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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

#61

Post by spankalee »

lukev wrote: post #41

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 potentia…

This is what Google has been trying to do with Fuchsia and the fact is that you can't escape the product point of view because the products exist, already have an OS stack, and get pretty defensive when another team tells them they're going to replace their OS, or their core if the product team is Android or Chrome OS.

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

#62

Post by tanvach »

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.

Fun rumor: Google shut down the AR effort and transferred the team to project Fuchsia as a way to retain highly skilled employees. So essentially they didn’t have any real technical needs for a new OS.

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

#64

Post by tanvach »

jnwatson wrote: post #23

I'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.…

Yeah reverse engineering all the drivers is going to be a huge headache.

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

#65

Post by EGreg »

klik99 wrote: post #6

You could write a book on why it's practically impossible to create a new OS these days. Love Carmack for stating it so clearly. I also love that called out TempleOS, I also have a weird respect for it. Plan 9 is the probably the best example of a totally new OS and I hope someday it becomes viable because it's really a joy to use. But ultimately it just makes sense to adapt existing kernels / OS (say, arch) and adap…

OS isnt the hard part.

The driver ecosystem is the moat. Linux finally overcame it decades later

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

#66

Post by pipeline_peak »

Jonathan Blow is the world’s most successful hobbyist programmer. His whole thing is doing projects from scratch. Every game he made could be done in Unity with far less effort.

Most opinions of this man exists in a vacuum space isolated from the real world software industry. Building an OS from scratch is one of those examples.

It’s never seems like there’s a significant reason behind them other than………”I made dat :P”

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

#67

Post by [deleted] »

greggman65 wrote: post #26

And 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…

[deleted]

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

#68

Post by foldr »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #9

> 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.

Reading between the lines, it sounds like he got reported for giving a lot of what might kindly be described as unsolicited advice. The guy left Meta ages ago, but he apparently still can't let this one go.

If you're in the middle of trying to write a new operating system, then it's probably not helpful to have John Carmack standing over you repeatedly telling you that you shouldn't be doing it. In this case Carmack gets the last laugh. Then again, it is easy to get the last laugh by predicting that a project will fail, given that most projects do.

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

#69

Post by numpad0 »

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.

There's been a lot of anecdotal reports circulating that retweets don't work anymore, likes slightly better, quote tweets do best, links should be in replies, etc. They're hiding a lot of quote tweets as "unavailable" and shuffling thread orders as well. Twitter right now is not just biased, but they have been struggling for a long while to disrupt its resilient emergent meritocracy that don't favor Musk.
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