meanwhile the Bigscreen Beyond 2:

* Display: also micro-OLED

* Resolution: 2560 x 2560 per eye

* Angular resolution: 32 PPD

* Field of view: 116°D, 108°H x 96°V

* Chipset: none lol plugs into your computer

* Tracking and sensors: needs base stations

* Weight: 107 g

* Passthrough: no

* Price: $959 (+$200 for eye tracking)

* needs base stations, a PC, and has a cable, and looks kinda like dorky swim goggles (but still pretty futuristic and cool)

meanwhile the Steam Frame:

* Display: LCD

* Resolution: 2160 x 2160 per eye

* Angular resolution: 20

* Field of view: 110 degrees

* Chipset: Snapdragon 8 gen 3

* Memory and storage: 16GB of ram with 256GB UFS plus microSD

* Tracking and sensors: inside out camera based tracking

* Weight: 185 g core headset, 440 g including strap, rear battery, facial interface, and audio

* Passthrough: idk

* Price: $1059 for 256GB, $1299 for 1TB

Steam Frame has black and white passthrough but it's not good enough for AR. They sell a third party's passthrough camera as an add-on though which is $130 I think and clips on the front. Since the Frame runs open Linux with KDE this is really interesting to me.

I have to point out that all of these are terrible options for the general mass who are remotely interested in VR. If you are an enthusiastic who don't mind dropping $1000 on something completely optional to your everyday life, great, but otherwise they are terrible in value considering what they provide.

With bigscreen you also need to have 2-3 tracking stations ($500-750) with stands (another $100) you need to setup everywhere you want to use it.

This is hilarious of course but Opus 5.5 just came out and largely fixed a lot of the Claudlish.

It's kinda sad that this cool project is mired in controversy. On one hand it is kinda radioactive for a former Apple engineer to work on this, even if you worked on something else entirely while at Apple. On the other hand I really, really want proper Linux support with full GPU support on modern Macs and I feel like AI is an incredibly useful tool towards that effort.

Oh well, if this doesn't pan out, hopefully someone else will vibe code for a week and get it working in the near future.

Let’s take the kind view? If Apple has a problem in a former engineer possibly using insider knowledge that is first and foremost a problem between Apple and said engineer. Reasonably if that first round kicks off, in the second round of problems an OSS project is possible in scope.

The engineer and the project have discussed these risks and decided to continue in a fork from Asahi. So I would say that this is (nearly) how it is supposed to go. Asahi stays clean from contagion and Gravity Linux has taken a, hopefully well considered, risk.

If the Gravity Linux work is upstreamed into the kernel project, any issues with Apple sort of become everyone's problem.

> On one hand it is kinda radioactive for a former Apple engineer to work on this

If this were the case, then Wine and its forks like Proton would have the same issue.

Former Microsoft employees have contributed to Wine in the past.

Asahi is on Fedora now (and has been for a couple of years)

Very sad. I really want to get Linux on newer Apple chips working flawlessly but I can understand the legal minefield about this particular work.

The only cost was a month of llm usage. If the legal questions matter to you, you or someone else should be able to spend some tokens to redo their work in a similar way. I doubt Apple will actually care much about this. But even if they do, the worst they’ll do is get the repo taken down.

It may also be legal to do the following: 1. Have an llm read all the code these people have written and produce extensive documentation. 2. Have another llm consume that documentation and write another working driver. I am not a lawyer but I think this may fall under fair use, because reverse engineering is allowed for interoperability.

That’s fine. Linux upstream won’t take his code but you can for your own purposes.

There is no reason Linux the Kernel upstream wont take his code. Asahi is not Linux upstream.

Nobody does. We're only about to start settling it in courts, likely the supreme ones.

I meant I can understand the fact that a legal minefield exists.

I didn't mean that I understand the actual intricacies of the legal situation.

Sorry for my confusing wording.

If your business plan depends on the Roberts’ Court kneecapping AI, pivot.

This is super great. The biggest pain point of Asahi Linux is how it doesn't have GPU acceleration on M3 and newer, especially now that M6 is out!

