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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

#551

Post by sitkack »

baq wrote: post #428
sitkack wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say they were wasting their time on their hobby OS, they are wasting their time trying to get it to do very esoteric thing on GCP. They aren't trying to get reboot to work, they are trying to get their version of kexec to work so their hobby os reboots faster. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kexec The biggest scam in the OS world is drivers, we should demand more out of our hardware. Drivers shouldn't be ne…

Hardware is so broken that getting useful functionality basically amounts to casting magic spells and drivers are supposed to be master wizards who know all the points where the spell book is wrong or incomplete. If you think drivers are bad, don’t look at the hardware, you’ll get depressed.

This is fundamentally the problem. Just like being able to send OTA updates has enshittified all software, having this magic shim layer that fixes hardware problems has enabled shit hardware, and then foisted all this complexity into the OS. Many abstractions are like bondo, they just cover rot.

I am addressing your comment and eru's question about drivers.

The hardware that would normally need drivers should present itself over a fixed, well documented protocol. Think virtio, or usb device classes but more comprehensive. This would also allow for said hardware to rigorously tested before it ever sees an OS. As it is now, because the hardware is shit and requires a driver, you can't really test the hardware in a way that an OS would expect because it requires the OS driver to even start to function. The job of the OS is now to repair broken hardware.

https://docs.oasis-open.org/virtio/virtio/v1.3/virtio-v1.3.h...

https://wiki.osdev.org/Virtio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_communications_device_clas... (the only good thing to come out of usb)

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

#552

Post by sitkack »

eru wrote: post #344
sitkack wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say they were wasting their time on their hobby OS, they are wasting their time trying to get it to do very esoteric thing on GCP. They aren't trying to get reboot to work, they are trying to get their version of kexec to work so their hobby os reboots faster. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kexec The biggest scam in the OS world is drivers, we should demand more out of our hardware. Drivers shouldn't be ne…

> The biggest scam in the OS world is drivers, we should demand more out of our hardware. Drivers shouldn't be necessary. What do you mean by that?

Responded https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45075820

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

#553

Post by __turbobrew__ »

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.

Sometimes you have to let people fail, even though you can see it coming. It sounds like Carmack was sticking his nose in a project that wasn’t under his purview and he dug his heels in a bit too much when he should have just let it fail.

All the FAANG do dumb shit all the time and waste huge sums of money, if you work at a FAANG the best thing you can do is stay in your lane and don’t do dumb shit — eventually it will shake out.

I have been bullied around by L7s (as a L5) sticking their nose in things, and the best thing you can do is clearly articulate what you are doing and why, and that you understand their feedback. Turns out the L7 got canned — partially due to their bullying — and I got promoted for executing and being a supportive teammate, so things worked out in the end.

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

#554

Post by toast0 »

foldr wrote: post #469
toast0 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're in the middle of trying to write a new operating system, then it's probably not helpful to have John Carmack standing over you repeatedly telling you that you shouldn't be doing it. In this case Carmack gets the last laugh. Then again, it is easy to get the last laugh by predicting that a project will fail, given that most projects do. I mean, if you're working on a project that is likely to fail, wouldn'…

The people working on it may not have agreed that it was likely to fail. But in any case, almost all interesting projects are likely to fail. Of course it is objectively unlikely that a project to write a new OS will succeed. I expect the people working on it were aware of that.

> The people working on it may not have agreed that it was likely to fail.

They probably didn't agree, but the claim was that it wasn't helpful. being helpful and telling people what they want to hear aren't the same thing. If you're working on a destined to fail project, the most helpful thing to hear would be some way to change its destiny, the next most helpful thing to hear would be a call to stop doing it.

Besides all that, Facebook is probably one of the worst places to develop a new general purpose OS. The review system is built around rewarding impact, which means a long term project with no early deliverables sets up the staff to get poor reviews, which limits staffing. The company also has not built the kind of trust in products, sdks, etc that would make using a new OS seem like a good idea to potential users, or to encourage developers to make applications available for it, or to encourage companies to use it in their products. It would have to be so amazingly better than the marketplace of OSes that it made up for the lack of software for it and become a target of new software.

A special purpose OS is different. The development process is usually not as long, the requirements tend to be pretty narrow, and the target would likely be something in house. It might still not be a good idea, there's lots of off the shelf options to look at and they are likely good enough in many to most cases.

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

#555

Post by FirmwareBurner »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #384
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #2

I like that the top reply to Carmack's wall of text is a screenshot of TempleOS with a doodle of an elephant lmao. And ironically, that meme reply is on topic and it says a thousand words with just one photo. Another point I would add in support of that meme comment, is Google's recent rug-pull of Android not allowing sideloading apps from unsigned developers anymore starting this autumn, after over a decade of conqu…

Can you explain the TempleOS meme reply? I don’t know enough about its history to get the joke.

Just google/youtube the history of temple OS and its creator. It's fun, sad and tragic at the same time.

Spoiler alert: a single person coded it in his own programming language, but the person suffered from severe mental illnesses and ended up taking their own life.

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

#556

Post by rvba »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #190
dagmx wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John can be quite blunt and harsh in person, from everyone I know who’s interacted with him. If he doesn’t believe in something, he can sometimes be over critical and it’s hard to push back in that kind of power imbalance.

Carmack is a legend and I admire his work, but he seems to believe his own legend these days (like a few others big-ego gamedevs) and that can lead to arbitrary preferences being sold as gospel.

If you want to build 3d glasses probably you should fpcus on 3d glassess and software for it.

Not some new OS so you can start making the glasses 2 years later.

Just like when you want to bake a cake, you dont start by designing an oven, or creating an universe from scratch

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

#557

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #345
dist1ll wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel still does it. As far as I can see they're the only player in town that provide open, detailed documentation for their high-speed NICs [0]. You can actually write a driver for their 100Gb cards from scratch using their datasheet. Most other vendors would either (1) ignore you, (2) make you sign an NDA or (3) refer you to their poorly documented Linux/BSD driver. Not sure what the situation is for other hardware…

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…

[deleted]

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

#558

Post by ellis0n »

I've been developing a solo ACPU OS for many years now, one that's fast and simple enough to be better than any known OS. That's why I believe all OS development problems come from overengineering and overcapitalization. https://www.acpul.org/blog/so-fast

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

#559

Post by killerstorm »

ksec wrote: post #478
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…

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…

Software is bloated and unreliable. It's clearly a "local minimum".

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

#560

Post by rvba »

LPisGood wrote: post #355
lll-o-lll wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree. Being tactful is only relevant when dealing with people , criticise an idea, a project, a solution as much as you like. Intellectual debate is the fire from which genuinely good ideas are forged.

Unfortunately people have ideas, projects, and solutions that they care deeply about. Like it or not, some tact when dealing with these things goes a long way.

Projects to land them a fat salary while delivering no value.

No wonder they used any means necessary (including HR) to defend their source of money.

They probably knew very well they are a net loss for the company.

Lots of big orgs have such crooks. It's a failure of management not to fire them.

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