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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

#611

Post by spauldo »

mastermage wrote: post #460
markus_zhang wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like super fun if I could be paid a bit for it. What is an easy gate task to get into “reverse engineering some drivers for some OS”? Second thought: I don’t even know how to write a driver or a kernel, so I better start from there.

Isn't that what low level does on his YouTube channel teach people to reverse engineer stuff?

Mostly he seems to try to nail all the items on the "how to grow your YouTube channel" checklists. Clickbait sensationalist titles, exaggerated face on the thumbnail, etc. I have a rule that I don't click on any video where I can't tell the subject by the title, and that eliminated him from my watchlist a while ago.

I wish the guy luck on becoming a superstar influencer, since that seems to be his goal, but he can do it without my help.

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

#612

Post by GeorgeTirebiter »

The XROS thing sounds sort of like the PenPoint OS -- which was used with the EO 440 and EO 880 tablet + Cellphone-connected computers that came out around the same time as Newton (early 90s) - but with larger screens and cellular voice/data/fax connectivity (optional). Their tagline was "The Pen is the Point". Besides having a WACOM tablet as the pen-input device (requiring a driver), and baking in the notion that (at that time was true): connectivity was sporadic, and therefore you had to be opportunistic when you got a reliable cell signal (or were plugged into a phone jack). Those two ideas sure as heck did not require a whole new OS to support. But PenPoint built a company to market said OS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenPoint_OS?useskin=vector Interestingly, this company ended up being folded into EO itself, as there seemed to be no market for a pen-based OS.

The EOs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EO_Personal_Communicator?usesk... used the AT&T Hobbit chipset, which was a descendant from the CRISP architecture. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/30350.30385 by Dave Ditzel et al. The architecture was informed by examining millions of lines of unix C code; the arch was an attempt to execute C code well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Hobbit?useskin=vector It was a beautiful overall design. The design focused on fast instruction decoding, indexed array access, and procedure calls. The 32-bit architecture of Hobbit was well-suited to portable computing, and almost ended up in the Apple Newton. The manual is possibly worth a peruse: http://www.bitsavers.org/components/att/hobbit/ATT92010_Hobb...

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

#613

Post by GeorgeTirebiter »

GeorgeTirebiter wrote: post #612

The XROS thing sounds sort of like the PenPoint OS -- which was used with the EO 440 and EO 880 tablet + Cellphone-connected computers that came out around the same time as Newton (early 90s) - but with larger screens and cellular voice/data/fax connectivity (optional). Their tagline was "The Pen is the Point". Besides having a WACOM tablet as the pen-input device (requiring a driver), and baking in the notion that (…

There is another doomed project that XROS reminds me of: the Apple "Pink" OS. Brief history: https://lowendmac.com/2014/pink-apples-first-stab-at-a-moder... "Pink was spun out as Taligent. The kernel was jettisoned. Taligent would run on top of an operating system and act as an object oriented system (like OpenStep). It was released in 1995, but it sold poorly. It was canceled altogether in 1998." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent?useskin=vector more history http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/36A61A87-064B-470D-88... After Apple tried Pink, Taligent, and Copeland they .... ended up using Mach / FreeBSD and some pieces from other BSDs (as I understand it). Today, we have Windows and Unix of some flavor in the main. I think Geordi LaForge was using one of these OSs on his Warp Drive computers...

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

#614

Post by ronald_petty »

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…

Not saying these are perfect, but consider reviewing the work of groups like the Internet Society or even IEEE sectors. Boots on the ground to some extent such as providing gear and training. Other efforts like One Laptop Per Child also leaned into this kind of thinking.

What could it could mean for a "tech" town to be born, especially with what we have today regarding techniques and tools. While the dream has not really bore out yet (especially at a village level), I would argue we could do even better in middle America with this thinking; small college towns. While its a bit of existing gravity well, you could do a focused effort to get a flywheel going (redo mini Bell labs around the USA solving regional problems could be a start).

Yes it takes decades. My only thought on that is, many (dare say most) people don't even have short term plans much less long term plans. It takes visionaries with nerves and will of steel to stay on paths to make things happen.

Love the experiment idea.

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

#615

Post by theshackleford »

simoncion wrote: post #466
theshackleford wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Seems pretty clear from the post to me that they are making assumptions based on a similar event in their past, not that they were involved first hand in this event.

>> Do you know that that's what's going on here? > Yes. Seems pretty clear from the post to me that they are making assumptions... So you don't know what's going on; you're assuming. Cool.

> So you don't know what's going on; you're assuming. Cool.

Incorrect. Their post makes it clear they were not involved in their own words. It's called reading comprehension.

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

#616

Post by 827a »

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…

Continuing the thought experiment: There's an interesting sort-of contradiction in this desire: I, being dissatisfied with some aspect of the existing software solutions on the market, want to create an isolated monastic order of software engineers to ignore all existing solutions and build something that solves my problems; presumably, without any contact from me.

Its a contradiction very much at the core of the idea: Should I expect that the Operating System my monastic order produces be able to play Overwatch or be able to open .docx files? I suspect not; but why? Because they didn't collaborate with stakeholders. So, they might need to collaborate with stakeholders; yet that was the very thing we were trying to avoid by making this an isolated monastic order.

Sometimes you gotta take the good with the bad. Or, uh, maybe Microsoft should just stop using React for the Start menu, that might be a good start.

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

#617

Post by mixmastamyk »

dmazzoni wrote: post #236

I was at Google when the Flutter team started building Fuchsia. They had amazing talent. Seriously, some of the most brilliant engineers I've worked with. They had a huge team. Hundreds of people. It was so ambitious. But it seemed like such a terrible idea from the start. Nobody was ever able to articulate who would ever use it. Technically, it was brilliant. But there was no business plan. If they wanted to build a…

A bad business decision, yes. But is it any good?

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

#618

Post by spauldo »

kelipso wrote: post #590
bckr wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $20 million That’s a pittance for such a project. I wish we could see what he’d have come up with.

He is just a guy who can write game code well and has good PR skills online. I wouldn’t give him a cent if he promised anything in the AI field, no matter how much a bunch of online people gas him up.

He's a guy that knows a lot of math and how to turn that math into code. I don't know if he'd be able to come up with some brand new paradigm for AI but I'd want him on my team and I'd listen to what he has to say.

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

#620

Post by percentcer »

mastermage wrote: post #462
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…

Honestly sounds like a very cool Science fiction concept.

Not quite the same but check out A Canticle for Leibowitz
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