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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

#441

Post by sim7c00 »

frognumber wrote: post #432

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 someon…

been writing an OS for ever 10 years to try.

its seriously not something you want to do if you want to get anywhere.

then again,its a lot of fun, maybe imagining where it could be some day if you had an army of slave programmers (because still it wont make money lol)

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

#442

Post by lelanthran »

snickerbockers wrote: post #276
andreww591 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for certain types of OSes, it should be relatively easy to get most of Linux's hardware support by porting LKL ( https://github.com/lkl/linux ) and adding appropriate hooks to access hardware. Of course, your custom kernel will still have to have some of its own code to support core platform/chipset devices, but LKL should pretty much cover just about all I/O devices (and you also get stuff like disk filesys…

>but LKL should pretty much cover just about all I/O devices (and you also get stuff like disk filesystems and a network stack along with the device drivers). thus calling into question why you ever bothered writing a new kernel in the first place if you were just going to piggyback Linux's device drivers onto some userspace wrapper thingy. Im not necessarily indoctrinated to the point where I can't conceive of Linux…

If you're going this route, I have found netBSD a better option for this sort of thing.

It has a rump kernel architecture which makes reusing the drivers almost trivial compared to reusing linus drivers with a new kernel.

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

#443

Post by flr03 »

influx wrote: post #227
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 followed his posts internally too. It's amazing how many people were arguing against fucking John Carmack. What a waste of talent.

Damn, that's medieval. Anyone should be able to challenge anyone regardless of status.

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

#444

Post by dkiebd »

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

Ah, the Europeans woke up.

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

#445

Post by dist-epoch »

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

Providing a service that billions of people value is making the world worse? Wow

What next, go work for TV stations and sabotage them?

Go work for McDonalds and make it inneficient?

Sabotage manufacturers of combustion-cars?

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

#446

Post by saagarjha »

roncesvalles wrote: post #420
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

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.

Yeah I'm making the world a better place by earning 500k a year doing a bad job to slow down this company. Look at how much good I am doing sorry I can't hear you over my paycheck clearing

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

#447

Post by saagarjha »

simonw wrote: post #360
throwaway2037 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Don't worry they're writing documentation now for AI agents

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

#448

Post by baq »

const_cast wrote: post #169
ronsor wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason Chinese companies can even get away with these big projects is because of state backing and state objectives. By itself, the market doesn't support a new general-purpose OS at this point.

You're downvoted but you're 100% correct. It makes absolutely zero financial sense to create a new general purpose operating system. That's billions of lines of code. With a B. And that's just the code - getting it to work with hardware? Do YOU want to talk to 10,000 hardware vendors and get them on board? No! Nobody does! That's just money burning! But, there are valid political reasons for creating a new general pu…

If you are China, the vendors are you and money is treated differently than in the west. Balance sheet will accommodate a project like that easily, especially if it decouples them from the US. They’ve already got their own software ecosystem which most people don’t hear about or heard once or twice, and it’s running their tech scene.

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

#449

Post by lm28469 »

dist-epoch wrote: post #445
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

Providing a service that billions of people value is making the world worse? Wow What next, go work for TV stations and sabotage them? Go work for McDonalds and make it inneficient? Sabotage manufacturers of combustion-cars?

Providing fentanyl to addicts is doing God's work then I imagine?

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

#450

Post by saagarjha »

IshKebab wrote: post #372
Joker_vD wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Modern hardware is just so complicated it would take a long time to completely document, and even longer to write a driver for. You know, one'd think that having a complex hardware should make writing a driver easier because the hardware is able to take care of itself just fine, and provide a reasonable interface, as opposed to devices of the yore which you had to babysit, wasting your main CPU's time, and doing si…

No, the complexity usually isn't hidden. It's the driver's job to do that. I guess one exception maybe is Nvidia who have sort of hidden the complexity by moving most driver functionality onto software on the card. At least that's how I understood it. Don't quote me on that.

Yes, and then you get odd behavior you can't introspect because the card is a black box to you.
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