John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta • Hacker News Board

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

#481

Post by zaphirplane » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 11:28 AM UTC

LunaSea wrote: post #470

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #465

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".

Advertising has existed and powered tv and radio before the internet. That’s great / grandfather territory for some

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

#482

Post by lstodd » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 11:35 AM UTC

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.…

heh, in mid-2000s all I had were a batch of misbehaving SATA controllers under freebsd, and an (actually quite well-written core of a) linux driver was all I had to work with.

Without that, we would have probably just switched hw, because the quite obscure bug was in the ASIC, and debugging that on 2005-6-ish hw is just infeasible.

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

#483

Post by esperent » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 11:43 AM UTC

zaphirplane wrote: post #481

LunaSea wrote: post #470

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".

Advertising has existed and powered tv and radio before the internet. That’s great / grandfather territory for some

The issue isn't advertising, it's targeted advertising which is a very different and far more problematic beast than the advertising of your grandparent's time.

In the interest of not getting bogged down in semantics, let's just always assume that when people say "advertising" in this era, they mean "targeted advertising". Then we can avoid yet another tired attempt at excusing Meta's behavior.

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

#484

Post by amadeuspagel » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 11:45 AM UTC

greggman65 wrote: post #26

And yet, Sony did it, Nintendo did it, both have been pretty succeesful. We also need to be clear what an OS is. Is it "darwin" or "macOS" - they have different scopes. Things I'd want from an OS for an XR device. 1. Fast boot. I don't want to have to wait 2-3-4-5 minutes to reboot for those times I need to reboot. I feel like Nintendo figured this out? It updates the OS in the background somehow and reboot is nearly…

ChromeOS, which is based on linux has both fast boot and zero jank.

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

#485

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 11:50 AM UTC

To be fair, monastic order of engineers is absolutely what the world could use about now.

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

#486

Post by rollcat » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 11:52 AM UTC

flr03 wrote: post #443

influx wrote: 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.

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

I was one month into my first full-time job, when I've (unknowingly of his rank) challenged the CTO in a technical discussion - in a public email exchange. Regardless of the outcome - I've been treated like an equal. This one short exchange has influenced not only the rest of my career, but my entire worldview.

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

#487

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 11:52 AM UTC

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?

Hmm? What value? And for whom?

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

#488

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 11:54 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #447

simonw wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Honestly, this is by far the most amusing side effect of AI thus far -- management demanding better documentation to help AI digest it.

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

#489

Post by password54321 » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 11:58 AM UTC

dmbche wrote: post #88

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #9

> 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.

It got mentioned for a reason. And obviously escalating with HR is a big deal as it comes with career risks for the person you are reporting. Risking someone else's career should be a last resort but seems to be more commonly a knee-jerk reaction with HR becoming weaponised.

The drawback of this is you lose good talent and keep rent-seekers instead.

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

#490

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 11:58 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #456

throwaway2037 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I may be the only person who ever understood every detail of C++, starting with the preprocessor. I can make that claim because I'm the only person who ever implemented all of it. (You cannot really know a language until you've implemented it.) I gave up on that in the 2000's. Modern C++ is simply terrifying in its complexity. (I'm not including the C++ Standard Library, as I didn't implement it.)

P.S. we're adding an "Editions" feature to D so we can simplify the language by removing obsolete and deadend features. We didn't get everything right, and want to fix it!