“Recently someone posted about their experience in determining the file structure of the Doom WAD file. How did you feel when people were discovering how to modify Doom, from building new levels, to changing the executable itself (dhacked) originally without any information from id? In your opinion, is the modding community a valuable place for creating future game developers?”
John Carmack Answers:
“The hacking that went on in Wolfenstein was unexpected, but based on that, DOOM was designed from the beginning to be modified by the user community.
[…]
I still remember the first time I saw the original Star Wars DOOM mod. Seeing how someone had put the death star into our game felt so amazingly cool. I was so proud of what had been made possible, and I was completely sure that making games that could serve as a canvas for other people to work on was a valid direction.”
In my analysis, you absolutely did the right thing.
I have this underlying, background process that is continuously running in my mind that is essentially, “Please don’t let it be my fault.”
And so that thought has guided me while driving, in daily living, and in one particular instance that reminded me of your experience (because I was not in charge of safety).
I was a patron at a wave pool in the heat of the summer. The waves were churning, and the water was packed with people.
I am hyper vigilant by internal design, and I noticed this young girl starting to drown.
If you have not seen this before, it is nothing like you would imagine; there is no wild flailing of the arms, or urgent calls for help. It is an almost surreal, quiet experience.
I made my way to her in what seemed like a slow motion moment blended into a faster-than-life response, and scooped her up in my arms as if she were my own child.
I remember that she was stunned as I raised her from the water, with somniferous, glassy eyes before she inhaled.
I am welling up just thinking about it. It was an intense experience that I will never forget.
”It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I'm evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.”
It is simply stunning that the seasoned direction and counsel that someone of John Carmack’s caliber is capable of delivering was not being followed.
Throwaway because it could be easy to identify my position from my normal account name.
Carmack is many thing, engineering genius above them. However, he would frequently wade into areas where he had no experience, demand others do what he said, ignore evidence he was wrong, bully people, and disparage entire teams who were doing good, and in some cases legally required, work. When data proved his idea was wrong, he would say words to the effect of "I don't care, because I still believe I'm right from an ideological background". He would devalue people, there expertise, there experience, and there thoughts because "I'm John Carmack". Truthfully, I have never worked with someone before who was somehow so politely toxic to a workplace.
Carmacks work in VR was absolutely invaluable from a technical standpoint, but VR now is as successful as it is in spite of his influence, not because of it. When I hear people say "If only Meta would let Carmack do what he wants we'd see his ideal VR experience and it would be amazing". You already saw it. It was Oculus Go, and by every metric is was a commercial, financial, and technical, disaster.
Yeah well, you're anonymous, so you might as well be someone with a huge ego who got their idea shut down by Carmack once and is still bitter about it. More often than not, when people think they "prove something wrong with data" it's more that they're "taking some data and interpret in a way that fits their standpoint".
Carmack has proven enough times in the past that he's able to deliver, that he can push technology, knows what's possible and what isn't, and can wrap up a product. "Wading into fields he has no experience in" sounds pretty unlikely for VR given his past work. And I wouldn't consider the Oculus Go a failure, more like ahead of it's time and released too early. A prototype of the quest. But I guess now it's easy to claim everything that's bad about the go was Carmack's work and everything good about the quest and quest 2 was someone else's.
>who got their idea shut down by Carmack once and is still bitter about it
Nice fantasy you created there to support your argument. Have you heard of "don't shoot the messenger"?
I admire Carmack as much all other hackers around. I don't sympathize with many of Meta's practices. Still, it's entirely plausible that GP's experience holds truth.
I've been around the equivalent of people like Carmack in academia and all of them have their dash of arrogance and petulance, sometimes this leads them to take really bad decisions. Also, engineering skills and management skills are different things. And there's Peter's Principle as well, to which Carmack is not exempt either.
The person’s whole story was entirely based around their anonymous word. The follow up comment reads to me like a narrative way of pointing they out.
We don’t really know, I guess, what happened internally. But:
* Carmack has tossed some grenades as he left, so if there’s a real story there I guess we’re likely to hear about it from some non-anonymous sources soon enough if he was a real pain.
* He’s gone now, so we’ll see to what extent he was holding them back shortly.
I bet we hear nothing and they never release anything, but I won’t claim to have an uncle who works at ~~Nintendo~~ Facebook.
The story from Carmack is also based on his word. Unless you've worked with him directly, everything you know about John Carmack is based on some or other's words.
I'm not obsessed with Carmack, so I honestly don't know what has been said about him one way or the other. But really this is just a coat rack to hang a point about the epistemology of the argument.
>Yeah well, you're anonymous...Carmack has proven enough times in the past that he's able to deliver, that he can push technology
In a follow up agreeing with him
>The person’s whole story was entirely based around their anonymous word
And later still
>A word with a name behind it.
So what's being implicitly said here is "I judge what's true based on the authority of the source". The premise is John Carmack is an asshole, and the attempt to refute it is "I have it on good authority he isn't", and when you dig into that claim the authority is either Carmack himself or a tech news org article. Well, when you stop and think about it, tech news has no interest in learning or publicizing if he's an asshole.
Unless you worked with him, everything you know about Carmack is just something you read somewhere. But there is no root of the reputation tree. Reputation comes from nowhere. Its all just bits of text being trusted because they looks like other bits of text you previously trusted. Nothing ever grounds the Carmack story in something else you can observe. We have no way to test if we are in a PR manicured version of the truth or not. Claims about him are both unfalsifiable and inconsequential and reduce to insisting a preferred source of narrative is more reputable than the others.
As far as I know, he only exists as a concept which is written about in websites I frequent. I'm a John Carmack Truther. There is no John Carmack. The CIA made him up as part of MK Ultra II. I read it on a very reputable online forum.
>As far as I know, he only exists as a concept which is written about in websites I frequent. I'm a John Carmack Truther. There is no John Carmack. The CIA made him up as part of MK Ultra II. I read it on a very reputable online forum.
That's utterly ridiculous. John Carmack is real, but he's actually an alien from the planet Ka'vi. I know this is true because I read it on an actually reputable online forum (unlike your "reputable" forum). I know my preferred forum is reputable because its other postings agree with my opinions.
> The story from Carmack is also based on his word. Unless you've worked with him directly, everything you know about John Carmack is based on some or other's words.
As an admirer I saw a few videos of Carmack and immediately pegged him as NPD, obviously so. GGGP's post supports my observations, re: bully, disparaging, can't admit when he's wrong, can't acknowledge the accomplishments of others, all of which predicts what we don't see, deep anxieties, extreme self-criticism, long-held grudges, envy, etc. And I respect Carmack for leaving Meta, but its hard to ignore that he joined in the first place when Meta already has a CEN (Chief Executive Narcissist).
I think the point was that any large enough company will have a ton of politics related to decisions around technology, so one person's anonymous perspective shouldn't carry much/any weight.
Academic experience writing papers vs actual industry experience to the point of creating new technologies and new markets almost by himself are definitely not equivalent.
So, as much as I would be a bit judgemental about academics opinions, I would definitely listen to Carmack.
Academia can mean a lot of things, some of which have obvious parallels to industry. He may deserve a pedestal in some respects, and I'd listen to him too, but it should be tempered.
Everyone can and will make really bad decisions, but in my experience, owning up to mistakes and taking responsibility in contrast to playing it down and being history revisionists, is inversely proportional to, well, how clever they consider themselves be. The "well that was intentional/expected/irrelevant since it was really X instead of Y we did" is a bit worn by now. Painting broadly, generalizing etc of course.
The principple "Don't shoot the messenger" applies to real-life messengers.
It does not apply to anonymous 'messengers' on the Internet who spread stories that can't be verified, and who themselves are of unknown credibility/origins, and who could have undisclosed biases/prejudices against the person they are criticizing.
At risk of upsetting this thread’s balance and reducing it to negativity: I prefer your parent comment’s interpretation of the Go. “Ahead of its time”? Technology is the last space where a newfangled product would lose momentum by being released to early.
I’m open to being proved ignorant here. Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted?
Subscription music services like Rhapsody provided what Apple Music does now 15 years ago, and they died out (similarly Microsoft’s Zune service). Maybe this is what you’re saying? - All the same, I would trump these examples up to poor marketing, management, and product specifics. Apple Music isn’t releasing their service at a better time. They just put a lot more effort into it, and it provides the service better. (Their phone ecosystem plays a big part in this.) This example could be extended into saying that the Go just wasn’t good enough (thus: Carmack failed).
FWIW: I’m a Carmack fan, and I base a lot of how I use Emacs on his wisdom accumulated over the years. For example, his recent shift to VSCode has inspired me to think in that direction.
> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted?
Uh yeah, VR itself as a concept and models of VR have been live since the 80s but were especially hyped in the 90s but never went anywhere beyond amusement parks and arcades. And no one wanted to touch VR in the 00s despite huge leaps in processing power.
I would even argue the original Macintosh was ahead of its time, maybe because it was too expensive and too hard to upgrade. As a result, DOS and Windows and IBM clones took the PC market, despite coming later and initially being inferior.
I enjoy this as a friendly/elucidating discussion and don’t want to annoy or antagonize you (just don’t respond if I do).
I do appreciate your take on the original Macintosh.
VR has never been ahead of its time in that it’s never had a time. It still hasn’t made its way into any sort of popular acceptance. The gaming industry is the only space in which it has made significant strides. If VR circles back around to popular acceptance of something like Carmack’s vision (like the Mac has done with Job’s) your point will be valid.
As it stands, Carmack’s vision failed, and Meta continues to experiment and R&D with different directions. Carmack’s decision to leave more closely aligns with the ideas expressed in the comment that started this IMO.
I’m literally invested in Meta’s endeavors here. (FMET through Fidelity Investments.) The previous sentence is just communicating my bias that I think they have the right idea in the long run.
Carmack's vision culminated in Quest 2, which is the only hardware Meta has produced that any significant number of people care about.
Instead of Macintosh, I might point at Commodore. Affordable hardware with success in some niches like video production, but poor broader acceptance beyond gaming markets. Weirdly out of touch management with a yearning to be accepted by stuffy business types, but completely misjudging wants and needs. With Quest Pro I get vibes of the Commodore 128, a game machine trying and failing to be a Serious Business Device.
Tbh if oculus weren’t associated with Facebook in a meaningful way I’d be all over it. But it is so I avoid it. The technology works fine but is a commercial failure, that’s not wholly Carmack’s fault.
Yea it is a device that goes on your face, puts cameras in your room, and creates a pseudo-reality for you. Who in their right mind would trust Facebook with that?
While I completely agree with you. I think it’s important to point out that if it wasn’t sold by Facebook, it would be 2.5x the cost and then most people wouldn’t touch it as it would be too big of an investment.
I think, in terms of the hype, VR was going to be the next big thing in gaming, and then maybe not just gaming after that, but other applications. So I was expecting it to become a required peripheral like a headset or a good mouse & keyboard.
But I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything by not having a VR headset. Like the product direction was very clear for oculus, had lots of buy in from devs… then it was bought by Facebook and became so much muddier. (“We’re going to use it in the meta-verse for boring work stuff” VR will be everything).
You need an exciting killer app for these things and they need to be commodity hardware. I’m guessing the best thing anyone could do for VR is give up all their patents.
It is probably helpful to define 'commercial failure'. In the sense that it sold a lot of units, it is a success; in the sense that it made any money for the company which produced it, it is a failure. So, it could be taken different ways depending on how the term is defined.
Between Oculus, Vive, and other various competitors, VR has been successful in many ways that it wasn't able to achieve 20 years ago. If you set the bar so high that it needs to be as successful as the personal computer or the mobile phone, sure. But I wouldn't call Oculus or modern VR a failure. It's a niche success.
>I would even argue the original Macintosh was ahead of its time
You can argue about the Mac but certainly the Lisa was. Early laptops like the Data General/One as well (although in that case there business issues as well).
As for streaming music, to go mainstream it probably needed cheap enough and fast enough cellular service. Of course, ripped, purchased, and umm acquired local copies of music also had a place once cheap enough portable devices with sufficient storage were available.
The company I worked for, had a Xerox system. It looked like an 860, but may have actually been more modern.
Now that was ahead of its time.
We also had Osborne and Kaypro computers, but the 860 was arguably the inspiration for the Mac. The operating system presented a mouse (actually, I think it was a touchpad)-driven, icon-based GUI. I remember seeing the “trash can,” on the bottom right (I think). I also seem to remember folder icons.
But that was from a brief, 5-minute (or less) peek, 40 years ago.
They didn’t let us mensch engineers near the thing.
>Old school hackers, military generals, special forces paratroopers, and space shuttle astronauts who are sensitive to social status use a GRiD Compass.
>Development began in 1979, and the main buyer was the U.S. government. NASA used it on the Space Shuttle during the early 1980s, as it was powerful, lightweight, and compact. The military Special Forces also purchased the machine, as it could be used by paratroopers in combat.
>Along with the Gavilan SC and Sharp PC-5000 released the following year, the GRiD Compass established much of the basic design of subsequent laptop computers, although the laptop concept itself owed much to the Dynabook project developed at Xerox PARC from the late 1960s. The Compass company subsequently earned significant returns on its patent rights as its innovations became commonplace.
I asked Glenn Edens, who co-founded GRiD, about a story I heard about the GRiD a long time ago, and here's the discussion:
>Not a solution for people who are sensitive to social status.
>Old school hackers, military generals, special forces paratroopers, and space shuttle astronauts who are sensitive to social status use a GRiD Compass. [...] I can't find a citation and don't know if it's true, but decades ago I heard a rumor that a Mossad agent's magnesium alloy GRiD stopped a bullet! Try that with a MacBook Air.
>Man in a Briefcase: The Social Construction of the Laptop Computer and the Emergence of a Type Form
>Abstract
>Dominant design discourse of the late 1970s and early 1980s presented the introduction of the laptop computer as the result of 'inevitable' progress in a variety of disparate technologies, pulled together to create an unprecedented, revolutionary technological product. While the laptop was a revolutionary product, such a narrative works to dismiss a series of products which predated the laptop but which had much the same aim, and to deny a social drive for such products, which had been in evidence for a number of years before the technology to achieve them was available. This article shows that the social drive for the development of portable computing came in part from the 'macho mystique' of concealed technology that was a substantial motif in popular culture at that time. Using corporate promotional material from the National Archive for the History of Computing at the University of Manchester, and interviews with some of the designers and engineers involved in the creation of early portable computers, this work explores the development of the first real laptop computer, the 'GRiD Compass', in the context of its contemporaries. The consequent trajectory of laptop computer design is then traced to show how it has become a product which has a mixture of associated meanings to a wide range of consumers. In this way, the work explores the role of consumption in the development of digital technology.
>[translated:] The Grid Compass was made of black lacquered magnesium alloy.
>Among its most remembered features, there is the fact that the paint went away after a while, due to the weight and dimensions that did not allow it to be too delicate with its transport. And so the dull black splintered, revealing the shiny metal beneath.
>Grid Compass - Bill Moggridge Design
>The Grid Compass was a status symbol, the flag of that tribe of people who wanted to show the world that they can never really disconnect from work.
>Owning it was cool.
>But even cooler was having chipped it, because it was the unmistakable sign that one not only possessed that thing, but actually used it.
The GRiD was so well built, and they were so popular with the military, that rumor was totally believable.
This has some stories about spooky GRiD users, like Admiral John Poindexter, who was a bit of a hacker:
>Pioneering the Laptop: Engineering the GRiD compass
>Introduced in 1982, the GRiD Compass 1100 was likely the first commercial computer created in a laptop format and one of the first truly portable machines. With its rugged magnesium clamshell case (the screen folds flat over the keyboard), switching power supply, electro-luminescent display, non-volatile bubble memory, and built-in modem, the hardware design incorporated many features that we take for granted today. Software innovations included a graphical operating system, an integrated productivity suite including word processor, spreadsheet, graphics and e-mail. GRiD Systems Corporation, founded in 1979 by John Ellenby and his co-founders Glenn Edens and David Paulsen, pioneered many portable devices including the laptop, pen-based and tablet PC form factors.
>Key members of the original GRiD engineering team -- Glenn Edens, Carol Hankins, Craig Mathias and Dave Paulsen -- share engineering stories from the Wild West of the laptop computer. Moderated by New York Times journalist John Markoff.
(At 32:37 they mention an external 5 1/4" floppy disk peripheral that was returned for service with a bullet hole, and the "Scrubbing Bubbles" software they wrote for the government to erase the bubble memory in case of emergency.)
Glenn Edens sent the following messages at 11:16 PM
Hello Don, I know that rumor, I can neither confirm nor deny :)
We got a lot of returned gear with bullet holes or shrapnel damage of odd kinds.
I doubt GRiD's use had anything to do with social status though - it was more about it was the first laptop, it was rugged (we over-engineered the heck out of it), it had an amazing software development environment (you could actually write SW for it on it beyond BASIC), usually folks rag on the price, however if you fully configured any other computer of the day the price was not all that different - plus no one paid retail in those days, thats what everyone forgets :)
I love all the references you found!
I'll also add that it is a myth that the military and Government were our biggest customers, they were about 25%, our biggest early customers were banks, audit firms, engineering firms, oil exploration, etc.
The first machine went to Steve Jobs (he paid for it, it was a bet he and I made), the second machine went to William F. Buckley (he paid for it as well). The one thing I regret is that we didn't release the Smalltalk system we did for it (getting a mouse was not easy in 1982, the only producer at that time was Tat Lam and all his production went to Xerox (Star prototypes as I remember). A funny story that for Apple to get a mouse prototype for the Lisa I had to go "appropriate" one from Xerox PARC - with tacit permission, everyone forgets Xerox was an investor in Apple (Trip Hawkins kindly tells that story from time to time).
So how are you doing?
