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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

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an extremely reductive view. Whatever you think of Meta core products, they pay a ton of people to work on various open source projects, do R&D on things which are only tangentially related to social media like VR or data center tech. There is worse way to get a paycheck to do what you are interested in.

> tangentially related to social media like VR This is in no way tangential. VR is Meta's way of trying to move social media from web to VR in a Second Life way. And you can believe me that there will be advertisement in the "game".

What’s the issue with advertisement exactly?

It’s completely tangential at this point. Meta dreams of a metaverse but most of their investments have gone to solving foundational issues with VR.

If Meta wants to pay for that, well, I’m not going to bite the hands that feeds VR research. My starry-eyed teenage years are thankfully far behind me.

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

#473
post #88

> they also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad This is madness. The safe space culture has really gone too far.

A meeting with HR is not madness. No one got maimed or died, or even lost work, seemingly. Some people exchanged words. Cool off.

The only reason you want me to "cool off", is because you feel bad just interacting with somebody expressing a polite, strong opinion. Online. On the other side of the world. With text.

This is exactly the madness I'm talking about.

Case in point.

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

#474

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?

Facebook seems to have strange relationship with most Americans while the rest of the world is quite happy with it. Including both WhatsApp and Instagram.

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

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Activism doesn't require participation in a poverty cult. Any socialist in a nation like the USA or the UK is by someone's lens a champagne socialist. Let's not participate in this tired trope.

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

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tangentially related to social media like VR This is in no way tangential. VR is Meta's way of trying to move social media from web to VR in a Second Life way. And you can believe me that there will be advertisement in the "game".

What’s the issue with advertisement exactly? It’s completely tangential at this point. Meta dreams of a metaverse but most of their investments have gone to solving foundational issues with VR. If Meta wants to pay for that, well, I’m not going to bite the hands that feeds VR research. My starry-eyed teenage years are thankfully far behind me.

I used to watch commercials during my starry-eyed teenage years as well. I used to think ninja turtles was anything but a 20 minute ad for toys when I was in preschool.

Ads are actually horrible. Holy moly I'm so glad I can just ublock my way through the sea of garbage that is the internet nowadays. The fact there are people still indoctrinated by commercials makes sense, I'm just sorry you see that as a marker of maturity.

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

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tangentially related to social media like VR This is in no way tangential. VR is Meta's way of trying to move social media from web to VR in a Second Life way. And you can believe me that there will be advertisement in the "game".

What’s the issue with advertisement exactly? It’s completely tangential at this point. Meta dreams of a metaverse but most of their investments have gone to solving foundational issues with VR. If Meta wants to pay for that, well, I’m not going to bite the hands that feeds VR research. My starry-eyed teenage years are thankfully far behind me.

> What’s the issue with advertisement exactly?

Advertisement isn't showing you something you might be interested in. Advertisement is an industry of psychoanalysts spending untold man hours of effort crafting ways to psychologically manipulate the population into serving the needs of a given corporation.

Instagram doesn't just show you cool clothes you might want to buy. It leverages dark pattern ux to keep you engaged with the app well past any healthy duration, and shows you content designed to enrage or arouse you to keep you in a mental state that will increase engagement and possibly lead to you engaging in shopping therapy.

Advertising is releasing psychofauna into the world of YouTube kids to get your children obsessed with brand characters that they absolutely must have physical representations of. Or it gets even darker than that, look up Elsagate.

Maybe advertising wasn't evil when it was a sweet potato hawker shouting their wares into the market. Now it's an entirely different beast and it is anti human and evil.

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

#478

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…

Love this idea and wondering where that low cost of living place would be. But genuinely asking;

What problem are we trying to solve that is not possible right now? Do we start from hardware at the CPU ?

I remember one of an ex Intel engineer once said, you could learn about all the decisions which makes modern ISA and CPU uArch design, along with GPU and how it all works together, by the time you have done all that and could implement a truly better version from a clean sheet, you are already close to retiring .

And that is assuming you have the professional opportunity to learn about all these, implementation , fail and make mistakes and relearn etc.

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

#479
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I followed his posts internally too. It's amazing how many people were arguing against fucking John Carmack. What a waste of talent.

I disagree that you should just defer - but it’s sad that politics was obviously consuming and inhibiting his ability to help the product.

No one should just defer, but you better be right. In the end do they have a better product without him?

Don’t think so.

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

#480
post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an extremely reductive view. Whatever you think of Meta core products, they pay a ton of people to work on various open source projects, do R&D on things which are only tangentially related to social media like VR or data center tech. There is worse way to get a paycheck to do what you are interested in.

"It wasn't all bad. They built the Autobahn"

Few more years and they would've finished Polarbanen. The northern Norway railroad connecting Trondheim to Tromsø, far inside the Arctic Circle. Giving us $50 trains to Tromsø instead of $500 planes.

But my enthusiasm diminished after learning that they worked thousands people to death.

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