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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

#571

Post by markus_zhang »

osullivj wrote: post #423
markus_zhang wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get it man. It’s really tough. How old is your kid? Mine is a 5 years old boy and he doesn’t seem to need a lot of sleep but a huge amount of companionship which really bugs me out. In theory, it’s better to sleep early, get up around 5 and get 2 hours of quality time, but man he sometimes gets up around 6:15 and earlier, and I found it difficult to get good sleep anyway, so I tried to switch to 2 hours of night ti…

I'm now a post kids greybeard; two nats, two steps, both flavours. Yes, girls under 10 are easier than boys. That flips on you in the teen years!

That sounds scary…I don’t know how to communicate with teenage boys. I had a lot of quarrels with my parents back then.

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

#572

Post by wafflemaker »

procaryote wrote: post #519
wafflemaker wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few more years and they would've finished Polarbanen. The northern Norway railroad connecting Trondheim to Tromsø, far inside the Arctic Circle. Giving us $50 trains to Tromsø instead of $500 planes. But my enthusiasm diminished after learning that they worked thousands people to death.

> thousands people to death I have some bad news to tell you about the overall number of dead related to that government

You tell me, I'm from Poland. Talked to many older people, who remember the war. One thing that caught my attention, because it surfaced with every single old person I asked about the war: Germans/Nazis were horrible, but Russians/Soviets were an order of magnitude worse.

Funny thing that now many people don't even know that it was Russia and Germany BOTH that started the war. And they were supposed to attack Poland simultaneously, but Stalin, PR animal that he was, delayed Red Army's attack by one week, thereby creating the legend that it wasn't Russia that started the war.

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

#573

Post by markus_zhang »

IshKebab wrote: post #374
markus_zhang wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get it man. It’s really tough. How old is your kid? Mine is a 5 years old boy and he doesn’t seem to need a lot of sleep but a huge amount of companionship which really bugs me out. In theory, it’s better to sleep early, get up around 5 and get 2 hours of quality time, but man he sometimes gets up around 6:15 and earlier, and I found it difficult to get good sleep anyway, so I tried to switch to 2 hours of night ti…

> They sleep earlier and don’t fight too much, as far as I heard from friends. Definitely depends on the specific children!

I guess so. But the sample size is over 10, although not statistically significant but definitely something.

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

#574

Post by markus_zhang »

torginus wrote: post #506
leoc wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it really that successful? I think the wildest dream is that everyone is using it but I don’t really see it happening anytime soon in the future.

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

#575

Post by raggi »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #527
raggi wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By forced I guess you’re referring to the room full of leads who all said yes, but then reported otherwise back down to their ics to avoid retribution. I caught early wind of this from folks being super rude in early on the ground discussions and tried to raise it with Linus. One of the directors got his kickers in a twist and accused me of making a mountain out of a molehill. I guess clearly not, as the sentiment an…

I don't care who agreed to what, it's bad engineering practice to take a working successfully launched product and throw out its entire working software stack no matter how inelegant it seems. To what end? What did Fuchsia offer? When it finally shipped -- what, 2, 3 years late? --- custmers couldn't even tell it happened. And in order to make it happen it also required writing the already-launched HTML-based UI in F…

Customers not being able to tell that it happened was a goal of that deployment.

It wasn’t anywhere near that late the numbers you’re saying was about the whole build cycle - board bringup for one of the two boards first commit in zircon was 3y before launch (that codes public, I just checked and Mike landed it in 2018) - and discussions weren’t done then, that was before any prototype/demos could be done. There were sluggish stages and project management was rough, and there were delays at the end related to quality but the quality bar was necessarily high, particularly on the core system - don’t brick all the devices in the field. And we didn’t, and that’s actually a feat replacing everything from firmware to gui in the field without users noticing.

What was the goal? Well two things: fuchsia needed a first, and realistic shipping target that wasn’t excessively lofty. Nest needed to get out of the OS game so it could focus resources on product. Chris talked about this in his 9to5google interview.

It’s a shame you feel so sour about it, everyone involved did good work. I have friends from nest and some of the ics also have similar pained history from that time - it’s sad, once upon a time it was maddening. It’d have been so easy for a leader to substantially improve that. Sure plenty of things could have been better, for sure we could have fixed these awful sentiment and relationship issues (I tried, got burned for it - that even showed up in my calibration), but we all shipped.

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

#576

Post by dehrmann »

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.

Carmack's best work was between Keen and Quake, and it was mostly optimizations that pushed the limit of what PC graphics could do. He's always been too in-the-weeds to have a C-level title.

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

#577

Post by lokar »

LPisGood wrote: post #358
lokar wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw the same thing at Google. A distinguished engineer tried gently at first to get a Jr engineer to stop trying to do something that was a bad idea. They persisted so he told them very bluntly to stop. HR got involved. I even found myself letting really bad things go by because it was just going to take way to much of my time to spoon feed people and get them to stop.

What kind of thing is bad enough that it warrants multiple discussions without the junior engineer getting the hint that it’s a bad idea?

I can’t say much without it being clear who it was, but a critical low level thing.

And the Sr was generally a very nice person who did not give much weight to levels, willing to engage with anyone.

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

#578

Post by Hydraulix989 »

mrandish wrote: post #561

> 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'…

You don't report someone like Carmack to HR, it will only backfire and make your ignorance even more visible.

Also, I am not surprised he was reported -- typical underhanded political hustling commonplace at Meta.

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

#579

Post by dehrmann »

leoc wrote: post #229
WD-42 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Meta's AR/VR division has burned a huge amount of money and years of time, with relatively little to show for it. Now it seems to be on the verge of being cancelled or slashed back, and in response people are saying that this proves VR, something Carmack champions, is commercially untenable or even that Carmack himself is partly responsible for the failed initiative. I don't even entirely agree with him on the questi…

AR/VR was always a side project for Zuck (like the Aquila airplane or the Libra cryptocurrency or AGI) that he works on because he's bored. It was pretty clear from the product's popularity and Metaverse experience that it didn't have any legs. Carmack had little to do with that one way or the other, and the Apple Vision pro shows that it's not an execution or quality issue, it's product-market fit.

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

#580

Post by ekaryotic »

mkoubaa wrote: post #547
frognumber wrote: post #432

John describes exactly what I'd like someone to build: "To make something really different, and not get drawn into the gravity well of existing solutions, you practically need an isolated monastic order of computer engineers." As a thought experiment: * Pick a place where cost-of-living is $200/month * Set up a village which is very livable. Fresh air. Healthy food. Good schools. More-or-less for the cost that someon…

Who needs good schools? Make it "The Summer of code in Sardinia"

or "The Summer of code in Pyonyang"
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