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

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 and could implement a truly better version from a clean sheet, you are already close to retiring .

And that is assuming you have the professional opportunity to learn about all these, implementation , fail and make mistakes and relearn etc.

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

> 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.

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.