Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because of state backing and state objectives MS is a state backed company. Very natural that China went the same path.
No it isn't
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John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
411–420 of 675 posts
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#412The 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.
Depending on the founder. With Apple it can be reasoned that it only went down after you know who passed away.
Yeah its not reliable to count on one charismatic leader to run the whole thing, but that is what the corporate model has being doing and how we ended up here.
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#413The 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.
Nokia (mostly networking-related things nowadays) touts - or at least used to, haven't kept up to date - itself as one of the most ethical companies around.
> But isn't that true for every big corp, or even every public company?
So I suppose not really, no.
Additionally companies working on carbon-free energy might also serve as evidence. There are some big ones around.
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#414> 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…
Yeah, people getting really angry if you say anything bad about a product (!) is a depressing commonality in certain places these days. I got angry emails from people because I wrote "replacing a primary page of UI with this feature I never use doesn't give me a lot of value" because statements like that make "the team feel bad". It was an internal beta test with purpose of finding issues before they go public. Not s…
When I compare workplace dynamics in the American company I work for with local company a friend of mine works for, I feel like I sold my soul to the devil.
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#415Earlier 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.
It will be easy to dismiss any critisism when it's forced to be vague.
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#416Late 2019 I had a short conversation with Abrash about a new OS for the next set of glasses and my immediate reaction was “why?” He was adamant that there was a security need which Linux could not fill (his big concern was too much surface area for exploits in the context of untrusted 3rd party code). I remember thinking that this would be a surprise to cloud engineers at the big hosters, but chose not to continue the argument. He didn’t get where he is by being dramatically wrong very often, after all, but it still struck me as a waste. Note I did not work at Meta so he may have had stronger justifications he chose not to expose.
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#417I 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…
My understanding is that people are working on Fuschia in name only at this point. Of course some people are passionate enough to try and keep it alive, but it’s only useful to the degree that it can help the Android team move faster.
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#418What would be the real advantage of a custom OS over a Linux distribution? The OS does process scheduling, program management, etc. Ok, you don’t want a VR headset to run certain things slowly or crash. But some Linux distributions are battle-tested and stable, and fast, so can’t you write ordinary programs that are fast and reliable (e.g. the camera movement and passthrough use RTLinux and have a failsafe that has b…
I stated this elsewhere, but at least six years ago a major justification was a better security model. At least that’s what Michael Abrash told me when I asked.
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#419Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#420The 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
One of the better "service to humanity" opportunities for software engineers is to join a company like Meta or TikTok and perform awfully for as long as you can.