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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

#311

Post by lll-o-lll »

bongodongobob wrote: post #308
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Just because something isn't an HR violation doesn't mean it's not wrong, rude, or unprofessional. Society is not a computer program. Being tactful is important to well adjusted people.

Hard disagree. Being tactful is only relevant when dealing with people, criticise an idea, a project, a solution as much as you like. Intellectual debate is the fire from which genuinely good ideas are forged.

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

#312

Post by surajrmal »

nashashmi wrote: post #239
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 machi…

That doesn't sound anything like what fuchsia is or ever was. Fuchsia takes a different set of tradeoffs with respect to baseline primitives and built a new stack of low level user space on top of those new primitives. This gives the software fundamentally different properties which might be better or worse for your use case. For consumer hardware products I think it comes out ahead, but only time will tell.

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

#313

Post by Uehreka »

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]

Seriously? Have you never had a person more powerful than you tell you that you’re wrong when they in fact are wrong? Often in corporate environments the answer to a “what to do next” question isn’t easily provable, and people who take advantage of this can make life really suck.

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

#314

Post by glaslong »

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 tends to keep people so on edge, with performance so heavily based on peer agreement, that it creates a sort of defensive toxic positivity

a little bit a negative feedback at high level can domino quickly too. massive pivots, reorgs, the works.

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

#315

Post by rainyrockies »

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…

Although I have have met and currently work with many people who struggle with direct interactions to an extent where one could consider it a personal problem, I have also found that people who are direct or don't "beat around the bush" also often get VERY upset when treated similarly.

I'm not saying that there's no space for direct communication and that everyone needs to be formal and socially polite during every interaction. But I've met many people who act like you describe John does who very much do not appreciate getting it back, implying some level of awareness that their directness is hurtful on occasion.

I've only met a few direct people who can take it as well.

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

#316

Post by surajrmal »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #307
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…

I always felt that Fuchsia was a make-work program to keep talented kernel engineers away from other companies. Sort of a war by attrition.

That's a weird rumor that I'm not sure I understand. Things are not that complicated.

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

#317

Post by surajrmal »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #286
yard2010 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it's just a political shit show at this point. Ideas go hard if the people behind them aren't playing the game well enough, no matter their value.

There's few things worse for the long-term health of a software project than people who have hammers and are hunting for nails for them.

Isn't this how folks use Linux today? It's the only tool they know and don't understand the tradeoffs, hurting the product.

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

#318

Post by rand593843 »

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.

Please name them all. Would love to read and watch their content. I usually come across a decade later and like, whaaat.. how did i miss this. Man i could have had better time watching them instead of doom scrolling.

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

#319

Post by jkestner »

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!

Where are the good war stories on Keller?

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

#320

Post by laserbeam »

agsnu wrote: post #99

Huawei seem pretty committed to building their own OS and uncoupling from the Western technology stack in total https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-h...

Geopolitical reasons for making your own OS are actually reasonable and understandable. Not saying they are good, because I would much prefer a planet where we collaborate on these things… but they’re not dumb. They make sense in a similar way the space race made sense.
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