John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by atiedebee » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:37 AM UTC

xxs wrote: post #408

procaryote wrote: post #387

The problem when working for Meta is that if you do a good job, you've helped make the world worse... so the real heroes are the people wasting money and reducing efficiency If you're at all competent, go work somewhere else

I'd take zstd any time while I have facebook and friends blocked. The world is not black and white.

zstd can't really be attributed to Facebook. Yann Collet started work on it before joining Facebook, so it was kind of imported.

I am sure it made developing and standardizing the algorithm easier, but what makes it such a good (performant) algorithm is the design of the original creator.

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

#452

Post by makeitdouble » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:37 AM UTC

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…

> the code is only as good as its documentation

This heavily depends on your niche I think. If you're writing closed source vendor software and your client's only guiding light is your documentation, it's 100% true.

If you're working on a 5 people project that evolves at a fast pace, and everyone touching the code is expected to be familiar with the domain and operations, you'll mostly leave comments (todos, meta info, external ticket links etc), not documentation per se.

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

#453

Post by saagarjha » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:38 AM UTC

markus_zhang wrote: post #214

toast0 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how you get paid for it, but if you want to write your own kernel, I'd start with an osdev tutorial. started with this one [1], but this one [2] has a promissing name... and I haven't really looked around. It helps to have a concept to guide you too, but you can certainly make some progress on the basics before you figure out what you really want to do. [1] https://wiki.osdev.org/User:Zesterer/Bare_Bones…

Thanks. I got all the resources covered. But I don’t have the energy to work on them as a side project any more. Alas! I wasted my younger days and hope you fare better!

Unfortunately, you are unlikely to be able to jump into just being paid to write an OS with no experience.

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

#454

Post by thrance » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:45 AM UTC

lyu07282 wrote: post #301

thrance wrote: post #57

He's acting like their VR UX is top notch when it's as bad as it gets. Just yesterday I dusted off my Meta Quest 2 to play a bit, and spent around an hour trying to pair up my left controller to the helmet after replacing the battery. You can't do it without going through their fucking app, that asks for every permissions under the sun, including GPS positioning for some reason. After finally getting this app working…

You can pair the controllers in the settings you don't need an app. Their VR UX does suck that is true, and horizon worlds is such a collosal failure that I'm surprised they haven't cancelled that entirely yet. But carmack also stated the technical issues numerous times.

No you can't? By their own documentation, you have to use the app: https://www.meta.com/fr-fr/help/quest/967070027432609/

And my quick search on the internet yielded no other mean to pair controllers.

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

#455

Post by thrance » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:47 AM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #179

thrance wrote: post #57

He's acting like their VR UX is top notch when it's as bad as it gets. Just yesterday I dusted off my Meta Quest 2 to play a bit, and spent around an hour trying to pair up my left controller to the helmet after replacing the battery. You can't do it without going through their fucking app, that asks for every permissions under the sun, including GPS positioning for some reason. After finally getting this app working…

> You can't do it without going through their fucking app, that asks for every permissions under the sun, including GPS positioning for some reason. If it uses bluetooth, which it might for the controller?, the permission for bluetooth on Android is fine location --- the same permission as for using GPS. That might be the same permission you need for wifi stuff, too? Because products and services exist to turn blueto…

No, it doesn't use Bluetooth. Or maybe it does under the hood but the permissions they ask for are GPS and "see nearby devices". You are able to pair your device with Bluetooth disabled in the phone's quick menu.

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

#456

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:48 AM UTC

throwaway2037 wrote: post #345

dist1ll wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel still does it. As far as I can see they're the only player in town that provide open, detailed documentation for their high-speed NICs [0]. You can actually write a driver for their 100Gb cards from scratch using their datasheet. Most other vendors would either (1) ignore you, (2) make you sign an NDA or (3) refer you to their poorly documented Linux/BSD driver. Not sure what the situation is for other hardware…

Wow... that PDF is 2,750 pages! There must be an army of technical writers behind it. That is an incredible technical achievement. Real question: Why do you think Intel does this? Does it guarantee a very strong foothold into data center NICs? I am sure competitors would argue two different angles: (1) this PDF shares too much info; some should be hidden behind an NDA, (2) it's too hard to write (and maintain) this P…

I may be the only person who ever understood every detail of C++, starting with the preprocessor. I can make that claim because I'm the only person who ever implemented all of it. (You cannot really know a language until you've implemented it.) I gave up on that in the 2000's. Modern C++ is simply terrifying in its complexity.

(I'm not including the C++ Standard Library, as I didn't implement it.)

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

#457

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:50 AM UTC

b112 wrote: post #114

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.…

Modern hardware is just so complicated it would take a long time to completely document, and even longer to write a driver for. That's what's claimed. That's what people say, yet it's just an excuse. I've heard the same sort of excuse people have, after they write a massive codebase, then say "Oops, sorry, didn't get around to documenting it". And no, hardware is not more difficult than software to document. If the s…

I find myself largely unable to document code as I write it. It all seems obvious at the time. It's when I go back to it later, and I re-figure it out, that the documentation then can be written.

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

#458

Post by mastermage » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 10:04 AM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #150

crote wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that organisations like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC were primarily tech-first: innovations were the result of very clever and creative people doing blue skies research. The most groundbreaking stuff shocked the world while it was still a hacked-together demo, and similarly the cost of failure was quite low. On the other hand, Meta's experiment is primarily CEO-driven. The outcome is predetermined, chan…

Arguably the distinction you're pointing at is macroinvention (the transistor) vs microinvention (a better VR headset): one is a refinement of something that exists, another is transformative opening up whole new worlds of possibility. https://www.antonhowes.com/blog/macroinvention-vs-microinven...

In my opinion the difference is rather invention versus innovation. A better VR headset is innovation, transistors are an invention.

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

#459

Post by gorgoiler » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 10:05 AM UTC

anttiharju wrote: post #413

wolvesechoes wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't that true for every big corp, or even every public company? Even if founders may had some other goals in addition to making money, as the time passes profit becomes the only goal, and usually more profit is being generated while doing bad and malicious things. Problem is systemic.

Nokia (mostly networking-related things nowadays) touts - or at least used to, haven't kept up to date - itself as one of the most ethical companies around. > But isn't that true for every big corp, or even every public company? So I suppose not really, no. Additionally companies working on carbon-free energy might also serve as evidence. There are some big ones around.

Nokia Siemens Networks provided the Iranian Revolution with their lawful intercept equipment under a special contract. They may have a good overall ethical track record but they don’t have a clean sheet.

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

#460

Post by mastermage » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 10:07 AM UTC

markus_zhang wrote: post #155

tanvach wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sounds like super fun if I could be paid a bit for it. What is an easy gate task to get into “reverse engineering some drivers for some OS”? Second thought: I don’t even know how to write a driver or a kernel, so I better start from there.

Isn't that what low level does on his YouTube channel teach people to reverse engineer stuff?