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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

#211

Post by markus_zhang »

WD-42 wrote: post #201
markus_zhang wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you are trying to be /s, but yeah that's basically what I'm trying to say. Definitely better than working on those recommendation systems. Damn, I'd pay to work in some serious OS/Compiler teams, but hey why should they hire me? Oh well...Yeah I'm doing a bit of projects on my side but man I'm so burnt out by my 9am-5pm $$ job + 5pm-10pm kid job that I barely have any large chunk of time to work on th…

Not sarcastic at all. I'm in the same boat. I've been trying to get into contributing to Redox, but at the end of the work day when the kid is finally asleep it's hard to motivate.

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 time, but he wants to sleep with me for 30 mins around 9pm before going to my wife’s bed, and I usually fell sleep sooner than he did…

Girls are much easier to raise. They sleep earlier and don’t fight too much, as far as I heard from friends.

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

#214

Post by markus_zhang »

toast0 wrote: post #205
markus_zhang wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like super fun if I could be paid a bit for it. What is an easy gate task to get into “reverse engineering some drivers for some OS”? Second thought: I don’t even know how to write a driver or a kernel, so I better start from there.

I don't know how you get paid for it, but if you want to write your own kernel, I'd start with an osdev tutorial. started with this one [1], but this one [2] has a promissing name... and I haven't really looked around. It helps to have a concept to guide you too, but you can certainly make some progress on the basics before you figure out what you really want to do. [1] https://wiki.osdev.org/User:Zesterer/Bare_Bones…

Thanks. I got all the resources covered. But I don’t have the energy to work on them as a side project any more. Alas! I wasted my younger days and hope you fare better!

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

#215

Post by loeg »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #55
koolala wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reviews I've seen of its stability and usefulness have not been good.

That was also frustrating in that sel4 was right there. Why not invest efforts in the existing thing?

The microkernel core isn't the buggy/hard part; Fuscia's got a similar microkernel that also works great. It's everything else that's hard.

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

#216

Post by leoc »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #139
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

Masters of Doom does seems to want to, however accurately or not, set Carmack up as the antagonist of its story against Romero as the hero sometimes. I think that readers just largely didn't notice that since Carmack's heroic image was already so firmly established. In fact some of the early-ID stuff really does seem to raise some questions. (Was Tim Willits mostly Carmack's protégé, for instance?)

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

#217

Post by loeg »

numpad0 wrote: post #101

Is the difficulty in theoretical complexity of operating systems, or in project scoping/scope creep? It's probably not that hard to write bare metal code for a modern CPU that runs and crashes. It's obviously insurmountably hard to compete with Android in features with scratch built bare metal code. An "OS" can be anything between the two. But it's very easy to imagine an "XR OS" project snowballing quickly into the…

XROS definitely suffered from scope creep and an outrageous set of goals/priorities.

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

#218

Post by Fade_Dance »

WD-42 wrote: post #193
dagmx wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

>Is he now more concerned with protecting shareholder value? Who cares.

It doesn't sound like he's concerned with waste. It sounds like it's a typical Carmack argument - distilled and hyper logical, and his conclusion is more to do with the pointlessness of it. He actually concedes the point that the project may have been highly efficient (which it may or may not have been, he was steelmanning).

His main points seemed to be:

If every cycle matters and efficiency is paramount, just make the project monolithic C++ code. If every cycle matters, that is somewhat incompatible with general purpose OSs, and if it doesn't, the existing landscape is more than good enough. Presumably, he's calling out the absurdity of counter-arguments which are being unrealistic about the objectives of creating a new general purpose OS, while also focusing on extreme efficiency. He states that the requirements to fully achieve these objectives would require a "monastic coding enclave" like Plan 9 OS, and it wasn't realistic even with the high talent in Meta.

And that plays into the second point, which seems to essentially be "new OSs aren't a draw for developers, they are a burden". This is painfully obvious when looking at the history of OSs and software, and it's the obvious reason why "let the kids build their operating system ffs" should result in a reflexive "noooo..." from the greybeards. The deeper point though is that if A. is achieved, the B. Burden on devs will be even more onerous. Therefore unless the entire project is committed to truly moving crowds to new paradigms (good luck, literally billions have been lost here), just use the proven, faily high performance options that have widespread support.

The conclusion is "on balance, it's a bad idea." He's arguing it sharply (although I understand a Carmack steelman is intimidating to attack), but in essence it's a fairly banal and conservative conclusion, backed with strong precedent.

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

#219

Post by thepryz »

techpineapple wrote: post #191
thepryz wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For another take - what’s the game theory here? If I’m kinda sensitive but also hyper-ambitious, I acknowledge that Facebook has 1. Some of the highest pay in the industry. 2. Ultra-competitive environment. 3. Low moral principles. Seems like the strategy would be to use every lever at your disposal to manipulate your environment, rather than leave and risk getting paid less.

Expecting that you can change people, in my experience, is quixotic. What you can change is yourself and how you interpret and respond to events around you.

If I understand the hypothetical you've proposed, my advice would be for you to adapt and learn to be less sensitive rather than have you believe that you can manipulate the environment, or worse, directly manipulate people.

It's possible that you could be a positive influence for change, so I don't want to completed discount any effort there, but I also think it's worth being realistic about what you can actually affect.

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

#220

Post by markus_zhang »

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…

Impressive. JC is always one of the engineers I look up to and read up to when depressed.

John Carmack, David Cutler, Tom West, Cameron Zwarich, etc. There are about maybe 50 of them.

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