Can someone please paste the letter? I haven’t had fb account for years now.
John Carmack Leaves Meta
651–660 of 1001 posts
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#652Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it was the left wing driving Facebook it would not collect so much data. They’re the ones who wrote about big brother, not the other guys.
Depends on whether you see the Stasi and KGB as "left" or "right" organizations. It doesn't take a whole lot of thought to convince yourself that these are the wrong terms to use when discussing the problem of large-scale data collection and misuse. As for Orwell, he was a socialist, for what little that's worth.
Especially since KGB was created to supercede Чека, which was created by a hardcore Bolshevik.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#653I'm surprised he's able to be this open about it. Wouldn't his contract have a non-disparagement clause?
[deleted]
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#654He just founded a new company called Keen Technologies to work on AGI. Not surprising that he wants to focus on that now. He's been part-time at Meta for years. I'm interested to find out what kind of business model he's planning for an AGI company. Edit: he posted his leaving message publicly here: https://www.facebook.com/100006735798590/posts/pfbid0iPixEvP... Additional public comments on Twitter here: https://twi…
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…
Or maybe you know he is simply a lot more excited about AI than VR now and that's it. No need to stick with something that doesn't excite you any more just because you were excited about it at one point and spent several years working on it :-)
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#655Earlier 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…
I've watched many Carmack videos over the years and he never complained about the team not following him or people working for him being not good enough, he always praised the work done and explained in very fine details why the decisions where taken one way or another. When he wanted to remove a pebble from his shoe, he talked extensively of the company decisions, in the higher ups, which is more than fair given his…
Well, if John Romero vouches for him... rolls eyes
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3nxd3/how-kindness-saved-th...
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#656Seems a little off to be calling out perf metrics when the whole system hasn't found product-market fit yet
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#657I’m a strong believer in dictatorship at companies. Every team has someone with ultimate decision making power, as does every project with a project leader, and above teams are leaders who have authority above them, and so on. Of course there are meetings and discussions but there is always someone with the authority to make a decision that everyone has to respect. Honestly it benefits everyone. ICs like that authori…
Finding good devs is hard enough without a dictatorial style of leadership. I find that people like democracy, for some reason.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#658> [edit: I was being overly poetic here, as several people have missed the intention. As a systems optimization person, I care deeply about efficiency. When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul. I was likening observing our organization's performance to seeing a tragically low number on a profiling tool.] as someone who spends a lot of time…
I think the 5% was a metaphor for how the org is barely able to utilize its resources.
Also wouldn't React JS/TS be an instance where you are fully utilizing resources? Not from a raw machine performance standpoint, but from a developer efficiency standpoint. Using nested for loops instead of a series of JS array functions is way more efficient but it is not even close to worth it. Machines are so powerful these days also that sacrificing readability/maintainability for performance doesn't really make sense to me.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#659I think Carmack is a great engineer. Part of that is being great at communication.
And he is! Usually. But this paragraph is quite hard to follow:
> If I am trying to sway others, I would say that an org that has only known inefficiency is ill prepared for the inevitable competition and/or belt tightening, but really, it is the more personal pain of seeing a 5% GPU utilization number in production. I am offended by it.
I think what he means is that he is offended by inefficiency in itself. Not because of any secondary ills inefficiency causes but just because he is that way.
He must know that hist last post will be read by many. Even if it would not leak, and only circulate inside facebook many non-developers would read it. And even if you are a developer "seeing a 5% GPU utilization number in production" might mean nothing to you. I assume it is bad from the way he phrases it. Maybe it should be higher? Probably. But honestly who cares about the GPU utilisation if the app does what it should in a performant way?
He could have just wrote. "... pain of seeing an application waste resources in production." And then nobody has to spend mental cycles trying to guess what does 5% GPU utilisation means for him.
(And it is absolutely a guesswork. I'm myself working in a team responsible for the performance of a performance critical application and I love to see 5% gpu utilisation. My job is not to fill up the GPU, but to do something useful for the business. If an app can do that with only 5% of the GPU all the better!)
And then in the next paragraph in an edit he tried to explain himself. Probably because people complained that they don't understand what he is saying. As if you can alleviate confusion by explaining more. Instead of you know, fixing the source of confusion.
I'm a bit sad that he didn't had anyone help him edit such an important announcement before he posted it.
> Make better decisions and fill your products with “Give a Damn”!
Now that I love! I want that printed on a t-shirt. :)
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#660I’m a strong believer in dictatorship at companies. Every team has someone with ultimate decision making power, as does every project with a project leader, and above teams are leaders who have authority above them, and so on. Of course there are meetings and discussions but there is always someone with the authority to make a decision that everyone has to respect. Honestly it benefits everyone. ICs like that authori…
Finding good devs is hard enough without a dictatorial style of leadership. I find that people like democracy, for some reason.
As a dev in an XL org, I agree with the parent comment: if decision-making power isn't clear from the outset, people hold important-feeling weekly sync meetings for months and then wonder why they can't hit the deadline. Also everyone disagrees as to what the product that we were building in the first place even was because nobody was in charge of clearly delineating it.