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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#51

Post by bravetraveler »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #28
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…

> This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption. I worked at a medium-sized company that went through a phase of hiring ex-FAANG people, thinking we'd improve our quality by implementing FAANG practices. It did the opposite: The ex-FAANG people were absolutely masterful at self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for them…

Just here to echo a similar experience

- FAANG competitor that is (thankfully) left out of the acronym

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#52

Post by Gigachad »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #14
etchalon wrote: post #11

Based on that hour-long talk, I'd say Carmack just had a fundamentally different set of priorities. He seemed to be focused on latency and scale, where Meta seems to be pivoting to fidelity and graphics.

He’s probably the best graphics programmer in the world so I would trust his read on the priorities over whatever Meta manager handles that project

Given the fact that the metaverse is widely mocked for looking like a Wii game, they probably do need to spend more time on graphics.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#54

Post by dinobones »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #42
rvz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Is AI really grifting? It's not like mom and pop can sink their savings into AI tech and lose it all to scams, etc. like they can with crypto. At worst some big investors sink a big seed round in and never get it back from a 'grifting' AI company--IMHO no real harm done, if you're an angel investor you're mature enough to deal with getting burned it's just part of the risk (and no one is going to cry for someone rich…

AI in its current form is grifting. Trying to actually productionize anything with GPT3 for example is a nightmare, it can actively lie to you, the embeddings are pretty sub-par, and inference is pretty expensive. But you hear nothing but praise from it here on HN, and people act like the 30 minute web app they built and charge $15/month for is going to change the industry.

But it's getting better. GPT3.5/InstructGPT and now ChatGPT are showing incredible leaps in performance. Less hallucination, more coherence, it's getting better over time.

So guess who wins and profits once the tech catches up? Is it the people like me sitting on the sidelines and poo-pooing the tech? Or is it the people who have been in the space for a while?

Just the act of being "in proximity" to a technology can be so valuable. I know first-hand, I was an Objective-C developer for pure passion, because I loved clean MacOS apps and wanted to build myself tools. Well guess what? That proximity to Objective-C, familiarity with Xcode, and knowledge of Apple API patterns paid handsomely when the iPhone came out and I became an iOS developer. The same happened for WatchOS.

You see this pattern in technology over and over again. And I have no reason to think that AI/large language models will be an exception.

TLDR: It's kind of a grift. Carmack likely won't advance the field of AI or make a major breakthrough. But I have no doubt the infrastructure and talent he surrounds himself with will be able to manifest something profitable when the time comes.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#55

Post by wpietri »

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…

> sounds remarkably like corruption

In the sense of external entities illegally hoovering up cash, I doubt it. For me this seems more like Soviet central planning, where real-world success is secondary to conformance to big ideas imposed from top personalities. It can work when the idea is correct, useful, and resonant with the people implementing it. But when the idea's off, political realities prevent honest feedback from rising up to the level where it can have an effect, so everybody just goes through the motions and things slowly fall apart. A reality explained by the ancient bit of capitalist samizdat, "The Plan": https://web.mnstate.edu/alm/humor/ThePlan.htm

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#56

Post by JohnFen »

santoshalper wrote: post #6
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #2

There is a pay wall, so I haven't read the article. I just want to put it out there: Did this seem predictable to anyone? I had the sense he was unsatisfied and Meta's public perception, particularly in Carmack's department, seemed to be plummeting. It seemed very likely that this would happen, but maybe I'm projecting too much. I imagined myself being deeply ungratified in his role.

It always seemed like a poor fit to me. From the begining, Facebook has always been an unctuous, slimy organization and Carmack seems to be a relatively high-integrity human. I'm honestly surprised it lasted as long as it did.