Larry Ellison was an early buyer as well to use for a sailing race computer - I was told it replaced a DEC minicomputer that was being used onboard, saving a lot of weight and power draw :)
I can add it wasn't Mossad that I know of, it was closer to home, although I think we may have discussed that long ago - it was a US Agency :).
Don wrote:
So I’m reading between the lines that it DID stop a bullet, but it was somebody in the US, not the Mossad. Is that why Reagan survived his assassination attempt??! ;)
I still believe the social status was more like the unintended effect, not the primary cause, of people owning a GRiD, because they certainly were bad-assed computers.
Maybe MythBusters cold do an experiment to find out if a GRiD will stop a bullet. Hopefully not a working one though, those should be treated with care and respect and not shot at.
Wow it would have been amazing to run Smalltalk on that thing. As it was so inspired by the Dynabook, did Alan Kay ever get to play with one?
Glenn replied:
That’s the story. I never heard it had anything to do with Reagan though. Over the years we did get multiple units with all sorts of crazy damage, much of it was repairable, some was not.
Well we certainly did nothing to counter the image, although I think that really came later. In that time (we started shipping in 1982) even having a computer was a big deal no matter if it were an Osbourne or a GRiD. Although the Compaq’s et. al. sewing machine sized computers shipped well into the late 80’s. We really didn’t any serious competition until 88’ or 89’, so nearly five years after we started shipping. For the first 3 years we were always catching up to the backlog.
Indeed :). We definitely found ‘debris' inside the machines that were returned to see if they could be repaired, obviously it would have to do with what size bullet and angle of incidence.
The Dynabook was the inspiration for sure. Yes, Alan Kay played with several GRiD models as did Dan Ingalls. The Smalltalk implementation was on the GRiD was pretty good for the day, the 8086 being a real 16-bit machine made a difference. The Alto II was still a bit faster, but not by much. If a mouse were readily commercially available we would have shipped it. It was a little hard to use on the small screen so you wound up moving windows often.
Were the GRiD laptops, which I remember reading about in Byte Magazine back in the day, waterproof? I believe decades of experience with portable computers suggest that might be a more important feature than being able to stop a bullet. Depending on what kind of company one is keeping.
I've been revisiting it lately, and Byte actually contains a vast collection of things that didn't make it largely because they were ahead of their time. Great stuff.
Expensive and hard to upgrade are both separate from being ahead of your time design-wise. (Apple had healthy margins on Macintosh from the start, and the 128k no-slots aspects were both argued against by people on the team. I guess there's a sense of "ahead of its time" that fits, where Jobs consistently aimed for more "upscale consumer" type products but wasn't yet able to make that work for a big market.)
I've always thought that TiVo was way ahead of its time. The company is still alive but it feels weird to talk about it in present tense when we've got Roku, Chromecast, Firestick, and Apple TV. Even the era of cable provider DVRs made me feel like TiVo was ahead of its time!
Tivo nailed the user experience which is why it took off. In the early years, the response time on the interface was nearly instant for everything. This made it delightful to use because it felt like an extension of your intentions. Today, even with all the content in the world available, there are far more delays and wait times because the content is streaming and not local. Even YouTube TV, which could have the same 10ms response time as Stadia, is slow in many places.
The idea of the actual device seems very tied to a particular time, not ahead of it. The point was to record broadcast TV (so, reliant on the time when broadcast TV was the main way of getting TV) and the ability to skip ads (nowadays any streaming service worth watching doesn’t have ads anyway).
footnote:
The TiVo UX was superb but, for my money, ReplayTV was superior, technically.
And, worth mentioning, its UX was not lacking in any perceivable way; OK, maybe less flair & eye candy than TiVo, but also really, really good in its discoverability & daily usability.
Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted
Mobile devices with clunky resistive touchscreens come to mind. The iPhone was hardly the first "smartphone," but Jobs's key insight was to have people sitting by the river waiting for decent touchscreen technology to come floating by. When capacitive multitouch happened, it was a classic example of apparent "good luck" being equal to "preparation meets opportunity." Musk is obviously
trying to camp the same spawning grounds with Neuralink.
Teletext might be another example, as the predecessor to the WWW. Putting a lot of money into advancing Teletext development would have resulted in WebTV at best, and more likely just an expensive waste of time.
Any of dozens of personal computer models in the 1980s, some quite advanced, that weren't made by Apple or IBM.
Navigation and infotainment in cars -- Buick's early CRT touchscreen and Honda's "electric gyrocator" for navigation come to mind. There was no point trying to do either of those things at the time.
Minidisc as an early embodiment of advanced DSP techniques for lossy audio compression. ATRAC could have been MP3 but wasn't, because Sony.
Analog laserdiscs as a home video format. It was the right basic idea, and boasted some exotic technology under the hood -- but disc-based A/V needed to wait for digital techniques before it really made sense.
Not hard to come up with examples that answer this question, for sure.
>Analog laserdiscs as a home video format. It was the right basic idea, and boasted some exotic technology under the hood -- but disc-based A/V needed to wait for digital techniques before it really made sense.
I'm not it really needed to; analog laserdiscs were a huge improvement over existing videotapes, at least for distribution of movies (not for recording obviously). The main problem was the price: they were expensive as hell. Not sure if that was due to technical limitations, or the players pricing it high because it was a "premium" format and they priced themselves into irrelevance and obscurity. I've seen this with many other technologies over the years: someone introduces something really cool, but it's so damn expensive no one buys it, so it goes nowhere, and eventually some cheaper alternative comes along and becomes the new standard.
Stadia is a great example. I am still using it today before the shut down, it's amazing how it's actually got me into playing games again and it's fantastic for casual games with friends since everyone can play no matter there hardware and the multiplayer features are fantastic for this.
It works and it is fantastic, but it's ahead of it's time and most people don't know what it is. That and Google's mismanagement of the service, but if it was an accepted thing, Google wouldn't have had to push it ahead so much, but since it wasn't they did and they failed.
I don't know if we really pin the blame on that for stadia. Maybe portions, but I also suspect that a big reason for stadia's "failure" wasn't necessarily Google's/Stadia's fault. Lots of homes still have really bad internet connections. I tried stadia, I think the concept is great and most everything is there except I can't get a decent enough internet connection from any ISP in my area to make it usable at home. But I know people is places with really good internet connections and have heard nothing but good things about it before I tried.
As someone that had stadia and a good enough connection for it, the technology was honestly really impressive.
The problem for me was that it was yet another platform. I already have many games I'd like to keep playing, I don't want to buy another copy that can only be used on stadia. I don't want to buy anything on stadia and then only be able to stream it while I still have a gaming pc.
For sure I definitely see that, but I think Stadia solves a different problem. If you are already heavily invested in something like Steam and have the hardware, Stadia doesn't really solve your problem. If you don't have the hardware, maybe the computer you can afford is a $200 netbook, or you can't travel with your gaming PC, but can pay the monthly fee and occasionally the cost of a game, then Stadia could solve the problem, barring a good enough internet connection. Which when I tried it was my case. I didn't have a gaming PC, I just bought an M1 Macbook Air, so didn't really wanna dish out more money for hardware, Stadia could have allowed me to game on my M1, but once again, bad internet connection. How I play locally and have games on Steam since my job provided me with a home gaming PC and they don't care what I do with it so long as I can work from home with it (no company spyware).
But yea, if you have the hardware already, the value add wasn't really there. But for the broke college student, or broke adult who can't justify dropping hundreds/thousands today but can eat a few bucks a month. Or someone who travels often for personal or work, then the value add is there.
> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted?
Smartphones. Microsoft and Symbian were at least 7 years ahead of Apple. The manner in which they squandered the opportunity aside, most people simply didn't care about having email on their phone.
Most people still don't care about having email on their phone: that's not what they use their phone for most of the time. They use it for text chats, taking photos, playing games, navigating, etc. I'd say email ranks pretty low in importance.
Those other companies failed because they had clunky UIs and thought that most people really cared about typing emails on their phones; they didn't. Apple finally proved that people want something easy to use that does things they want to do (which isn't email).
> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted?
Well I think we might have different ideas of what "ahead of its time" exactly is. I would include - and I think I hinted at that with "released too early" - things that simply weren't refined enough technically, as well as things that relied on other technology that simply wasn't capable, widespread or accepted enough at their time.
So regarding Rhapsody for example, it was released in 2001, a time where the majority of people was still on dial up iirc, and even if you were one of the lucky ones with a DSL connection, you might've had a metered connection, so music streaming was just... ahead of it's time.
The Go was certainly not "ahead of it's time". It was a standalone version of the GearVR, which was released three years earlier. At the same time Oculus released the Go with 3DOF tracking, Google released the Lenovo Mirage Solo with 6DOF tracking.
That said, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the Go. It was and still is, the cheapest entry point into VR. The lack of features made it much more lightweight and comfortable than its successors, which also cost double of the Go.
The only real problem with the Go is that Facebook didn't continue that line of product. There is plenty of room for a 3DOF/2D content focused headset, but Facebook never really cared about that area of VR.
Even if the statement were true, it’s not like they hired some anonymous guy, they knew what they were getting. Don’t hire a passionate guy like that if you don’t want him to concern himself with your company.
>Carmack has proven enough times in the past that he's able to deliver, that he can push technology, knows what's possible and what isn't, and can wrap up a product.
In the finance world, lesson number 1 is past performance is not a predictor of future results.
I don't care how much of a virtuoso you are, if you clash with culture, you're fucked. I'm just coming out of a similar stint where the best I could do was hold off a predilection toward toxic culture norms long enough for processes to materialize. To support the business in spite of it.
So I know exactly the kind of forces he was probably working against. It's rather thankless, draining, and exhausting in a way sleep doesn't help with.
It's often bidirectional as well, so there's a trick to figuring out when it's time to bounce.
Read the John Romero stuff. Even Carmack explains in the Lex Friedman interview how badly Carmack treated him. Carmack also presents enough in that interview to expect this take us quite likely correct.
Especially considering that there are two (unrelated) Carmacks: John and Adrian, both cofounders of id software. As for John Romero, he did a lot of "stuff".
How is it confusing? The way Carmack treated Romero is famous, and the recent Lex Fridman interview of Carmack even has it admitted by Carmack. Carmack, in the same interview, explains how he is an asshole to people that work(ed) with him at Meta.
Listen to the interview, and see if Carmack sounds like a reasonable boos, able to get the best from his staff, or sounds like someone that would cause serious friction. I'd pick the latter, from his own description of how he treats people.
He's a good programmer. He'd be absolutely terrible to work with or for.
Past experiences do not mean future success. This isn't even about Carmack: past 'heroes' end up failing in their decision-making in the future many times, and they were followed for no other reason than 'they have a track record'.
Past experience is not a perfect predictor, but still much better than almost anything else. I'm pretty sure you'd feel safer going into an operations if the surgeon said "I've done this 100 times now" instead of "This is my first time with this procedure".
Of course, it matters if the experience is directly relevant, and that's where hero worshiping often gets it wrong.
Let's say we have 2 people in two different walks of life. Jim and Alice.
Both of them are entrepreneurs and like doing startups. Both of their goals are to take a startup from idea to $1 Billion+ IPO in 2 years and exit and then start the next start-up. If they don't reach 1 Billion IPO they just exit.
After 20 years. Jim and Alice have both attempted 10 startups.
Jim has reached the goal 2 out of 10 times. While Alice has reached the goal 8 out of 10 times.
Would it be a fallacy to bet on Alice if you had to invest in either Jim or Alice's startup?
That is an indication of why the particulars are important, but not defining what makes the argument fallacious. For instance 'ad hominem' is a fallacy because attacking a person making an argument doesn't make the argument incorrect. Relying on past behavior to indicate future success is also what you just did, but you were more specific about the inputs.
I think its hard to prove without a very large statistical data set as we see that 8 out 10 times might IPO but in the next 50 years (if that would be possible) it might be 0 out of the next 10.
IMO the reason is that things change. People change. Markets change. The world just doesn't stay static. But our tendency is indeed to trust people who did something and I would probably also trust a person more given certain specifics as above.
I say this as someone who cares about language, and who has no dog in this Carmack dispute.
I think you are overweighting a fairly simple grammatical error. The commenter expresses themself clearly and logically. It is possible that they don't speak English as a first language, or that they simply are not that careful about making grammatical mistakes. Not everyone is as pedantic about language as you or I may be.
Unreasonable people can write grammatically, and reasonable people can write ungrammatically. I think it is better to judge an argument by its reasonableness.
I think many people would consider your response impolite and unkind to the original poster. Surely you do not want to shame someone for their lack of mastery with the English language? Surely you would rather judge an argument on its merits?
May I suggest a last question: could you see yourself reading this comment to the original poster face-to-face? Does it not seem rude and condescending to imagine yourself doing that?
> It is possible that they don't speak English as a first language
This is more of a fun side note: It's more likely that they're a native speaker. People who learn English as a second language generally don't make the their/there mix up.
Other keyboards are seriously annoying by either not having prediction, putting them behind late T9s or they have predictions which seems to be made by someone who almost actively try to make me look stupid.
English is the only language I know and my international friends take great pleasure in correcting my grammatical errors. I've learned a great deal about my mother tongue from them!
I observed that too on myself (English is my second language), and I even wrote comments like that in the past, but after 20 years I noticed that I started making those errors myself, which sucks.
I'm guessing when you read people making this mistake over and over (I even saw it done in news articles) I guess your brain starts equating them together :(
I'm thankful for those people correcting it, although I think it is a losing battle.
That is a fun side note :) Do you have a source for this? I'd love to read more about it. I assume it's because when you're actually taught this specifically, you remember it, as opposed to native speakers who "learn" the spelling via osmosis or something.
Native speakers learn the language at a time when they can't read or write, so they have to rely on their listening. Non-native speakers on the other hand usually first see the language written down, and then hear / pronounce it, and connect the writing with what they hear.
If I had a penny for every time a native speaker wrote "would of" instead of "would have" in forums, I'd be a billionaire. "Their" / "They're" / "There" is also common.
But the funny thing is, I noticed I would make similar errors after being immersed in a native environment after a few years time. Somehow I just say to myself what I wanted to write, and the slip-up happens. So native speakers are more prone to this, but it's not only there privilege!
I observed it on myself, although after some time I started doing it too.
My belief was that it's because English is not spelled the same way it sounds, so people who learn it are forced to memorize pronunciation and writing separately.
Going to reply on this comment since it's a thorough response to mine.
Look; I'm seeing a lot of reasoning across comments from non-native language, keyboard input, autocorrect, and so forth.
None of this changes the fact that the usage is just flat out wrong. Have we become so soft in society that nothing can be pointed out because of speculative reasons?
If it's a 2nd language, learn the language. If it's the keyboard, get a better keyboard. If it's autocorrect, double check what you write. Stop making excuses for everything.
All these cries for why we should accept there/ their/ they're uncontested is no doubt a reflection of the frustration Carmack must have experienced, if HN is any indicator of the FAANG workforce. John is known to be very direct and unapologetic himself, and here y'all are losing your mind on a slight criticism. It's no wonder.
I would suggest that it's not necessary to speculate too much about why they made a grammatical error. There are many possible reasons. For instance, I suggested that they may simply be less pedantic/careful about grammar. They may simply care about the form of their expression less than you or I do.
I think judging a hypothesis by its form/expression is not a great way to get at the truth. If a heuristic has to be used, then probably tone, coherence, and even-handedness are better than grammatical correctness. Those are at least closer to the substance of the argument.
I suggest that evaluating arguments on the basis of form/expression will not help you get at the truth.
It is your choice whether to be aesthetically dissatisfied by grammatically incorrect English. Many would consider that pedantic, though I might have a modicum of sympathy for you. However, I think the error you've made is to promote aesthetic displeasure into distrust for the OP's reasonableness.
I do not know about others, but I do not think I am losing my mind about anything. I suspect that most direct and unapologetic people have faith in the substance of their arguments, and would be frustrated to be judged using low-signal heuristics like grammatical correctness.
I only add that the post above invokes some wildly spurious logic in counting the 5 instances of the same mistake as if they were 5 different mistakes. Such a basic error really makes me question his general reasoning ability.
What a fatuous argument. Have you considered that they may have used speech to text to dictate there (sic.) response from a mobile device, or that perhaps their (sic.) not a native speaker?
I find that the people who are overly concerned about semantics tend to be the people who have the least to offer in terms of substance. The idea that you can draw a correlation between one's technological aptitude and the inability to distinguish between various possessive adjectives is patently absurd.
Here's a pithy quote I created just for you: "it doesn't matter how many languages you can speak if you have nothing to say."
or just be dyslexic or any other myriad of disorders like ADHD etc that may affect such minor grammatical rules yet not change or alter the likelihood that they could be a senior meta engineer?
> trying to be convincing on technical issues when you can't understand fundamentals of English is not persuasive at all.
Note to disprove your point but there are plenty of very technically capable people who learn English as a second, third, fourth language. In fact I would say in technical settings, such as here, that this is statistically more common than a native English speaker with poor writing skills.
There is/are and their sound very different in other languages, so I would say that people who speak English as a second language generally make these types of mistakes less often than natural speakers who learned speaking English many years before writing. (We make other types of mistakes more often though).
As a non-native Enlish speaker I'd like an n=1 'experience' to your n=1 'would say': the English is in my head first and then in writing. So at the time of writing there and their already sound alike and van be easily mixed up
This is true, but I (and you) learned to say and read/write these words at the same time, so we have an advantage over native English speakers in differentiating them.
At the same time the poster had a larger vocabulary than I have (which is true for native speakers generally, as I try to stay within simple English).
Likely. I can't find it now, but there was an HN story not long ago where someone used fairly rudimentary techniques to identify former/alt HN accounts based on stylometric similarity. It worked VERY well.
If I were going to post from a throwaway account for some reason, I would probably launder it through an intermediate language on Google Translate for one or two cycles. Otherwise, if I didn't bother with that, I'd certainly scatter some intentional errors here and there that I don't usually make.
