Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 675 posts

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

#181

Post by jonas21 »

gmueckl wrote: post #130
labrador wrote: post #43

> my old internal posts... got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad That jives with my sense that META is a mediocre company

It matters who you communicate concerns to. Something as fundamental as "I think that your team shouldn't even exist" should go to the team leads and their managers exclusively at first. Writing that to the entire affected team is counterproductive in any organization because it unnecessarily raises anxiety and reduces team productivity and focus. Comments like this from influential people can have big mental and phy…

Maybe on a mediocre team. But that was the parent comment's point.

On well-functioning teams, product feedback shouldn't have to be filtered through layers of management. In fact, it would be dishonest to discuss something like this with managers while hiding it from the rest of the team.

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

#182

Post by [deleted] »

thepryz wrote: post #174
howdyhowdy123 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can see that. Sadly, there are a lot of people in the world who simply don't know how to deal with people who can be direct, if not somewhat abrasive, in their communication style. Their intent can be noble, well-intentioned, and not meant to offend. They simply don't beat around the bush or worry about whether your fragile ego will be bruised when they make an observation. I've had to coach people and help them un…

[deleted]

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

#183

Post by toast0 »

foldr wrote: post #68
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #9

> they also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad This is madness. The safe space culture has really gone too far.

Reading between the lines, it sounds like he got reported for giving a lot of what might kindly be described as unsolicited advice. The guy left Meta ages ago, but he apparently still can't let this one go. If you're in the middle of trying to write a new operating system, then it's probably not helpful to have John Carmack standing over you repeatedly telling you that you shouldn't be doing it. In this case Carmack…

> If you're in the middle of trying to write a new operating system, then it's probably not helpful to have John Carmack standing over you repeatedly telling you that you shouldn't be doing it. In this case Carmack gets the last laugh. Then again, it is easy to get the last laugh by predicting that a project will fail, given that most projects do.

I mean, if you're working on a project that is likely to fail, wouldn't it be nice if someone gave you cover to stop working on it, and then you could figure out something else to do that might not fail? Can't get any impact if your OS will never ship.

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

#184

Post by lokar »

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…

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.

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

#185

Post by toast0 »

xantronix wrote: post #89
webdevver wrote: post #30

tbh linux has quite a bit of cruft in it these days at the syscall and interface layer. if youre apple, it does make sense to do stuff from scratch. i think in a way, software guys wind up building their own prisons. an api is created to solve problem X given world Y, but world Y+1 has a different set of problems - problems that may no longer be adequately addressed given the api invented for X. people talk about "re…

Apple doesn't do a lot of baremetal development from scratch that I'm aware of. The Lightning to HDMI dongle bootstraps an XNU kernel with an AirPlay decoder into 256MB RAM, for instance.

Doesn't Apple pretty much own their whole stack? You mentioned XNU, which they made...

Their CPU, their boards, their firmware (presumably), their OS[1], much of the perhipherals are theirs, too.

Lots of companies try to emulate Apple, but it's very hard to pull off.

[1] Yes, they use some parts from Mach and FreeBSD in their OS, but the amalgamation is theirs, and they support and change the whole thing as needed.

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

#186

Post by sitkack »

toast0 wrote: post #168
sitkack wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The VMM on GCP has only really been tested with Linux. You are kinda wasting your time, the only way to make it work is to make the hobby OS Linux.

> You are kinda wasting your time, the only way to make it work is to make the hobby OS Linux. Not the parent, but of course they're wasting their time... That's the point of a hobby OS. I'm working on a hobby OS, and I have no illusions that it's most likely fewer than 10 people will ever run it, and less than 100 will hear about it, but it lets me explore some interesting (to me) ideas, and forces me to learn a lit…

I didn't say they were wasting their time on their hobby OS, they are wasting their time trying to get it to do very esoteric thing on GCP.

They aren't trying to get reboot to work, they are trying to get their version of kexec to work so their hobby os reboots faster.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kexec

The biggest scam in the OS world is drivers, we should demand more out of our hardware. Drivers shouldn't be necessary.

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

#187

Post by dagmx »

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…

John can be quite blunt and harsh in person, from everyone I know who’s interacted with him.

If he doesn’t believe in something, he can sometimes be over critical and it’s hard to push back in that kind of power imbalance.

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

#188

Post by firesteelrain »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #175
randall wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But... That's not an HR violation. If something a team is working on is a waste of resources, it's a waste. You can either realize that and pivot to something more useful (like an effort to take the improvements of the current OS project and apply them to existing OSes), or stubbornly insist on your value. Why is complaining to HR even an option on the table?

One could argue that if it’s not in your swim lane, you just let it fail. And if you aren’t that person’s manager, you tell them the code or design that you are reviewing and thus the gatekeeper is not adequate. Politely. You said your part and no need to get yourself in trouble. Document and move on. If the company won’t listen then you move on. No need to turn it into a HR issue.

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

#189

Post by WD-42 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #161
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…

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.

Exactly! It seems very narc-y. Just let me build my cool waste of company resources, it's not like Zucky is going to notice, he's too busy building his 11 homes.

Imagine being able to build an operating system, basically the end-game of being a programmer, and get PAID for it. Then some nerd tells on you.

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

#190

Post by stephc_int13 »

dagmx wrote: post #187
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…

John can be quite blunt and harsh in person, from everyone I know who’s interacted with him. If he doesn’t believe in something, he can sometimes be over critical and it’s hard to push back in that kind of power imbalance.

Carmack is a legend and I admire his work, but he seems to believe his own legend these days (like a few others big-ego gamedevs) and that can lead to arbitrary preferences being sold as gospel.
Post reply on HN