I’m reminded of a quote from my biomed days: “If there’s ever a zombie apocalypse, you can bet it started in Cambridge.”

I just thought it an amusing anecdote until COVID, and then realized it’s less that said virus would be developed here and more that we have the business idiots to let it loose.

That's an odd point to make when in the actual world we live in, Cambridge was where the first COVID vaccine was developed.

Man I’m hoping this support extends to older Snapdragon X2 stuff as well as the current crop of chips. There’s a lot of VR/AR headsets out there otherwise running proprietary operating systems and left to rot that a generic Linux distro like Debian could rescue, though Qualcomm’s history makes me doubt those chips will ever see the same support their newer, AI-focused ones are with this announcement.

Still keeping my fingers crossed that in the near future we can throw Linux onto an HTC Vive Focus or a Meta Quest and re-take ownership of our data and devices, but it’s strictly hopium at this point.

This feels backwards to me, as inner-city transit is generally well-served by bus, rail, or walking.

It’s Commuter Rail where this is a net benefit, and honestly the target I’d go after were I Waymo, because selling these vehicles as fleets to large metro services as last-mile for commuter rail service (where busses would travel further with less passenger density) makes a lot of sense compared to huge parking lots.

In the mornings and evenings, the Waymos shuttle commuters to and from the rail station. At all other times, they provide last-mile transit where bus lines can’t reach effectively or consistently. If the cost can be covered by your transit pass, or a transfer can act as a discount, then that’s even better.

KLAC isn’t the problem so much as lazy or shitty devs refusing to put in the work to support Linux as a platform. They’ll literally have game logic run in encrypted VMs on other platforms but then refuse to do the same on Linux with superior hypervisors like KVM and bhyve. Some developers have explicitly removed EAC support on Linux from their games, despite no open issues with it. Others demand someone else write the APIs needed for their invasive rootkits to run, ignoring that Linux is very much a community effort and that if one will write and publish it, others will use it.

I will 100% give Linux evangelists the guff they deserve on shitty UX in GUIs and their insistence upon a dozen slightly-tweaked solutions to the same core problem that prevents the industry from consolidating into widescale popularity on endpoints, but the incompetence and/or laziness of major devs to support even something like Debian is not a failing of Linux.

There is no doubt an economics problem here, where it might not make sense to invest a lot of effort into a system from which less than 1% of revenue is derived.

However, KVM does not solve the problem. In fact, Riot explicitly explains why virtualisation can make the problem worse: if Vanguard runs inside a guest, a cheat can run on the host and manipulate the VM in ways the anti-cheat cannot see. Riot says Linux currently does not give it sufficient ability to attest the boot state or kernel modules, with distro differences making the problem harder.

Linux also deliberately does not provide a stable in-kernel ABI for proprietary out-of-tree drivers. The kernel documentation explicitly says there is neither a stable binary kernel interface nor a stable internal kernel interface. The preferred model is for drivers to be upstreamed and maintained with the kernel, which is almost the opposite of how closed-source kernel anti-cheat is normally deployed.

And this isn't just Riot. EA actually supported EAC through Proton for Apex and then removed Linux access because its anti-cheat team said Linux was being used for impactful cheats, that Linux cheats were harder to detect, and that they couldn't reliably distinguish a legitimate Steam Deck from a malicious Linux client pretending to be one.

Valve itself tells developers that Proton's recommended solution is user-space anti-cheat and that kernel-space anti-cheat is “not currently supported and is not recommended”.

So I guess it's technically possible for a game dev to effectively create their own Linux distro, but I hope we agree that's never going to happen. They're game devs, not Linux devs. Anti-cheat needs a trust chain that the hostile user cannot control and not just an API through which it can inspect the system. Linux deliberately gives the machine owner far more control over the kernel and environment, which is exactly what makes strong client-side attestation difficult.

FYI bhyve isn't a Linux hypervisor. It's part of FreeBSD.

> Riot says Linux currently does not give it sufficient ability to attest the boot state or kernel modules, with distro differences making the problem harder.

Why would a game developer have the power to approve what I boot on my hardware?

Especially a peddler of live service free to play.

Attestation is not permission.

Have you talked to those people running de googled Android phones lately? Apparently they're excluded from banking and government apps because of "attestation" that's not permission.

You are confusing your right as an individual to do what you want with your OS, and the rights of developers to do what they want, with their software. You have the right to use whatever software you like. They have the right to not sell or give you their software if you don't want to abide by their rules.

> AI bros keep telling me “just turn it off” and when I do they remove the choice.

This is why I continue screaming against AI. I’ve moved past the theft roots, because I know we can just make its output un-protected by copyright or trademark laws - including the models themselves - thus returning back for free what was stolen in the first place.

Consent, however, remains an evergreen nail in the entire industry’s heart. It’s shoved into everything without our consent, into products that used to be perpetual but are now subscription-based. We’re forced to pay for someone else’s feature we don’t want in terms of storage, electricity, and compute costs - both on what we buy, and in higher prices due to the industry hoovering up every scrap of NAND and memory it can find and at scales that would make the GPU cryptomining boom feel embarrassed by. We have to endure this destruction of our limited capital and freedom to use our devices on our own terms, along with the immense invasion of privacy it brings about in surveillance and telemetry, all to boost an industry that spends its time loudly boasting how it will destroy the economy/nations/humanity/the biosphere with its eventual, inevitable output.