Nowadays people would probably just use GPT prompts and rephrase to obscure identity. Good luck reversing the output to deduce the style of the author's original input.
I am quite confident that Satoshi Nakomoto was an Australian bloke(s) living in Japan when he/they/their wrote the Bitcoin Whitepaper. The code itself does suggest it was one person, but I still think it was a few people with one at the helm.
If you're typing quickly, you can miss when autocorrect puts in the wrong replacement
I stopped caring about when people have incorrect your vs you're and there vs their because it's really about whether the autocorrect ai is getting them right. English is an evolving language that I don't think will keep those distinctions in the future
It’s not a fundamental of English, because it’s (that’s another example) impossible to hear. You’re (that’s another example) being pedantic about an artifact of our writing system, which is strictly not language. I’m being pedantic about this because i’m tired of this being pointed out.
Grammatical mistakes aren’t a means to disprove anything. Not everyone is detail oriented and I doubt it prevented anyone from understanding the meaning of what they were saying. Their post wasn’t even technical, more like a stream of thought
someone writing and wishing to hide their identity may very well be masking their writing style. The bad grammar here might be the social media equivalent of using letters cut from magazines.
Their use of 'there' instead of 'their' could've been done purposely as a means of not being unmasked. A tool was posted the other week that took HN usernames and found accounts that it deemed as being alt accounts/similar writing styles.
Could be an attempt to throw something like that off
> specially anyone who doesn't know the difference between 'their' and 'there'
This is a really ablest take and should not really be seen here on HN. You have no idea what kind of an input device the author is using, if they have some handicap or disability nor even what their native language is. There are plenty of reasons a poster can make this mistake, and even more reasons to make it consistently. Please do better.
I worked with someone who was a bona fide development genius about 10 years ago and he was a CTO and co-founder at the time and considered himself to be able to input into any conversation with people who were domain experts in fields that he wasn't.
I remember him overruling the Head of Design and enforcing Arial to be the typeface used for the corporate brand because it was the typeface was present on more computers than any other in the world. Suffice to say the original typeface was much better.
Self doubt is a really really important trait to have as a leader - don't automatically assume you're right outside of your area of expertise and that team members can come up with good solutions that aren't yours is the only way you can ever really scale.
The CTO ultimately was forced out and became a specialist consultant and that probably suited him.
What’s wrong with Arial? I mean I know it is disliked by typography fans because it is a ripoff of the popular Helvetica. But like, moral concerns aside or whatever, as a slightly worse ripoff of a good and popular typeface, it is unsurprisingly fairly visually appealing…
It seems like a reasonable product decision given that most people don’t care about typeface history.
I find Arial slightly discomforting, because the kerning is not as nice as with Helvetica. Helvetica feels "denser".
But more to the point, for a corporate logo, Arial feels like a cheap knock off to the more polished Helvetica. You can see this yourself, by looking at corporate existing corporate logos designed in helvetica and then redesigned in Arial.
Admittedly this is personal preference in the end, but I feel like if HR is going to give someone bad news, they're going to do it in Arial. If Apple is going to release a life changing technology, they're going to do it in Helvetica.
I should have thought more about the experiment. I was trying to identify the helvetica ones, looking for example for logos that looked slightly unusual or janky.
I guess it would fit your point a little more if I just looked for whichever I thought was more aesthetically pleasing.
Anyway, I got about 50% (accidentally closed the window, I think it may have been 51%?) so at least if I was the customer, the company would not seem to gain any advantage from licensing the superior font.
It looks "fuller", "denser" to me. And leaves me with an impression of a "sturdy" company.
Finally, here's Neue Helvetica 75 and Arial Pro Bold pages from Linotype. I just open them up in a new tab each and switch tabs to get a better idea for things.
It's just really weird to me that people are all shocked-Pikachu about Carmack wanting to be the auteur in this scenario and to wield Meta's effectively-infinite resources in the exact ways that he wanted. It's apparent from every interview and article about him that this is how he operates. It seems to have worked well for him in the past, but it was obviously going to be a major culture clash at Meta unless they gave in and let him run the thing.
He was likely to have more success at Meta than his AGI startup. When it comes to intelligence and cognition no one even knows where to begin. The same for studying the brain. And the neural networks in the brain don't resemble anything like the neural networks in current AI.
I guess there's this idea that we'll wander into the right territory. That might work for other things but probably not for the most complicated organism on our planet.
Are those papers breakthroughs in understanding human cognition? It feels like there must be some philosophical underpinning to creating human-like intelligence.
I suppose there are two approaches: 1) understand the brain in all its complexity 2) wander upon something that seems like human cognition but isn’t (i.e. GPT)
Carmack and everyone else is taking the latter approach. Carmack may end up building something that seems intelligent — if that’s what you mean by intelligence.
Consider Chomsky’s view on current AI. He may disagree with me but he certainly disagrees with the idea that actual intelligence or something like AGI will result from current efforts.
> It feels like there must be some philosophical underpinning to creating human-like intelligence
Cognitive science, mostly stemming from this common intuition, has failed us after spending decades of research effort, while minting more than a few academic careers.
Same with many once prominent public intellectuals.
GPT is certainly presenting itself to be very uncharismatic to most and humiliating to some.
Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem.
It’s cool in concept but whose going to shell out cash to be tethered to a machine wearing goggles sitting in a chair?
AR has potential but even that is marginally better than alternative solutions.
Also, I don’t know about y’all but I don’t trust Facebook so I don’t trust Meta. They are a data-leach.
We still probably have a decade or more to go with this technology it has to be affordable, lightweight, AR glasses not tied to a company that sells peoples data!
Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem.
I feel like this is definitely the elephant in the room everybody is ignoring. Almost nobody gives a hoot about VR!
I'm a software engineer with a lot of (surprise, surprise) nerdy/geeky/whatever friends and interest in VR is close to zero. A few friends vouched for various games like Half-Life:Alyx and Beat Saber, but nobody was claiming it was a life altering experience and nobody is clamoring to live more of their lives in VR. VR definitely makes a great game controller for some kinds of games and there are even a few killer apps, but I mean like... Wii Sports was a "killer app" for motion controls and that doesn't mean it was a technology that shaped our lives in the long run.
And needless to say non-technical folks have less than zero interest in strapping a computer to their head and face.
God bless John Carmack, but it feels like he and FB are arguing about execution issues on a product nobody cared about in the first place.
I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve. It's a kind of gameplay that can't be repeated with 2d screens. I really do think it could be revolutionary, based on playing that game alone. If you can get ahold of a headset and a powerful gaming PC - I recommend giving it a try.
The problems right now are very fundamental. The quest 2 out of the box is supremely uncomfortable. Casual users will put it on and not want to use it due to VR nausea and the discomfort of the headset after wearing it for 20 minutes. The hardware is not powerful enough to create an experience like Alyx - all the headset games just have basic polygons and colors. Resolution is still poor, FOV is poor. We're still in the infancy of immersion/comfort/usability. I played Alyx on the Quest 1 which I actually think had better immersion due to the OLED screens.
IMO the trick is going to be whether Meta can pull off a usable, immersive device in the next 5 years without their revenues completely tanking. The problems to overcome are really hard and still at basic research level which takes years to develop. The other issue is the killer game or app that gets people into VR en-masse.
I guess my point is I think writing VR off completely is a mistake - like someone saying what is the point of a cell phone in the 1980s when they were giant bricks and cost a fortune. VR will get good enough at some point that it's like putting on a pair of glasses and stepping into another world without any friction. It's just a question of how long until we get there and who will bring it to us.
Disney World's Animal Kingdom has an Avatar-themed "ride" where you are linked to a banshee rider. And they make you wear these silly glasses, with thick, bulbous lenses.
So I'm there, mounted on a plastic motorbike, staring down in disbelief at the smaller-than-iPad display where the tachymeter and gauges would be. In front of me, in front of everyone to my left and right, is just plastic nothing. Plastic. And I think aloud, "Okay, are we gonna look down at this little screen the whole time?" The guy next to grins too: Where's the screen?
Then it starts. Holy crap. My entire field of vision is Pandora--up, down, left, right, everywhere.
And we are flying on banshees! I feel a moment of weightlessness as we careen down a canyon at the speed of gravity. I want to hoot and holler. It's pure joy, and my heart sings.
Absolutely—it’s also imagineering! Disney has done that for almost a century. But they make money because that’s their bread-and-butter. You’re buying an amazing experience at Disney, VR or otherwise.
Meta’s bread-and-butter is selling peoples data, irrespective of whether teens are committing suicide on their platforms.
You’re definitely right the technology has tons of potential. Lots of applications in, for instance, content-creation space as well.
The problem Meta ran into is that it’s difficult/impossible to make money on it. It’s a niche market at best, and it’s much more difficult to prove the value when compared to something like Facebook. Facebook is easy to use and provides social value to everyone on the planet. And I say that not using it myself but I live in a small town and all business here rely on Facebook; the municipalities use it to communicate; elderly use it… it’s accessible.
I’m sure the wall Carmack ran into was the shareholders. To shareholders it’s more often than not about profits. To Carmack it’s probably about the product he envisions, not the profits. But you can’t have both sustainably when folks can live without VR.
I would jump on the bandwagon if my VR headset was mine: like a computer I can install whatever I want there—not in a walled garden owned by Evil Corp.
The proper VR solution needs to be open source hardware and software. By the people, for the people. Reduce the barrier to entry and people will use it.
One more thing: those virtual avatars are impossible to take seriously. If I’m in a virtual boardroom filled with those, I might as well be playing Minecraft.
> I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve. It's a kind of gameplay that can't be repeated with 2d screens.
Every time I read something like this about VR I hear the same stuff I hear from like, audiophiles talking about gold plated cables and shit. I have a Rift, and I get a lot of use out of it for Beat Saber and VTOL VR, but there's no reason the latter can't be non-VR and I would categorize nearly everything I've ever played with it as a gimmick.
The experience is a little more immersive than a screen, but in my opinion not that significantly so especially considering all the drawbacks.
My experience is completely different. I haven't tried the oculus but I did play around with game development with the Vive 2 at university about 4(?) years ago. Maybe because it was room scale VR (eg you were physically walking around) but it was extremely good at immersing me to the point where memories of being inside (our rudimentary) game feel like memories of being in a space rather than memories of playing a game.
I think it's dumb to compare this to audiophile stuff with no proven benefit, it is a fundamentally different way of experiencing. The feeling of presence (as it is called in VR terms) is something that was really noticeable for me.
I suspect that maybe the immersion/presence just doesn't stick for certain people? I do know that I'm unusually good(?) at suspending disbelief and getting totally absorbed in media.
> Maybe because it was room scale VR (eg you were physically walking around) but it was extremely good at immersing me to the point where memories of being inside (our rudimentary) game feel like memories of being in a space rather than memories of playing a game.
Two things: One, room scale is extremely problematic for most people because they simply don't have an empty room to do it in. I own my own home and have a room free of obstacles to play VR stuff in, and yet I still occasionally hit walls with my fist and once slammed my head and shoulders into one pretty hard. Frequently in-game objects seem to be placed physically out of reach.
Second, I get that "I remember it like I was really there" feeling from a lot of 2D games I've spent significant amounts of time in. Recently while playing Scavenger SV-4 I felt distinctly unsafe during a certain in-game event despite being aware on some level that I wasn't actually in that situation in real life. Maybe there's only a certain kind of mind that can get that immersed on a screen though.
Yeah, physical movement is a big advantage. Gorn and Creed were also fun, but most of my time was spent with Beat Saber. Never tried Kinect / PS Move, but i doubt it's even close.
> a little more immersive
I wouldn't say a little... 10% to 20% maybe. That can be quite a nice bump for stuff counting on immersion. But again, the software has to properly use the system... my neck really hurt after playing Subnatica, and the play-through pretty much ended anyway due to Cyclops being pretty much uncontrollable.
I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx
opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve.
I've had a lot of friends who liked a few VR games like Alyx but never really touched their headsets after that.
My feeling is less "VR stinks" and more "yes, it can be a really nifty gaming controller/display but there's a big gap between 'nifty gaming thing' and Zuckerberg's opium dream of a fulltime VR revolution."
The other issue is the killer game or app that gets people into VR en-masse.
We've already had a few five star VR games, so I don't think that's sufficient.
Maybe the "killer app" is more of a paradigm or framework. Like how we didn't have killer GUI applications until Xerox/Apple/Microsoft created the environment in which those apps could be created.
But, I don't know. Fundamentally I just don't think people want to strap these things to their heads.
There's a critical faulty assumption in your logic above ... we are on the verge of seeing multiple simultaneous technical barriers fall that will seriously alter your equation around comfort and immersion. micro-OLED screens are shipping this year which enable full immersion with pancake lenses at half the weight and greatly improved FOV. The next gen of chipsets will support resolutions and frame rates that eliminate screen door effect and nausea for a wide swathe of people.
Within 2 years we'll be looking at very different landscape for VR hardware. This is why people like Zuckerberg and companies like Apple are excited about it - they can see where the puck will be and they are skating to it, ignoring the critics operating on obsolete assumptions.
Nausea issue is not solvable by any standalone device. We'll either have direct brain jack-in that can override full range of sensory input (so there will be no dissonance between your sense of balance and vision) or we're stuck with mostly static experiences (teleporting point-to-point instead of moving etc.) which are not immersive.
Not seeing the first one delivered within 5 years for sure and probably not within 50.
Do you have numbers of the percentage of people who do get motion sickness from vr? Perhaps 50% of the population not going vomity is a large enough market? Perhaps 10%? As devices get better the market will grow. I can definitely feel off at 60Hz, but no problem so far at 120 if the latency is kept to a minimum.
Plenty of people get seasick, but there are still quite a few of us who enjoy sailing a day through a proper October Storm.
I don't have an exact number, but let me answer your question with another question — why else are the most popular VR games (Beatsaber, Alyx etc.) either completely static or move-by-teleport? My suspicion is that they were playtested _ad nauseam_ and this showed significant portion of the players to be affected.
> I can definitely feel off at 60Hz, but no problem so far at 120 if the latency is kept to a minimum.
This is a common misconception and the type of nausea I'm talking about has nothing to do with the screen update latency or head tracking latency. Strongest effect happens when you're mostly stationary in the real world (sitting or standing on the floor) but moving in VR (let's say riding a rollercoaster). In this case, your vision tells your body that you should feel acceleration/deceleration, but your inner ear tells your body you're completely stationary. This is a contradiction commonly associated with intoxication and body deals with it accordingly.
I accept that strength of the effect is different for everyone, for me personally when I tried the rollercoaster demo on Quest 1 nausea lasted for 2 hours (!) despite the fact that I was never seasick in my life before.
I am starting to think that Alyx is VR high tide point. It was either going to be the thing that makes folks and developers run to VR or just stand out there is a neat proof of concept that gets ignored. Alyx is now 2 years old, there hasnt been a rush towards the space yet...
Offload to local device with, yes. Offload to server farm elsewhere ... naaah. You have at most a few ms to compress - stream - decompress - refresh. Any latency, jitter, stutter, etc has a very negative impact in vr. Much more so than on a regular monitor.
> Wii Sports was a "killer app" for motion controls and that doesn't mean it was a technology that shaped our lives in the long run.
Perhaps it could have been different if companies didn’t just focus on using these technologies as leverage to increase their profits at “unicorn” levels and for unimaginative reasons. Carmack should have known better than to expect a huge, boring company like Facebook to be a good place for a maverick to make a major breakthrough.
> Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem.
For some values of "no one". VR has been hanging on quite nicely despite repeated reports of it's demise. The problem is that some industry people keep expecting it to be iPhone huge and it's never going to be iPhone huge.
So - the truth is somewhere inbetween "no one" and "every one". Something above "niche" but below "mass market".
Virtual reality has been too abused. Is introduced typically a humorous home video when people is startled, hits some furniture with their fists or jumps over it, and unavoidably broke the very expensive TV in the wall.
Is shown as a room disaster, much more funny for the people watching the player than for the player itself.
And the people still wonder why people is not playing it in mass when you are mocking your own target? This is not how you sell a product.
Maybe stopping the "need for jumpscare to show how awesome is our game" would help. Dunno. Maybe just making the game aware of he surrounding would help (This big square is the limit, if the player walks next the frontier show a warning or made it take one step back).
VR and AR have essentially merged at this point. Nobody is releasing VR headsets without passthrough (and non-passthrough VR still isn't viable tech yet. cost, brightness and poor FOV are holding it back).
Passthrough AR inherently has the same FoV as VR so I'm having trouble interpreting your comment. I also don't see how brightness would be an issue for non-passthrough VR. Did you mean "non-passthrough AR", like the HoloLens?
He was alone on his side of the table for the All In One integrated hardware approach that was the Go and became the Quest and, after years, proved to be the right long term direction. Of course that is out of his mouth according to him but, if true, it is the kind of high level strategy setting that separates market leaders from the also ran's. Very different from task level involvement but friction there should be separate from effectiveness at the CTO's desk level (& I have to guess Boz is the one who's quality of life got improved more than specific engineering teams)
His critique resonates with my expectations from large enterprises, and your perception also resonates from what I expect of large enterprises workers. So I'm guessing he's probably not wrong and your experience was probably an example of him hitting social/political roadblocks. In my arguably limited human sized experience, the vast majority of people at Meta-sized companies prefer the safety and comfort of things going slowly and being discussed at length, and being careful to respect all the hoops that need jumping through. And not having their caged shaken too much. This leads to 5% GPU utilization.
Guess what buddy.... the entire fing executive management team is wading into areas they don't know this about, stabbing each other in the back, slowing progress due to corporate BS.
And so what if Carmack was 'wading into areas where he had no experience'? (What was he showing up at the quarterly internal financial review and advising on advance tax strategy with offshore account to line exec pockets???? ;
When you have a talent like that the organization makes space for them. It was never a cultural fit from the start.
