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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#921

Post by zmmmmm »

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…

There's a critical faulty assumption in your logic above ... we are on the verge of seeing multiple simultaneous technical barriers fall that will seriously alter your equation around comfort and immersion. micro-OLED screens are shipping this year which enable full immersion with pancake lenses at half the weight and greatly improved FOV. The next gen of chipsets will support resolutions and frame rates that eliminate screen door effect and nausea for a wide swathe of people.

Within 2 years we'll be looking at very different landscape for VR hardware. This is why people like Zuckerberg and companies like Apple are excited about it - they can see where the puck will be and they are skating to it, ignoring the critics operating on obsolete assumptions.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#922

Post by IIAOPSW »

bee_rider wrote: post #834
moralestapia wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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’…

The story from Carmack is also based on his word. Unless you've worked with him directly, everything you know about John Carmack is based on some or other's words.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#924

Post by cachvico »

baby wrote: post #829
LarsDu88 wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve is a great example of how this doesn't work in practice. Jeri Ellsworth got fired and revealed that the supposedly flat hierarchy at Valve is really composed of informal cliques - with the most influential groups having a direct line to the CEO/ Kinda what happened to communism in Russia, if you think about it

The flat org of fb I described is not really flat the way Valve is. Valve is truly flat from what I understand, whereas the one at facebook is not but encourage people to behave like it is.

I think I read that it's not flat since a few years back anyway

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#925

Post by IIAOPSW »

ruggeri wrote: post #842
gompertz wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I say this as someone who cares about language, and who has no dog in this Carmack dispute. I think you are overweighting a fairly simple grammatical error. The commenter expresses themself clearly and logically. It is possible that they don't speak English as a first language, or that they simply are not that careful about making grammatical mistakes. Not everyone is as pedantic about language as you or I may be. Un…

Thank you for saying everything I wanted to say.

I only add that the post above invokes some wildly spurious logic in counting the 5 instances of the same mistake as if they were 5 different mistakes. Such a basic error really makes me question his general reasoning ability.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#926

Post by masteranza »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #485
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…

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…

You're exactly right.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#927

Post by DonHopkins »

andybak wrote: post #612
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.

Oh the legs thing again. I don't want legs (or arms) until they are out of the uncanny valley. No legs is better than janky legs in the same way stylized graphics are better than bad "realistic" graphics.

In that case, then off with their heads, not just their legs!

Marc Zuckerberg's head is already uncanny in real life, but his avatar's head should be guilleitened.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#928

Post by Razengan »

fudgefactorfive wrote: post #218
Razengan wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rarely put my VR headset on because I have to COMMIT to it and stop doing everything else; i.e. no host OS's GUI is VR-friendly. Why did smartphones supersede computers in usage? and laptops supersede desktops? because of the low commitment barrier: something you can pick up and put down at any time without necessarily pausing other activities, is always going to be preferred by the masses. So all current VR is sit…

I completely agree with this sentiment. I think VR has the same issue that smartphones had at the start of their cycle, the UI/UX is not designed to intuitively mesh with how users actually want to use the system. Even things like keyboard inputs are just not quite there yet, resorting to clunky index-finger typing at best and type-by-laser at worst. I think we are moving towards a usable version of AR eventually (wi…

Yes, AR+VR should converge into something similar to the differentiation between windowed- vs fullscreen-mode today: AR should be translucent, non-intrusive visuals overlaid atop your vision of meatspace, and when you need to sit down and fully immerse yourself into a game or movie, you would temporarily switch to VR, on the same device.

So until we have lightweight and powerful-enough glasses — not bulky headsets — everything else is just a public-funded prototype on the way to the real goal.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#929

Post by grumbel »

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…

> It was Oculus Go, and by every metric is was a commercial, financial, and technical, disaster.

It was the second best selling VR headset at that time, only behind PSVR1. The only problem with it was that it came too late. GearVR had been around since 2015 already, Go was essentially just a standalone version of that, but it took until 2018 to release. That was simply to late, as a year later it was replaced by the Quest1 and 3DOF VR was killed.

Another problem with the Go was that Facebook didn't put effort into good 3DOF content. They never released a VR180-3D camera. Never build their own VR video platform. And finally they made Quest2 deliberately incompatible with Go, despite Quest1 still having some compatibility.

There was and still is a lot of unnecessary fracturing going on in the VR space, even among Meta's own headsets. I think the Go line should simple have been continued with a stronger focus on movie instead of gaming. The Nreal Air shows what is possible when going that direction and Meta with an 8 year head start should have an easy time matching that. Instead we only got Quest2, which is much more heavy and low resolution than it needs to be for a movie headset.

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