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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

#501

Post by sarchertech »

flr03 wrote: post #443
influx wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Damn, that's medieval. Anyone should be able to challenge anyone regardless of status.

I mean to some extent sure. But also you need to respect expertise and experience. So much of what we do is subjective, and neither side going to have hard data to support their arguments.

If it comes down to someone saying “I’ve been doing this for 30 years, I’ve shipped something very similar 5 times, and we ran into a problem with x each time”. Unless you have similar counter experience, you should probably just listen.

What happens in tech is you get a very specific kind of junior who wants to have HN comment arguments at work constantly and needs you to prove every single thing to them. I don’t know man it’s a style guide. There’s not going to be hard quantitative evidence to support why we said you shouldn’t reach for macros first.

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

#502

Post by bonoboTP »

komali2 wrote: post #475
saagarjha wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm making the world a better place by earning 500k a year doing a bad job to slow down this company. Look at how much good I am doing sorry I can't hear you over my paycheck clearing

Activism doesn't require participation in a poverty cult. Any socialist in a nation like the USA or the UK is by someone's lens a champagne socialist. Let's not participate in this tired trope.

Who said anything about socialism? There are many ways to criticize Meta from non-socialist angles.

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

#503

Post by redleader55 »

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 find this kind of comment revolting - if I owe something, I owe it to my family and my parents, so if Meta comes to make me an offer and I accept it, it's my business and no one else's. Strangers on the internet, instead of judging people based on the company they work for, and divide them into "good" and "bad", should get off their high horses and join these companies, if they are capable, and change them from the inside if they think they are doing bad things.

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

#504

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

kriops wrote: post #495
Hammershaft wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a better service to humanity is to excel at your job even if you end up at a socially corrosive org like Meta or Tiktok but donate a decent chunk of your paycheck to effective altruist charities that save lives.

A better service to humanity yet is taking that money and spending it on whatever is valuable to yourself, thus providing more people with the opportunity to sustainably work for a living. Capitalism and all that.

There is no reason to expect "buy stuff you want" to be more charitable than charity. At a glance, the stuff itself obviously takes up a good chunk of the money and much is going to end up in the hands of people who already have plenty.

You emphasize "sustainably", but how is it more sustainable to give 500k/year to capitalism until you don't make that much / retire / die? In either option, that 500k/year is there until it isn't. With charity, you'd help more people but it would be no more or less sustainable.

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

#505

Post by torginus »

Fade_Dance wrote: post #206
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 remember watching Carmack at a convention 15 years ago. He took a short sabbatical and came back with ID Tech 3 on an iPhone, and it still looks amazing well over a decade later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52hMWMWKAMk&t=1s This is a guy who figures that what he wants to do most with his 3 free weekends is to port his latest, greatest engine to a Cortex-A8. Leading corporate strategy? Maybe not. But Carmack on…

The quality you can achieve with simple painted textures and computed lightmaps never ceases to impress.

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

#506

Post by torginus »

leoc wrote: post #244
markus_zhang wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have mixed feelings about this. In one part, JC is someone I look up to, at least from the perspective of engineering. On the other hand, putting myself in the shoes in someone who got the once in life chance to build a new OS with corp support for a new shiny device…I for hell would want to do this.

Look at the outcome of Meta's performance in AR/VR over the past few years: a fortune has been spent; relatively little has been achieved; the whole thing is likely about to be slashed back; VR, something Carmack believes in, remains a bit commercially marginal and easily dismissed; and Carmack's own reputation has taken a hit from association with it all. You can understand perfectly well why he doesn't feel that it…

It's insane how VR has succeeded beyond most people's wildest dreams on the hardware front (all that hardware that goes into a VR headset either sounded like science fiction or seemed like would be exotic stuff costing tens of thousands of dollars), and the software also had standout successes, but it kinda just petered out both in the entertainment and professional realms.

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

#507

Post by lyu07282 »

keysdev wrote: post #412
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.

Depending on the founder. With Apple it can be reasoned that it only went down after you know who passed away. Yeah its not reliable to count on one charismatic leader to run the whole thing, but that is what the corporate model has being doing and how we ended up here.

> its not reliable to count on one charismatic leader to run the whole thing

> it only went down after you know who passed away.

I mean that's kind of ironic. You believe that Jobs was a great and decent person who led Apple to be roses and rainbows. Outside this cult of personality it was a company that engaged in unethical and monopolistic business practices just as anyone else did, walled-garden lock-in of their platform, intentionally making their devices impossible to repair, planned obsolescence, slave labor conditions in manufacturing, etc. etc.

So the point is untrue, its the benevolent dictator delusion, just like there are no benevolent political authoritarian leaders so are there no benevolent CEOs either. Because the system itself is the issue, authoritarianism/capitalism. If you are a conservative/authoritarian you believe in the former if you are a liberal/libertarian/capitalist you believe in the latter.

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

#508

Post by CPLX »

roncesvalles wrote: post #420
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

One of the better "service to humanity" opportunities for software engineers is to join a company like Meta or TikTok and perform awfully for as long as you can.

The best way to serve humanity in your professional life is serve humanity in your professional life.

In other words, be useful. You don't have to worry about "being good" or "doing good" though many do and it's quite admirable to do so. But that's not the bar you have to clear.

The bar you should try to clear is to be useful. If what you're doing all day is helping people have shelter, or raise families, or be more healthy, or have more knowledge, or even be entertained or amused, you're being useful to people.

If what you do all day ultimately serves to make people poorer, more divided, more addicted, and more unwell, then what you're doing is not useful, it's harmful.

If what you're doing all day primarily contributes, even indirectly, to making people's lives worse, then nothing you do after that will erase it. Arguments to the contrary are just rationalization.

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

#509

Post by kelipso »

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.

Ugh. Can we as an industry stop blowing people up like this? It’s a clear sign that the community is filled with people with very little experience.

I remember this guy wanted $20 million to build AGI a year ago (did he get that money?), and people here thought he would go into isolation for a few weeks and come out with AGI because he made some games like that. It’s just embarrassing as a community.

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

#510

Post by CPLX »

kriops wrote: post #495
Hammershaft wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a better service to humanity is to excel at your job even if you end up at a socially corrosive org like Meta or Tiktok but donate a decent chunk of your paycheck to effective altruist charities that save lives.

A better service to humanity yet is taking that money and spending it on whatever is valuable to yourself, thus providing more people with the opportunity to sustainably work for a living. Capitalism and all that.

The idea that all decisions under capitalism are value-neutral is ludicrous.

By your definition, selling arms to dictators and using the money to buy a yacht and private security qualifies as "service to humanity."

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