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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

#521

Post by metaltyphoon »

WalterBright wrote: post #490
WalterBright wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

This is one thing Rust did it right and I hope more languages adopt this.

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

#522

Post by procaryote »

redleader55 wrote: post #503
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

I find this kind of comment revolting - if I owe something, I owe it to my family and my parents, so if Meta comes to make me an offer and I accept it, it's my business and no one else's. Strangers on the internet, instead of judging people based on the company they work for, and divide them into "good" and "bad", should get off their high horses and join these companies, if they are capable, and change them from the…

Or take almost any other job.

If you can get a well paying job at meta, you have other options.

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

#523

Post by sour-taste »

stefan_ wrote: post #494
sour-taste wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't all the asahi Linux Mac m1 drivers essentially get reverse engineered with little to no support from apple and no public docs? If I'm remembering correctly then I guess it's possible with enough effort and reverse engineering skills

It was reverse engineered from a driver . With no driver and purely some PCIE device registers mapped into memory you might as well be trying to guess lottery numbers.

I guess the driver was the one that runs on Mac that they were able to refer to? Not sure you have any links to blog posts about this process it sounds so cool

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

#524

Post by dmbche »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #473
dmbche wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, your comment was potent nonsense. It raises no feelings in me other than contempt towards you personally.

And me saying cool off is madness? You must live in a mad, mad world. Good luck going forward.

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

#525

Post by tomovo »

Does SteamOS count as something Carmack would discourage as well? Yes it's a Linux-based system and yes even based on an existing distro, but it is a purpose-specific OS and it seems like it's working well for Valve and people using it to play Windows games without Windows...

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

#526

Post by dmbche »

password54321 wrote: post #489
dmbche wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Has HR been weaponized if the result was just a chat

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

#527

Post by cmrdporcupine »

raggi wrote: post #338
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only did they target Home Hub, they basically forced a rewrite on it (us, I worked on the team). After we already launched. And made our existing workable software stack into legacy. And then they were late. Then late again. And late again. With no consequences. 100% agree with your points. To me watching I was like -- yeah, hell, yeah, working on an OS from scratch sounds awesome, those guys have an awesome job.…

By forced I guess you’re referring to the room full of leads who all said yes, but then reported otherwise back down to their ics to avoid retribution. I caught early wind of this from folks being super rude in early on the ground discussions and tried to raise it with Linus. One of the directors got his kickers in a twist and accused me of making a mountain out of a molehill. I guess clearly not, as the sentiment an…

I don't care who agreed to what, it's bad engineering practice to take a working successfully launched product and throw out its entire working software stack no matter how inelegant it seems. To what end? What did Fuchsia offer? When it finally shipped -- what, 2, 3 years late? --- custmers couldn't even tell it happened.

And in order to make it happen it also required writing the already-launched HTML-based UI in Flutter/Dart. Again ... why? What for? There wasn't even a working "native" Flutter at the time, despite promises, and there certainly wasn't a working accessibility stack -- no screen reader, no magnification, nothing -- so that all had to be kludged in. It was everything wrong with the "rewrites considered harmful" distilled.

Not to mention terrible for morale, execution, planning, budget, customer satisfaction.

I was just a lowly SWE 3 "IC" just in the trenches, not nearly as "important" as all that, so my opinion mattered not at all. But to me it violated every sound engineering / project planning principle I'd learned in the 15 years of my career up to that point. Just another event that led to me becoming quite cynical about the ability of leadership at Google to actually manage anything of significant complexity that wasn't ads/search related.

Again, Fuchsia .. very neat. But it didn't belong there.

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

#528

Post by zaphirplane »

esperent wrote: post #483
zaphirplane wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

people should use the correct words

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

#529

Post by jjmarr »

tomovo wrote: post #525

Does SteamOS count as something Carmack would discourage as well? Yes it's a Linux-based system and yes even based on an existing distro, but it is a purpose-specific OS and it seems like it's working well for Valve and people using it to play Windows games without Windows...

End of the tweet:

> I can only really see a new general purpose OS arriving due to essentially sacrificing a highly successful product’s optimality to the goal of birthing the new OS

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

#530

Post by password54321 »

dmbche wrote: post #526
password54321 wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Has HR been weaponized if the result was just a chat

The result does not change the intent.
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