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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

#91

Post by savanaly »

pipeline_peak wrote: post #66

Jonathan Blow is the world’s most successful hobbyist programmer. His whole thing is doing projects from scratch. Every game he made could be done in Unity with far less effort. Most opinions of this man exists in a vacuum space isolated from the real world software industry. Building an OS from scratch is one of those examples. It’s never seems like there’s a significant reason behind them other than………”I made dat :…

As an outsider...his games just look and feel different. They feel like bones-deep art, in a way that even the best of the best games (say, Hades) don't. Since Blow's games are puzzle games they're not even my favorite games! But the effort spent on making them exactly the way he wants them pays off.

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

#92

Post by Strom »

foldr wrote: post #68
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.

Reading between the lines, it sounds like he got reported for giving a lot of what might kindly be described as unsolicited advice. The guy left Meta ages ago, but he apparently still can't let this one go. 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…

> unsolicited advice

He was the CTO of Oculus. Surely it is appropriate for the CTO to give advice on any big technical decisions, if not outright have veto power.

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

#93

Post by foldr »

Strom wrote: post #92
foldr wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading between the lines, it sounds like he got reported for giving a lot of what might kindly be described as unsolicited advice. The guy left Meta ages ago, but he apparently still can't let this one go. 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…

> unsolicited advice He was the CTO of Oculus. Surely it is appropriate for the CTO to give advice on any big technical decisions, if not outright have veto power.

Clearly he didn't have veto power on the project he's talking about.

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

#94

Post by TiredOfLife »

lukev wrote: post #41

This is completely right from a product point of view, which is Carmack's argument. But I have wondered why one of these companies with billions of dollars to burn hasn't tried to create something new as a strategic initiative. Yes, there wouldn't be any ROI for years, and yes, the first several products on the platform would probably be better off on something more traditional. But the long term value could potentia…

Microsoft had Singularity - canceled after 12 years in development

Google has Fuchsia - is about 10 years in development. Recently was a target for layoffs

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

#95

Post by [deleted] »

mariusor wrote: post #74
Inityx wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll offer a different interpretation: If a professional can't give critical feedback in a professional setting without being rude or belittling others, then they need to improve their communication skills.

From what you know of Carmack, does "can't give critical feedback in a professional setting without being rude or belittling others" sound like him to you? It does not to me, though granted maybe he's different in his non public persona than what you can see in presentations and talks.

[deleted]

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

#97

Post by amarant »

Inityx wrote: post #25
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.

I'll offer a different interpretation: If a professional can't give critical feedback in a professional setting without being rude or belittling others, then they need to improve their communication skills.

This is not that though. This is just developers being unable to handle constructive criticism, and when they can't win the argument on merits, went for the HR option. It happens.

I've had it happen to me too, but my response was to resign on the spot (I was already not satisfied with the company).

The "toxic behaviour" I had done? I reverted a commit on the master branch that didn't compile, and sent a slack to the Dev who had committed it saying "hi! There appears to have been a mistake in your latest commit, could you please check it out and fix it? I've reverted it in the meantime since I need to deploy this other feature"

The dev responded by force pushing the code that did not compile to master and contacted HR.

I decided there was greener grass on other pastures. I was right.

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

#98

Post by numpad0 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #72
greggman65 wrote: post #26

And yet, Sony did it, Nintendo did it, both have been pretty succeesful. We also need to be clear what an OS is. Is it "darwin" or "macOS" - they have different scopes. Things I'd want from an OS for an XR device. 1. Fast boot. I don't want to have to wait 2-3-4-5 minutes to reboot for those times I need to reboot. I feel like Nintendo figured this out? It updates the OS in the background somehow and reboot is nearly…

Sony and Nintendo both forked off of either NetBSD or FreeBSD. Sony's cameras at least up until the A7S2 run Linux (there's jailbreaks for these), although I never found any kernel / bootloader dump like it would be required. Android suffers from being Java at the core, with all the baggage that brings with it.

Sony cameras all run Linux. Models with "PlayMemories Camera Apps" feature like A7M2 support runs Android userland on top. It's probably easier to count the cameras that don't(like old Olympus).

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

#100

Post by ironman1478 »

I worked on a completely different hardware project within meta and while they didn't want a custom OS, they used an off the shelf rtos with the intention of modifying it and it was a shit show. They had a million justifications for why they needed it, but they had no performance tests or metrics to verify to actually justify it. They incurred a huge development overhead for no verifiable performance improvements.

None of the code they wrote couldn't have just been written as a kernel module in Linux. It would've also been so much easier due to all the documentation and general knowledge people have about Linux both within the company and outside the company.

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