John Carmack Leaves Meta • Hacker News Board

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#831

Post by baby » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 11:18 PM UTC

civopsec wrote: post #711

baby wrote: post #626

I see a lot of negative comment on the other thread and on twitter so I feel the need to comment as well. It’d be great to get the perspective from someone who worked there, but I can offer mine as an outsider (worked on a different team at fb). Back then, I would religiously read every workplace posts from Carmack (that wasn’t hidden to other orgs). I loved everything he was saying, I always found it really insightf…

I don’t understand what the problem would be for him if this was the environment. He’s respected as a technologist and had strong opinions on technology. He’s not merely a tech. savant without social skills. Again, this assumes that this was what the environment was like. Not that it was just like that in name only.

I think he probably expected to be able to lead by authority, and tbh maybe he could have been such a steve jobs-like leader? But who knows. It’s also possible that there were much more talented people than him, not as public or beloved as him, who ended up winning technical decisions.

Large organizations all have all sorts of issues, and from the outside the devices that RL released were huge technologicL successes. I think we should acclaim the progress we’ve made so far in the field.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#832

Post by brezelgoring » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 11:20 PM UTC

didibus wrote: post #815

brezelgoring wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the monster hardware it has, Oculus (at least in games) can only rival a PS2 in terms of polygon count. Pair that with the 5% GPU utilization metric and you get that this device can handle a whole lot more load and it's just being used inefficiently. I'd even use the word 'wrong', people within Meta made 'good enough' libraries and called it a day, and he's mad about that. This thing has billions of dollars poure…

I don't think that's what he meant. It sounded more like he meant that he is seeing their organization be inefficient at working on the right things and making progress towards VR. And as a person who cares deeply about efficiency of resources, that pains him to see so much human resources (in this case) being wasted when they could accomplish so much more so much quicker (in his opinion) with better focus and direct…

I interpreted it too literally, you're probably right.

Ultimately we're talking about the same thing, here.

Good day, didibus!

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#833

Post by jauer » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 11:30 PM UTC

rightbyte wrote: post #571

jauer wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is that Oculus has all the overhead from Meta’s regulatory compliance burden, so they can’t escape some of the most frustrating pressures.

Regulatory compliance would be quite easy by just not doing spywares.

Meta could have a subsidiary that does nothing but stamp out manhole covers. That subsidiary would have a far higher compliance burden than any other manhole cover manufacturer.

Their past choices have consequences. It’s too late for them to “just not” do anything to reduce that burden.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#834

Post by bee_rider » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 11:36 PM UTC

moralestapia wrote: post #532

iforgotpassword wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah well, you're anonymous, so you might as well be someone with a huge ego who got their idea shut down by Carmack once and is still bitter about it. More often than not, when people think they "prove something wrong with data" it's more that they're "taking some data and interpret in a way that fits their standpoint". Carmack has proven enough times in the past that he's able to deliver, that he can push technolog…

>who got their idea shut down by Carmack once and is still bitter about it Nice fantasy you created there to support your argument. Have you heard of "don't shoot the messenger" ? I admire Carmack as much all other hackers around. I don't sympathize with many of Meta's practices. Still, it's entirely plausible that GP's experience holds truth. I've been around the equivalent of people like Carmack in academia and all…

The person’s whole story was entirely based around their anonymous word. The follow up comment reads to me like a narrative way of pointing they out.

We don’t really know, I guess, what happened internally. But:

* Carmack has tossed some grenades as he left, so if there’s a real story there I guess we’re likely to hear about it from some non-anonymous sources soon enough if he was a real pain.

* He’s gone now, so we’ll see to what extent he was holding them back shortly.

I bet we hear nothing and they never release anything, but I won’t claim to have an uncle who works at ~~Nintendo~~ Facebook.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#835

Post by bee_rider » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 11:44 PM UTC

somehnacct3757 wrote: post #538

comfypotato wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At risk of upsetting this thread’s balance and reducing it to negativity: I prefer your parent comment’s interpretation of the Go. “Ahead of its time”? Technology is the last space where a newfangled product would lose momentum by being released to early. I’m open to being proved ignorant here. Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Subscription music services like…

I've always thought that TiVo was way ahead of its time. The company is still alive but it feels weird to talk about it in present tense when we've got Roku, Chromecast, Firestick, and Apple TV. Even the era of cable provider DVRs made me feel like TiVo was ahead of its time!