I don't work with John Carmack, but I had a meeting with him once. He is brilliant, no doubt, but he is exactly like every single engineer with no professional communications training. He struggles to make his points in everyday developer language, when he needs to speak more calculated, more measured, and with significantly more audience empathy. Just like 99% of us technologists. We're an industry of weak communicators, and it is hurting all of our careers.
I think the notion of developers being 'weak communicators' is a bit too simplified. It suggests that if developers were better communicators, then things would move faster & better forward. But the fact is that the audience of non-developers tends to have a completely different mode of thinking, and indeed a different set of targets. Developers would like to see organizations as machines to give instructions to. Non-developers more often see organizations as ladders to climb. It would indeed be a miracle to persuade the latter people into machine-like thinking without a total cultural shift.
I think it's weird that people don't talk about non-developers being weak communicators because they often are as well. I guess it's because if a product manager is a bad communicator then they're just a bad product manager. While a developer can be a bad communicator but still a good developer.
> It suggests that if developers were better communicators, then things would move faster & better forward.
That is exactly what would happen, within developer circles themselves at least. A huge amount of miscommunication and lack of communication routinely takes place within dev teams, and that process knot forming behavior would be eliminated by better communications.
Good analogy. Ideally ladders are designed based on problem type - simple to complex. But in corporate wonderland, the ladder climbers regularly change that ideal to stay on the ladder.
You dont need a miracle. You just need to recognize early, who the most mindlessly ambitious over energetic unimaginative people, in the room are and keep them on leash/direct the energies away from ladder reconfig.
I think developers in my experience are very clear communicators, and PMs & managers tend to be poor communicators or at least communicators who have goals very disaligned from that of the company.
I don't doubt he speaks like an engineer because is basically is THE uber-engineer. He should be treated more as an oracle than an engineer. There aren't many people I would say that about in the world of computing, but Carmack definitely is that.
You could be right about all of this, but it isn't very compelling without more concrete detail.
From the perspective of a neutral observer, what we're getting here is one anonymous person's interpretation of Carmack's behavior, and we don't know anything about this person. So for all we know, it's equally possible that this person is arrogant and narcissistic and takes disagreement as bullying.
Not saying I actually believe this of you, but there are plenty of such people in the tech industry. So I don't know what to think here.
>> When data proved his idea was wrong, he would say words to the effect of "I don't care, because I still believe I'm right from an ideological background". He would devalue people, there expertise, there experience, and there thoughts because "I'm John Carmack"
Projecting are you? You're devaluing someone with way more experience and accomplishment than you. Did it ever occur to you that he was right? I've read a lot of his posts that cover ideology, and I always agree. Ideology is what it takes to go big and play a long game. If the short term stuff does fail (even his) it is appropriate to fall back to ideology to figure out what to do next.
I also never saw anything revolutionary in his work. He's really good at selecting practical and straight forward approaches to real problems. If he says "that's stupid and here's why", it's worth listening to even if you can make it work.
If i had nickel for every time i had been in a conversation where someone “proved they were right” even though they were nowhere near there, ok, i wouldn’t have millions but I’d have somewhere in the $50s which is a lot higher than you’d expect
Indeed. I couldn't believe Facebook bet so much on VR, and especially a low-quality 3D MMORPG full of micropayments. With no LEGS. How long have video game characters had legs??
I feel dizzy even playing Minecraft on a plain screen. I won't ever buy VR goggles. Let alone ones bound to a Facebook account.
Zuck must’ve been high when OKing VR, I still think Google Glass is the way forward with augmented reality. Very comfortable and isn’t trying to rewrite how humans communicate.
I have VR and it is immersive, but way too uncomfortable.
If you imagine arbitrarily good technology VR still feels like a niche while it's easy to imagine lots of uses for a lightweight stylish internet-connected HUD that supplies realtime information--even if we're talking years in the future. I tend to believe this is one of the next consumer (and industrial) device categories but a long way to go as a wearable. (We'll presumably see it on a phone first.)
Google Glass was not arbitrarily good technology. And, while the glasshole thing may have been a factor in its demise, if you look around privacy factors don't much deter the use of anything people actually find useful.
You don't need to store video for AR to work. Besides, people take video and photos of others all the time and upload to the Internet without permission of the subject whether that's technically allowed or not in a given country.
Oh the legs thing again. I don't want legs (or arms) until they are out of the uncanny valley. No legs is better than janky legs in the same way stylized graphics are better than bad "realistic" graphics.
I've heard they bet on VR for the same reason Microsoft bet on a mobile phone -- they want to own a device ecosystem. It makes a lot more sense to me in that context.
FWIW, my interactions with Carmack have shown him to be extremely pragmatic when it comes to tech. Going quickly from “we absolutely shouldn’t do that” to “ok it makes sense in that context”.
> When I hear people say "If only Meta would let Carmack do what he wants we'd see his ideal VR experience and it would be amazing". You already saw it. It was Oculus Go, and by every metric is was a commercial, financial, and technical, disaster.
Hasn't Carmack always been pretty clear about wanting Meta to deliver an ultra-low-cost high-volume headset prioritizing getting them in as many hands as possible? Did Oculus Go deliver this? Because Carmack has seemed to be constantly complaining about this with every germane talk he's given to date...
I know someone who built a solid business around using the Oculus Go to show off kitchen designs to prospective buyers. The fact that the Go was a cheap-ish stand-alone Android device was really valuable for them.
I've watched many Carmack videos over the years and he never complained about the team not following him or people working for him being not good enough, he always praised the work done and explained in very fine details why the decisions where taken one way or another.
When he wanted to remove a pebble from his shoe, he talked extensively of the company decisions, in the higher ups, which is more than fair given his role.
He never struck me as a "Steve Jobs of coding" (probably today Elon Musk?).
I also had several encounters with John Romero and talked a bit about the times at id Software and he never ever hinted that Carmack was problematic in any way.
He's also obviously not a very good politician/sellperson (he can't sell what he hasn't already produced or envisioned) and suffers bureaucracy, like every normal person here that is not a bureaucrat.
Anyway.
Regardless of the truthfulness of what you write, Carmack has always been able to deliver, both in time and as of code quality and maintainability, one way or another, Meta hasn't.
The evidence pile up more against FB/Meta management than against Carmack, moreover I think it's easy to attack the person taking responsibility in person than those hiding in the shadows, Linus suffered the same destiny, but he created Linux and brought it where it is now, the attackers didn't, so maybe Linus was simply right.
Check out Lex Fridman and John Carmack interview. Also read Masters of Doom. I think the key with Carmack is that he's a workaholic, and he expects the same from the ones around him.
Their point was that it means something when someone who was badly hurt still praises the person who did it. (“Did it” is shorthand for the full story.)
From the Dallas Observer article quoted by story I linked to (Jan 1999):
"Throughout it all, ION Storm has been hemorrhaging employees; of the approximately 85 people ION employed a year ago, more than half have quit or been let go. Finally, six weeks ago, virtually the entire team working on Daikatana jumped ship and joined Wilson's company."
To think that John Romero has the slightest bit of credibility as a character witness when it comes to such issues is so far from reality it is almost funny.
Interesting perspective. One ominous anecdote is I've noticed that kids seem to have lost interest in the Oculus / VR. I'm assuming the business model needs to be bootstrapped with games and then move into other areas. I hope it is successful however, the world will be kind of boring if all we ever have is screens.
I'm gonna dismiss this whole story, since it's anonymous, while the person you're criticizing (Carmack) isn't.
First, we have no idea what "evidence" or "data" you allege that disproved Carmack, or how Carmack insisted on being right "from an ideological background" (whether that even happened at all).
Second, Carmack is one of the most data-driven and performance-oriented programmers you can find, and is quick to admit errors where he is wrong; to suggest that he is ideology-first (which, from his Twitter and public statements, has never been the case) over truth in tech matters - is bonkers-insane.
And it's such an easy thing to call out someone you dislike as "toxic", just because you disagree with them. Your statement also makes no sense: the phrase 'politely toxic' is an oxymoron - as when one 'politely disagrees', it suggests reasonable disagreement, not outright difficultness.
Further, "good, and in some cases legally required, work" can be work that have nothing to do with the end goals - it could even be baseline administrative work.
Not sure I’d trust someone who mixes up ‘their’ and ‘there’ to interpret data proving or disproving some strategy. From the looks of the product, I’d say he was probably right on whatever that stuff was.
it could be auto(in)correct, perhaps via dictation.
i'm a language and grammar stickler and rewritten spellings in dictation and just plain autocorrect sometimes sneak by, particularly since iOS started correcting at a delay and several words back.
I once wished a girlfriend that her presentation would be "kick ass" but she got a text wishing it to be "lick ass". But it was obviously autocorrect being stubborn.
By reading between the lines of your story and carmack's, my guess is carmack was against facebook user profiling in VR headsets, and you think the sales numbers are sufficient and prove him wrong. If that's the case I'm with Carmack both because "the ideological background" and because the sales argument does not hold : you don't know what the sales would have been (and will be in the future) if facebook did not strong arm users into surrendering their privacy
> It was Oculus Go, and by every metric is was a commercial, financial, and technical, disaster.
It was the second best selling VR headset at that time, only behind PSVR1. The only problem with it was that it came too late. GearVR had been around since 2015 already, Go was essentially just a standalone version of that, but it took until 2018 to release. That was simply to late, as a year later it was replaced by the Quest1 and 3DOF VR was killed.
Another problem with the Go was that Facebook didn't put effort into good 3DOF content. They never released a VR180-3D camera. Never build their own VR video platform. And finally they made Quest2 deliberately incompatible with Go, despite Quest1 still having some compatibility.
There was and still is a lot of unnecessary fracturing going on in the VR space, even among Meta's own headsets. I think the Go line should simple have been continued with a stronger focus on movie instead of gaming. The Nreal Air shows what is possible when going that direction and Meta with an 8 year head start should have an easy time matching that. Instead we only got Quest2, which is much more heavy and low resolution than it needs to be for a movie headset.
Carmack has also had a lot of wins.
His accomplishments stand on their own.
Perhaps he is not a good people person.
He puts in an astonishing amount of effort on his pursuits
or at least he used to.
He may expect the same of others, not understanding that
the majority of people have different lives and goals.
He might also just be an asshole.
It will be interesting to see what he does next.
I think he still has one or two wins left in him.
I think he meant commercially, technically (ideologically?) for me it was an amazing iphone/ipad like innovation - integrating samsung gear in one standalone easy to use package. I'd still use it for certain apps.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusGo/comments/rnphlq/was_the_oc...
Oculus Go formed one of the starting points for 6DOF mobile VR (even though the Quest1 'Santa Cruz' was already in development).
If the comment was truthful, here it shows some bias. There are always multiple sides to a story.
> When data proved his idea was wrong, he would say words to the effect of "I don't care, because I still believe I'm right from an ideological background".
I cannot imagine commercial software in any form where that is not the prevailing sentiment. I have heard of developers who actually measure things in the capacity of their corporate employment but in 20 years of doing this work I have only seen it once.
As such I don’t even bother mentioning performance or correctness at work (across all my employers) where evidence is so hastily discarded and inconvenient conclusions are a suicide pill.
Steve Jobs once said: “ It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to , We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
Someone who is visionary, accustom to being in charge, and uses their intuition/gut as their compass because they fully understand the buck stops with them.
HN is all about that cult of personality, we want to believe in heroic programmers (or founders) who singlehandedly change the world with their geinus clarity.
Paul Graham said this, John Carmack said that and we lap it all up.
It's been this way since the ancient times, and the stories of Hercules and Theseus. We mythologize these personalities, and in our mind they become demigods.
But there's a reason the folk wisdom tells you to never meet your heroes. When you do, you painfully realize that the stories didn't focus on their humanity but instead were spinning the myths of their divinity.
The person in your head is a source of inspiration. The person in the world, on which the former is based, is a source of disappointment.
More than that, I think it's important to remember that no one, even a technologist as strong as Carmack, is going to get more right than wrong.
Carmack has been a huge inspiration for me over the years. I grew up eagerly reading his plan files.
But if we look at the big picture, a lot of his big calls haven't in fact worked out.
His vision for the future of graphics was to stick closer to the original OpenGL state machine, and just make it so blazing fast you could do complex lighting and materials via accumulating 100's of passes per frame. The world chose shaders instead, and I don't think they got that wrong.
Stencil buffer shadows were a dead end.
iD tech used to set the standard for the entire industry, but long term its totally lost out to Unreal and Unity.
Carmack's ideas around sparse voxel trees were really interesting to me at the time, but now with hindsight I can see he totally misunderstood what artists want/need. They don't want to uniquely paint every bit of the game world, they want tools that let them use instancing and smart materials/shapes. In comparison Unreal's Nanite gets this totally right. Artist productivity is the key constraint in both film and games.
I don't say this to be pointlessly negative. As I said JC is one of my personal heros. But the problem with the "superman" approach to coding is no one is in fact superman, even someone like JC. It's just not possible to get complex calls like this right long term. If you don't pay that some respect in your interpersonal behavior, you are gonna end up alienating people.
> Carmack's ideas around sparse voxel trees were really interesting to me at the time, but now with hindsight I can see he totally misunderstood what artists want/need. They don't want to uniquely paint every bit of the game world, they want tools that let them use instancing and smart materials/shapes. In comparison Unreal's Nanite gets this totally right. Artist productivity is the key constraint in both film and games.
Aren't voxels and instances/shapes orthogonal? Do artists really care if the shapes are textures or pictures wrapped on triangles or pictures wrapped on voxels?
The real argument for Voxels is analogous to the argument for raytracing. It is more accurate at describing how the world works, but we currently don't have the computational power to do it in anything close to realtime in advanced games -- even with lots of optimizations.
If you have a single world representation made out of voxels, you can't trivially edit instanced objects and have the changes propagate out to the whole world where all the instances were. Or if you get that feature, it comes at the cost of the voxels being a secondary representation, and now the instance updates potentially trample some custom textures/geometry that were placed on top of the instances. It changes the workflow a lot.
Adding more realistic lighting also completely changed workflows from adding random pseudo light sources to having to describe how light should work on various things (this is before considering ray tracing). Those changes were better for realism which was better for users and that trumps artists having to learn new things.
> iD tech used to set the standard for the entire industry, but long term its totally lost out to Unreal and Unity.
Unless you fault Carmack for selling id to Bethesda, this isn't so much Carmack's fault. He always proposed more sharing of id tech. Look at the older versions of the engine that are available under GPL. Unreal really took over when they started their cheap licensing with source available. Bethesda was asleep.
iD tech was already floundering before the acquisition. I obviously don't fault JC for taking the bag.
Unreal was always far cheaper and way better supported than iD tech. This is something iD got very wrong from the very beginning. iD was "give us 500k, here's a cd rom, and never talk to us again." Epic was considerably less (I forget exactly but I want to say 100k), and was all "ok, here's the email list, here's the news group, here's the IRC channel, and here's some folks you can talk to when you get stuck."
All the Unreal licenses collaborated and helped each other underneath Epic's umbrella. iD licensees had to do again working around iD's hostility/apathy.
There was no comparison in the quality of the toolchains either. Quake's kit did the job, but with a ton of flaky behavior and horrible UX. The BSP code had so many numerical issues level designers were constantly reworking stuff to prevent leaks. Unreal was an absolute dream in comparison.
Cliffy B sending you unsolicited porn pics over IRC was more of a "perk." /s
Source: was contracted on an Unreal port to the Playstation 1 by Infogrames back in the day.
Again, JC is one of my personal heroes, but I think people are reluctant to point out he got a lot of stuff just wrong vs choices others made. His tendency towards contrarian independence is a double edged sword.
Is it possibly because he lacks the academic rigour? I don't think casually reading math (or any) texts as a $50M+ net worth individual is remotely the same as having to study and pass tests like a regular person.
I'm an autodidact and that's something I definitely struggle with. I'm good at getting the "gist" of something by scanning fast, but then I get hung up in the details because I didn't go back and actually work through the formalisms in the paper.
JC strikes me as someone that would do the math however, or at least would code up something that probed it real quick.
Just to ramble about another point I wish I'd made in my post above: I've had some success in my career by depersonalizing these kind of debates. Instead of "my plan" vs "your plan" try to frame it as everyone enumerating the possible plans as a group, brainstorming on benefits vs risks on each of them, etc. So if I set myself up as facilitator on the white board aggregating everything, without pushing my own view much, I find it tends to get less into back and forth arguments. Not a silver bullet but that depersonalization is a big part of how I think about these dilemmas now.
Agree. I’ve been on both sides of this. Forced to learn things as a student as well as rushing through self curated material for a particular purpose. There is definitely some value in simply being a student. Spending 8 years studying to get a phd in math doesn’t guarantee that you will be an outlier (like Carmack) but you will have a solid foundation. I think both types of people are needed to make progress realistically.
You know, maybe he just has a huge blind spot when it comes to optimization: Because he's so good at it, he overestimates others' ability (and possibly appetite for - I personally find optimization grueling and soul deadening work though of course needs to be done)
Carmack aside, I think the "never meet your heroes" thing is even simpler: no one's perfect. Your hero could have cured cancer but maybe they're a nervous wreck in public. Or aren't native to your area and may commuicate badly face to face for culture clashing reasons. Or maybe they are great in a small intimate team but completely fall apart in a large setting. Heck it could be as simple as finding out they are a heavy smoker or an alcoholic.
The common stereotype is "heroes are narcissitic and have skeletons in the closet", but there are valid reasons for an otherwise good person to fail in what may be common sense to others.
To me it would be the opposite; we all have our faults, so how do they manage the feats that they do?
There's no point idolizing people for their accomplishments in the "they must be perfect" kind of way.
Ie I look at John and see someone amazingly fit for their age (very close to mine - only a few years older, yet he appears younger); I'd like to learn more about his routines (running and judo?) to see how I might benefit from the same.
