Isn't the core problem VR. It will never fly. I remember I had some glasses that you put your phone in. Worked perfectly. But VR is even more annoying than home 3D movies.
John Carmack Leaves Meta
601–610 of 1001 posts
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN is all about that cult of personality, we want to believe in heroic programmers (or founders) who singlehandedly change the world with their geinus clarity. Paul Graham said this, John Carmack said that and we lap it all up. It's been this way since the ancient times, and the stories of Hercules and Theseus. We mythologize these personalities, and in our mind they become demigods. But there's a reason the folk wis…
If you want a hero to idolize, select someone who's been dead for at least 100 years. Most of their foibles will be public knowledge by that time, so you probably won't be in for any rude surprises.
Even that might not be entirely safe, as Schrödinger's behaviour has only become widely known in recent years for example. (Although he died around 60 years ago, so not quite 100.)
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#603Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I think Portal is a perfect example of how slow to adapt the company has become. It's a fantastic video conferencing device, certainly the best at its price point. We happened to enter the pandemic with this device already available for sale, but we completely failed to capitalize on it. Thanks for your insight, but the Portal failure shouldn't be surprising. There are a large number of people who would never want t…
> There are a large number of people who would never want to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook infrastructure Have you ever heard of Whatsapp? More than a billion people use it for private communication daily. Maybe not in the US, but elsewhere on the planet. You know who owns Whatsapp? Meta does.
> There are a large number of people who would never want to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook infrastructure
Seriously, this is a really dense comment from previous poster. Sure people don't like the idea of a dedicated hardware appliance with camera and microphones from Meta but the idea that folks are so paranoid that they won't use any of Meta's private communications systems or infra is beyond out of touch with reality.
I had a couple models of Portal. Really useful products but they literally didn't iterate on adding features fast enough and they locked it out from the existing Android ecosystem. Too complacent IHMO. On top of that the built-in browser was a purposely limited version of chromium that seemed like whatever the custom user-agent was would just cause problems with all sorts of web-apps especially Google's (couldn't even sign into YouTube etc, got "unsupported browser" errors all the time).
The Portal TV is still the only good Consumer Home TV based VC system I've ever used (so good that its the only Portal device Cisco wouldn't ship WebEx on probably because it would be too competitive against their own hardware I suspect is the reason).
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#604Earlier quoted context omitted.
He might be considered by others as "boomer" that hasn't been relevant "since Quake III"
If so, then they missed the games that used id Tech 4 and id Tech 5 (almost impossible given the success of Doom 3), and how Carmack continued to invent truly unthinkable performance and fidelity enhancements to real time 3D graphics until the day he left for Occulus. Then at Occulus he translated that engineering talent into a ruthless attack on latency and other issues with VR at the time. He was even working on th…
I think this also sums up his weakness though in a megacorp like Meta. He's technically brilliant, and that can go a very long way. But in a large corporation, technical brilliance is secondary to excellence in leadership.
I remember reading an article in the '00s or '90s about how Id worked, and it just seemed not very scalable beyond Carmack.
And while he his companies have had great success, other '90s era peers - Valve and Epic - are on a whole other level today. Technical brilliance brought his company far, but it can't bring you to those heights.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#605Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lex's guest list is absurd. I'm honestly not sure how he's managed to pull it off.
Who else can bridge the neurotypical spectrum? Maybe Eric Weinstein from the portal but he stopped that.
Is that the finance guy who claimed he solved a theory of everything for physics?
This whole section of the so-called "intellectual dark web" should be treated with lots of skepticism.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#606”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…
If Carmack suggested changes to my code I'd implement them in a heartbeat. If he suggested changes to my business I'd be a bit more cautious.
Even if he said “change this to this” without any explanation why?
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lex's guest list is absurd. I'm honestly not sure how he's managed to pull it off.
He has the quality of being unformidable. The guests are very relaxed on his show I find. Tim Ferris is similar. Contrast to say Sam Harris, who although very erudite, perspicacious and articulate, asks paragraph long multipart questions and spends around 50% of his air time talking. Tyler Cowen is a better example of a formidable interviewer, who keeps things quite short and punchy and is always a little lighthearte…
Great explanation - Tyler Cowen is a good interviewer for sure. For some reason have never been able to get into Lex Fridman by contrast.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want a hero to idolize, select someone who's been dead for at least 100 years. Most of their foibles will be public knowledge by that time, so you probably won't be in for any rude surprises.
Even that might not be entirely safe, as Schrödinger's behaviour has only become widely known in recent years for example. (Although he died around 60 years ago, so not quite 100.)
Was he mean to his cat?
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just really weird to me that people are all shocked-Pikachu about Carmack wanting to be the auteur in this scenario and to wield Meta's effectively-infinite resources in the exact ways that he wanted. It's apparent from every interview and article about him that this is how he operates. It seems to have worked well for him in the past, but it was obviously going to be a major culture clash at Meta unless they ga…
He was likely to have more success at Meta than his AGI startup. When it comes to intelligence and cognition no one even knows where to begin. The same for studying the brain. And the neural networks in the brain don't resemble anything like the neural networks in current AI. I guess there's this idea that we'll wander into the right territory. That might work for other things but probably not for the most complicate…
> When it comes to intelligence and cognition no one even knows where to begin
Is it true, though? There is quite nice literature out there, surely John has read these papers during his bootstrap period:
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#610Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
For some values of "no one". VR has been hanging on quite nicely despite repeated reports of it's demise. The problem is that some industry people keep expecting it to be iPhone huge and it's never going to be iPhone huge.
So - the truth is somewhere inbetween "no one" and "every one". Something above "niche" but below "mass market".