Of the many things that cooled my interest in VR, the presence of Facebook in the space is near the top.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#57

Post by jackosdev »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #28
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…

> This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption. I worked at a medium-sized company that went through a phase of hiring ex-FAANG people, thinking we'd improve our quality by implementing FAANG practices. It did the opposite: The ex-FAANG people were absolutely masterful at self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for them…

I worked for the three largest mining companies in the world, and a much smaller miner before that. The small company had 1 geologist, 1 mining engineer, 1 general manager and an office admin person. The next place I went to was a similar sized mine with about 200 people in the office, and many more support people in the city. The resource was 1:1 coal to dirt and much higher quality, compared to the previous place which was 1:13 coal to dirt and way harder to mine. The large miners have the best resources in the world so they can afford to over-hire, those people don't actually do anything but make things worse doing "improvement projects", and then use bullshit charts to show why it's better. We had a huge downturn in mining about 15 years ago and they fired about 15,000 people across Australia, and overall production improved! I only work for startups now where I can be a core engineer, I had a role before where I knew I wasn't doing anything valuable and it's soul crushing, I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers who can't break free from the golden handcuffs and actually do something valuable with their time.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#58

Post by didericis »

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…

The more I understand about how many risks and problems are involved in running an organization as large and with as high a social profile as Meta, with all the accrued obligations and entrenched loyalties and overpromising managers that glom on over time, all while building new unproven technological infrastructure, the more sympathy I have for how blurry the line between corruption and implosion is.

I don't think anybody trusts Facebook at this point, and the idea of being forced into a pay for play virtual world controlled by a single company is understandably scary and deserving of criticism, but at the same time I've done social VR and I truly and honestly believe it's a vast improvement over any other existing kind of remote interaction. I actually get and believe in the vision, it just seems like the execution is really bloated/bad and they tried to way over abstract things/make things way too big way too early. I could see how spending that amount of money would be easy to do if you're trying to create universal abstractions for making, selling, creating, stitching services for an interactive set of 3D environments together that is easy for people to make "apps" for, building data centers, accounting for latency, building out supply chains, subsiding hardware, doing R&D on tracking, doing social research, and dealing with entrenched employees and middle managers accustomed to "the cushy tech worker lifestyle".

You really have to try social VR to understand how much better it is than video chatting or text channels. There's absolutely something to it. There's so much more information in the way people interact about what their intentions are, how they feel about what you're saying, what they're interested in, etc when you're interacting in VR with a 3D avatar.

All that being said, the virtual real estate and clear corporate "branding" angle is really gross, regardless of whether the money gets shady/you could really call that "corrupt". I prefer the wide range in quality but genuine effort and creativeness you get with a free and open ecosystem like VRChat.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#59

Post by wpietri »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #42
rvz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Is AI really grifting? It's not like mom and pop can sink their savings into AI tech and lose it all to scams, etc. like they can with crypto. At worst some big investors sink a big seed round in and never get it back from a 'grifting' AI company--IMHO no real harm done, if you're an angel investor you're mature enough to deal with getting burned it's just part of the risk (and no one is going to cry for someone rich…

Your theory is that it isn't a scam if the people can afford to lose the money? That is certainly not how I think of them.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#60

Post by madaxe_again »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #28
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…

> This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption. I worked at a medium-sized company that went through a phase of hiring ex-FAANG people, thinking we'd improve our quality by implementing FAANG practices. It did the opposite: The ex-FAANG people were absolutely masterful at self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for them…

This isn’t something limited to big tech companies - this is ubiquitous. Humans automatically optimise for the greatest reward for the least effort. It turns out, office politics and self-promotion are a lot better for your career than being good at what you do.

Therefore, everywhere you go, people are usually where they are not because of competence in their professional domain, but due to competence in the social arts. You see true creativity, throughout history, from tiny enterprises (a fistful of people, no hierarchy to compete for, an actual shared goal) and from individuals. Never corporations. They just do more of the same, at scale, which makes up for their aching inefficiencies.

I watched my business grow from a fistful of coders to a political hellscape. Even no hierarchy has a hierarchy. Us apes just can’t be without it.

Many labour under the misapprehension that hard work will be noticed and rewarded. This is not so, and never will be, as long as humans are involved.

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