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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

#621

Post by howdyhowdy123 »

os2warpman wrote: post #277
SgtBastard wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically you are correct but the commenter you’re responding to means that with the amount of Western Governments spend on MS products and services, the are a d facto (if not de jure) state backed enterprise.

US government spending is (for now) easy to track, and you can get totals for spending by corporate entity. In total across the entire US federal government, $518.8 million was paid to Microsoft for products and services in 2024. That is approximately 0.21% of their total annual revenue. I assert that the threshold for "state sponsored" is well in excess of 0.21% of annual revenue. Federal Spending: https://www.usasp…

Exactly

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

#622

Post by howdyhowdy123 »

hx8 wrote: post #566
os2warpman wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US government spending is (for now) easy to track, and you can get totals for spending by corporate entity. In total across the entire US federal government, $518.8 million was paid to Microsoft for products and services in 2024. That is approximately 0.21% of their total annual revenue. I assert that the threshold for "state sponsored" is well in excess of 0.21% of annual revenue. Federal Spending: https://www.usasp…

How much money have states and local governments spent on Microsoft products and services? How much money has Microsoft collected from companies that are providing products and services to US governmental agencies? Government spending is not easy to track. This doesn't even begin to touch on non-monetary benefits Microsoft receives with government influence.

Now you are really starting to bend over backwards. The claim was that MS was a state enterprise. It's still not even close.

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

#623

Post by ksec »

827a wrote: post #616
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 ide…

>maybe Microsoft should just stop using React for the Start menu, that might be a good start.

Agree but again worth pointing out the obvious. I don't think anyone is actually against React per se, as long as M$ could ensure React render all their screens at 120fps with No Jank, 1-2% CPU resources usage, minimal GPU resources, and little memory usage. All that at least 99.99% of the time. Right now it isn't obvious to me this is possible without significant investment.

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

#624

Post by ksec »

mikepurvis wrote: post #129
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…

I think the proper comparison point here is probably what game consoles have done since the Xbox 360, which is basically run a hypervisor on the metal with the app/game and management planes in separate VMs. That gives the game a bare metal-ish experience and doesn't throw away resources on true multitasking where it isn't really needed. At the same time it still lets the console run a dashboard plus background tasks…

Hold on a sec, is that the same on PS5? I am pretty sure that wasn't the case two generations ago. Is that the norm now, running on hypervisor ?

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

#625

Post by simoncion »

theshackleford wrote: post #615
simoncion wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

> It's called reading comprehension.

Right back at you.

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

#626

Post by m463 »

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…

He might be describing Elbonia.

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

#627

Post by balder1991 »

ronsor wrote: post #112
agsnu wrote: post #99

Huawei seem pretty committed to building their own OS and uncoupling from the Western technology stack in total https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-h...

The only reason Chinese companies can even get away with these big projects is because of state backing and state objectives. By itself, the market doesn't support a new general-purpose OS at this point.

Actually the “market” won’t prioritize anything that won’t give returns as soon as possible (except for the weird situation of VC money being poured in).

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

#628

Post by torginus »

markus_zhang wrote: post #574
torginus wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's insane how VR has succeeded beyond most people's wildest dreams on the hardware front (all that hardware that goes into a VR headset either sounded like science fiction or seemed like would be exotic stuff costing tens of thousands of dollars), and the software also had standout successes, but it kinda just petered out both in the entertainment and professional realms.

Is it really that successful? I think the wildest dream is that everyone is using it but I don’t really see it happening anytime soon in the future.

I meant success in the technical sense - they managed to get the tech as good as it could realistically get - and cheap too.

But it turned out nobody cared. People who envisioned doctors using VR glasses to look at MR images in 3D, architects, modelers, mechanical engineers, who people thought would use 3D to do work turned out to not want it.

Immersive games were created, that looked and ran amazing, and afforded a never-before-seen level of interactivity, but after a few standout successes, people just moved on.

It's like Apple got to about the iPhone 4 level (where most people would agree the experience was decent), then everybody decided to go back to their old Nokias.

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

#629

Post by saagarjha »

komali2 wrote: post #475
saagarjha wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm making the world a better place by earning 500k a year doing a bad job to slow down this company. Look at how much good I am doing sorry I can't hear you over my paycheck clearing

Activism doesn't require participation in a poverty cult. Any socialist in a nation like the USA or the UK is by someone's lens a champagne socialist. Let's not participate in this tired trope.

I don't think you need to be poor to protest injustice. I just think that joining Meta so that you can "bring it down from the inside" is unlikely to be effective and very easy to justify to yourself.

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

#630

Post by cubefox »

wredcoll wrote: post #103
cubefox wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This attempted equivalence is wild. I'm not sure if you're uninformed or malicious, but "far right posts" means posts talking about "the jews taking over" or some other racist drivel and discussing which minority to attack next. "Far left posts" are like, what, people should have access to healthcare? People should pay more taxes?

Recently, anti-Jewish sentiment seems actually more common among the far left.

> "Far left posts" are like, what, people should have access to healthcare? People should pay more taxes?

No, like abolishing the police, open borders, calling the war against Hamas a "genocide", censorship of any statistics on race, IQ and crime, cancelling people for things that were considered completely normal 15 years ago, etc.

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