surveillance tech, or at least that we don’t connect them to the internet and require a warrant to access and use their data? Personally, I’d just prefer cops enforce traffic law the old fashioned way.

Thanks for this term, I’ll try using it!

Interesting perspective.

As others have noted, I believe the brightline is less “general purpose computer…” and more “…that is remotely accessible & modifiable effectively anywhere in the world”. I worry not just about OEMs and cops, but also criminals, foreign intelligence agencies, etc. Honestly potentially anyone at this point, now that folks have figured out you can use LLMs to do analysis.

This is a sound foundation for concern by itself, don’t you think?