But there's a reason the folk wisdom tells you to never meet your heroes. When you do, you painfully realize that the stories didn't focus on their humanity but instead were spinning the myths of their divinity.
This is part of the reason I like Steve Jobs so much. The stories around him never failed to mention his legendary penchant for downright nasty behaviour. And yet people loved him anyway, even when they lived in fear of stepping into an elevator with him! It’s bizarre and entertaining stuff!
Personally I’d rather work with boring, reliable, friendly people in an low-stress job and focus my passion on my hobbies. I recognize that others might want to take risks and try to make something big.
I don't think many people loved Jobs, and a good few hated him.
But unlike most narcissistic assholes he was unusually good at certain things [1]. And he could be persuaded to change his mind when he was dead wrong, at least some of the time.
So that made him tolerated.
[1] Finding good people, understanding that computing is about services and UX and not just boxes, and having a goal for commodity computing that was at least as aesthetic as technological.
I had the privilege of meeting Claude, at the CMU Robotics Institute, and showed him how to use (what turned out to be) an early incarnation of of Boston Dynamics -- a hopping pogo stick. Here you can see an operator using the same control box that Claude Shannon used: https://youtu.be/mG_ZKXo6Rlg?t=34 p.s. yes, that 'operator' in the video is me.
Well said but we don’t know for sure if the above is true. Carmack is a genious programmer and rather than trash him right away we should acknowledge that his job was hard- very hard. In any biography the failures are way more interesting than the successes. The ancient greek understood that pretty well.
As you mention, the world is about cult of personality, not just hacker news. Look at the situation with influences and such and why brands are following over themselves to link there products with some personality.
We like to think it's some super human person that is some for of genius, but there are very real limits to human intelligence and while there are some admittedly great and lucky people in that regard, they are still very limited and would likely be disappointing if we knew what the rest of there lives were like outside of what we see.
In some ways we seem to love the idea that others are just somehow more gifted than we are and then idolize them, we don't like to accept that everyone is just making it up as they go along all the time, maybe it's a defense mechanism in some ways as it keeps us from doing some of the more exciting things that we could do, because that's only for these special people that we somehow idolize and of course to make it worse, these people generally love the attention so play up to that even more.
A young fan of James Joyce once asked the Irish maestro, "May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?" The novelist replied: "No, it did lots of other things too."
There are many people lurking on HN who do not fall for the cult of personality and stick to technical and personal topics. You should look around for them! They’re cool.
PG has been an inspiration but he gets things wrong all the time. Most famous Silly Valley leaders are people I’d steer well clear of.
If you want a hero to idolize, select someone who's been dead for at least 100 years. Most of their foibles will be public knowledge by that time, so you probably won't be in for any rude surprises.
Even that might not be entirely safe, as Schrödinger's behaviour has only become widely known in recent years for example. (Although he died around 60 years ago, so not quite 100.)
> HN is all about that cult of personality, we want to believe in heroic programmers (or founders) who singlehandedly change the world with their geinus clarity.
I'm not one to defend the culture here but this isn't fair. Everyone is like this and it has nothing to do with HN. They do it with politicians, rock stars, capitalists, etc. Just look at the cult of Elon Musk. And they do it because all of those people put a lot of money and work into making sure they do it. Worship is paid for. That's what PR and image firms do, not to even mention that it's the default culture of the media in pretty much every country on the planet.
I'm pretty sure you don't know what you're talking about. Carmack has been covered by multiple PR departments, sometimes simultaneously, throughout his career. Knuth literally has publishers doing that work and I don't know what you think the Nobel committee or ACM Turing Awards are for. That's their entire purpose, to promote these people for their accomplishments. It's not like they hide that. And what do you know, Bellard isn't even remotely as popular as those others. I wonder why.
Yep. There are lots of talented people, programming wise, who can't communicate vision, lead, or inspire teams. These are mostly orthogonal to technical skill, but are extremely important if you're building something that requires more than one person.
What comes to mind is how hard it is to get low-latency user experiences out of a comglometate of teams exchanging data via blocks. I would expect someone like Carmack to have to interact with such teams in ways that they’ll find intrusive
Given the fact that this is a throwaway account your credibility on this matter is less then zero. In fact this sounds like as if your project was shut down by Carmack and now your ego is bruised.
It takes two.
If accurate and true, there is an obvious conflict between the two of you. John perhaps didn't listen to your point of view enough and in the reverse you didn't respect his view and role in the company.
His success was your success and it would seem you both failed as a result of the conflict.
Tech is full of difficult personality and ego. It's multicultural and communication challenges and cultural differences are common are often misinterpreted.
At the end of the day though, many of us just want compassion and respect in our roles, to be valued and heard.
All said, feel in this described circumstance that perhaps the initial folly was all indeed John's. He held the power after all to make the right start.
This is an interesting comment. In my experience most people were right in their way of thinking. Even if they come to vastly different conclusions, most of the time they are kind-of-right. This continues until objective reality hits as in "can we ship" and "does it make money". And even then it depends on many factors with many people involved. For a vision like VR this is far into the uncertain future and "being right" can mean many different things to people. Data doesn't help much if it is biased, if the analysis is biased or if you just have different definitions and priorities.
At the end of the day the real struggle is achieving alignment on business goals and priorities across the whole team. And also aligning them with reality. This is usually where you elect one leader to define those things and the others to follow those definitions.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I have trouble believing that someone in your position would mistake "above" for "among" and not know the difference between "their" and "there." Surely a company like Meta has higher standards for written English.
Big corps usually prohibit their employees from expressing their personal opinions. It’s sometimes tolerated but always against the employment contract. So whenever you’re saying something, bigcorp could decide that “this one’s too far”. On a topic with as much PR as this one, it’s rather dangerous to comment on if you gave a medium-to-high level position.
The reason big corps do it is so that their PR department has ANY chance of sending a coherent message. So it’s not even evil behaviour IMHO.
All that to say, I understand why they used an anonymous account. Of course, that doesn’t mean one has to believe them, it’s their word against Carmack’s. But it’s good to hear that perspective IMO.
> Big corps usually prohibit their employees from expressing their personal opinions.
Yes, but does that make it any better though? We understand why they have to do it anonymously, but it's still someone with nothing at stake, who we can't evaluate the claims of.
I'm not sure there is much of substance to evaluate. If we fired every technical lead who sometimes "waded into areas with no experience," issued orders, followed a conviction or two and occasionally provided disparaging feedback, there would be no good engineers left. The bullying and devaluing claims are worth investigation, but that's always very subjective and range from "my boss disagrees with me" to horrific abuse.
I don't disagree, and I was in a similar position not too long ago.
But it also doesn't change the fact that this is ultimately hearsay. Maybe this was someone who butted heads and ultimately had the better idea go by the wayside because they lacked clout. Maybe they are a gilted employee whose full story would make them feel like how they described Carmack. We don't know and on the internet it's way too easy to pretend to that sabetour who never even worked at Meta but is very angry about some design decision in Quake 3.
There's ultimately no good way to do PR as a non-PR employee for that reason, even if the big corp allowed it. You either put your name on the line or you just say nothing. Most employees choose the latter. Your best bet if you have any real evidence and want impact is to seek a journalist for coverage and anonymity.
Anything else is simply a footnote to keep in mind until (if ever) some big bust happened.
You can, but I'm not that anonymous (one can easily find my name by searching for my username, not that there's much interesting to find anyway). More importantly, I wouldn't try to damage a person's reputation if I wasn't ready to stand behind what I said and, if proven wrong myself, take some responsibility. I think a few negative things were said about his personality, which can be damaging. An anonymous internet comment is not the most credible source though.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Meta, don't know Carmack, etc.
You can't attack others like this here. Since you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly in other contexts as well, I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to do this with.
Well, from what I have experienced, the people who dare to say “I don’t care” in a corporate settings are usually much trust worthy than those been polite. Also most of time he said that because of the sheet frustration from the enormous BS that surround him.
People with attitudes like yours are why Zuckerberg _WILL_ fail in his vision. If Meta VR cannot be more compelling than video games, it is and will continue to be Dead on Arrival. Good luck though, with your feelings and whatnot. The "avatars" that Mark was forced to present are frankly embarrassing and humiliating in this day and age. 5% GPU utilization is a joke. Mark's gotta give all of you the boot. I'm happy for John that he got to escape that sycophantian paradise.
I understand this year they presented much more believable avatars, but yeah presenting Second Life as a next gen experience must have been frustrating for John.
A core problem is that FB culture is way too positive and happy, and hard criticism is received poorly. The politics to get anything done if your name isn't Mark is borderline impossible.
I feel like I got to enjoy a couple of years before the company started to lose its nimbleness. Feedback groups used to get responses from the people that actually built the things instead of contractors whose primary function is feedback group triage. Sometimes you could actually have an impact by giving feedback, and you could see others having those impacts as well.
When I left, it seemed like whatever wasn't planned for upfront at the planning meetings for each half just won't happen. Around 2018 I came to a team with a small feature request that I was happy to take on myself as long as they'd provide code review. I was told if I'd come to them a month ago they might've been able to do it, but now I'd need to wait until planning for the next half.
I think Portal is a perfect example of how slow to adapt the company has become. It's a fantastic video conferencing device, certainly the best at its price point. We happened to enter the pandemic with this device already available for sale, but we completely failed to capitalize on it. Zoom become the dominant video conferencing service pretty quickly. We failed to roll out Zoom support until October of 2020, when everyone had already established their video conferencing routines and were less likely to see the benefit of a dedicated device.
Portal ended up failing so hard as a consumer product that it got transferred over to the Workplace division.
I'd argued internally that at the very least we should allow sideloading of apps. Portal is just Android. People could run their videoconferencing application of choice, as well as any other apps. That would make the Portal more competitive versus an Android tablet, which all have okay videoconferencing as well as the whole world of Android apps.
The Portal camera is fisheye so we'd need to modify Android to let regular apps pull a normal image using the Android camera APIs, but that's totally doable.
In the distant past these kinds of requests would've at least gotten engagement from people working on the product. In 2020, they got a chipper response from a contractor who I guess filed them in a feature requests tool where they went to die. Oh, the contractor also would provide directions on how to use the web browser in lieu of apps. Like the first iPhone.
>I think Portal is a perfect example of how slow to adapt the company has become. It's a fantastic video conferencing device, certainly the best at its price point. We happened to enter the pandemic with this device already available for sale, but we completely failed to capitalize on it.
Thanks for your insight, but the Portal failure shouldn't be surprising. There are a large number of people who would never want to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook infrastructure or be forced to create a Facebook account to join a meeting. As far as Zoom support, again, why would anyone trust Facebook infrastructure with private meetings?
Aside from the trust issue, why buy hardware from FB just to have meetings?
> There are a large number of people who would never want to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook infrastructure
Have you ever heard of Whatsapp? More than a billion people use it for private communication daily. Maybe not in the US, but elsewhere on the planet. You know who owns Whatsapp? Meta does.
Granted that they've at least tripled MAU since, but that's the power of network effects. There's a heavy dose of "in spite of" rather than "because of". On the other hand if Meta tried to, say, merge Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger, I think they'd lose half their users overnight.
Similarly, if Meta bought Zoom (and kept it running as it does today), most businesses probably wouldn't switch. Zoom already owns the market.
> Similarly, if Meta bought Zoom (and kept it running as it does today), most businesses probably wouldn't switch. Zoom already owns the market.
Zoom's continued survival still surprises me. There was a point in time during its meteoric rise, early in the pandemic, when stories broke about it being spyware for China and a security threat, and its use was subsequently banned in many places. Then some months later people were back to using it, as if nothing ever happened.
Zoom had appaling security when it started being used by the masses. But it did the right thing, acquired Keybase which were doing really great work in the field of security and UX, and they subsequently fixed the problems Zoom had (stories about spyware for China are bullshit, as usual, they just had just *really* basic issues like anyone was allowed to crash into a meeting by just knowing its ID, which used to be easy to guess). Today, I consider Zoom a solid, safe choice for private meetings until something new comes to light that proves otherwise.
I think you're forgetting the core controversy, which was that their marketing materials proudly claimed they used end-to-end encryption, which was just completely false at the time.
Zoom has by far the best feature set out of any videoconferencing system - Zoom Rooms work almost seamlessly, and the core product is pretty user friendly and incredibly reliable from my experience - something I've never been able to say about Hangouts, Teams, Skype, GoToMeeting or Webex.
I donr use zoom much but it has a very intuitive UI - everything is easy to discover.
Meanwhile in TEAMS people dont know how to do things.
Recently I had a meeting that was supposed to be recorded, firsf nobody could record it; now the supplier side does not know how to share it as a downloadable file.
The Microsoft cloud experience is pure trash from productivity point of view.
My favorite thing about Zoom (and I suspect a large portion of its staying power) is that it somehow manages to just work on every device, even if your device is slow or your internet connection is garbage. Heck, I’ll be on a Zoom call on my phone driving in a rural area with two bars and I’ll somehow still get grainy video.
In comparison, I use teams for my two person startup and we can only get that absolute trash fire working reliably about 75% of the time.
So? OP claimed nobody was willing to do private communication on facebook/meta infrastructure. More than 2 Billion people on the planet do just that on WhatsApp, which is Meta. It doesn't matter that WhatsApp started as its own thing, it is owned by Meta and people use it all the time for very private things.
Facebook messenger is another example, hundreds of million of people use it all the time.
> There are a large number of people who would never want to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook infrastructure
Seriously, this is a really dense comment from previous poster. Sure people don't like the idea of a dedicated hardware appliance with camera and microphones from Meta but the idea that folks are so paranoid that they won't use any of Meta's private communications systems or infra is beyond out of touch with reality.
I had a couple models of Portal. Really useful products but they literally didn't iterate on adding features fast enough and they locked it out from the existing Android ecosystem. Too complacent IHMO. On top of that the built-in browser was a purposely limited version of chromium that seemed like whatever the custom user-agent was would just cause problems with all sorts of web-apps especially Google's (couldn't even sign into YouTube etc, got "unsupported browser" errors all the time).
The Portal TV is still the only good Consumer Home TV based VC system I've ever used (so good that its the only Portal device Cisco wouldn't ship WebEx on probably because it would be too competitive against their own hardware I suspect is the reason).
> There are a large number of people who would never want to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook infrastructure or be forced to create a Facebook account to join a meeting.
A large number of people in your circle / on HN / etc perhaps, but I think the vast majority of the general population have no such concern.
If you talk about privacy they don’t care but they absolutely do when it comes to “I was talking to my friend about X and suddenly I’m seeing ads for it everywhere - my phone must be listening to me”. Their phone may not actually be listening to them but as soon as they see what it means, people hate how their data is used. They just never made the connection before.
Totally different usecase. My elderly parents LOVE theirs - it's simple to make calls, the camera quality is great, the automatic pan and zoom was top notch (especially for following toddlers around the room, which was crucial to them to see their grandchildren during lockdown).
The story mode was much loved as well - my mother (an ex kindergarten teacher) would read the stories to my niece and nephew and they loved the AR effects and filters it applied to her, in tandem with the story.
It’s clearly not intended to compete with a smartphone. It’s 50 times the size and mains powered. It’s intended to be an always-on device with a wide camera and large screen that makes it easy for a few people to talk on video. Like video conferencing.
My family uses them so my parents can see my kids and they are great. We plop down on the floor in front of it and everyone has a chat, sees the kids, etc. propping up phones and straining to hear/see things is much inferior.
The elevator pitch I heard, was that it would be ideal for connecting grandparents who would struggle with existing videoconferencing software. So it would be a supplemental device -- not a replacement -- with ease of use for non-technical people being a main driver of adoption. It would be a wonderful gift to help keep in touch, though pricey.
This was conceived prior to the implosion of the Facebook brand during the Cambridge Analytical revelations. It's hard to say for sure how successful Portal would have been in another universe where that didn't happen.
There's probably more people using WhatsApp securely in authoritarian hellholes and nightmarish war zones around the world than many of the alternatives you are thinking of combine.
Personally I wouldn't use any chat service for super sensitive conversations about company comms and IP that didn't have strong encryption as well as limitations on how messages can be backed up as well as disappearing messages. I think Signal is the only system that is semi-popular that does this where by default backups don't leave the device unencrypted.
As a recent insider, this is one of those things where the outside perception doesn't match the inside at all.
Privacy is taken more seriously at Facebook than any other place I've ever worked. It's drilled into you from day one that we have systems in place to catch you accessing things you shouldn't and you will be immediately fired if you do.
You can make mistakes that bring the entire site down and cost the company millions and they won't fire you. If you try to bypass privacy controls on an ex-girlfriend's post, you're gone.
Yes, they hoover up a ton of personal data. But they guard it like the crown jewels. If you do want your data deleted, they'll delete it. I've worked on the systems responsible for this where we had to reason through what to do with things like offline backups.
I appreciate you making the point, but it sounds like the perception is correct, but the definitions don't match. Individual-human-level privacy controls are important, and it's good that they're in place, but equally important is the systemic use of all that hoovered data.
Sure, but I expect most people's primary threat model isn't that a rogue Facebook employee will access their data and use it to stalk them. It's that Facebook will sell their data to advertisers who will use it to better manipulate them, or to insurance companies who will raise their rates.
That’s another common misperception, that Facebook sells data. They don’t. They sell targeted advertising that uses that data. The advertiser API specifies descriptors for who should see the ads. There’s no facility for accessing private data.
Selling the data itself would be giving away a huge component of what differentiates their product from other advertising platforms. It would be like Coca Cola selling the recipe for Coca Cola.
That's true, but most users aren't going to understand or care about that distinction. And for the concern of targeted ads creepily following them everywhere, it doesn't matter.
I know there are lots of people here knowingly redefining the meaning of sell in this regard, but doing so is really harmful to the privacy cause since most companies do actually sell user data so we need that distinction.
