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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

#231

Post by Fade_Dance »

markus_zhang wrote: post #220
Fade_Dance wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Carmack and Jim Keller for me. Hardware engineering for the latter!

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

#232

Post by com2kid »

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.

I got the chance to do this at Microsoft, it is indeed awesome! Thankfully the (multiple!) legendary programmers on the team were all behind the effort.

Anyway, if anyone reading this gets a chance to build a custom OS for bespoke HW, and get paid FAANG salary to do so, go for it! :-D

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

#233

Post by gmueckl »

labrador wrote: post #144
gmueckl wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If I was on that team I'd welcome the opportunity to tell John Carmac why he was wrong or if I agreed start looking for another project to work on. When I was on nuclear submarines we'd call what you are advocating "keep us in the dark and feed us bullshit."

This assumes that you would be sincerely listened to, which you wouldn't in a case like this. Higher ups in large organizations don't have the bandwidth to listen to everybody.

Your sub's officers also need to constantly be aware of what to communicate to whom and in which language. Your superiors certainly kept you in the dark about a ton of concerns that were on their plate because simply mentioning them to subordinates would have been too distracting.

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

#234

Post by markus_zhang »

Fade_Dance wrote: post #231
markus_zhang wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Carmack and Jim Keller for me. Hardware engineering for the latter!

HW is kinda too magical for me at this age :)

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

#235

Post by ux266478 »

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.

Reading on from that he says:

> If the platform really needs to watch every cycle that tightly, you aren't going to be a general purpose platform, and you might as well just make a monolithic C++ embedded application, rather than a whole new platform that is very likely to have a low shelf life as the hardware platform evolves.

Which I think is agreeable, up to a certain point, because I think it's potentially naive. That monolithic C++ embedded application is going to be fundamentally built out of a scheduler, IO and driver interfaces, and a shell. That's the only sane way to do something like this. And that's an operating system.

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

#236

Post by dmazzoni »

I was at Google when the Flutter team started building Fuchsia.

They had amazing talent. Seriously, some of the most brilliant engineers I've worked with.

They had a huge team. Hundreds of people.

It was so ambitious.

But it seemed like such a terrible idea from the start. Nobody was ever able to articulate who would ever use it.

Technically, it was brilliant. But there was no business plan.

If they wanted to build a new kernel that could replace Linux on Android and/or Chrome OS, that would have been worth exploring - it would have had at least a chance at success.

But no, they wanted to build a new OS from scratch, including not just the kernel but the UI libraries and window manager too, all from scratch.

That's why the only platform they were able to target was Google's Home Hub - one of the few Google products that had a UI but wasn't a complete platform (no third-party apps, for example). And even there, I don't think they had a compelling story for why their OS was worth the added complexity.

It boggles my mind that Fuchsia is still going on. They should have killed it years ago. It's so depressing that they did across-the-board layoffs, including taking away resources from critically underfunded teams, while leaving projects like Fuchsia around wasting time and effort on a worthless endeavor. Instead they just kept reducing Fuchsia while still keeping it going. For what?

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

#237

Post by gmueckl »

sesm wrote: post #160
gmueckl wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This entire situation looks very suspicious. Was Carmack even responsible for triaging research projects and allocating resources for them? If yes, then he should have fought that battle earlier. If no, then the best he could do is to refuse to use that OS in projects he controls.

Carmack had no direct say over research AFAIK.

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

#238

Post by gmueckl »

1718627440 wrote: post #167
gmueckl wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not when this is his personal opinion he thought nothing should follow from. "I think that your team shouldn't even exist" doesn't mean "I want your team to no longer exist.".

But the name Carmack carries some clout and people listen to him (too) closely because of his reputation alone. This is soft power that automatically comes with responsibility.

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

#239

Post by nashashmi »

dmazzoni wrote: post #236

I was at Google when the Flutter team started building Fuchsia. They had amazing talent. Seriously, some of the most brilliant engineers I've worked with. They had a huge team. Hundreds of people. It was so ambitious. But it seemed like such a terrible idea from the start. Nobody was ever able to articulate who would ever use it. Technically, it was brilliant. But there was no business plan. If they wanted to build a…

Wasn’t Fuchsia supposed to be a platform where different OS could run in a virtual environment and software packages would be complete containers? Was not this a new way of tackling the ancient OS problem?

These were my imaginations. I thought maybe an OS that could run on the web. Or an OS that could be virtualized to run on several machines. Or an OS that could be run along several other instances on the same machine each catering to a different user.

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

#240

Post by techpineapple »

thepryz wrote: post #219
techpineapple wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 posi…

But my point is that this is a highly competitive environment, the whole point in a highly competitive environment is to manipulate the environment and people. That’s what people get promoted for. So why not play the game? Again in the hypothetical if you are “less sensitive rather than believe you can manipulate the environment.” You lose.

But like it works for Musk and Trump, and probably hundreds of other leaders today, why not take their example? (Assuming again, your highly ambitious and competitive, I’m more pro social, so I’d take your route)

This is legitimately something I’ve been asking myself lately, we talk about a world that values one thing ( rationality, respect, pro social behavior) but reward another (pettiness, vindictive, selfishness). Why do we pretend?

Also, and maybe the most important point, John Carmack is 100% trying to manipulate his environment and people, that’s why he’s so successful!

The world is literally run by people who are good at manipulating people and their environment. That’s what an entrepreneur is, that’s what a politician is, that’s what an artist is. Your argument seems to mostly be people shouldn’t try to manipulate the world in a way that I don’t like.

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