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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

#401

Post by izacus »

LPisGood wrote: post #355
lll-o-lll wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mostly notice that those people aren't emotionally grown up enough to actually produce good results.

When your emotions over your work become more important than the quality of the work you're outputting, you become a problem for people who use your work.

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

#403

Post by knorker »

LPisGood wrote: post #358
lokar wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A junior engineer can make an API that can basically live forever as tech debt.

(Especially if it's an "API" persisted to disk)

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

#404

Post by thrown-0825 »

tanvach wrote: post #35

Was at Oculus post acquisition and can say that the whole XROS was an annoyance and distraction the core technology teams didn’t need. There were so many issues with multiple tech stacks that needed fixing first. Mind you, this XROS idea came after Oculus reorged into FB proper. It felt to me like there were FB teams (or individuals) that wanted get on the ARVR train. Carmack was absolutely right, and after the reorg…

[flagged]

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

#405

Post by izacus »

bri3d wrote: post #108
EGreg wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS isnt the hard part. The driver ecosystem is the moat. Linux finally overcame it decades later

Android built a new, giant moat for Linux (or "Linux" depending on your opinions about Android) in the embedded application processor space - now the "standard" board support package target for new embedded AP hardware is almost always some random point-in-time snapshot of Android. Running "mainline" Linux is hard (because the GPU and media peripheral drivers are usually half-userspace Android flavored stuff and rely…

I don't remember there being any time in history where you got "register-level documentation".

Those boards were always accompanied by horrific binary blobs glued to a kernel form a stone age. Or Windows.

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

#406

Post by sour-taste »

pjjpo wrote: post #363
throwaway2037 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow... that PDF is 2,750 pages! There must be an army of technical writers behind it. That is an incredible technical achievement. Real question: Why do you think Intel does this? Does it guarantee a very strong foothold into data center NICs? I am sure competitors would argue two different angles: (1) this PDF shares too much info; some should be hidden behind an NDA, (2) it's too hard to write (and maintain) this P…

In terms of (2), I wonder if it's even possible to write a driver without such a document. In the end, the vendor is on the foot for the driver for major platforms (let's assume Linux) - if they can write a Linux driver without a similar spec to this doc, then the doc probably doesn't need to exist since the business wins from hobbyist drivers will be low. If they can't though, then it's just a matter of formatting a…

Didn't all the asahi Linux Mac m1 drivers essentially get reverse engineered with little to no support from apple and no public docs? If I'm remembering correctly then I guess it's possible with enough effort and reverse engineering skills

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

#407

Post by knorker »

wilg wrote: post #196
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…

It is very much not an objective discussion if you are discussing whether it makes sense to develop a new operating system.

How is it not?

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

#408

Post by xxs »

procaryote wrote: post #387

The problem when working for Meta is that if you do a good job, you've helped make the world worse... so the real heroes are the people wasting money and reducing efficiency If you're at all competent, go work somewhere else

I'd take zstd any time while I have facebook and friends blocked. The world is not black and white.

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

#409

Post by wolvesechoes »

procaryote wrote: post #387

The problem when working for Meta is that if you do a good job, you've helped make the world worse... so the real heroes are the people wasting money and reducing efficiency If you're at all competent, go work somewhere else

But isn't that true for every big corp, or even every public company? Even if founders may had some other goals in addition to making money, as the time passes profit becomes the only goal, and usually more profit is being generated while doing bad and malicious things.

Problem is systemic.

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

#410

Post by XorNot »

the-rc wrote: post #230
dist1ll wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the other hand, see the complete mess that are the IPU6/7 camera chipsets and their Linux support.

Good christ this is my current work laptop. It...mostly doesn't work. Plug in a USB camera and it'll just go. Several drivers, userspace utilities and other daemons and sometimes gstreamer works, but does Zoom work? Who knows!
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