Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

John Carmack Leaves Meta

facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 1001 posts

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#581

Post by seanmcdirmid »

_the_inflator wrote: post #462
wpietri wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very interesting to me that he's giving up on VR entirely. If he thought it was just an issue with Facebook, presumably he'd jump in somewhere else and get the impact he was looking to have. That's another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhere. Or rather, half of it isn't. Oculus-style VR is two best in one: 3D persistent virtual worlds and stereoscopic facehugger interfaces. The former has had gre…

Try it yourself. Strap something 8 hours or longer around your head, don't move, because every small tremor distorts the vision of the device. VR in its current form is eye cocaine, nothing more. Why watch poppy avatars hop around in a virtual reality, while you are bound to do nothing? In every way, VR should be restricted to very few use cases, not to - hello Zuck - rebuild reality completely and hereby track every…

I only use Abe for fitness apps about 1 hour a day and frankly the weight isn’t a problem for that period of time with intense movements.

In fact I think the other use cases are bogus, everything else is unimpressive to me except the ability to have a decent fitness experience with FitXR or Beatsaber.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#582

Post by sesm »

doktorhladnjak wrote: post #349
Blue111 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FB culture is way too positive and happy oh wow.. never thought they could be happy at FB

I’d describe it more as optimism than happiness. You gotta believe in the future vision, how great a place this is, etc. The hope is that it creates a can-do culture. Downside is that it can create a culture where no one feels safe criticizing bad ideas.

It’s possible to deliver criticism in an optimistic way, if it’s impersonal and concrete (according to M Seligman). BTW, that’s also a standard for academic criticism. But there is a difference between allowing only optimistic criticism and banning criticism at all. That’s the problem with both tech culture and academia these days.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#584

Post by varjag »

ryandrake wrote: post #322
Buttons840 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I feel like this a lot. I don't know if it's a bias of some kind but it feels right. I suppose it's selection bias. I don't know how to market, but apparently the marketing people do because we have customers. I do know about my corner of the system though, and when my advice is ignored it usually turns out I was right in the end.

At MegaCompanies, being right, having evidence, and trying to persuade just isn’t enough, as John Fucking Carmack figured out. It’s more like High School. You need to be in the right clique or have the ear of the right Very Important Person. When you send that E-mail and say “We should do X because Y and Z…” people stop reading at “because” and just go look in the company directory for your name. If you’re high enoug…

> What’s surprising to me is how someone like Carmack didn’t have enough totem-pole clout just from who he is!

He is a game developer. Some people now at Facebook have breakthroughs in Computer Science on their resumes.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#585

Post by ghaff »

eddiewithzato wrote: post #549
danuker wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I couldn't believe Facebook bet so much on VR, and especially a low-quality 3D MMORPG full of micropayments. With no LEGS. How long have video game characters had legs?? I feel dizzy even playing Minecraft on a plain screen. I won't ever buy VR goggles. Let alone ones bound to a Facebook account.

Zuck must’ve been high when OKing VR, I still think Google Glass is the way forward with augmented reality. Very comfortable and isn’t trying to rewrite how humans communicate. I have VR and it is immersive, but way too uncomfortable.

If you imagine arbitrarily good technology VR still feels like a niche while it's easy to imagine lots of uses for a lightweight stylish internet-connected HUD that supplies realtime information--even if we're talking years in the future. I tend to believe this is one of the next consumer (and industrial) device categories but a long way to go as a wearable. (We'll presumably see it on a phone first.)

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#586

Post by tiffanyh »

throwaway_8989 wrote: post #452
Arjuna wrote: post #111

”It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I'm evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I…

Throwaway because it could be easy to identify my position from my normal account name. Carmack is many thing, engineering genius above them. However, he would frequently wade into areas where he had no experience, demand others do what he said, ignore evidence he was wrong, bully people, and disparage entire teams who were doing good, and in some cases legally required, work. When data proved his idea was wrong, he…

Sounds like Steve Jobs.

Someone who is visionary, accustom to being in charge, and uses their intuition/gut as their compass because they fully understand the buck stops with them.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#587

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

osigurdson wrote: post #580
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than that, I think it's important to remember that no one, even a technologist as strong as Carmack, is going to get more right than wrong. Carmack has been a huge inspiration for me over the years. I grew up eagerly reading his plan files. But if we look at the big picture, a lot of his big calls haven't in fact worked out. His vision for the future of graphics was to stick closer to the original OpenGL state m…

Is it possibly because he lacks the academic rigour? I don't think casually reading math (or any) texts as a $50M+ net worth individual is remotely the same as having to study and pass tests like a regular person.