Maybe as a company.

The idea of the actual device seems very tied to a particular time, not ahead of it. The point was to record broadcast TV (so, reliant on the time when broadcast TV was the main way of getting TV) and the ability to skip ads (nowadays any streaming service worth watching doesn’t have ads anyway).

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#836

Post by goostavos » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 11:53 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #126

throwabayhay wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted. I have no reason to doubt that in the particular corner of your organization that may well have been the case, but you cannot generalize this over the whole field. As stated elsewhere, I never played any game to be promoted, I simply never consciously sought the goal of promotion, and I was promoted anyway just beca…

We have multiple people giving their anecdotes saying big tech positions emphasize self-promotion, and one anecdote (yours) saying they don't. So, sincere question: for those of us who haven't worked at a FAANG, why should we believe that your experience is the norm while the other people's is the "corner"?

>why should we believe

Oh, good lord.

Listen, you're talking about companies with hundreds of thousands of employees scattered all across the globe. Do you really think there's one homogeneous culture across everything? Single orgs can have the population of small towns. "culture" is a local phenomenon.

There are promotion oriented people. There are not promotion oriented people. There are mutants who work 12 hours every day and call into meeting while on vacation because they want to climb the ladder. There are teams which are hyper focused on visibility and self-promotion, and there are teams which just quietly churn out good tech. There are hundreds of thousands of people. You're going to get different experiences. I'm not sure why that's such a crazy idea to you.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#837

Post by bee_rider » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 11:53 PM UTC

richliss wrote: post #534

throwaway_8989 wrote: post #452

Earlier 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 worked with someone who was a bona fide development genius about 10 years ago and he was a CTO and co-founder at the time and considered himself to be able to input into any conversation with people who were domain experts in fields that he wasn't. I remember him overruling the Head of Design and enforcing Arial to be the typeface used for the corporate brand because it was the typeface was present on more computer…

What’s wrong with Arial? I mean I know it is disliked by typography fans because it is a ripoff of the popular Helvetica. But like, moral concerns aside or whatever, as a slightly worse ripoff of a good and popular typeface, it is unsurprisingly fairly visually appealing…

It seems like a reasonable product decision given that most people don’t care about typeface history.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#838

Post by JohnBooty » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 11:55 PM UTC

nvarsj wrote: post #588

JohnBooty wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 supre…

    I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx 
    opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve.

I've had a lot of friends who liked a few VR games like Alyx but never really touched their headsets after that.

My feeling is less "VR stinks" and more "yes, it can be a really nifty gaming controller/display but there's a big gap between 'nifty gaming thing' and Zuckerberg's opium dream of a fulltime VR revolution."

    The other issue is the killer game or app that gets people into VR en-masse.

We've already had a few five star VR games, so I don't think that's sufficient.

Maybe the "killer app" is more of a paradigm or framework. Like how we didn't have killer GUI applications until Xerox/Apple/Microsoft created the environment in which those apps could be created.

But, I don't know. Fundamentally I just don't think people want to strap these things to their heads.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#839

Post by blobbers » Sun, Dec 18, 2022, 12:01 AM UTC

Meta has made the mistake of trying to build the killer app, rather than building the killer App Store.

Apple software is garbage for the most part; they outsource software dev to the entire universe and take a 30% cut.

Meta should be doing the same thing but instead they are spending 10B to get people to play horizon world, a wii graphics chat world app.

They should be incentivizing developers of games like world of Warcraft to build a quest 2 interface; 100M addicted users who want a more immersive world.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#840

Post by wucaworld » Sun, Dec 18, 2022, 12:06 AM UTC

I'm very curious what he means about the software not being right. I haven't played with the Meta Quest but my experience with HoloLens 2 is absolutely shit on the software side. Microsoft used to be decent at software (this is opinion but I quite liked Win32 and MFC back in their day). The HoloLens 2 software stack is just ridiculous on so many levels (they try to shoehorn Windows and Universal Apps, for the actual innovative 3D apps, you just use Unity or Unreal???). I could not believe my eyes when Microsoft's developer documentation tells me to use a different commercial entities software framework for 3D app development.

This is again a controversial point (but hey ... so is the letter being discussed) .. isn't the software framework for the 3D rendering, spatial awareness the future software platform (what Windows was or Android and iOS are today)???

I'm curious if this is the issue Carmack seems pissed about. Clearly there is a story here.