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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

#281

Post by jayd16 »

Aurornis wrote: post #133

> They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad I've only seen John Carmack's public interactions, but they've all been professional and kind. It's depressing to imagine HR getting involved because someone's feelings had been hurt by an objective discussion from a person like John Carmack. I'm having flashbacks to the times in my career when coworker…

If you're in high leadership, even just being pessimistic can be a massive morale killer. It doesn't mean that going to HR is the right call but I could see how someone would vent that way.

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

#282

Post by Aeolun »

influx wrote: post #227
jamra wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I followed his posts internally before he left. He was strict about resource waste. Hand tracking would break constantly and he brought metrics to his posts. His whole point was that Apple has hardware nailed down and it’ll be efficient software that will be the differentiator. The bloat at Meta was the result of empire building.

I followed his posts internally too. It's amazing how many people were arguing against fucking John Carmack. What a waste of talent.

Can’t really imagine a better person to argue against?

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

#283

Post by Aeolun »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #257
spydum wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that's true but I've worked with a lot of engineers that are of this caliber and as long as you can form a coherent logical explanation they will bend they're way more open than you expect. But you got to put in the work to make that argument. They won't take it on faith

It is an entirely different thing, gifted, highly experienced and confident in his assertions is quite frequent, but the cult-like following and status of personalities like Carmack or Blow can seriously alter their own self perception and importance.

Of course it can. It’s hard not to assume you are right if everyone keeps telling you so. I can’t really fault them for that. The challenge is to continue being right more often than not.

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

#284

Post by andrekandre »

snickerbockers wrote: post #276
andreww591 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for certain types of OSes, it should be relatively easy to get most of Linux's hardware support by porting LKL ( https://github.com/lkl/linux ) and adding appropriate hooks to access hardware. Of course, your custom kernel will still have to have some of its own code to support core platform/chipset devices, but LKL should pretty much cover just about all I/O devices (and you also get stuff like disk filesys…

>but LKL should pretty much cover just about all I/O devices (and you also get stuff like disk filesystems and a network stack along with the device drivers). thus calling into question why you ever bothered writing a new kernel in the first place if you were just going to piggyback Linux's device drivers onto some userspace wrapper thingy. Im not necessarily indoctrinated to the point where I can't conceive of Linux…

  > you're never going to get there off of recycling linux's device drivers because that forces you to design your new OS as a linux clone in which cade you definitely did not need to write an entire new kernel from scratch.
thats in interesting point, and makes me wonder if some kind of open interface for drivers to write to (and os's could implement) wouldn't be worthwhile?

probably it would have to be very general in design, but something along the lines of driverkit or iokit might work?

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

#285

Post by Aeolun »

WD-42 wrote: post #193
dagmx wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John can be quite blunt and harsh in person, from everyone I know who’s interacted with him. If he doesn’t believe in something, he can sometimes be over critical and it’s hard to push back in that kind of power imbalance.

Which makes sense when you are one of 3 developers at ID software. There's absolutely no room for waste. This is Meta. Let the kids build their operating system ffs. Is he now more concerned with protecting shareholder value? Who cares.

No, no. If you want your VR apps running in two years on something that looks like an OS, just build an app that runs on an existing one.

If you want to be the dominant player in the market in 10-15 years, build the OS and keep funding it.

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

#286

Post by cmrdporcupine »

yard2010 wrote: post #242
dmazzoni wrote: post #236

I was at Google when the Flutter team started building Fuchsia. They had amazing talent. Seriously, some of the most brilliant engineers I've worked with. They had a huge team. Hundreds of people. It was so ambitious. But it seemed like such a terrible idea from the start. Nobody was ever able to articulate who would ever use it. Technically, it was brilliant. But there was no business plan. If they wanted to build a…

I guess it's just a political shit show at this point. Ideas go hard if the people behind them aren't playing the game well enough, no matter their value.

There's few things worse for the long-term health of a software project than people who have hammers and are hunting for nails for them.

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

#287

Post by hedgehog »

mook wrote: post #166
Nuthen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the latter tweet in the chain, I'm wondering if Carmack is hinting that Foveated Rendering (more processing power is diverted towards the specific part of the screen you're looking at) was one advantage envisioned for it. But perhaps he's saying that he's not so sure if the performance gains from it actually justify building a custom OS instead of just overclocking the GPU along with an existing OS?

Wouldn't that be an application (or at most system library) concern though? The OS is just there to sling pixels, it wouldn't have any idea whether those pixels are blurry… well for VR it would all be OpenGL or equivalent so the OS just did hardware access permissions.

I think the context is that foveated rendering ties sensor input (measuring gaze direction) to the rendering pipeline in a way that requires very low latency. Past a certain point reducing latency requires optimizations that break normal abstractions made by user land, so you end up with something more custom. I'm not sure why that would require a whole new OS, the obvious path would be to put the latency-sensitive code onto dedicated hardware and leave the rest managed by Linux. If a bunch of smart people thought XROS was a good idea there's probably something there though, even if it didn't pan out.

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

#288

Post by branko_d »

MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #263
makeitdouble wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Oops, sorry, didn't get around to documenting it". That's obviously the wrong message. They should say "Go ask the engineering VP to get us off any other projects for another cycle while we're writing 'satisfying' documentation". Extensive documentation comes at a price few companies are willing to pay (and that's not just a matter of resources. Look at Apple's documentation)

I write documentation as I'm writing the code. In my opinion, the code is only as good as its documentation -- they're two parts of the same thing. It's mostly comments at the top of files, and sometimes a markdown file in the same directory. This way, good documentation is priced into my estimate for the project. I don't have a work item "spend a few days documenting." Nope, if I'm doing a foo then that includes doc…

In my experience, coding is much faster when doing it this way.

Yes, you can produce a small amount of code faster if you don’t “waste” your time on documentation, but that becomes counterproductive as soon as you can no longer keep the entire codebase in your head.

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

#289

Post by shistkye »

Aurornis wrote: post #133

> They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad I've only seen John Carmack's public interactions, but they've all been professional and kind. It's depressing to imagine HR getting involved because someone's feelings had been hurt by an objective discussion from a person like John Carmack. I'm having flashbacks to the times in my career when coworker…

> They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad

This is one of the reasons I’m sick of working pretty much anywhere anymore: I can’t be myself.

Appreciating people for their differences when they are humble and gifted is easy. I side with liberals, but I have a mix of liberal, moderate, and conservative friends.

But there are only so many years of pretending to appreciate all of the self-focused people that could be so much better at contributing to the world if they could quietly and selflessly work hard and respect people with different beliefs and backgrounds.

I’m happy for the opportunity I have to work, and I understand how millennials think and work. But working with boomers and/or gen X-ers would be so much less stressful. I could actually have real conversations with people.

I don’t think the problem is really with HR. I think the problem is a generation that was overly pandered to just doesn’t mix with the other generations, and maybe they shouldn’t.

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

#290

Post by jambutters »

pipeline_peak wrote: post #66

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 :…

I don't think unity was as polished when braid came out in ~2008 that can also easily rewind time on low end Xbox hardware. The witness maybe in unreal? But there are some wild things there I've never seen an unreal game do that the witness does do
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