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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

#561

Post by mrandish »

> I wish I could drop (so many of) my old internal posts publicly, since I don’t really have the incentive to relitigate the arguments today – they were carefully considered and prescient. They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad

Carmack being Carmack, I'm sure the HR report came to nothing but it's just another reminder of the annoyances I don't miss about working at a BigCo. In the end, it doesn't matter that it went nowhere, that he was right or that it was an over-reaction and likely a defensive move in inter-group politics Carmack wasn't even playing - it just slowly saps your emotional energy to care about doing the right things in the right ways.

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

#562

Post by rvba »

jayd16 wrote: post #281
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.

If you are senior leadership and you find that your org has some people do useless side projects for fun (and tons of money) what delivers no value, your job is to solve this problem by reassigning or firing them.

Facebook VR never needed a new OS in the first place. It needed actual VR.

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

#563

Post by ellis0n »

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…

There is also ACPU OS https://www.acpul.org/blog/so-fast

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

#564

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

makeitdouble wrote: post #452
MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inf…

Everywhere I've worked, there is software written by those five people, who are now all rich and don't write code anymore, and I still would appreciate the courtesy of an explainer.

The trouble with good docs is that they are work to maintain, like good code. If we decide to change this component in a substantial way soon, which we likely will, I'd have to practically rewrite the docs! Why bother?

Because the docs are part of the code. Write the docs.

I don't expect to win this crusade, but I'll keep writing docs anyway. Then later people will modify the code without modifying the docs, and so the docs will be a lie, but still useful, I think.

It's like asking three people who are not closely familiar with a component, but who have worked with it, "what is this thing, how does it work?" You will get three different answers. It would be nice if one of them were a written description straight from the horse's mouth, even if the component is now more of a camel.

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

#565

Post by ellis0n »

scared_together wrote: post #7

What if instead of writing the entire OS, a company were to pick up an existing “hobby” OS and refine it? For example any of the systems listed in Carmack’s post. Or perhaps Serenity OS, RedoxOS, etc.

ACPU OS is also good for that https://www.acpul.org/blog/so-fast

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

#566

Post by hx8 »

os2warpman wrote: post #277
SgtBastard wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically you are correct but the commenter you’re responding to means that with the amount of Western Governments spend on MS products and services, the are a d facto (if not de jure) state backed enterprise.

US government spending is (for now) easy to track, and you can get totals for spending by corporate entity. In total across the entire US federal government, $518.8 million was paid to Microsoft for products and services in 2024. That is approximately 0.21% of their total annual revenue. I assert that the threshold for "state sponsored" is well in excess of 0.21% of annual revenue. Federal Spending: https://www.usasp…

How much money have states and local governments spent on Microsoft products and services? How much money has Microsoft collected from companies that are providing products and services to US governmental agencies?

Government spending is not easy to track. This doesn't even begin to touch on non-monetary benefits Microsoft receives with government influence.

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

#567

Post by cornstalks »

WalterBright wrote: post #456
throwaway2037 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

You've done some great work but I have to call BS with this claim:

> I'm the only person who ever implemented all of it.

Sean Baxter is an easy counter example.

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

#568

Post by ellis0n »

0xb0565e486 wrote: post #50

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 aroun…

I think any OS can be divided into a "backend" that deals with the hardware and a "frontend" user-level applications with a UI. The backend is mostly similar everywhere, while the frontend is what the general public typically perceives as the "OS". It's hard to see anything truly new in the "invisible" backend, but the frontend changes with every update (Windows, Mac, Linux etc). ACPU OS is a good example of this, where the backend can be a different OS, an emulator or actual hardware, while the frontend remains the same across all execution environments. https://www.acpul.org/blog/so-fast

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

#569

Post by bckr »

kelipso wrote: post #509
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.

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.

> $20 million

That’s a pittance for such a project. I wish we could see what he’d have come up with.

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

#570

Post by bckr »

ignoramous wrote: post #272
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.

> were arguing against fucking John Carmack I am sure Carmack himself encourages debates and discussions. Lionizing one person can't be expected of every employee (unless that person is also the founder or the company is tiny).

I think the implication is that they were arguing poorly and wasting time
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