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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

#641

Post by mikepurvis »

ksec wrote: post #624
mikepurvis wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

It's been the case since the PS3: https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps5/Hypervisor

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

#642

Post by ezoe »

> They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad

Sigh... Usual company politics.

No matter how much money you pour with top talents, code quality, documents etc, developing a custom OS doesn't make sense.

Been there, seen that. I faced a similar situation at one company. They failed on custom Not-Invented-Here syndrome derived implementation. My technically correct skepticism was criticized for decreasing moral of the team working on it.

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

#643

Post by ezoe »

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…

They will just face the same problems we solved decades ago and reinvent the mostly similar solution we also had decades ago.

In a few decades, they will reach to our current level, but then, rest of our world didn't idle for these decades and we don't need to solve the old problems.

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

#644

Post by foldr »

toast0 wrote: post #554
foldr wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Besid…

Although I think JC is right in this case, I'm not convinced that he had any kind of insight that wouldn't have already been obvious to the OS experts hired on the team. Writing a new OS is going to be really difficult? No shit!

I guess if he'd been on the Apollo program he'd be the guy telling all the experts that landing humans safely on the moon was going to be quite hard. Thanks John. We'll bear that in mind.

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

#645

Post by ezoe »

tanvach wrote: post #35

Was at Oculus post acquisition and can say that the whole XROS was an annoyance and distraction the core technology teams didn’t need. There were so many issues with multiple tech stacks that needed fixing first. Mind you, this XROS idea came after Oculus reorged into FB proper. It felt to me like there were FB teams (or individuals) that wanted get on the ARVR train. Carmack was absolutely right, and after the reorg…

It looks to me Meta was a victim of ivory tower researchers who just want to experiment on their non-practical theoretical research on company's expense.

It has some value a huge company funds these research, as long as it doesn't affect the practical real for-profit projects.

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

#646

Post by ezoe »

WalterBright wrote: post #456
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…

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.)

Now, who can claim such bold... oh, it's YOU.

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

#647

Post by ezoe »

Fade_Dance wrote: post #206
jamra wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I followed his posts internally before he left. He was strict about resource waste. Hand tracking would break constantly and he brought metrics to his posts. His whole point was that Apple has hardware nailed down and it’ll be efficient software that will be the differentiator. The bloat at Meta was the result of empire building.

I remember watching Carmack at a convention 15 years ago. He took a short sabbatical and came back with ID Tech 3 on an iPhone, and it still looks amazing well over a decade later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52hMWMWKAMk&t=1s This is a guy who figures that what he wants to do most with his 3 free weekends is to port his latest, greatest engine to a Cortex-A8. Leading corporate strategy? Maybe not. But Carmack on…

At that time, Rage was delayed forever I consider it vaporware, falling the same category was Half-Life 3 or Duke Nukem Forever.

Still, I saw this demo at that time and I felt it was impressive considering the toy level performance of 2010's smartphone.

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

#648

Post by wredcoll »

cubefox wrote: post #630
wredcoll wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, yeah man, referring to an attempt to exterminate a population as a genocide is definitely just as bad as calling for the extermination of minorities. That's definitely the same level of morally wrong.

Like, this is literally my point, "abolishing the police" may not be the most effective way to build a better society, but there's absolutely nothing morally or ethically wrong with saying it. If you don't get this, I'm genuinely not sure how to explain it, but here's a short attempt:

A police force/buildings/cars/employees are an artificial construct created by a series of laws passed by a (in this case) democratic government. Repealing/passing new laws that removes the police system is just a neutral action in the same way that creating them in the first place was.

People say "abolish the police" because they genuinely believe it will help everyone. People do not say "deport brown people" because they think it will help everyone. You get how this is different, right?

Also, lol, you said "cancelling people" like it was a real thing. What happened, did someone have an invitation rescinded because they said something offensive? Wow, yeah, uninviting someone is definitely some kind of awful moral hazard. That person was entitled by his existence to give that speech, dammit!

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

#649

Post by jovial_cavalier »

rcxdude wrote: post #631
jovial_cavalier wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. The actual technical writing portion of the TRM leaves much to be desired.

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

#650

Post by globnomulous »

dedup-com wrote: post #271
tanvach wrote: post #35

Was at Oculus post acquisition and can say that the whole XROS was an annoyance and distraction the core technology teams didn’t need. There were so many issues with multiple tech stacks that needed fixing first. Mind you, this XROS idea came after Oculus reorged into FB proper. It felt to me like there were FB teams (or individuals) that wanted get on the ARVR train. Carmack was absolutely right, and after the reorg…

Just a small bunch of XROS people came from FB proper (mostly managers) because an average FB SWE has no required skills. Most folks were hired from the industry at E5/E6 and I think we had ever took one or two bootcampers that ultimately were not successful and quickly moved elsewhere in FB.

What were the required skills that bootcampers lacked? Has anybody without a university degree succeeded there?
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