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

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 efficiency? Just do it.

Impressive. JC is always one of the engineers I look up to and read up to when depressed.

John Carmack, David Cutler, Tom West, Cameron Zwarich, etc. There are about maybe 50 of them.

I followed his posts internally too. It's amazing how many people were arguing against fucking John Carmack. What a waste of talent.

Carmack and Jim Keller for me. Hardware engineering for the latter!

HW is kinda too magical for me at this age :)

Tim Sweeney of Epic is up there for me too.

> were arguing against fucking John Carmack

I am sure Carmack himself encourages debates and discussions. Lionizing one person can't be expected of every employee (unless that person is also the founder or the company is tiny).

Can’t really imagine a better person to argue against?

Please name them all. Would love to read and watch their content. I usually come across a decade later and like, whaaat.. how did i miss this. Man i could have had better time watching them instead of doom scrolling.

Where are the good war stories on Keller?

I saw a few of those. He really leaned in on just how much waste was in the UI rendering, with some nasty looking call times to critical components. I think it was close to when he left.

Dude just seemed frustrated with the lack of attention to things that mattered.

But...that honestly tracks with Meta's past and present.

The software for the Quest 3 is unreliable and breaks often. A team that attacks attempts to hold them accountable makes a lot of sense.

I don't think you should treat the founder more special than eg John Carmack.

But I agree that civil discussion is good.

I disagree that you should just defer - but it’s sad that politics was obviously consuming and inhibiting his ability to help the product.

Zachary's Showstopper book is a great account of Dave Cutler and WinNT.

Would love to hear Carmack's thoughts on render cost...

Damn, that's medieval. Anyone should be able to challenge anyone regardless of status.

No one should just defer, but you better be right. In the end do they have a better product without him?

Don’t think so.

I was one month into my first full-time job, when I've (unknowingly of his rank) challenged the CTO in a technical discussion - in a public email exchange. Regardless of the outcome - I've been treated like an equal. This one short exchange has influenced not only the rest of my career, but my entire worldview.

I mean to some extent sure. But also you need to respect expertise and experience. So much of what we do is subjective, and neither side going to have hard data to support their arguments.

If it comes down to someone saying “I’ve been doing this for 30 years, I’ve shipped something very similar 5 times, and we ran into a problem with x each time”. Unless you have similar counter experience, you should probably just listen.

What happens in tech is you get a very specific kind of junior who wants to have HN comment arguments at work constantly and needs you to prove every single thing to them. I don’t know man it’s a style guide. There’s not going to be hard quantitative evidence to support why we said you shouldn’t reach for macros first.

The quality you can achieve with simple painted textures and computed lightmaps never ceases to impress.

Ugh. Can we as an industry stop blowing people up like this? It’s a clear sign that the community is filled with people with very little experience.

I remember this guy wanted $20 million to build AGI a year ago (did he get that money?), and people here thought he would go into isolation for a few weeks and come out with AGI because he made some games like that. It’s just embarrassing as a community.

Computer History Museum interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh8nhK7WS80

Worked on DEC Alpha, AMD K7 & K8, Broadcom, P.A. Semi, was in turn purchased by Apple. Jim spent four years at Apple before first returning to AMD, then on to Tesla, Intel and finally Tenstorrent.

Keller keynoting TSMC's 2022 Open Innovation Summit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32CRYenTcdw

> $20 million

That’s a pittance for such a project. I wish we could see what he’d have come up with.

I think the implication is that they were arguing poorly and wasting time

Carmack's best work was between Keen and Quake, and it was mostly optimizations that pushed the limit of what PC graphics could do. He's always been too in-the-weeds to have a C-level title.

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.

I’d really love to hear his story from the beginning. I believe his first published game was a Blue Disk one, ZZT, in 1991, and he went forward to write the Unreal engine which was released in 1998. People like Tim and John really could bag a huge amount of knowledge in half a decade.

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.

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.

In my experience the one big problem on the Quest 3 is the user interface. I am still puzzled why they made a floating taskbar with tiny buttons that you have to hit with VR controllers. I have good eyes, decent hand-eye coordination and don't have shaky hands, yet I manage to hit a button at first try maybe 40% of the time. They made a cut-down 2D desktop interface that makes up a small fraction of the field of view for a VR device and called it a day, and then put the user into some virtual room with zero interactable elements.

Meta Quest 3 feels like sci-fi tech with badly executed UI design from the 90s.