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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

#51

Post by actionfromafar »

cubefox wrote: post #49
thrance wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not though. The GitHub repo was never updated once. Here's an experiment for you: open X in a new private tab and count political posts, see how many of them are far right. Bias is evident.

> The GitHub repo was never updated once. Pretty sure that's false: I remember seeing the recent commit that made Grok misbehave. > Here's an experiment for you: open X in a new private tab and count political posts, see how many of them are far right. Bias is evident. Go to Bluesky and count far left posts. The result will be similar, because political bubbles form by themselves.

Nazi bubbles form naturally around nazi owners.

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

#52

Post by philistine »

lukev wrote: post #41

This is completely right from a product point of view, which is Carmack's argument. But I have wondered why one of these companies with billions of dollars to burn hasn't tried to create something new as a strategic initiative. Yes, there wouldn't be any ROI for years, and yes, the first several products on the platform would probably be better off on something more traditional. But the long term value could potentia…

Apple bought one of those in the 90s, and they are still reaping the benefits of that strategic initiative. But the thing is, NeXt allowed Apple to think up new, differentiated products. If you come at the problem of the OS from a purely technical perspective, you'll waste time for no gain.

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

#53

Post by drewbeck »

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.

People have been getting mad at being made to feel bad at work for much longer than “safe space culture” has existed. If someone or some team had more power than you at an organization you for sure will get reprimanded for making them feel bad.

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

#54

Post by tanvach »

koolala wrote: post #39
tanvach wrote: post #16

I think people have forgotten about Google Fuchsia which I guess is a good sign for a new OS. They’ve done quite well in deploying it seamlessly to their consumer devices.

The reviews I've seen of its stability and usefulness have not been good.

Yup it’s because they had to rewrite the drivers I presume. Always going to be the biggest issue with any new OS.

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

#55

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

koolala wrote: post #39
tanvach wrote: post #16

I think people have forgotten about Google Fuchsia which I guess is a good sign for a new OS. They’ve done quite well in deploying it seamlessly to their consumer devices.

The reviews I've seen of its stability and usefulness have not been good.

That was also frustrating in that sel4 was right there. Why not invest efforts in the existing thing?

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

#56

Post by webdevver »

trollied wrote: post #42
webdevver wrote: post #30

tbh linux has quite a bit of cruft in it these days at the syscall and interface layer. if youre apple, it does make sense to do stuff from scratch. i think in a way, software guys wind up building their own prisons. an api is created to solve problem X given world Y, but world Y+1 has a different set of problems - problems that may no longer be adequately addressed given the api invented for X. people talk about "re…

You can still do “unsafe” stuff in rust, and people do. It’s perfectly possible to write safe C and C++ these days. And you don’t have to deal with a borrow checker, and a very small pool of developers available to hire.

oh, i didnt mean to invoke rust in any technical sense - i brought up rust to introduce an example of the attitude that rust people are known for, namely "why not rewrite everything?", which a lot of people have a kneejerk rejection of.

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

#57

Post by thrance »

He's acting like their VR UX is top notch when it's as bad as it gets. Just yesterday I dusted off my Meta Quest 2 to play a bit, and spent around an hour trying to pair up my left controller to the helmet after replacing the battery.

You can't do it without going through their fucking app, that asks for every permissions under the sun, including GPS positioning for some reason. After finally getting this app working and pairing it with my headset, I could finally realize the controller was just dead and their was nothing to do.

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

#58

Post by Nuthen »

armchairhacker wrote: post #12

What would be the real advantage of a custom OS over a Linux distribution? The OS does process scheduling, program management, etc. Ok, you don’t want a VR headset to run certain things slowly or crash. But some Linux distributions are battle-tested and stable, and fast, so can’t you write ordinary programs that are fast and reliable (e.g. the camera movement and passthrough use RTLinux and have a failsafe that has b…

Based on the latter tweet in the chain, I'm wondering if Carmack is hinting that Foveated Rendering (more processing power is diverted towards the specific part of the screen you're looking at) was one advantage envisioned for it. But perhaps he's saying that he's not so sure if the performance gains from it actually justify building a custom OS instead of just overclocking the GPU along with an existing OS?

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

#59

Post by v9v »

armchairhacker wrote: post #12

What would be the real advantage of a custom OS over a Linux distribution? The OS does process scheduling, program management, etc. Ok, you don’t want a VR headset to run certain things slowly or crash. But some Linux distributions are battle-tested and stable, and fast, so can’t you write ordinary programs that are fast and reliable (e.g. the camera movement and passthrough use RTLinux and have a failsafe that has b…

Maybe not applicable for the XR platform here, but you could add introspection capabilities not present in Linux, a la Genera letting the developer hotpatch driver-level code, or get all processes running on a shared address space which lets processes pass pointers around instead of the Unix model of serializing/deserializing data for communication (http://metamodular.com/Common-Lisp/lispos.html)

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

#60

Post by thrance »

cubefox wrote: post #49
thrance wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not though. The GitHub repo was never updated once. Here's an experiment for you: open X in a new private tab and count political posts, see how many of them are far right. Bias is evident.

> The GitHub repo was never updated once. Pretty sure that's false: I remember seeing the recent commit that made Grok misbehave. > Here's an experiment for you: open X in a new private tab and count political posts, see how many of them are far right. Bias is evident. Go to Bluesky and count far left posts. The result will be similar, because political bubbles form by themselves.

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm

Not updated in two years.

> Go to Bluesky...

At least people are not fantasizing about "race wars" or discussing the "jewsish question" there. Two subjects I saw multiple times on X's front page.

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