And honestly, I’m incredibly sick of it. It’d be one thing if I could turn off telemetry and point Siri to a local OpenAI-compatible API endpoint for inferencing and processing, but those options are barred specifically because the data harvesting is the point. These features were never designed or intended to improve the quality of my life, otherwise they’d be flexible enough for me to engage with them on my terms; no, the surveillance and data was always the point, and a proprietary answer engine that can have ads inserted into it or have its output engineered into speech benefiting the creator without transparency to the user - reality authoring - is a holy grail to a tech industry that still deeply resents open source software and “public good” services like Wikipedia.

AI companies refuse to let us opt out, because opting out means we’ve chosen to engage reality on our own terms, rather than theirs.

Man, I’m exhausted by the hand-wringing of folks reading through to the end and ignoring the questions posed in favor of “well the world ain’t that simple obviously” as a means of not having to justify or defend their own positions.

Obviously morality and ethics aren’t binary. OP isn’t saying that. What they’re saying in a clear and concise manner is that your actions have consequences far beyond your personal sphere, and good people acknowledge that and fight for what’s better despite the harm they personally may suffer as a result. That what makes someone “good” in their point of view isn’t a binary deed or outcome, but of the sacrifices they’ll make for themselves to build a better existence for others.

Planting a tree whose shade you’ll never enjoy, in other words.

So to reiterate OP’s challenge at the end, at least be honest about why you’re still in the game. Let others know where you stand so that we don’t waste our time on futility. If your voluntary position on something mutable risks making you a target, then the rational next step would be to evaluate how important that position is to you that you would weather said harm instead of changing it.

That’s all OP was getting at: promoting the mere notion of critically thinking about the decisions you make in regards to your own moral philosophy and acting more authentically, including tanking the damage trying to bring about change.

Came here to post this, got beaten by someone putting it far more succinctly than I would have.

I think the price is very reasonable for what’s on offer (especially given the current memory crisis), and given that Valve doesn’t subsidize the cost of anything, it really shows how much Meta values your privacy and biometric data for advertising purposes (~$600 in subsidies).

One thing I keep seeing reviewers skip over is VR Chat, which is weird since it’s a core VR experience that continues seeing average player count increases YoY compared to the boom-bust cycle of most VR games/experiences. It’s also an experience the headset seems uniquely targeted for - wandering the home or apartment streaming over 6GHz Wi-Fi, hanging out with friends or going to raves, no umbilical needed or dodgy Quest support limiting the experience.

For VRC alone, $1300 is a very respectable price for the experience on offer, especially compared to the $1k “entry point” of the Index. Common man VR this ain’t, this is targeting the VR serious as well as those who value privacy higher than what Meta offers in subsidies. The 2D support is a clever way of justifying the higher price though, and giving folks a more private way of enjoying their libraries in non-gaming spaces.

You're fooling yourself if the quest provides any advertising data value, let alone 600$ The device is simply just being sold for as a loss and is not a data harvesting operation.

Some quick googling shows the ARPU of a meta user is approx 57$ a year, and ~65$ in NA. Even if the quest provided useful advertising data (it doesn't) it would never come close to 600$ over the lifetime of a user.

I don't even understand what you mean by "biometric data" for advertising purposes. What biometric data is the quest collecting? How in the world is biometric data useful for advertising?

There's a reason why Meta is tens of billions of dollars in the hole for reality labs. It's not to subsidize for advertising that's for sure.

For VRChat it has even more benefits - built in eye tracking out of the box and and expansion port for which rumoredly there should be an official project Babble lower face tracker under development. :)

That’s a big reason I’m buying it (along with the wireless freedom of movement). VRChat has been a godsend of socialization and authenticity, and I want to immerse myself into it more with FBT, ET, and FT/MT such that it feels like a proper digital self. I couldn’t do that in my apartment layout with lighthouses a la BSB or Index, but the Frame and modern SteamVR/OpenXR suggests this will be one of the best ways to immerse into VR experiences going forward.

The fact I can throw it into my bag and travel with it is a bonus.

I'm really hopping for a combined face/vive tracker, because calibrating the Frame to Vive trackers is going to be annoying without it.

vrchat is just weird enough (and for, maybe, weird people) plus the new user experience/children yelling slurs situation makes it hard to even bring up to general audiences

I do think hardcore sims and vrchat are the only good reasons to get into vr now, though

Almost like if the $100k fee is the sticking point, then maybe the talent being brought in isn’t world class talent we can’t find domestically so much as easily exploitable manpower that can be replaced with another H-1B if they start asking for reasonable treatment or higher wages.

Sorry IEEE, but offshoring happens regardless of the H-1B fee. I’m a pretty flexible dinosaur but you’re never going to get me to feel sympathy for employers leveraging a visa that’s tantamount to employment slavery in its onerous restrictions and lack of direct pathway to citizenship.

Seems like, if the $100k fee is too high a barrier to clear for talent they claim they cannot find domestically.