https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1961172409920491849
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John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
21–30 of 675 posts
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#22My objection is that there is no universe in which Meta can be trusted with direct access to your raw gaze tracking data.
The only thing I can imagine that would be more invasive would require a brain implant.
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#23I've written a lot of low level software, BSPs, and most of an OS, and the main reason to not write your own OS these days is silicon vendors. Back in the day, they would provide you a spec detailed enough that you could feasibly write your own drivers.
These days, you get a medium-level description and a Linux driver of questionable quality. Part of this is just laziness, but mostly this is a function of complexity. Modern hardware is just so complicated it would take a long time to completely document, and even longer to write a driver for.
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#24> they also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad This is madness. The safe space culture has really gone too far.
Something tells me that if we heard the other side of the story it might hit different. There's a lot of wiggle room in what "making his team members feel bad" could mean, and I would be surprised if constructively voiced criticism would have gotten someone written up.
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#25> they also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad This is madness. The safe space culture has really gone too far.
I'll offer a different interpretation:
If a professional can't give critical feedback in a professional setting without being rude or belittling others, then they need to improve their communication skills.
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#26And yet, Sony did it, Nintendo did it, both have been pretty succeesful.
We also need to be clear what an OS is. Is it "darwin" or "macOS" - they have different scopes.
Things I'd want from an OS for an XR device.
1. Fast boot. I don't want to have to wait 2-3-4-5 minutes to reboot for those times I need to reboot.
I feel like Nintendo figured this out? It updates the OS in the background somehow and reboot is nearly instant.
2. Zero jank. I'm on XR, if the OS janks in any way people will get sick AND perceive the product as sucking. At least I do. iOS is smooth, Androind is jank AF.
Do any of the existing OSes provide this? Sure, maybe take an existing OS an modify it, assuming you can.
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#27What if instead of writing the entire OS, a company were to pick up an existing “hobby” OS and refine it? For example any of the systems listed in Carmack’s post. Or perhaps Serenity OS, RedoxOS, etc.
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Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#28I think people have forgotten about Google Fuchsia which I guess is a good sign for a new OS. They’ve done quite well in deploying it seamlessly to their consumer devices.
I thought they rolled back all of those efforts. What devices shipping today come with Fuchsia installed?
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#29https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1961172409920491849
Didn't even realize this was a thread and not a single tweet until you posted this link. Guess that's the downsides of not having a Twitter acct anymore.
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#30tbh linux has quite a bit of cruft in it these days at the syscall and interface layer.
if youre apple, it does make sense to do stuff from scratch. i think in a way, software guys wind up building their own prisons. an api is created to solve problem X given world Y, but world Y+1 has a different set of problems - problems that may no longer be adequately addressed given the api invented for X.
people talk about "rewrite everything in rust" - I say, why stop there? lets go down to the metal. make every byte, every instruction, every syscall a commodity. imagine if we could go all the way back to bare metal programming, simply by virtue of the LLM auto-coding the bootloader, scheduler, process manager, all in-situ.
the software world is full of circularities like that. we went from Mainframe -> local -> mainframe, why not baremetal -> hosted -> baremetal?