This comment could not be more wrong. The Portal failed because for exactly the reason the parent pointed out: it can't run the video conferencing apps people need it too.
If it's just Android then yeah, intercept the camera API to let the portal stuff work with any app and you've got yourself a killer product getting put on every grandparents TV.
I get the feeling that the Quest Pro is a similar game changing experience, but the strategy tax from being forced into Facebook services is absolutely suffocating.
I am legit excited about the idea of having VR eye contact, and would gladly pilot headsets for my team. But nobody wants to be on Facebook's platform. It's embarrassing to even talk about it. And I'm frustrated that something that should be a fun, cool, liberating, wide open new platform is so stifled and locked down.
> The Quest allows both sideloading and third party app stores
When did that happen? Last I checked, sideloading was a potentially bannable offense (as in effectively bricking your device and losing you your Facebook account).
One didn't need FB account at the start either. Nothing says they won't bring it back despite backlash.
Even if they have now changed their opinion on what can be done a large amount of damage is done. No-one will actively monitor that have their changed their terms. I was also under the impression that it's FB account and do the tiniest mistake and you lose it all. Thankfully it's just FB account so unlike with Google no real damage will be done.
Even if the things are better now I kinda have moved on, like many others.
If you sideload pirated copies of commercial games that are on the Quest store, that's forbidden. But sideloading 3rd-party apps is fine.
The "grey area" is modding games(notably Beat Saber), since it involves replacing the APK with an altered one without the consent of the developer. And if the developer sells DLC, that cuts into their profit and maybe they'll threaten to sue Facebook for damages since they created the development tools and authorized development accounts that allow people to do it.
> Portal ended up failing so hard as a consumer product that it got transferred over to the Workplace division
The immediate response I heard from everyone who heard about it (not in my tech circle) was an immediate NOPE. Followed by “I’m not letting Facebook put a camera in my house.”
I don’t think the failure can be blamed on the lack of zoom support.
In contrast to all other comments, Portal was/is one of the best done video conferencing product made before pendamic, and fully support your speculation.
I wanted to buy it for personal work meetings usage, corporate usage to setup in conferencing room, etc, but..
Ye you get an apartheid atmosphere when the amount of contractors go so high that they can't be experts anymore.
Oh so now there is a Xmas lunch, but a third of the group is not invited. Or "No ice cream" for you.
It is funny how it was the small things that pissed me off. Who in their right mind even has a Xmas lunch without everyone ...
It was always one manager layer disconnected from the actual contractors that pulled off the BS meany things. The direct management knew that had to give ice cream to contractors too.
The portal devices wouldn't have succeeded even if it came with lunch voucher for a 1:1 with the Zuck himself. The devices failed as a consumer product due to years of Facebook disregarding users privacy and their focus on growth at all costs. Zuck has become nothing more than a meme ceo and the only reason he hasn't been removed by the board is because of the king like structure that he has setup for himself.
Is this a classic middle management malaise where everyone gets paid so well they don’t want to stir the pot? The bureaucracy and protection of today’s money cows which only clouds them from seeing tomorrow’s cows that will rescue them from certain obscurity?
The Clayton M Christensen solution to big companies ignoring obvious problems is to have isolated small teams “infrapreneurship” who aren’t under the pressures of the larger org. With Meta’s push towards VR it’s obvious Oculus’s purpose is now Meta’s purpose. And all the downside that comes with such a thing.
Google ended up with a bunch of chat apps because the culture promotes building new over keeping things running.
The first chat was basically an XMPP service. It was decent, it federated outside of Google, it was fully functional. It even supported group channels (XMPP conferences) internally. But I don't think that was ever exposed to the public.
Then Hangouts was created. It was, per usual at Gooogle, a ground-up rewrite. IIRC not the same team. So they spent at least a couple years playing catch up to get feature parity with the XMPP chat. Worse, Hangouts was one of the first services to suffer from strict team-created "Personas" design philosophy. Any time anyone would complain about a feature, or miss-feature, it was flatly ignored because "You're not one of our Personas". It took years of complaints to get them to change their minds.
By the time Hangouts was good enough to fully replace the previous service it was now boring and people left the team for other new projects. Because maintenance won't get you promoted.
The other random chat services were basically experiential toys.
Now we have Meet, which is is likely another case of "Hangouts is unmaintainable tech, we need to re-write it". Years of getting up to feature parity. And miss-features that won't get fixed.
Yea, it was great. But it was more lack of maintenance than anything. The original chat devs were passionate about open federation. The new devs were not.
Add to that it was a big source of spam that nobody wanted to deal with.
Apparently the team tried really hard to get more companies on board with opening up federation. But I think the only "major" service that did was what was left of AOL.
> Is that how Google ended up with eight chat apps
Its more because they killed their already working, well-accepted Google Chat app, not seeing gigantic profit or any market control benefit from it. Somehow they thought it was a better idea to have some 'chat' through the browser - which resulted in whatever 'Hangouts' was. Prioritized 'engineering' and profits over users as its so normal for large public corporations.
Then Slack and Discord came and wiped the floor with all of them.
Monopolies tend to stick around much longer than other industries despite their lack of competence. Clayton’s book was mostly about Intel which operated in a competitive market with AMD and others.
DuckDuckGo is great but it’s not nipping at their heels meaningfully.
I kinda wonder if there is a type of employee who likes working at dying firms. Every year their job gets easier with fewer demands. Failure becomes kinda expected.
I’m reminded of someone I met at a party who actually worked for Sears. They’d spent many years at Amazon on the retail side of the business, in the earlier days of Amazon. Sears hired several people with this background in Seattle to turn their business around.
Pretty quickly, they figured out upper management had no interest in their ideas to make Sears into a viable online retailer. Everybody left or started coasting. They all knew the company was doomed but cashed their paychecks. After all, that’s literally what they were being paid to do.
WeWork is living dead, taking down and feasting on the flesh of the living. Their financials are so bad that there is no possibility of rescue, only the matter of the timing and details of end. Meanwhile the coworking space continues to be critical for an increasing fraction of the workforce. Those companies that actually live in this space by charging members fees that pay for the property and services required have a huge challenge competing with WeWork. It is a textbook case of venture capital doing terrible damage to an entire sector without actually contributing anything. The capital will be burned through and WeWork and other companies will die and then maybe we can start again for real. It is so frustrating.
Yeah, but I’m sure most of those businesses would have done their due diligence on WeWorks financials before moving in.
Changing offices is an expensive exercise so they wouldn’t want to risk renting space from somewhere that is likely to go under in the next year or two.
The whole point of wework from a customer perspective is that you don’t have to commit to long 10-year leases. So wework leases long-term and the customers short-term. If the customers dry up wework still needs to pay their commitments.
My point is the dynamic I mention explains the problems of wework, and is not proved wrong by the argument you put forward, paraphrased, that "businesses have evaluated long-term risk of renting at wework so wework is not at risk"
Your second attempt at paraphrasing my comment is still way off the mark.
You keep discussing a long term context yet my comment was just as much about short term risk too.
You don’t have to agree with me, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t “paraphrase” my comment in a way that’s disingenuous to the original point it was making.
I paraphrased to try to reach a common ground, not as a kind of trick, but I understand you don't agree with the gist of the argument. We will have to agree to disagree, and that is ok.
I’m willing to bet that that’s also how Google will be completely disrupted by an AI-first competitor. The execs will be too chicken to kill their current golden goose.
Search is already heavily ML-powered. Right now it’s impossible to provide ad-sponsored fully-AI-powered search and make it profitable. Remember, you are actually not paying for it at the cost, and users that actually click ads are subsidizing you.
But when it will be possible, Google is going to be in perfect position to capitalize on it.
It might be ML powered but has that power made it better? Can it actually provide you with useful relevant info without adding “site:reddit.com” to the query?
Google simply can’t monetize chatGPT-like search to the tune of $150B/year.
The current model doesn’t work for this new reality. They’ll have to find a new model. And if history is any clue, the suits will be unwilling to change
ChatGPT already far outperforms google for heavily-SEO’d topics like recipe searches.
Try asking “what herbs and spices go well in a chilli?” in both. I get a sensible, rough answer from ChatGPT within seconds. From Google I get page after page of content farms hiding information in amongst ads and life-story filler.
I wanted to demo it for my wife who was writing a paper on digital media consumption during the pandemic.
She was trying to find poems that went viral during the pandemic. Googling it showed a bunch of mediocre articles or irrelevant news stories
I asked chatGPT and it gave me a list of 10 poems by relatively well known poets. A brief review showed that these poems were, indeed, viral during the pandemic. Saved at least 15 minutes of Googling.
This is going to take a long time. Longer than one would think if one is using the progression of the language model as a basis for this prediction.
There are a lot of pitfalls and erroneous assumptions built into both Google's current search and the information used to train AI/ML models. Two big ones are "assuming that a person searching for something and accepting the answer means it's a successful search" and "assuming a person searching/asking for something actually wants what they're asking for".
I'm a librarian with several years of reference experience under my belt and neither of those things are true. They're both good tools for a well considered and well informed information search, but that 'well considered and well informed' is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Since you have domain expertise, I'd love to know your opinion on searching through "personal libraries" like Zettelkasten (or similar repositories), and perhaps linking that with Internet-scale indexes.
Are there tools that do that well right now? Do you know of (maybe niche) projects exploring such ideas?
This sounds like “Success Theater,” where everyone always reports green lights up the chain of command, until it’s too late and the show ends abruptly and poorly.
It’s a poison that seems to seep into organizations as they get larger.
I once gave a talk about “Enterprise Entrepreneurs” after being labeled as one. It can be a good approach to prevent stagnation as grass-roots initiatives often generate great ideas in large companies.
Unfortunately the practice requires executive sponsorship, which can be hard to attain if executives feel *their position and stature is being undermined by subordinates.
I’ve never understood “enterprise entrepreneurs” or “intrapreneurship” from the perspective of the employee. The massive potential upside for a success just isn’t there compared to founding your own start-up, so why do it?
The best answer I could come up with: it's not your typical employees who are going to be doing that. Employees are employees. Typically you want someone who is about to leave the company because they are bored and want to do something interesting...and they have an idea (or you give them an idea) that excites them.
So instead of VCs you invest company capital into them.
Obviously 99% of the time employees just leave and startups win the day. Which is fine. But that's basically just how it is. So you either adapt or die until the monopoly/cash cow runs its course.
Facebook turning into Meta making the 'startup' be the whole companies mission is a bold new idea, which I'm skeptical can work. But it's interesting.
The company takes the risk rather than you personally. If it fails but you maintain good relations with the rest of the company you lose nothing and just transfer elsewhere (I guess, I’ve never worked at a big company preferring to go it alone)
Less risk yes, but more importantly, for me, more stability. I can still hustle and innovate, but within the context of a full-time job where I can collect a (usually) steady paycheck.
I’m far more motivated by working on cool projects, so the reward for me is just as salient if I build something cool within someone else’s company or my own… I guess, having never done the latter.
Part of the problem is that Oculus has all the overhead from Meta’s regulatory compliance burden, so they can’t escape some of the most frustrating pressures.
Meta could have a subsidiary that does nothing but stamp out manhole covers.
That subsidiary would have a far higher compliance burden than any other manhole cover manufacturer.
Their past choices have consequences. It’s too late for them to “just not” do anything to reduce that burden.
How does this solution work? Does every team work this way? Is there no HR but only local administration? Or is it only a few teams who get this privilege? How do you avoid us vs. Them mentality in that situation?
Well most of the company still needs to keep the cash cow running. So it’s only 10% of the company at most typically. You just have to have your future bets simultaneously be taken serious and isolated from the middle management and cyclical swings of the parent company.
Often companies get excited about a new idea, staff and finance them well… then after a year or two they get thrown into the wider system and expected to survive.
Eventually they are absorbed and managed as if they are the old cash cow, needing layers of management, risk adversion, accelerated timelines, and new ‘processes’ to fix every small problem instead of focusing on the bigger picture.
> Spin "the other bets" out as a separate company.
Aha, glad somebody is seeing the same thing I'm seeing.
The problem with Google is that it is too large, and too successful. Their idea of having experimental projects is a good one, the problem is that Google makes so much money that they don't commit to them. They become too dilettante about them.
The fix is to do spin-offs, say keeping a minority stake at less than 20%. This generates capital for Google, gives them a share of the upside, but they don't have too much influence on the spin-off. So it's Death or Glory for the spin-off. They are forced to make whatever it is they invented work, or face extinction. There is a smaller management team, focussed on success.
This strikes me as a much better proposition than what we see at the moment, with Google just dabbling around pouring money into something they'll eventually get bored with.
You'd think that what with all the big brains at Google, someone would have thought of this. Maybe someone at Goldmans should make a pitch.
The issue is if they did this, what would happen is:
1) An enormous pile of cash would accumulate on Google's balance sheet.
2) The spinoffs would be subject to normal commercial rules about risk, rate of return and such.
3) The spinoffs couldn't be "brand Google." Which is a not-inconsiderable thing.
Couldn't they just be in the Google family? Like there's a startup I work adjacent to called aker BP. BP owns a 30% stake. But aker BP is a separate company that's publicly traded.
Right. Spin off a company and the spin-off now needs all those corporate functions that cause many developers to ask "What do all those people do?" It's not purely duplicative as such things scale with size to a certain degree. And it depends to some degree on how the spin off is structured but there's almost certainly a lot of incremental headcount and other expense.
I hadn't heard this this term before but I think it is pretty accurate in many organizations. Nothing is worth doing as its impossible to prove ROI conclusively - just do what the boss says instead.
There are lots of companies that entertain this solution. There are just very few examples of it working for the simple reason that this advice generally doesn't work. We look at the one company that succeeds and "say why didn't we just do that?" without remembering that there were 10 other startups that failed. The more reliable solution is to use the same wisdom of hindsight to pick winners and just buy out the one that succeeds. Facebook bought instagram, but none of their internal efforts have produced anything so useful.
The only experiences I've seen of intrapreneurship didn't solve these problems, since funding was guaranteed and their leadership basically worked for the "parent" company.
I've heard that before about Facebook, that there's a taboo against "cynicism".
But sometimes lack of cynicism can be disastrous. I'm reminded of a story, recounted in Francis Spufford's "Red Plenty", of Leonid Kantorovich who invented linear programming, and wrote a letter to Stalin politely suggesting he was doing economics wrong, he should do things his way instead. At the time Stalin was in his paranoid phase and had a tendency to murder anyone he noticed. Luckily for Kantorovich, a much more cynical bureaucrat intercepted the letter before Stalin could read it, and didn't pass it on.
When things are unacceptably bad, it's actually necessary to realize things are unacceptably bad, and not pretend that there's always a nice and right way out of it.
People who suppress their own doubts force others to carry their doubts for them.
Never worked there, but from everything I have observed, the free lunches, full medical/dental/vision and high six figure salaries generally imbue people with a sense of well being. The nice offices and decent working hours also help. The trip is that Facebook also has some mission driven stuff about making the world a bit nicer that some people really buy into. It's a good mission too and a lot of people really do enjoy using their products so it's not all that crazy to thing for someone to associate with. Why would anyone feel bad about making the world a more connected and open place for ~$300/hr? Hence the oppressive optimism.
Facebook is one player in a large ecosystem of workers and companies, in which things like lunch and nice offices and health insurance are simply table stakes, and total compensation levels are broadly comparable. Until recently, Facebook did pay at the upper end of that spectrum, which was some combination of their stock doing well and people souring on social media as a force for good in the world. Certainly relative to peak social media excitement ca. 2006, working there is now considered going off to be a cog in a vaguely evil faceless machine; they couldn’t get away with lowballing people the way SpaceX or even Google can.
Hedonic adaptation is real. You compare yourself to your peer group, in which there’s always people living larger than you, stocks appreciated more than yours, bought their house earlier than you, higher earning spouse than yours (or any spouse at all if you’re single), generational wealth from China, etc. And homeownership in the Bay Area is such an insatiable black hole that this kind of money merely puts you in the running. You’ll never be, like, unable to repair a household appliance - which is better than many people! - but neither are you just waltzing through life milestones in the way people think when they see these figures. You’re mostly a pass-through vehicle from your company to local property owners.
Some companies are more top down and some companies are more entrepreneurial. Amazon is famous for assigning just the right amount of work to break you before your stock vests. Apple has rigid and precise opinions about what it wants built, with engineers discouraged from scratching their own itches. Facebook on the other hand is all about initiative, with engineers being almost like Wall Street traders: come up with ideas and implement them on your own, and in your performance review we’ll check the numbers to see whether you made us money or not. Like trading, you might have a good hypothesis that just didn’t pan out, or something else outside your control might have shifted, but that’s not going to save you. You have to be right. It’s stressful! But one thing that happens in places run this way is a pretty strong social norm against trying to stop anything before it happens. If someone wants to run an AB test, however stupid it seems, they get to run it, and you have to trust in the data (and data analysis) to reveal whether it was really a good idea or not.
Practically speaking not really. The official mission is something like ‘empower people to build communities and make the world more open’.
It’s a pretty nice goal and you really have to be trying to find an objection to it that doesn’t come off as being a jerk. You can make anything political in some sense but most things just aren’t.
Yes, the atmosphere at most big tech companies is this way. Everyone writes their emails with a plastered-on fake smile.
The worst part is when people pretend that things are difficult. You can't just suggest that someone not waste time on an obviously bad idea; you must acknowledge that the team's development strategy is a complex, multifaceted governance problem, and many quarters of sync meetings will be necessary to drive the appropriate alignment with all stakeholders and establish prioritization and scheduling on an action item to form a spot committee that will deliberate on the necessity of a course correction.
It's suffocating, it produces terrible products, but it pays really well.
I'd say it's more a cultural echo of a time when it felt like anything was possible, and you were making stupid money to work on whatever you felt like working on, and everyone you interacted with was super competent and happy to help you out.
