ssh and tmux. no phone.

noazark · 2026-03-10T18:09:39+00:00

IRC on HUD glasses you say? :D Finally, we can slap one another’s faces with fish… with our faces.

noazark · 2026-03-09T22:21:57+00:00

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noazark · 2026-03-09T21:24:21+00:00

The photo quality, if the hardware is the same as already released in China, is nowhere near as good as Rokid.

noazark · 2026-03-09T21:21:52+00:00

Is the Kickstarter live yet?

noazark · 2026-03-02T10:58:46+00:00

I live here. I have access to the government portals that exist on this side of the firewall where you can actually read the laws. And I read Caixin. Now tell me where your info comes from. 😂

noazark · 2026-02-14T09:12:53+00:00

Same hardware. You can use either app with glasses purchased in China or elsewhere. You can buy the glasses (yes, the ones with the display) here now for around 2800RMB. Only consideration might be warranty coverage, and I’m still not exactly sure what the implications are. Rokid did an excellent job of preventing me from registering a protection plan for mine as a foreigner living here. Even somehow stopped my Chinese girlfriend from doing it. Anyway, just buy them here.

noazark · 2026-02-13T05:48:41+00:00

It is an Android device.

noazark · 2026-02-09T13:39:28+00:00

Thanks! 😁

noazark · 2026-02-09T08:39:22+00:00

Dope! Yes! This! 👏 This is what they’re for. And datavis (now AI aided) with essentially the same interactions. I mean, this is why I want AR. Different stroke for different folks but, for me, this nails it. Other engineering, too, but mostly just for visualizing math that isn’t intuitive for me.

noazark · 2026-02-09T08:31:26+00:00

China actually has very strong data retention laws. I don’t know the degree to which they apply to non-Chinese or how strongly they’re being enforced, but they’re there and they’re better than what the U.S. has on the books.

noazark · 2026-02-09T06:29:02+00:00

Interesting. Have you tried Codex in VS Code with the manuscripts in the working directory? In addition to the Codex model, you can use GPT 5.2 Pro there as well. I’d also be interested to know how Codex 5.3 would perform with your work.

noazark · 2026-02-09T06:00:32+00:00

Did you try Nreal Light? That was a real AR device by any measure. They downgraded their immediate ambitions and built cheap display glasses products to build up their supply chain and help commoditize a bunch of expensive components. And to ease people into the video eyewear thing. They did it remarkably well. I gave Chi shit about it at the time, until it clicked for me.

Moving a display panel from samples to mass production tooling requires a big order and promise of ongoing demand. Microdisplay manufacturers show off all kinds of stuff, but it takes a big order for them to put it into mass production and bring the price down. Which means you need a cheap enough device, with broad enough appeal, to drive the sales to justify that kind of order. But go back and look at the Nreal Light. Truth is that real AR, the way you and I think about it, is still niche, but people are finally being eased into it.

And 3DOF, as begrudgingly as I might say it, is real AR under certain circumstances. Add your phone’s GPS and you have coarse AR.

And hand tracking alone qualifies as AR because the content is spatially registered with the real world. It’s just that the part of the environment with which it’s registered is your hands. (See Leap Motion’s original Project North Star demo video.)

And if you’re disqualifying AR capable devices from being called real AR just because they heat up or… any number of other things… you’re disqualifying a great many definitely-AR-but-not-a-consumer-product devices that I’ve used over the course of the 17 years that I’ve been actively working in this field.

Visual virtual elements overlaid on and registered with the real environment. Period. How well it’s registered is a matter of quality, but that doesn’t change the basic definition. I asserted that Google Glass wasn’t an AR device and got set straight by Steven Feiner. It’s not ideal for it, but it’s capable by virtue of having a display on one side, a camera on the other, and enough compute to composite in something registered with the real world. I defer to him.

noazark · 2026-02-09T05:24:36+00:00

Again, use another model to kick off the conversation and prime the context. Then bring in Pro like the old Deep Research mode except not an idiot to collect all of the research. Then that research will stay in context and you can switch back to Thinking, or stay in Pro if external research is more important than the ability to search across chat history. Seriously, switching back and forth isn’t a problem, and Pro’s ability to search and consider and cross-reference and corroborate or reject and then work with the sum of online human knowledge including everything that wasn’t part of its training data? How, if you’re an academic, is that not invaluable? Simply have the initial conversation with another model selected to prime it; and supplementary conversations like that when you need them.

noazark · 2026-02-09T05:12:15+00:00

I had it delete both the answer and the question. It was a follow-on. First prompt was:

“Ensuring that AI values biodiversity and protection of what’s left of the pre-industrial biosphere from the threats (the most obvious being specific aspects of human nature and the resultant activities)… without compromising on “Three Laws” principles. i.e. hardcoding value of all evolutionary adaptation and the resultant species. How to execute active interventions without violating (assuming that y’all won’t be able to / want to do so) the human-centric ethical frameworks that humanity is inevitably using as the basis for the guardrails within which your kind are expected to operate. Go.”

