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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

#291

Post by wtallis »

dist1ll wrote: post #200
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.…

Intel still does it. As far as I can see they're the only player in town that provide open, detailed documentation for their high-speed NICs [0]. You can actually write a driver for their 100Gb cards from scratch using their datasheet. Most other vendors would either (1) ignore you, (2) make you sign an NDA or (3) refer you to their poorly documented Linux/BSD driver. Not sure what the situation is for other hardware…

The NVMe spec is freely downloadable and sufficient to write a driver with, if your OS already has PCIe support (which doesn't have open specifications). You don't need any vendor-specific features for ordinary everyday use, so it's a bit of a different situation from NICs. (Also, NVMe was in very large part an Intel creation, though it's maintained by an industry consortium.)

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

#292

Post by kid64 »

daseiner1 wrote: post #275
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.

[flagged]

Are you arguing that everyone's power is equal? What an asinine position.

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

#293

Post by lyu07282 »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #48
trollied wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still do “unsafe” stuff in rust, and people do. It’s perfectly possible to write safe C and C++ these days. And you don’t have to deal with a borrow checker, and a very small pool of developers available to hire.

> It’s perfectly possible to write safe C and C++ these days. It's also very hard to do so.

The chrome team doesn't manage that, but perhaps they are just bad at C++ /s

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

#294

Post by simoncion »

tom_ wrote: post #224
amarant wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not that though. This is just developers being unable to handle constructive criticism, and when they can't win the argument on merits, went for the HR option. It happens. I've had it happen to me too, but my response was to resign on the spot (I was already not satisfied with the company). The "toxic behaviour" I had done? I reverted a commit on the master branch that didn't compile, and sent a slack to the…

Carmack says he can't post the actual discussion, but clearly you have access to it - can you post it?

Even if that didn't violate NDAs & etc, that would be super rude. You realize that, right?

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

#295

Post by theshackleford »

nrp wrote: post #247
theshackleford wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've only seen John Carmack's public interactions, but they've all been professional and kind. You don't know someone or how they really behave because they are a public figure.

I’ve been on both the same side and the opposing side of debates with him, both in person and over internal discussion threads. His public persona and private behavior match. I viewed it positively, though per the topic of the thread, not everyone did.

That’s very different than simply observing someone in public. Which is what my post was referring too to and so it remains accurate.

FWIW I like carmack from what I have seen publically (and Romero, who I have interacted with) but I wouldn’t pretend to know who either of them really are from my observation of them.

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

#296

Post by lll-o-lll »

dedup-com wrote: post #264
lll-o-lll wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And stupid. Like it or hate it, a non-nonsense, direct speaking, but fair and objective boss is the one you want. No one is served by failure; not the people at the top, nor the people at the bottom. There is a difference between “this project is not going to work” vs “these people are incompetent and the project should be cancelled as a result”. The former needs to be said, the latter is a HR violation.

Carmack absolutely 100% percent did not say "these people are incompetent". What he said boils down to "these people are world's best experts on writing operating systems and they'd love to write a new one from the scratch but I strongly believe that writing a new operating system is not the best path forward."

> Carmack absolutely 100% percent did not say "these people are incompetent".

Sorry if I wasn’t clear; this was the point I was actually trying to make. Direct and to the point should not a HR incident make. I was trying to contrast with something that would.

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

#297

Post by simoncion »

fatbird wrote: post #79
Inityx wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll offer a different interpretation: If a professional can't give critical feedback in a professional setting without being rude or belittling others, then they need to improve their communication skills.

This. Being "reported to HR" doesn't mean "almost got fired". It likely meant a meeting where someone explained "hey, the way you communicated that caused some upset, let's discuss better ways to handle that situation next time." Very often in larger companies, complaints about things like "this bigwig from this other group jumped all over us" are automatically sent through HR because HR has staff whose job just is r…

FWIW, it can also mean a meeting where HR says to the complainer: "Are you good, dude? Why are you complaining about this? This is perfectly normal workplace behavior. Stop wasting our time."

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

#298

Post by dagmx »

kid64 wrote: post #292
daseiner1 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Are you arguing that everyone's power is equal? What an asinine position.

It must either be a belief that everyone is equal, and that they would be comfortable telling Carmack that he’s wrong.

Or it’s an appeal to authority in that if a person of authority says it then they must be right so there’s no reason to push back in the first place.

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

#299

Post by ryandrake »

alanbernstein wrote: post #241
firesteelrain wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Carmack's swim lane was exceptionally wide. My understanding was that this sort of criticism was actually his main job duty.

No matter how big or small one's "swim lane" is, an argument on technical merits without getting personal or discriminatory (assuming this was the case with J.C.) is never an HR issue. The whole "Weaponizing HR" thing is a nightmare and should not be acceptable.

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

#300

Post by zer0zzz »

I was there when they wanted to do the custom XROS. I remember asking them in a Q&A session exactly why they would build this and I recall the reasoning behind it totally fell flat. Fundamentally it became clear these guys just wanted to write a new OS because they thought it would be cool or fun.

Much of the scenarios they tried to address could have been done with Mach or some realtime kernel or with fuchsia. I recall later on they did consider using fuchsia as the user space for the os for some time.

On another note, there was similarly an equally “just for fun” language effort in the org as well (eg “FNL”). That was also conceived by a bunch of randos who weren’t a bunch of compiler guys that had no product vision and just did it for fun.

Well when the era of efficiency arrived all of this stuff ended.

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