It used to be an incredibly fulfilling place to work.
Yeah the book "The Circle" (now of course a major motion picture :) really captured that culture well, I thought. A lot of these companies are really like that.
My problem with the movie was that it played it straight with a novel that IMO could only be enjoyed as a deliberately over the top "if this goes on" satire. The film really needed some Doctor Strangelove level black humor.
I don't know, it's a form of extrapolation IMO. The 1984 of our time. That was also not realistic back in the day but reality overtook it.
However it feels like the time of social media is already coming to an end. With the companies filling our timelines with ever more crap in a futile attempt to 'engage' us, they are only driving us ever more away.
It’s possible to deliver criticism in an optimistic way, if it’s impersonal and concrete (according to M Seligman). BTW, that’s also a standard for academic criticism. But there is a difference between allowing only optimistic criticism and banning criticism at all. That’s the problem with both tech culture and academia these days.
> It is simply stunning that the seasoned direction and counsel that someone of John Carmack’s caliber is capable of delivering was not being followed.
This doesn't actually surprise me in the least bit, and that's not a criticism of either FB/Meta or Carmack. It's simply that after a couple of decades in industry, I now see that effective organizational leaders are exceedingly rare, and I've seen now many super-experts --legends in their fields-- join big companies and not find their footing.
I also don't really buy the "you gotta be good at cutthroat politics." I have plenty of examples across multiple top-tier companies, of senior leadership who were smart, thoughtful, effective... and still reasonable and compassionate.
I think it's simply that it's tough to move people, plain as that. And in Carmack's case, I will wager that his expertise and track record were not enough to get everyone to drop what they're doing and follow his lead. After all, there are many other legends at Meta too. And, there's an abundance of good ideas all fighting for limited mindshare and limited ability to act.
Carmack is an absolute genius and it would be madness to disregard anything he's spent any significant amount of time thinking about.
But let's be real, he isn't Tim Sweeny or Gabe Newell. As smart he is, I don't think he is even top 3 in the best business decision makers of his specific field of first person shooter game developers. His track record is that using his tremendous skill he caught one of the biggest waves, and he's been riding that out and catching smaller waves ever since. I don't even think he didn't see the larger subsequent waves that Sweeney and Newell saw, I think he just wasn't interested in them.
Was he interested in catching big waves for Facebook, or was he interested in pursuing his specific vision?
Doom kicked ass not because it was trying to catch big waves but because they followed their specific vision. Making shit tons of money is not everything.
Agree that Sweeney seems to be the better captain. And he left carmack in the dust with unreal.
Perhaps this is the point of criticizing 5% utilization of the gpu. Why not have 90% gpu utilization of a $400 headset? Which strategy is more likely to succeed in gaining more adoption?
>I have plenty of examples across multiple top-tier companies, of senior leadership who were smart, thoughtful, effective... and still reasonable and compassionate.
some hide it well, some haven't met a cutthroat enough politician/executive. Some may be smart or lucky enough to completely avoid the scene altogether and tend to their own farm peacefully. And then maybe 2 remaining groups are truly in sync and altruistic and overall seem to be interested in the betterment of their audience than profits.
I wouldn't bet on Meta being in the latter category tho. I hope carmack enjoys his farm, he's definitely earned it.
>I think it's simply that it's tough to move people, plain as that.
can't make a horse drink. In this case, it's probably more like you can't even lead the horse to water to begin with.
That's why culture fit is such a strong factor in success. you can't spend all day fighting and expect reasonable progress to be made.
For every example of smart, thoughtful, effective senior leadership there are 10 or 100 of the opposite sort. Most corporations are a living proof of Peter's principle, where senior management is a country club of old* people covering each other's incompetence.
* It is not about ageism, but about people that are in their 5 years before retirement and have zero motivation to do any work, keep skills in shape or give a damn. I worked with a lot of people that were more than decent in their careers, but dropped the ball completely in the last 5 to 10 years before retirement with huge negative impact for their employers. How can this happen? In big companies the inertia covers for these people.
That honestly sounds like a lot of tech "gurus" too, like Mudge and Carmack. These people made a name for themselves with incredible skill as an IC (usually in a hot field, too), and never made the transition beyond that level, towards being leaders with the ability to grasp the full picture.
There is a completely different set of skills involved. In fact, the best wide-area tech leads I met at Google were not great engineers, but they were very good at inspiring other engineers.
I think this is where Steve Jobs actually deserves a lot of credit, and honestly Elon Musk too.
While I agree with the idea, I think John Carmack illustrated he was capable as more than an IC but also a team leader for several projects while at Id.
So, probably a very able leader of a small-ish team. Which is OK and can still lead to huge impact and I wish he'd stayed in that zone in anything he was doing (probably started that way at Occulus?).
Some of us can't acquire (or haven't acquired yet) the skillset and daily gumption of leading bigger orgs and I guess it's fine.
I hope his next endeavour gets him back to a manageable high-impact I-decide-most-things job. I just want to see what a happy and free Carmack can still do.
Ironically I felt reassured reading this. "[...] I'm evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after [...] evidence piles up" especially resonates with me. While I rationally understand it's just corporate bureaucracy / politics, sometimes I still wonder if I were just a bit more capable I'd be more persuasive.
If John fucking Carmack cannot move the bureaucracy this way, then it's folly for me to try the same. I should accept that we're playing checkers not chess.
Carmack is famous externally, especially among a generation that grew up with Doom/Quake. But it isn't like Facebook employs a bunch of ordinary engineers and then Carmack. There are a lot of people with extraordinarily impressive resumes and a long history of massive technical success there. It is not a surprise to me that it didn't just become the "do what Carmack says" show when he joined. Consensus-building becomes even harder at larger institutions.
I think some people are forthright and outspoken, but a long game persuasion might be the best strategy sometimes.
I remember Linus Torvalds commenting on systemd, and accepting the work with upstanding neutrality (I wished he had rejected the binary log files)
"I don't actually have any particularly strong opinions on systemd itself. I've had issues with some of the core developers that I think are much too cavalier about bugs and compatibility, and I think some of the design details are insane (I dislike the binary logs, for example), but those are details, not big issues."
Could he actually reject it though? The kernel has to interact with all kinds of other interfaces and I'm sure Linus doesn't like a lot of them - he's certainly commented as such. But if there's a binary logging system used by some distros and good code is submitted to the kernel to interact with it, it wouldn't be great if he rejected it on a philosophical basis. They make it work well, not dictate what you do with it.
How could Linus have rejected a systemd feature, even one he didn't like?
Linus runs the kernel. systemd is not the kernel. They're completely different projects.
Yes, systemd runs on Linux (exclusively so) but Linus doesn't magically get veto power over separate Linux-only projects just because they run on Linux.
Heck, even if Linux weren't Free Software, and was proprietary like the Windows kernel, he still wouldn't be able to tell other people what they could and could not build on top of Linux, just like Microsoft can't tell people what to put in their Windows apps. The fact that Linux is Free Software makes the idea even weirder.
With those big companies, commonly there simply isn't a productive way to walk the line.
Saving face and preserving "decision making credibility" means that taking advice is simply not on the cards for a large portion of the middle management class.
> commonly there simply isn't a productive way to walk the line
I think that sums up the problem of institutional dynamics and
individual talent rather well. For people with strong work ethics,
sense of duty and genuine creative optimism, it's very painful to sit
in a room of avoidant, grinning suits being superficially nice to one
another wasting time trying to find "clever" reasons not to do
anything. The whole show is a cloying deadlock. It's squandering human
intelligence and life opportunities. I can't be witness to that
tragedy and no remuneration, however many zeros you add, can make it
worthwhile.
> Saving face and preserving "decision making credibility" means that taking advice is simply not on the cards for a large portion of the middle management class.
While I'm happy to admit that this construct may be true in practice; it is _deeply_ infuriating that so many people's calculus nets out in this manner. It's infuriating to me, primarily, because I simply don't understand. By my understanding, "decision making credibility" comes _exclusively_ from *being right*. If you're optimizing for this metric, then how you get there should be an almost irrelevant footnote.
Yet here we are; with a non-trivial percentage of managers coming to the conclusion that the correct answer is to not take advice.
Decision making credibility is simply not anchored in "being logically correct."
It's anchored in the ability to consider the needs of the tribe appropriately.
Leadership credibility in human society is mostly anchored via your track record of emphasizing with the needs of a Dunbar's number sized tribe.
Empathy, not logic, is the KPI our brains are tuned to. Empathetic leaders emphasize data collection, logical ones make decisions using that data. Evolution has optimized for empathy.
The core problem with large companies is the middle management buffer grows large enough that it forms a subculture which drives decision making.
Plus, institutions of 1,000, 5,000, 10,000, all have their "local" rules of detailed management
know-how. Add it all up, and you have a problem that's just as thorny & knotty as any engineering problem. Requiring just as much detailed expertise.
In any large company, everything is so complex and connected with each other that it's close to impossible to hash out the actual output (positive or negative) of any big decision. So, decisions are not based on merit because it's impossible to reason what is good what is not. Instead, there's a leader who has some kind of vision and the company follows that vision, for better or worse.
> If John fucking Carmack cannot move the bureaucracy this way
My read is its not so much the bureaucracy of project managers or paperwork as it is junior executives trying to 'leave their mark', defend their turf, etc.
What makes you think Carmack is especially persuasive? Often, those with the best technical chops are the least persuasive and it seems misguided to think that the reason you can't persuade is because you are lacking technically.
Yeah. I feel like this a lot. I don't know if it's a bias of some kind but it feels right.
I suppose it's selection bias. I don't know how to market, but apparently the marketing people do because we have customers. I do know about my corner of the system though, and when my advice is ignored it usually turns out I was right in the end.
At MegaCompanies, being right, having evidence, and trying to persuade just isn’t enough, as John Fucking Carmack figured out. It’s more like High School. You need to be in the right clique or have the ear of the right Very Important Person.
When you send that E-mail and say “We should do X because Y and Z…” people stop reading at “because” and just go look in the company directory for your name. If you’re high enough on the totem pole, they’ll respond to you. If you’re even higher, they might suggest a meeting to discuss X! And if you are really high up, they will stop what they are doing and do X right away.
What’s surprising to me is how someone like Carmack didn’t have enough totem-pole clout just from who he is! He’s practically a celebrity, and I’d have thought that would go a long way in the High School Drama Club but I guess not.
That didn't seem to be the implication. Carmacks name carries weight, and we're talking about navigating beurocracy and politics. My own thoughts and opinions tell me that they don't matter in those two domains
Oh they do. Leaders/execs will take note of enough people voicing something in common, assuming those opinions have passed counter-arguments/tests/discussions of sorts.
Carmack is only one guy. Maybe his voice might be worth a little more, but your voice also matters, so don't be so quick to despair.
This is why there are so many leaks from Facebook. My sister is a reporter and she says that people leak when they feel they can't influence the decision of the org, that they are a Cassandra who is being ignored by the organization. That there is so much leaking from Facebook- much of it from seemingly senior and highly respected people- suggests major problems in the decision making process there.
Facebook leans into making everyone feel like their opinions matters: "Nothing at Facebook is someone else's problem". But not everyone can be right, so of course you end up with people being ignored and feeling shirty.
At other companies I've worked at the norm is that the rank and file feel powerless, and it doesn't even occur to them to offer their opinion.
> This was admittedly self-inflicted – I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway.
I interpret this as strong circumstantial evidence that companies who start out as engineering centric and claims to be meritocratic eventually deteriorate into good ole nepotistic power play and a sea of bureaucracy. It’s quite entertaining to observe even John Carmack go through this very relatable frustration.
I see it more as the simple truth. There's only so much influence you can wield working one day a week as an executive advisor. By his own admission he could have steered things better if he'd been more involved, but he didn't want to be more involved. He's got his own startup to work on.
Oh yeah I was assuming we were talking about when he was actually working there. That whole consulting gig felt like a slow quit.
> By his own admission he could have steered things better if he'd been more involved
My reading is that back when he was full time, he was busy with actual product work and coding, and he could have possibly made a difference by going political, but there would have been no guarantee and it would have taken a lot of his time.
It only seems universal because the management universe has ben captured by the MBAs. All upper management feels the same way because they were all largely trained at the same few MBA schools.
I don't see that distinction mattering all that much. What matters is that people with a specific mindset come out of these MBA schools that also have formed strong networks there which help them win the power and status games later on.
Reckon the cost of doing an MBA has a big role to play in this. MBAs are just stupid expensive. If you’re 200k in debt at graduation, you’re likely going to make conservative choices in your career.
Siding with the in-group and perpetuating the bureaucratic structure is one way to ensure that you stay employed.
I don't want to sound rude nor elitist, but at the end of the day most workers don't care about the product the work on. They care about the prestige, or the money, or some other meta-factor (no pun intended) that comes with the role.
Even those that really resonate with a product they work on don't necessarily view said product as their dream calling or calling in life. Maybe the knowledge and ideas from the industry are useful but not necessarily what they are used for (for a topical exmaple: I'm sure meta has top VR engineers working on some of the most boring, least ambitious apps you can imagine).
If all that can happen at the non-1% level of society, I'm not surprised it happens amongst the wealthy elite, especially those whose job is to try and make the most money for the next quarter.
I think we can only speculate about reasons, so everybody is gonna project. Maybe the Facebook culture is uniquely bad. Maybe Carmack isn't an effective leader. Maybe it's just how large corporations work. Maybe he was dealt a bad hand.
Meanwhile, I admire that he had the guts to see the issue, say it out loud in a self-critical way, and call it quits. Most people don't.
That can be true, it's also definitely what people say at a failing org that has become bureaucratic and political and doesn't value technical skill. I have seen this first hand. There's such thing as an asshole that nobody can work with of course. But overall it's a red flag when accomplished people leave an org because "it's not for everyone".
I had a coworker once who had as an annual goal "convince the director of engineering of X" - given to them by the Director of Engineering. Dude, you should never have agreed to that. Responsibility for something you have no control over is a bad day waiting to happen.
One of the people who made it on my Never Again list was a technical lead who somehow thought "bring me solutions, not problems" was a reasonable thing for a technical lead to say. In a large, complex system that you built the person who's been there for a hot minute knows enough to see problems but not enough of the interactions to know the solution. You're supposed to tell me how to fix it, or fix it yourself, not deflect. Took a couple years before I could actually fix any of the problems and there are still bits of code that just look like a Shadow over Innsmouth to me.
I don’t think it’s specific to failing orgs. I doubt technical skill is what gets you to the top at Goldman Sachs, LVMH, VW, the US government, or any other incredibly successful organization. At a certain point of scale, any organization is about politics
Politics isn't necessarily some dirty thought-terminating cliche. It did used to have an actual meaning:
>the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.
As long as you work with people, you will have to engage in some politics. But I guess another definition has become the more popular lately:
>activities within an organization that are aimed at improving someone's status or position and are typically considered to be devious or divisive.
Politics or "people who don't know what they are doing doubling down on decisions or lack thereof and others aligning themselves because they are busy doing stuff and rocking the boat isn't useful unless you have time, mandate and mindshare enough to coordinate with others".
I have a genuine question about what to do when one finds oneself in this type of position and one is surrounded by people who seemingly do give a damn (and one isn't compelled to just give up and leave).
In my experience, the software industry, in it’s aggressive desire to be egalitarian, has an authority problem. I have encountered the “I told you so one year ago but we just had to learn the hard way didn't we” situation more times than it seems efficient. I am not unaware that I may be selectively remembering things and I’m not so prideful to ignore that I’ve also made calls that turn out to need adjusting down the road… but it baffles me why people put in positions of power and leadership are so often ignored almost on the whim of some well meaning but misguided other party. Certainly Carmack has the industry respect to be taken seriously. Why wasn’t he?
I want to write about this topic in more depth, but in a nutshell I found that the more innovative and valuable your idea is, the harder it is to sell (because it's very value comes from the fact that it's a distance from bow people are thinking today)
People are busy and attention is scarce so knowing how to genuinely push and sell your idea in such environments is a rare ability and one that needs curation.
You'll find that people who rise are ones who can do this.
You also have to be ruthless as required and not take no for an answer. Sometimes you have to run people over and leave the bodies in the ditch to get stuff done.
And two years later, your idea fails and your boss says:
> A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it.
So serious point: if everyone is ruthless and tries to push their own ideas through, how can a manager know who is right and which direction to follow?
It doesn’t even have to be innovative in a global sense. Just making suggestions that are outside the experience of the people you need to convince can become futile.
Egotistical people with power are more than happy to ignore maths and rationality. I don’t know why. It never works out for them and it brings everyone else down. It’s very frustrating.
The slightly less boring answer: some people don't necessarily have the audience's best interests at heart. Sometimes not even the company's best interests. To use a slightly less heinous example than some of the obviously malicious backstabbing: maybe you do know that Idea B is more efficient, but Idea A was yours, and it looks great on a resume to say that you achitected Idea A, that is being used in production (even if it made the company less money and the product worse off). You're gonna leave the company in 3 years anyway, so why care about some efficiency? Why even care if 6 years down the line someone else comes in and cleans up the code and ends up using Idea B in the end? You got your value out of it.
Slghtly less boring answer 2: people aren't perfect. And attach to the smallest fixations. So they fight not because the idea is bad but because their goal is to spite that particular person. You just need to be more discrete about it than back in grade school. This example was a person, but it can be extended to a group, a company, even an idealogy as a whole. Be it in zealous defense or in spite of, it has a similar effect on productivity.
> Certainly Carmack has the industry respect to be taken seriously. Why wasn’t he?
I wonder if his schedule played some part. He worked there for one day a week. I could see it being really difficult to understand his vision if you have to wait 7 days to ask a follow-up*, for example. And it's gotta be close to impossible to move the needle on existing culture if you're barely around.