However, Asahi Linux has a strictly no-AI policy [1]. So this great work can't be upstreamed. I expect to see a bunch of AI-assisted forks that get things working smoothly on newer hardware to dominate as most people just care about getting stuff working, while only a handful of purists stick to the non-AI version running on ancient hardware.

[1] https://asahilinux.org/llm-policy/

:) I think we have a surprise in store here. Asahi don't have a monopoly over Linux for Apple Silicon, and upstream Linux absolutely does *NOT* ban LLMs.

i install proprietary modules for nvidia all the time, i'm not going to care if i have to do it for something else that i own

Nvidia's kernel module is open source these days, it's the usermode stack that's still closed.

Even though the kernel module is open-source (sort of, development still happens behind closed doors), it's still an out-of-tree module, rather than being built into the kernel, which would give you as smooth an experience as with AMD or Intel, who's GPUs literally do just work on any distro with no fuss.

It’s never gonna be a smooth experience with Linux on Macs, because of installation, but also firmware upgrades etc. there’s always some manual steps involved and nothing will change unless Apple itself starts supporting Linux natively

Can't wait for someone to point an LLM at that and "open it up" ;-)

Asahi's long term goal is to get everything possible merged into the (actually) upstream projects anyways so any distro can just work. It'd be nice to see that continue rather than have forks on forks for the sake of singular differences (and it looks like proper upstreaming is what they are going after per the Remaining Work section).

> upstream projects anyways so any distro can just work

This may never end up working like that, considering how complicated installation is, comparatively speaking, and how macOS is still pretty much required to be installed.

You can make the Linux installation on Apple Sillicon Macs pretty painless nowadays. One terminal command on macOS, reboot to Linux, run one script - voila.

Yeah, but it's unlikely such installers will be officially supported by the distributions, which was my point regarding upstreaming.

The Asahi installer can set up a standard UEFI environment on the Mac and you're off to the races from there.

The problem right now is more that you then need to use a patched kernel+mesa+others to do much with that environment. As more and more of those patches make it upstream, the process will converge to being a standard ARM64 install from the distro's point of view.

I imagine either they or others can take their discoveries and write a real driver now, though. The hard part was always the reversing the black box system.

you could also exploit the fact that some flags may appear more frequently than others and use huffman encoding or something to encode the commonly used flags in a shorter sequence than rarely-mentioned countries, and save some bits on average

It has a list of data sources here: https://www.threebodyorbits.com/about

This whole thing does have a strong "GPT-6 Astra look" with the big text on the left style. But it is indeed very cool.

Fallout 4's endgame with the autogenerated "quests" of defending settlements get boring extremely fast.

I really hated the fact that Fallout 4 doesn't communicate to you what missions are procedural and which ones are actually handcrafted. This is the most frustrating part of that game. The procedural missions lack narrative closure, so you keep playing for a payoff that never comes

This was awful in Fallout 4, but a lot of fun with friends in Fallout 76

Weird. It's almost like synthetic content is less fulfilling to humans than friendship.

It's even worse when you see the exact same animal asset but scaled differently with a different color hue on a completely different planet. Ruins the immersion immediately. Obviously, it has come a long, long way since the 2016 article, but still.

For me it's the asteroids. Having space being so densely populated with procedural asteroids is immediately, irreversibly immersion breaking for me. Like... space would be opaque and life on these plants would immediately cease in a cataclysm of bombardment.

This was also one of many gripes I had with Starfield.

I think you gotta set aside some of that to enjoy both as Sci-Fi games, not space sim games. In Sci-Fi, asteroids are close together and you can shoot them for resources or lose an enemy in them like a dark forest, because those things are fun. IRL, they are ridiculously far apart and not nearly as fun.

It's always a potential danger to one's enjoyment to know too much about something though. :)

I mean, I do, but there's a reason KSP is so popular despite all the flaws.

Well this update fixes your asteroid complaint then

Adds persistent asteroid belts, asteroid mining, and base building on asteroids

Go wild