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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#31

Post by Kranar »

ggm wrote: post #19
johnwheeler wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a quest pro, and it’s pretty awesome. Zuckerberg made the argument that Microsoft spent about 10 billion on development of the first Xbox, and that turned out to be a good bet.

What is the ROI of the xbox series over time?

To the best of my knowledge it's negative so far but it's very hard to tell since MS only reports revenues but not the expenses. I'm guessing Xbox's main purpose right now is to serve the purpose of keeping MS relevant to home users and preserving brand awareness, but in terms of direct profitability Xbox is likely an overall loser.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#33

Post by LarsDu88 »

nebulous1 wrote: post #15
sxg wrote: post #10

John Carmack did a 5 hr podcast with Lex Fridman recently [1]. Moving away from Meta seemed like something that had been happening slowly over a long period of time. [1] https://lexfridman.com/john-carmack/

Lex's guest list is absurd. I'm honestly not sure how he's managed to pull it off.

Honestly his guest list is so good, I thought for several years that he must be working for the Kremlin and honeypotting folks behind the scenes (or something)

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#34

Post by ilyt »

ggm wrote: post #20
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

“During Meta's developer conference in October, Carmack hosted a solo hour-long talk about the company's Oculus or Quest headset. He admitted he had many things to be ‘grumpy’ about, like the company's rate of progress on technological advancements and the basic functionality of the headsets. He said it was frustrating to hear from people inside Meta who found the Quest 2 headsets so unreliable that they refused to u…

IT projects fuck up all the time. Poor execution is baked into the human DNA. It doesn't take malice or crime to fail to be excellent. Neither the Newton nor Google glasses failed on corruption. Carmack is smart but he also failed to make his rocketry mark. Maybe individual brilliance in code is less important to execution of things than we (he?) thinks? Or maybe he only picks targets with hard end-goals versus the e…

He's one man. Could be him, could be the team, could be the overall management structure pushed the team into wasting time on dead-end pursuits.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#35

Post by muglug »

johnwheeler wrote: post #12
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

“During Meta's developer conference in October, Carmack hosted a solo hour-long talk about the company's Oculus or Quest headset. He admitted he had many things to be ‘grumpy’ about, like the company's rate of progress on technological advancements and the basic functionality of the headsets. He said it was frustrating to hear from people inside Meta who found the Quest 2 headsets so unreliable that they refused to u…

I have a quest pro, and it’s pretty awesome. Zuckerberg made the argument that Microsoft spent about 10 billion on development of the first Xbox, and that turned out to be a good bet.

But in the case of the Xbox they knew there'd be an appetite for a gaming console, because gaming consoles had been selling like hot cakes for over 15 years.

VR is a very differently-sized market.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#36

Post by ggm »

Kranar wrote: post #31
ggm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the ROI of the xbox series over time?

To the best of my knowledge it's negative so far but it's very hard to tell since MS only reports revenues but not the expenses. I'm guessing Xbox's main purpose right now is to serve the purpose of keeping MS relevant to home users and preserving brand awareness, but in terms of direct profitability Xbox is likely an overall loser.

So $10b (conjectured by OP I am responding to) dug a defensive moat, didn't bring in > $10b income

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#37

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

cokeandpepsi wrote: post #13

I actually thought facebook was doing a ok job with oculus until the whole 'metaverse' social push happend it feels like the people invovled are serverly deteacted on what people want out of VR in general it's hard for me to imagine someone like carmack prefering to work in a envinronment like that (tearing down corp/product walls) vs building his own team and trying to solve technical challenges

I just want cool hardware people can hack on. I couldn't care less about the metaverse worlds that they were building but I'm giddy as a child on Christmas at advances in the hardware lately.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#38

Post by pas »

nebulous1 wrote: post #15
sxg wrote: post #10

John Carmack did a 5 hr podcast with Lex Fridman recently [1]. Moving away from Meta seemed like something that had been happening slowly over a long period of time. [1] https://lexfridman.com/john-carmack/

Lex's guest list is absurd. I'm honestly not sure how he's managed to pull it off.

network effects mostly. how Joe Rogan did it? not by being a genius. (by being mostly entertaining and a bit informative, and Lex built on this by being mostly informative and almost completely anti-entertaining)

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#39

Post by ggm »

ilyt wrote: post #34
ggm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IT projects fuck up all the time. Poor execution is baked into the human DNA. It doesn't take malice or crime to fail to be excellent. Neither the Newton nor Google glasses failed on corruption. Carmack is smart but he also failed to make his rocketry mark. Maybe individual brilliance in code is less important to execution of things than we (he?) thinks? Or maybe he only picks targets with hard end-goals versus the e…

He's one man. Could be him, could be the team, could be the overall management structure pushed the team into wasting time on dead-end pursuits.

Completely agree. Some fundamentals about VR aren't going away either. Headset weight for instance

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#40

Post by tomxor »

habibur wrote: post #17

He was talking about working on AI the other day. Artificial general intelligence "or die" type of challenge taking. Guess he's getting full time busy with that.

As grateful as I am for his contribution to VR, I can't wait.

He's not only brilliant and no BS, but seems to have a way of picking out and focusing on highly relevant and fruitful threads of progress without losing any nuance, with whatever he dips into. It will be exciting to see what might emerge if he pours all his effort into AGI.

Also his talent seems wasted battling Facebook, if they don't want to listen to him, why bother.

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