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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

#131

Post by modeless »

scrlk wrote: post #124
danielodievich wrote: post #120

Back in mmm like 2002 or 2003 or 2004 while at Microsoft I read an internal paper from a few OS guys who hackathoned something for Bill Gates's Think Week (which is when he used to go to some island in San Juans or somewhere similar and just read curated papers and think, it was a huge prestige to get such a paper to him) and that something was an OS written from scratch with GC and memory management on top of someth…

Was it Singularity? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity...

Singularity was cool. I'm sad that it was abandoned. The concept of using software isolation instead of hardware memory protection was really interesting.

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

#132

Post by crote »

b112 wrote: post #117
rwmj wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is that a good use of Meta's money? Compared to making a few patches to Linux to fix any performance problems they find. (And I feel bad saying this since Meta obviously did waste eleventy billion on their ridiculous Second Life recreation project ...)

I don't like Meta, but there used to be a time where big corp used to spend 30% of its budget on R&D. It's how we got all the toys we have now, R&D labs of big Bell and others. So please don't mock the spend. Big spends fail sometimes, and at least people were paid to do the work.

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, changing direction is not possible. Sure, clever engineers get to draw the rest of the owl, but that's not very useful when it turns out that everyone needs a horse instead.

They are spending a fortune, but rather than getting 900 crappy ideas to throw away and 100 great ones to pick from for continued development, they are developing 1 technological marvel nobody is interested in.

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

#133

Post by Aurornis »

> 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 coworkers tried to weaponize HR to push their agenda. Every effort was eventually dismissed by HR, but there is a chilling effect on everyone when you realize that someone at the company is trying to put your job at stake because they didn't like something you said. The next time around, the people targeted are much more hesitant to speak up.

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

#134

Post by adastra22 »

danielodievich wrote: post #120

Back in mmm like 2002 or 2003 or 2004 while at Microsoft I read an internal paper from a few OS guys who hackathoned something for Bill Gates's Think Week (which is when he used to go to some island in San Juans or somewhere similar and just read curated papers and think, it was a huge prestige to get such a paper to him) and that something was an OS written from scratch with GC and memory management on top of someth…

It was a multi-year project at Microsoft Research with a team of >100 developers.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/whatever-happened-to-microsoft...

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

#135

Post by randall »

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…

meta was a weird place for a while. because of psc (the performance rating stuff) being so important… a public post could totally demoralize a team because if a legend like carmack thinks that your project is a waste of resources, how is that going to look on your performance review?

impact is facebook for “how useful is this to the company” and its an explicit axis of judgement.

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

#136

Post by Aurornis »

lukev wrote: post #41

This is completely right from a product point of view, which is Carmack's argument. But I have wondered why one of these companies with billions of dollars to burn hasn't tried to create something new as a strategic initiative. Yes, there wouldn't be any ROI for years, and yes, the first several products on the platform would probably be better off on something more traditional. But the long term value could potentia…

> But I have wondered why one of these companies with billions of dollars to burn hasn't tried to create something new as a strategic initiative.

See Google's Fuschia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuchsia_(operating_system)

> But the long term value could potentially be astronomical.

Such as what?

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

#137

Post by supermatt »

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…

> If the system is complex, there's more need to document

It’s not first party documentation that’s the problem. The problem is that they don’t share that documentation, so in order to get documentation for an “unsupported” OS a 3rd party needs to reverse engineer it.

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

#138

Post by danielodievich »

adastra22 wrote: post #134
danielodievich wrote: post #120

Back in mmm like 2002 or 2003 or 2004 while at Microsoft I read an internal paper from a few OS guys who hackathoned something for Bill Gates's Think Week (which is when he used to go to some island in San Juans or somewhere similar and just read curated papers and think, it was a huge prestige to get such a paper to him) and that something was an OS written from scratch with GC and memory management on top of someth…

It was a multi-year project at Microsoft Research with a team of >100 developers. https://www.zdnet.com/article/whatever-happened-to-microsoft...

I am very certain in my recollection that this was started much earlier than this as hackathon skunkworks before something like this happened at MSR. It didn't do anything beyond kernel and command line, there was no browser. I don't know if those two shared roots either. Anyhow, but yeah, still both were intellectual feats!

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

#139

Post by shortrounddev2 »

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…

Masters of doom portrays carmack as a total dictator of a boss. Doom Guy by John Romero seems to back this up

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

#140

Post by howdyhowdy123 »

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…

Hehehe. I have talked to John Carmack a few times. He's super harsh and has zero filter or social niceties (Azperger's level, not that he is, but just sayin'). If you are not used to it or understand where it's coming from, it can be quite a shock. Or at least he was, many years ago. Maybe he's changed.
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