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

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521 points OlympicMarmoto | 1 comments | 29 Aug 25 16:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.356s | source
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jnwatson ◴[29 Aug 25 17:46 UTC] No.45067216[source]▶
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. Modern hardware is just so complicated it would take a long time to completely document, and even longer to write a driver for.

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boredatoms ◴[29 Aug 25 20:54 UTC] No.45069282[source]▶
Presumably if you’re meta you could pay the vendors enough to write drivers for any arbitrary OS
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rwmj ◴[29 Aug 25 20:59 UTC] No.45069321[source]▶
But is that a good use of Meta's money? Compared to making a few patches to Linux to fix any performance problems they find.

(And I feel bad saying this since Meta obviously did waste eleventy billion on their ridiculous Second Life recreation project ...)

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bbarnett ◴[29 Aug 25 21:05 UTC] No.45069369[source]▶
I don't like Meta, but there used to be a time where big corp used to spend 30% of its budget on R&D. It's how we got all the toys we have now, R&D labs of big Bell and others.

So please don't mock the spend. Big spends fail sometimes, and at least people were paid to do the work.

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crote ◴[29 Aug 25 21:23 UTC] No.45069546[source]▶
The difference is that organisations like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC were primarily tech-first: innovations were the result of very clever and creative people doing blue skies research. The most groundbreaking stuff shocked the world while it was still a hacked-together demo, and similarly the cost of failure was quite low.

On the other hand, Meta's experiment is primarily CEO-driven. The outcome is predetermined, changing direction is not possible. Sure, clever engineers get to draw the rest of the owl, but that's not very useful when it turns out that everyone needs a horse instead.

They are spending a fortune, but rather than getting 900 crappy ideas to throw away and 100 great ones to pick from for continued development, they are developing 1 technological marvel nobody is interested in.

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1. throwway120385 ◴[29 Aug 25 21:39 UTC] No.45069709[source]▶
It was also pretty obvious how the VR glasses would support Meta's existing goals. It would give Meta total power over what you see and who you can speak with through their system. It's a natural extension of their total control over how people interact with on the Internet. And I think the only reason it failed is because it was expensive and dumb-looking.