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John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

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Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#41

Post by lukev »

This is completely right from a product point of view, which is Carmack's argument.

But I have wondered why one of these companies with billions of dollars to burn hasn't tried to create something new as a strategic initiative. Yes, there wouldn't be any ROI for years, and yes, the first several products on the platform would probably be better off on something more traditional.

But the long term value could potentially be astronomical.

Just another case of quarterly-report-driven decision making, I suppose. Sigh.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#42

Post by trollied »

webdevver wrote: post #30

tbh 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 "re…

You can still do “unsafe” stuff in rust, and people do. It’s perfectly possible to write safe C and C++ these days. And you don’t have to deal with a borrow checker, and a very small pool of developers available to hire.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#44

Post by belval »

tanvach wrote: post #16

I 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.

Isn't that somewhat debatable? Originally they were aiming at much more (chromebook OS for example) but seems like they settled for Google Home only as their scope.

Still a very interesting project, but that feels like a similar story, for limited use cases (a smart thermostat/speaker with specific hardware) it works, but for wider use cases with heterogeneus hardware and complex interfaces (actual screen, peripherals) it didn't work.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#46

Post by AceJohnny2 »

blkhp19 wrote: post #28
tanvach wrote: post #16

I 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?

Google Nest Hub

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#47

Post by aschla »

blkhp19 wrote: post #28
tanvach wrote: post #16

I 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?

According to Wikipedia, looks like only the Nest Nub.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#48

Post by AceJohnny2 »

trollied wrote: post #42
webdevver wrote: post #30

tbh 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 "re…

You can still do “unsafe” stuff in rust, and people do. It’s perfectly possible to write safe C and C++ these days. And you don’t have to deal with a borrow checker, and a very small pool of developers available to hire.

> It’s perfectly possible to write safe C and C++ these days.

It's also very hard to do so.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#49

Post by cubefox »

thrance wrote: post #40
cubefox wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Twitter algorithm is open source, unlike the algorithm for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc. I'm not aware of any evidence for bias in the algorithm.

It's not though. The GitHub repo was never updated once. Here's an experiment for you: open X in a new private tab and count political posts, see how many of them are far right. Bias is evident.

> The GitHub repo was never updated once.

Pretty sure that's false: I remember seeing the recent commit that made Grok misbehave.

> Here's an experiment for you: open X in a new private tab and count political posts, see how many of them are far right. Bias is evident.

Go to Bluesky and count far left posts. The result will be similar, because political bubbles form by themselves.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#50

Post by 0xb0565e486 »

I'd love a truly new OS, but I just don’t know what it would look like at this point? "New OS" ideas tend to converge on the same trunk.

Building a hobby OS taught me how little is just "software". The CPU sets the rules. Page tables exist because the MMU says so. Syscalls are privilege flips. Task switches are register loads and TLB churn. Drivers are interrupt choreography. The OS to me is just policy wrapped around fixed machinery.

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