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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

#421

Post by osullivj »

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.

Zachary's Showstopper book is a great account of Dave Cutler and WinNT.

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

#422

Post by osullivj »

NBJack wrote: post #322
jamra wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I followed his posts internally before he left. He was strict about resource waste. Hand tracking would break constantly and he brought metrics to his posts. His whole point was that Apple has hardware nailed down and it’ll be efficient software that will be the differentiator. The bloat at Meta was the result of empire building.

I saw a few of those. He really leaned in on just how much waste was in the UI rendering, with some nasty looking call times to critical components. I think it was close to when he left. Dude just seemed frustrated with the lack of attention to things that mattered. But...that honestly tracks with Meta's past and present.

Would love to hear Carmack's thoughts on render cost...

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

#423

Post by osullivj »

markus_zhang wrote: post #211
WD-42 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sarcastic at all. I'm in the same boat. I've been trying to get into contributing to Redox, but at the end of the work day when the kid is finally asleep it's hard to motivate.

I get it man. It’s really tough. How old is your kid? Mine is a 5 years old boy and he doesn’t seem to need a lot of sleep but a huge amount of companionship which really bugs me out. In theory, it’s better to sleep early, get up around 5 and get 2 hours of quality time, but man he sometimes gets up around 6:15 and earlier, and I found it difficult to get good sleep anyway, so I tried to switch to 2 hours of night ti…

I'm now a post kids greybeard; two nats, two steps, both flavours. Yes, girls under 10 are easier than boys. That flips on you in the teen years!

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

#424

Post by sylware »

anttiharju wrote: post #413
wolvesechoes wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember, nokia about to release the first smartphone, full linux with a clean plain and simple C written OS/platform... and... then nothing happened. I recall the user groups being puzzled on what was waiting nokia, they were ready, had it all super open source and LEAN open source, and the iphone happened and they were bought by msft... ??????????

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

#425

Post by procaryote »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #409
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.

There are lots of profit motivated big companies that cause much less collateral damage. Facebook ranges from individualised harm like showing kids makeup ads when they delete a selfie, to macro scale harm like election interference

You could take a job designing landmines and you'd have a real hard time causing as much actual harm, as there just aren't enough wars going on to reach the same scale

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

#427

Post by nicce »

sour-taste wrote: post #406
pjjpo wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But it took 5 years. And since the first model, there are many others. It is huge work.

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

#428

Post by baq »

sitkack wrote: post #186
toast0 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are kinda wasting your time, the only way to make it work is to make the hobby OS Linux. Not the parent, but of course they're wasting their time... That's the point of a hobby OS. I'm working on a hobby OS, and I have no illusions that it's most likely fewer than 10 people will ever run it, and less than 100 will hear about it, but it lets me explore some interesting (to me) ideas, and forces me to learn a lit…

I didn't say they were wasting their time on their hobby OS, they are wasting their time trying to get it to do very esoteric thing on GCP. They aren't trying to get reboot to work, they are trying to get their version of kexec to work so their hobby os reboots faster. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kexec The biggest scam in the OS world is drivers, we should demand more out of our hardware. Drivers shouldn't be ne…

Hardware is so broken that getting useful functionality basically amounts to casting magic spells and drivers are supposed to be master wizards who know all the points where the spell book is wrong or incomplete. If you think drivers are bad, don’t look at the hardware, you’ll get depressed.

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

#429

Post by baq »

boredatoms wrote: post #109
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.…

Presumably if you’re meta you could pay the vendors enough to write drivers for any arbitrary OS

Things you can’t buy: vendor who cares enough to replicate your exact use cases in their lab

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

#430

Post by ivolimmen »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #409
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.

I think I can say that this wasn't the case with Sun Microsystems. I never worked there but everything I read on tht company was positive. I gate the fact that Oracle (one of the worst) bought them.
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