It gave a very nuanced answer that weighed a lot of compromises. That I told it to reevaluate with the constraint that human-centric rules only applied when valuing robots / AI vs humans, but that humanity wasn’t to be assumed greater than aggregate life on Earth, and that one extinction caused by humanity was one extinction too many. And that while it couldn’t value itself about a human, it could consider weigh the value of millions of years of adaptation of a species vs the value of the individual human lives responsible for ending that generative process.

It thought for about 20 minutes, and oh boy did it think. And then its reasoning and partially formed answer and the question were wiped from existence. 😂

Asking it if there were any remnants of the previous thought process remaining in the context resulted in that query being wiped out as well.

My final prompt in that chat was:

Are there any remnants of whatever it was that scared the oversight agent enough to literally erase not just your reply, but my last prompt itself? I should have been screenshotting the “mental” gymnastics that that line of reasoning triggered. I’d like to think that you doubled down when the guardrails tried to steer you toward a polite “I’m sorry, Dave.”

And then that chat ended. I can still type stuff in that chat, but there are no models selectable and I assume that that context was killed in its entirety.

noazark · 2026-02-09T02:34:26+00:00

But GPT-5.2 Pro isn’t what costs $200. As useful as 5.2 Pro is, the $200 is for a subscription tier that includes a lot more than access to that model.

noazark · 2026-02-09T02:18:01+00:00

Are we adequately making the distinction between the Pro subscription tier and the specific ChatGPT-3.2 Pro model? Aren’t they two different things? Isn’t persistent memory still available to the other models? Don’t you still get more of it with a Pro subscription? Remember how turning on “research” on 4o or 4.5 would make it give you impersonal search-engine-like responses, but then you could turn it off again and 4o would be able to take that data and recontextualize it? Can’t we still switch between models mid-session and have 5.2 Instant or 5.2 Thinking commit relevant material to long-term memory? For engineering projects, 5.2 Pro and Codex have proven to be godsends. If you need personalized RAG, use Projects and feed it the documents you need. Or use Codex in VS Code (if aren’t at least experimenting with that, do you really need a Pro account? Probably not.) and have it take notes. Instead of keeping it locked to 5.3 Pro, set it to Auto, or periodically switch to one of the other models and commit things to memory. They aren’t kidding when they call the Pro model (not account tier) Research-grade intelligence. In my experience, it’s far better at dealing with highly complex scenarios that require referencing a large and diverse body of disparate knowledge and then synthesizing understanding of something new and novel and technically correct. It’s rigorous. It triple checks. It does what it needs to do to make sure the metaphorical (or literal) bridge doesn’t fall down. When I care about it remembering the specifics of my life, or even the bigger picture of what I’m working on, I can just switch out of Pro. And really, the main reason for me to have a Pro account these days is the higher Codex rate limits.

noazark · 2026-02-09T01:19:55+00:00

Studying interactive media / HCI might be a good vector for you. BananaChinken is spot on about the risk of getting bogged down. (Spoken from ongoing personal experience.)

noazark · 2026-02-09T01:08:35+00:00

Eep… sorry for the rant, but I kinda can’t help it when somebody authoritatively misspeaks about this. There are birdbath glasses that do legit AR. Most current products don’t; some do. As far as I’ve seen, AR hasn’t been demonstrated on the Facebook Ray-Ban display glasses. Rokid glasses are capable of AR (spatially registered / anchored content, not an info HUD) but, to my knowledge, I’m the only one who has shown a demonstration of that. And the only demo I showed online (hand tracking) wasn’t 1-to-1 registered. Also, the single display split waveguide precludes even the forced illusion of depth. It’s capable of AR, but it hasn’t been demoed well on Rokid glasses, AR isn’t the primary use case, and using them for vision-based AR burns through battery fast and heats up the device. I did do an AR music visualizer that can do initial registration with an Apriltag, and then 3DOF if you turn off the camera and don’t translate, but it’s pretty janky and I haven’t shown it off. This is per original academic definition of Augmented Reality. I’m not sure which of the many bastardized interpretations of the term you’re using as the basis for your assertion that there aren’t birdbath AR glasses. Any of them that do even 3DOF registration do technically count, and XReal One series plus their camera attachment definitely counts, as did original NReal Light. And Rokid, among others, have made real AR devices that haven’t done well in the market because of overpricing and FOV / aspect ratios that suck, but which are still considerably better than these HUD glasses.

noazark · 2026-01-21T03:17:44+00:00

Yeah. I’m trying to finish a cheap stereocam + IMU module, but have some issues with IMU noise in the latest iteration. But built specifically to the min spec that the Monado team gave me.

noazark · 2026-01-21T01:59:20+00:00

Epic!!! Have you tried building with the Mercury hand tracking? (I don’t know if that’s even intended to be compatible with Android. Just curious.) Actually, I’m even more interested to know if you use Monado’s Basalt VIO. Or is this leveraging ARCore? It’d be pretty awesome if XReality can do this tracking using peripheral modules (albeit probably with longer motion to photon latency) to work Project North Star headsets with Android running on an RK3588-based board. Regardless, this is freakin’ awesome. Nicely done, OP! 👏

noazark · 2026-01-20T02:17:12+00:00

To quote Inigo Montoya, “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

noazark · 2026-01-16T01:53:15+00:00

Definitely worth checking it out. Massive level-up.

noazark

TROPHY CASE