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

351–360 of 675 posts

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

#351

Post by eru »

ignoramous wrote: post #272
influx wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I followed his posts internally too. It's amazing how many people were arguing against fucking John Carmack. What a waste of talent.

> were arguing against fucking John Carmack I am sure Carmack himself encourages debates and discussions. Lionizing one person can't be expected of every employee (unless that person is also the founder or the company is tiny).

I don't think you should treat the founder more special than eg John Carmack.

But I agree that civil discussion is good.

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

#352

Post by pjmlp »

modeless wrote: post #122
tanvach wrote: post #16

I think people have forgotten about Google Fuchsia which I guess is a good sign for a new OS. They’ve done quite well in deploying it seamlessly to their consumer devices.

"Quite well" by what metric? It shipped on one device. That's pretty much the lowest bar you can imagine! Did it provide any tangible benefit to anyone? Let alone a benefit commensurate with the enormous cost of developing it and continuing to maintain it? I think it was insane to start a new OS effort written in C/C++. We have plenty of OSes written in C/C++! We know how that story ends. If you're going to spend the…

While I agree with the sentiment given my bias towards safe systems languages, Genode OS is pretty much mostly C++, although they added some Ada/SPARK as well, which is relatively recent research OS.

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

#354

Post by deadbabe »

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.…

Wouldn’t LLMs make it way easier

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

#355

Post by LPisGood »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #311
bongodongobob wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately people have ideas, projects, and solutions that they care deeply about. Like it or not, some tact when dealing with these things goes a long way.

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

#356

Post by pjmlp »

twelvedogs wrote: post #128
lukev wrote: post #41

This is completely right from a product point of view, which is Carmack's argument. But I have wondered why one of these companies with billions of dollars to burn hasn't tried to create something new as a strategic initiative. Yes, there wouldn't be any ROI for years, and yes, the first several products on the platform would probably be better off on something more traditional. But the long term value could potentia…

How would that be better than just grabbing a bsd and starting with that, PlayStation and Apple did it and actually ended up with functional products

Apple surely did not, as NeXTSTEP wasn't invented at Apple.

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

#357

Post by mrbungie »

deadbabe wrote: post #354
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.…

Wouldn’t LLMs make it way easier

Only if you are an expert who wants to use time debugging LLM code rather than coding it yourself.

PS: Half-joking, you can write some big portions with LLMs but the point stands.

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

#358

Post by LPisGood »

lokar wrote: post #184
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.

What kind of thing is bad enough that it warrants multiple discussions without the junior engineer getting the hint that it’s a bad idea?

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

#359

Post by pjmlp »

pipeline_peak wrote: post #66

Jonathan Blow is the world’s most successful hobbyist programmer. His whole thing is doing projects from scratch. Every game he made could be done in Unity with far less effort. Most opinions of this man exists in a vacuum space isolated from the real world software industry. Building an OS from scratch is one of those examples. It’s never seems like there’s a significant reason behind them other than………”I made dat :…

He got the right to be acknowledged by his peers for the work he has made at GDC, and anyone can make games with Unity, just like everyone can make a novel with Word, now making one without pre made tooling, that is a skill on itself.

Why is such a meme among gamers about Unity and Unreal based games?

Exactly because so many make so little effort it is clear where the game is coming from.

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

#360

Post by simonw »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #347
makeitdouble wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Oops, sorry, didn't get around to documenting it". That's obviously the wrong message. They should say "Go ask the engineering VP to get us off any other projects for another cycle while we're writing 'satisfying' documentation". Extensive documentation comes at a price few companies are willing to pay (and that's not just a matter of resources. Look at Apple's documentation)

> Look at Apple's documentation To clarify for me: Is this good or bad?

It's bad. Apple's documentation is notoriously weak, despite them being one of the most well-resourced companies in the world.
Post reply on HN