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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

#431

Post by baq »

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

LLMs trust the docs. This is a rookie mistake in driver development, especially on prerelease hardware

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

#432

Post by frognumber »

John describes exactly what I'd like someone to build:

"To make something really different, and not get drawn into the gravity well of existing solutions, you practically need an isolated monastic order of computer engineers."

As a thought experiment:

* Pick a place where cost-of-living is $200/month

* Set up a village which is very livable. Fresh air. Healthy food. Good schools. More-or-less for the cost that someone rich can sponsor without too much sweat.

* Drop a load of computers with little to no software, and little to no internet

* Try reinventing the computing universe from scratch.

Patience is the key. It'd take decades.

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

#433

Post by baq »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #257
spydum wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that's true but I've worked with a lot of engineers that are of this caliber and as long as you can form a coherent logical explanation they will bend they're way more open than you expect. But you got to put in the work to make that argument. They won't take it on faith

It is an entirely different thing, gifted, highly experienced and confident in his assertions is quite frequent, but the cult-like following and status of personalities like Carmack or Blow can seriously alter their own self perception and importance.

First, look at what they’re shipping, then decide the likelihood of them being right.

Maybe you know something they don’t; it’s actually very likely. But maybe what you think matters actually doesn’t at all and ultimately they’re right.

In either case, they were shipping, so best to listen and be prepared if you disagree.

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

#434

Post by baq »

WD-42 wrote: post #193
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.

Which makes sense when you are one of 3 developers at ID software. There's absolutely no room for waste. This is Meta. Let the kids build their operating system ffs. Is he now more concerned with protecting shareholder value? Who cares.

This is how megacorps die. You’re describing Intel-level complacency.

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

#435

Post by phendrenad2 »

surajrmal wrote: post #316
phendrenad2 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it's even a rumor then I started it, I just can't imagine Fuchsia serves any other purpose. I don't even usually give Google a lot of credit, but I just can't imagine they made something this useless and misunderstood the feasibility of such an OS this badly. It would be like Hewlett-Packard in the early 2000s levels of incompetence.

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

#436

Post by KaiserPro »

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 think the issue is, Carmack didn't talk like a "normal" facebook engineer.

Supposedly you were meant to have you disagreements in private, and come to support what ever was decided. "hold your opinions lightly" The latest version of it was something like "disagree and commit".

This meant that you got a shit tonne of group think.

This pissed off Carmack no end, because it meant shitty decisions were let out the door. He kept on banging on about "time to fun". This meant that any feature that got in the way of starting a game up as fast a possible, would get a public rebuke. (rightly so)

People would reply with "but the metric we are trying to move is x,y & z" which invariably would be some sub-team PSC (read promotion/bonus/not getting fired system) optimisation. Carmack would basically say that the update was bad, and they should feel bad. This didn't go down well, because up until 2024 one did not speak negatively about anything on workplace. (Once carmack reported a bug to do with head tracking[from what I recall] there was lots of backwards and forwards, with the conclusion that "won't fix, dont have enough resources". Carmack replied with a diff he'd made fixing the issue.)

Basically Carmack was all about the experience, and Facebook was all about shipping features. This meant that areas of "priority" would scale up staffing. Leaders distrusted games engineers("oh they don't pass our technical interviews"), so pulled in generalists with little to no experience of 3D.

This translated in small teams that produced passable features growing 10x in 6 months and then producing shit. But because they'd grown so much, they constantly re-orged pushed out the only 3d experts they had, they could then never deliver. But as it was a priority, they couldn’t back down

This happened to:

Horizons (the original roblox clone)

video conferencing in oculus

Horizons (the shared experience thing, as in all watching a live broadcast together)

Both those horizons (I can't remember what the original names were) Were merged into horizons world, along with the video conferencing for workplace

originally each team was like 10, by the time that I left, it was something like a thousand or more. With the original engineers either having left or moved on to something more productive.

tldr: Facebook didn't take to central direction setting, ie before we release product x, all its features must work, be integrated with each other, and have a obvious flow/narrative that links them together. Carmack wanted a good product, facebook just wanted to iterate shit out the door to see what stuck.

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

#437

Post by lelanthran »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #345
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…

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…

For datasheets that's normal. Might even be leaning towards smaller than average for the device in question.

For comparison, a data sheet for a single transistor can be around 12 to 30 pages. A data sheet for a tiny microcontroller is probably a few hundred pages.

I once wrote a driver for a flash chip and that had a data sheet of around 80 pages.

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

#438

Post by miki123211 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #345
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…

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…

Probably CPU vendor culture? I forgot how large Intel's manual set is, but ARM's was ~11k pages the last time I checked. Intel's was smaller, but not that much smaller, certainly within an order of magnitude.

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

#439

Post by KaiserPro »

WD-42 wrote: post #193
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.

Which makes sense when you are one of 3 developers at ID software. There's absolutely no room for waste. This is Meta. Let the kids build their operating system ffs. Is he now more concerned with protecting shareholder value? Who cares.

> This is Meta. Let the kids build their operating system ffs.

the problem was, it was holding back products. Because if youre going to make your own OS, it changes what chips you put in. If you don't know what chipset you're going to have, you don;t know what your pixel budget is, you can't plan features.

It takes about 2 years to get hardware out the door, and another 1.5 years to iron out the bugs and get a "finished" product.

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

#440

Post by sim7c00 »

sylware wrote: post #424
anttiharju wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... ??????????

the most ethical company still goes for profit and earn shittons.... the most fragrant turd still smells of shit
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