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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

#631

Post by rcxdude »

jovial_cavalier wrote: post #532
throwaway2037 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Look up the Texas Instruments am3358. It's a tiny SOC, it was used in the beaglebone black. Its technical reference manual[1] is over 5000 pages, and it details all peripherals, all of the interconnects and every single register in the system. This, by contrast, is really just an overview. Regards to (1), if you don't publish this information you're not selling a CPU, you're selling a very expensive chunk of sand. Th…

having used the AM3358 extensively, the TRM is not complete. There are some pretty important and complex systems that have literally no documentation at all in the TRM, not to mention the large number of quirks and small details that you can only pick up from a scattering of other areas (including a wiki that TI deleted some years ago). It is, however, miles better than the documentation available for most SOCs.

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

#632

Post by rcxdude »

sitkack wrote: post #551
baq wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem with your wish is that's you're kinda getting it in some cases, and it's a bit of a monkey paw. Hardware vendors are increasingly creating systems that abstract away the underlying hardware from the OS (usually by writing their own software on some other core that really drives the hardware), but the problem is they're generally closed, buggy, and leaky, and so the OS stops really being the OS of the system and instead you have a collection of barely-related subsystems that it's really difficult to get to work together effectively, and way more security holes than you can shake a stick at. (Oh, and they're usually only ever tested against one particular OS and so they're not actually particularly portable)

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

#633

Post by zaphirplane »

esperent wrote: post #534
zaphirplane wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people should use the correct words

They are. The meaning of words changes over time, and with context. When talking about advertising on the internet, it's all targeted advertising (except some tiny unimportant fraction). There's no need to type "targeted" every time, it's redundant.

I don’t know why it’s so important to you to conflate the 2 and have privacy invading advertising synonyms with any form of advertising.

I don’t think we have crossed the threshold to make them synonymous, feel free to provide data to back that claim globally not in some hip Silicon Valley I don’t own a tv market. My quick search shows targeted isn’t there

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

#634

Post by frognumber »

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…

> Love this idea and wondering where that low cost of living place would be

Parts of Africa and India are very much like that. I would guess other places too. I'd pick a hill station in India, or maybe some place higher up in sub-Saharan Africa (above the insects)

> What problem are we trying to solve that is not possible right now?

The point is more about identifying the problem, actually. An independent tech tree will have vastly different capabilities and limitations than the existing one.

Continuing the thought experiment -- to be much more abstract now -- if we placed an independent colony of humans on Venus 150 years ago, it's likely computing would be very different. If the transistor weren't invented, we might have optical, mechanical, or fluidic computation, or perhaps some extended version of vacuum tubes. Everything would be different.

Sharing technology back-and-forth a century later would be amazing.

Even when universities were more isolated, something like 1995-era MIT computing infrastructure was largely homebrew, with fascinating social dynamics around things like Zephyr, interesting distributed file systems (AFS), etc. The X Window System came out of it too, more-or-less, which in turn allowed for various types of work with remote access unlike those we have with the cloud.

And there were tech trees build around Lisp-based computers / operating systems, SmallTalk, and systems where literally everything was modifiable.

More conservatively, even the interacting Chinese and non-Chinese tech trees are somewhat different (WeChat, Alipay, etc. versus WhatsApp, Venmo, etc.)

You can't predict the future, and having two independent futures seems like a great way to have progress.

Plus, it prevents a monoculture. Perhaps that's the problem I'm trying to solve.

> Do we start from hardware at the CPU ?

For the actual thought experiment, too expensive. I'd probably offer monitors, keyboards, mice, and some kind of relatively simple, documented microcontroller to drive those. As well as things like ADCs, DACs, and similar.

Zero software, except what's needed to bootstrap.

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

#635

Post by lelele »

jnwatson wrote: post #23

I've written a lot of low level software, BSPs, and most of an OS, and the main reason to not write your own OS these days is silicon vendors. Back in the day, they would provide you a spec detailed enough that you could feasibly write your own drivers. These days, you get a medium-level description and a Linux driver of questionable quality. Part of this is just laziness, but mostly this is a function of complexity.…

>> These days, you get a medium-level description and a Linux driver of questionable quality.

Then how do devices end up up having drivers for major OSes? It's all guesswork?

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

#636

Post by frognumber »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #600
killerstorm wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If it's so bloated then just start cutting Whatever expertise you need to prune a working system is less than the expertise you'll need to create a whole new one and then also prune it as it grows old

Absolutely not.

Software is bloated in part because it's built in layers. People wrap things over, and over, and over. Stripping down layers is neigh-impossible later. Starting from scratch is easy.

Starting from scratch fails in practice because you don't get feature parity in time short enough for VC (or grant) funding cycles.

If we build a tech tree around 200MHz 32MB machines, except for things like ML and video, we'd have a tech tree which did everything existing machines do, only 10x more quickly in 0.1% of the memory. Machines back then were fine for word processing, spreadsheets, all the web apps I use on a daily basis (not as web apps), etc.

Need would drive people to rebuild those, but with a few less layers.

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

#637

Post by frognumber »

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…

An isolated monastic order in the hills around the Himalayas should ideally be completely isolated from Overwatch and .docx files.

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

#638

Post by frognumber »

ronald_petty wrote: post #614
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 re…

Pick a university, and given them $1B to never use Windows, MacOS, Android, Linux, or anything other than homebrew?

To kick-start, given them machines with Plan9, ITS, or an OS based on LISP / Smalltalk / similar? Or just microcontrollers? Or replicate 1970-era university computing infrastructure (where everything was homebrew?)

Build out coursework to bootstrap from there? Perhaps scholarships for kids from the developing world?

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

#639

Post by sour-taste »

morganw wrote: post #543
sour-taste wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39385382 Here's Hector Martin (marcan) talking about their tooling: https://asahilinux.org/2021/08/progress-report-august-2021/ Running macOS in a hypervisor controlled from a second machine (proxy mode + verbose==on) to watch drivers talk to the hardware: https://asahilinux.org/docs/sw/m1n1-user-guide/#running-a-ma...

Thanks for taking the time to round up these posts for me!

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

#640

Post by kelipso »

spauldo wrote: post #618
kelipso wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AI math is not game code math. There are plenty of actual experts in AI who know “how to turn math into code” with years of experience. I would not want this guy, his ego, his lack of social skills, his online fanbase, and his lack of experience in AI to be anywhere near my AI team.
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