I'm an autodidact and that's something I definitely struggle with. I'm good at getting the "gist" of something by scanning fast, but then I get hung up in the details because I didn't go back and actually work through the formalisms in the paper.

JC strikes me as someone that would do the math however, or at least would code up something that probed it real quick.

Just to ramble about another point I wish I'd made in my post above: I've had some success in my career by depersonalizing these kind of debates. Instead of "my plan" vs "your plan" try to frame it as everyone enumerating the possible plans as a group, brainstorming on benefits vs risks on each of them, etc. So if I set myself up as facilitator on the white board aggregating everything, without pushing my own view much, I find it tends to get less into back and forth arguments. Not a silver bullet but that depersonalization is a big part of how I think about these dilemmas now.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#588

Post by nvarsj »

JohnBooty wrote: post #555
heather45879 wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem. It’s cool in concept but whose going to shell out cash to be tethered to a machine wearing goggles sitting in a chair? AR has potential but even that is marginally better than alternative solutions. Also, I don’t know about y’all but I don’t trust Facebook so I don’t trust Meta. They are a data-leach. We still probably have a decade or more to go with this tec…

Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem. I feel like this is definitely the elephant in the room everybody is ignoring. Almost nobody gives a hoot about VR! I'm a software engineer with a lot of (surprise, surprise) nerdy/geeky/whatever friends and interest in VR is close to zero. A few friends vouched for various games like Half-Life:Alyx and Beat Saber, but nobody was claiming it was a life alterin…

I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve. It's a kind of gameplay that can't be repeated with 2d screens. I really do think it could be revolutionary, based on playing that game alone. If you can get ahold of a headset and a powerful gaming PC - I recommend giving it a try.

The problems right now are very fundamental. The quest 2 out of the box is supremely uncomfortable. Casual users will put it on and not want to use it due to VR nausea and the discomfort of the headset after wearing it for 20 minutes. The hardware is not powerful enough to create an experience like Alyx - all the headset games just have basic polygons and colors. Resolution is still poor, FOV is poor. We're still in the infancy of immersion/comfort/usability. I played Alyx on the Quest 1 which I actually think had better immersion due to the OLED screens.

IMO the trick is going to be whether Meta can pull off a usable, immersive device in the next 5 years without their revenues completely tanking. The problems to overcome are really hard and still at basic research level which takes years to develop. The other issue is the killer game or app that gets people into VR en-masse.

I guess my point is I think writing VR off completely is a mistake - like someone saying what is the point of a cell phone in the 1980s when they were giant bricks and cost a fortune. VR will get good enough at some point that it's like putting on a pair of glasses and stepping into another world without any friction. It's just a question of how long until we get there and who will bring it to us.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#589

Post by wpietri »

chimprich wrote: post #507
wpietri wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very interesting to me that he's giving up on VR entirely. If he thought it was just an issue with Facebook, presumably he'd jump in somewhere else and get the impact he was looking to have. That's another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhere. Or rather, half of it isn't. Oculus-style VR is two best in one: 3D persistent virtual worlds and stereoscopic facehugger interfaces. The former has had gre…

> That's another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhere That's not Carmack's opinion. To quote from his post: "Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place." "the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world" The m…

When people say one thing with their words and another with their actions, I tend to believe the actions. And "we made cool hardware that doesn't have much practical use" is not the most ringing of endorsements.

Also suspicious to me is the way that Meta still isn't releasing actual use statistics. They're happy to release DAU numbers for Facebook. Where are the equivalent numbers for Oculus? What Carmack says is consistent with my suspicion that a lot of people bought the Quest to try it but don't use it regularly. Which would explain why they keep those numbers very quiet.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#590

Post by wpietri »

mjfl wrote: post #514
chimprich wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhere That's not Carmack's opinion. To quote from his post: "Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place." "the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world" The m…

The main problem with VR is that it is a gimmick that people don't want to use as their main medium of interaction whether with games or job communication.

I see you're getting downvoted, but that's my suspicion as well. Since the 1850s, stereoscopic 3D has had many waves of short-term popularity but has produced no lasting impact. From the Brewster Stereoscope to the Viewmaster to multiple tries at 3D movies and TV, to 30 years of "VR will break out once we improve the tech", each time people get very excited about the novelty and think it will change the world. And each time it doesn't.

The simple answer here is that people's brain hardware is already quite good at turning flat 2D representations into 3D mental experiences, so stereoscopy doesn't add much. Making it, as you say, a gimmick. The historically cyclical interest in the gimmick suggests that it's mainly appealing as a novelty.

Post reply on HN