* and while you wait there are plenty of other people around to ask instead
That saying about how teenagers and twenty year old think they're immortal? There's some variant of that for programmers. That failure mode is something that happens to other people, to suckers, so I don't have to change direction because some guy who's going grey at the temples tells me I'm walking toward a cliff.
I've been in places where my job became a bit of a cleaner, for things that shouldn't have needed to be cleaned in the first place. When I realize that's what I'm doing - when it's most or all of what I'm doing - I leave. Sounds like John might have similar boundaries, and found himself standing at the edge of one.
I'd really like to see him try his own thing again, and either not sell it this time or be quite a bit more precious about what he's willing to part with and for how many zeroes.
I dunno man. I think I'm a pretty good dev, but if John Carmack told me I was wrong about a technical issue/overall technical direction I'd give him some serious consideration. The only time I can recall disagreeing with him was a few years ago when he said people who want better gaming on Linux should focus on improving Wine instead of native support. And it turns out he was largely correct there and I was wrong, if Valve's success with Proton is any indication.
> It is simply stunning that the seasoned direction and counsel that someone of John Carmack’s caliber is capable of delivering was not being followed.
I'd be very careful about making that assertion when you're only hearing one side of the story. There is a good quote from the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey about why she never takes sides in a broken marriage: "Because however much the couple may strive to be honest, no one is ever in possession of the facts."
>It is simply stunning that the seasoned direction and counsel that someone of John Carmack’s caliber is capable of delivering was not being followed.
He worked for an Ad company that voraciously mined through their user's data. Unless he was able to find new ways to monetize their users or bypass iOS's opt in app tracking, I see no reason why they would even care.
I so wish I could "kill stupid things before they cause damage", "set direction" and have people follow, but it seems especially difficult for technical people.
We spend all-day every-day talking to our subservient (a compiler) but a human is fuzzy and unreliable which is compounded by team size. Carmack can realize something in an instant but it is amazing how long it can take an entire team.
One thing I've noticed that really does not work is "complaining", if Carmack thinks he is complaining, then magnify that by 10 for others on the team.
Rather than attacking an idea directly, I'm wondering if ignoring the idea may be more effective. This way there's no one to fight and the idea can slip away without any ego or drama, there's no face to lose.
If you really can't help the situation, then leaving is the last resort. Oh well, on to the next thing, very curious to see what Carmack gets into next.
It's very confusing that a company by that name [1] seems to exist already, in an adjacent/near area ("Keen Technologies Pvt Ltd. is a comprehensive repository for online courses offering high quality state-of-the-art IT and Business related e-learning and training related courses.").
Meta doesn’t seem to be able to do anything at all. At Facebook it was an unrivaled (yet amoral) champion of social media, but it doesn’t even seem like that now
Meta is gargantuan compared to 2009-2013 Bethesda, which frankly seems like a golden handcuffs-era footnote in Carmack's professional history. He isn't even mentioned once in Bethesda's wikipedia page[0]...
Oculus seemed far more apropos for a get-shit-done guy like Carmack. Personally I think FB acquiring him/Oculus was an almost certain shitty outcome for the VR technology.
But I'm glad Carmack surely refilled the piggy bank in the process. I look forward to seeing what he manages to do free of the FB/Meta albatross with gas in the tank.
It's confusing because the recent Doom games were developed by Id and published by Bethesda Softworks, and both of them are subsidiaries of Zenimax. Bethesda Softworks is just a publisher; the games Bethesda is best known for (The Elder Scrolls and Fallout 3+) are by Bethesda Game Studios.
That's what it looks like from the outside, but the reality is that he works alongside people at the same level as him as far as the company is concerned. His experience is incredible but its likely that the people he works with are also deeply experienced engineering managers too. He's just more famous.
I don't work at Meta, but I assume that, like any other bureaucracy
It's a large company, with home-grown political feifdoms - and technical merits for ideas aren't good enough to get things your way. Even if he is a big cheese in the world of actually knowing things, that doesn't really matter to his executive peers.
You need to both know things, and be very good at politicking to be successful.
(Im not comparing my skillset to Carmack, im my eyes hes a god of programming and has an insanely deep skillset and knowledge about so much software related)
Sometimes i feel the same, a new feature is requested and i directly see this is an anti-feature, or just overall a bad decision. I voice my concern, but the client request goes first.
Next up the feature is poorly implemented, usually "just like the client wanted it" without any bigger design. Testing is barely done, and finally it goes to prod. Next is a 3 month period of bugfixes, and ultimately this one feature can take up 60-70% of a devs time.
Can people not see the big flashing warning lights of his attitude right there in his faux self deprecating comment? When one talks about killing 'stupid things', that's actually a colleague's initiative, or possibly some project in flight, with a team of people working on it. People putting in blood sweat and tears. Not everyone in the organisation gets to choose what they are working on. For us adults in the room, who have worked our entire careers treating our colleagues with respect, this is not how you effect change in an organisation. Sure, privately one may think this or that is stupid, but you don't go around using that language. It just offsides people. To bring change you need to bring people with you.
I mean the guy came up in the gaming industry, which by many reports is somewhere on the spectrum between techbro dominated monoculture (not unlike this forum), through to just abusive of its employees, so his bar is very low. And yes I know he was brilliant, but there's no special rules for him because he made Quake run fast.
At the level he was brought on, something more than technical skills were required. He failed.
I'm as shocked as you are. What a wasted opportunity by petty people with big egos. And I paid for it literally. I bought a Oculus set and stopped using soon after. What a disappointment. I wanted to support the technology, but my good will was squandered. At least I feel vindicated by every thing John Carmack says because I thought some similar things.
Idk I feel like Carmack is a genius, and has done genius tech related things at id. But does he really have credentials to speak on latest modern developments in technology?
Does he have any skin in the game? Last I heard of him was Megatexturing in idtech 5 and that wasn't really a huge marvel nor necessarily did it make the engine the forefront of game tech.
It's interesting to me that, even here where people pride themselves on their intellectual and rational superiority, we can still observe the primitive human tendency to appeal to authority; see the top throwaway comment [1].
His internal badge (ie. goodbye) post. This is definitely not in the article.
Edit: The article has a link to some other paywalled link that may contain the full contents of the note. I don't have a subscription so I can't tell but the quote is real at least.
It's only stunning because programmers view him as a god, when in reality, he is a just a fallible human being. Just goes to show even programmers are susceptible to idolism.
The signs were all there. He entered a den where he doesn't hold founder status anymore, and that the value of his contributions to the company does not hold as much weight.
If so, then they missed the games that used id Tech 4 and id Tech 5 (almost impossible given the success of Doom 3), and how Carmack continued to invent truly unthinkable performance and fidelity enhancements to real time 3D graphics until the day he left for Occulus.
Then at Occulus he translated that engineering talent into a ruthless attack on latency and other issues with VR at the time. He was even working on this before he left.
Anyone who has watched one of his QuakeCon Keynotes in the past 20 years knows just how much raw talent Carmack has as an engineer. Most of them are on YouTube, you should check them out.
I think this also sums up his weakness though in a megacorp like Meta. He's technically brilliant, and that can go a very long way. But in a large corporation, technical brilliance is secondary to excellence in leadership.
I remember reading an article in the '00s or '90s about how Id worked, and it just seemed not very scalable beyond Carmack.
And while he his companies have had great success, other '90s era peers - Valve and Epic - are on a whole other level today. Technical brilliance brought his company far, but it can't bring you to those heights.
The man went from making the fastest 3D games ever to grace silicon to literally launching rockets. He's been the fastest nerd alive, and Meta couldn't even give him legs (figuratively and literally [1])
“Beware an old man in a profession where men die young”
I am in my late 20s, and I think there’s plenty to learn from the past that still applies to the world of today. When a seasoned veteran says something, I shut up and listen, because there’s often a learnable tidbit there, or at least a fun war story.
Which is why I said “part of being young.” That said, I don’t remember being so explicitly mad at previous generations when I grew up (as a millennial). “Ok boomer” is a big part of the gen z vocabulary.
I've seen it used by both millenials and zoomers, mostly directed at boomers. It captures a general sentiment that is widespread among those generations that the boomer generation uses (or used existing) systems of power to benefit themselves to the detriment of younger generations and then complains as the younger generations struggle to earn their place in those systems.
What makes you say that? Certainly tiktok seems to be full of a lot of generational humor/videos, which must explicitly naming boomers and often showing people their age. But maybe I’m too old to understand their explicit gripes.
Meta itself only exists because of poor direction. It is an aberration of humanity. If good counsel and advice were important to Meta, it would shut down on itself because its very existence is an offence to common sense.
”The same thoughtless disregard for basic music fundamentals that plagued the preliminary edits ended up on the final OST.”
As a musician and music-lover, seeing how they brickwalled [1][2] Mick’s tracks in the screenshots only serves to add to the heartbreak of his entire saga.
It seems the brickwall mastering was intentionally done by Mick Gordon. See the section starting at "id Software approved my mastering". The alleged "disregard for basic music fundamentals" appears to have introduced more dynamic range, although not in a way that's pleasant to listen to.
Lowering the volume does not equal introducing more dynamic range. It was just done to avoid clipping when pasting two bits of track on top of each other.
The masters delivered by Mick Gordon were meant for use in the game. I'm not an expert at game audio engineering, but the brickwall mastering may have been intentional to make the music stand out over the rest of the game audio. Either way those masters were approved by id Software for use in the game so nothing was wrong with those.
The problem is that those exact same masters were then used to produce the OST. To do a proper OST, you would have to go back to the source materials, remix them and produce a new master that is suitable for playback as an album. One that isn't as brickwalled and maintains more dynamic range. This is the important part that was skipped by Chad Mossholder and not caught by id Software's internal QA. If you take an already mastered piece of music meant for a different context and just cut it up and splice it back together, without regard for volume leveling, tempo adjustment or proper balancing, then you're inevitably going to produce garbage.
>Lowering the volume does not equal introducing more dynamic range. It was just done to avoid clipping when pasting two bits of track on top of each other.
If you overlap two tracks, and reduce volume to avoiding clipping, the combined track has spikes in volume where they overlap. This is increased dynamic range. But like I said, it is not musically pleasant to listen to, and it's certainly reasonable to complain about it.
You're making an extremely pedantic distinction, which is only correct in a purely technical sense. Which is the worst kind of correct.
Yes, mastering engineers work from track-level dynamic range (usually achieved with slow-response compression) to transient-level dynamic range (fast compression/limiting), and the range in between. When the context for this discussion is about "brickwall limiting", we're talking about very fast, transient-level compression, and your comment mistakes slower dynamic range for the transient-level dynamic range everyone else is discussing.
So, no. In this context, what you're talking about isn't increased dynamic range.
I'm well aware of the difference, as acknowledged by my first post in this thread ("not in a way that's pleasant to listen to"). But it is not pedantry, and it is relevant to the context, because this unusual form of dynamic range provides evidence as to when the dynamic range compression was applied. If it was applied after the edits described in the article, I do not think we would not see the volume spikes.
I do not see a single complaint from Gordon about the dynamic range, only the editing. But there is a paragraph in the article suggesting the dynamic range was intentional:
"Marty says that Chad, apparently working in a hurry, only had my supposed “bricked” in-game score to work with. He points to my so-called “bricked” score and adopts that as the reason behind Chad’s poor editing. But not only is Marty confused and clearly doesn’t understand the mastering process, but he also seems ignorant of how Chad’s editing introduced significant problems."
Note that there is no objective definition of "bricked". I personally tend to prefer higher dynamic range, but I've heard plenty of recordings with higher dynamic range than I would like. It seems very likely that some people prefer lower dynamic range than I do. Arjuna attributed the dynamic range to some unknown "they". There is no evidence for this in the article, or in Arjuna's linked Twitter thread. I believe the most reasonable interpretation is that Gordon deliberately chose low dynamic range as a stylistic choice. If you disagree, how about providing evidence?
Yes, it's clear Gordon has applied a mastering limiter to the tracks he delivered to Bethesda, and given that the style of the music involves heavy processing/effects and multiple levels of compression, a somewhat aggressive mastering limiter seems appropriate here.
But your point about "increased dynamic range" due to the editing errors is a distraction from your claim that Gordon applied a mastering limiter (which he clearly did). It creates ambiguity, because you're using it in a way that's not aligned with common usage in this context. That's part of why you're getting pushback.
In any case, if we want to try to answer the question of why the OST has low dynamic range (in the mastering limiter sense), I am somewhat receptive to ndepoel's argument - it seems reasonable that in-game tracks could be mastered more aggressively, and with lower dynamic range, than what would be appropriate for a proper OST release. Caveat: I haven't done mastering work in the context of game audio so I can't say if that's common practice, but it seems a little more likely than not.
That wouldn't increase the dynamic range, it's just preventing the overlaps from clipping. Both tracks would still have the same dynamic range, the relative overall volume might be different for the track you lowered/increased to match the other one, but I doubt the transition between the two would be considered increasing the dynamic range.
In order to increase the dynamic range of a mastered track you would have to uncompress/master it in the first place. If you are just decreasing/increasing the overall volume, you would have the same dynamic range just at a quieter or louder listening level.
”His edits are riddled with these clearly visible mistakes. Anyone comparing my original tracks to his edits can hear (and see, by looking at the waveform [1]) the unmistakable errors introduced during the editing process.”
This is comparing Doom 2016 with Doom Eternal. It shows strange production in Doom Eternal that is very probably an error (overlapping without crossfade), but it provides no additional information as to why the Doom Eternal OST has low dynamic range.
In the tweet, the waveform image on the left is Mick’s original “BFG Division” track from the Doom 2016 OST.
In the same tweet, the waveform image on the right is Chad’s edited version of Mick’s track for the Doom Eternal OST, entitled “BFG Division 2020.”
The comparison is valid, because it is Mick’s music, and it also serves to demonstrate the audio engineering expertise on the Doom 2016 OST, which was hailed as a masterwork soundtrack in the genre.
However, Mick did not mix this particular track for the Doom Eternal OST, and this is the critical point of this specific waveform comparison; that is, as Mick expresses in the article (and the waveform comparison demonstrates), the Doom Eternal OST is not entirely representative of his actual work, or the full depth of his audio engineering expertise.
This is due to decisions and modifications that were made without his input (e.g., the aforementioned editing).
> It seems the brickwall mastering was intentionally done by Mick Gordon
Where are you getting this? His in-game music was perfectly fine, and the only instances of brickwall mastering were present within the "official OST" (that was mixed by Chad, splicing together the in-game music poorly). Which Gordon had no hand in whatsoever, outside of providing the source material, i.e., the in-game music.
The edits described in the article have no mention of additional dynamic range compression. The music in the OST is described as "normalized" to 0dBFS, which means simply adjusting the gain. This suggests that the dynamic range was already compressed (which is not unreasonable for game audio, because it will make the sound effects easier to hear).
The edit described in Gordon's post talks about overlaying tracks with zero crossfading done and instruments clashing, all being done hastily by hand. That alone is a massive contributor to the dynamic range brickwall.
Gordon explicitly singled out those instances. He didnt say "the track as a whole has a DR brickwall through and through." He mentioned a complete lack of crossfading being the massive contributor to the brickwall and weird tempo changes, and it all checks out.
"Brickwall" limiting is about very short-term transient compression; to oversimplify things, those limiters are operating at the timespan of 1-30 milliseconds, more or less.
These edits are a few hundred ms to a few seconds at a time, so it doesn't make sense that Gordon would refer to them as "brickwall".
(Another problem here is that evaluating a mastered waveform's dynamic range by eye is extremely subjective, and I would argue next to useless most of the time. The way these waveforms are shown in the post, we'd be hard-pressed to tell 9db (hyper-compressed) from 14db (pretty good) by eye. Professionals have software and metering to measure this; that's a much better approach.)
Bottom line: do these clumsy edits contribute to brickwalling? Really doesn't look like it, but I don't have the raw files to measure to know for sure. Are the edits good? Not in a million years.
> Really doesn't look like it, but I don't have the raw files to measure to know for sure.
You have access to the official OST of Doom Eternal (which is claimed to have the brickwalling), as well as access to the in-game versions of those tracks (which you can rip out of the game or find the already-ripped ones on youtube easily). I can certainly confirm by playing the game and listening to the ripped files myself that there was no brickwalling in the in-game tracks. However, it becomes very obvious in the official OST.
Interesting. My initial comment was discussion of the article only. This additional information, which is not mentioned in the article, makes it seem that the brickwall mastering was not done by Mick Gordon.
Now, applying a mastering limiter to sub-tracks? Extremely novice mistake, and could be described as brickwalling. Certainly within the realm of possibility given the novice quality of the editing here.
Overlapping without crossfading is strange and very likely wrong, but it cannot contribute to brickwalling unless further dynamic range processing is applied, or unless it causes clipping, which is avoided by the described normalization. No further dynamic range processing is described in the article, and no evidence of such processing is visible in the screenshots.
> [...] Doing so caused dramatic amplitude spikes at the edit point. Chad didn’t bother to crossfade the transition: both files play simultaneously (causing spikes at double the volume).
> To compensate, he “remastered” the edited song by normalising it to 0dBFS — a rudimentary error.
That's not what "normalising" means. Normalising is just changing the gain of the whole track so the peak level matches your target. And this is obviously what it meant, because if it somehow actually meant dynamic range limiting, we would not see the volume spikes.
“Recently someone posted about their experience in determining the file structure of the Doom WAD file. How did you feel when people were discovering how to modify Doom, from building new levels, to changing the executable itself (dhacked) originally without any information from id? In your opinion, is the modding community a valuable place for creating future game developers?”
John Carmack Answers:
“The hacking that went on in Wolfenstein was unexpected, but based on that, DOOM was designed from the beginning to be modified by the user community.
[…]
I still remember the first time I saw the original Star Wars DOOM mod. Seeing how someone had put the death star into our game felt so amazingly cool. I was so proud of what had been made possible, and I was completely sure that making games that could serve as a canvas for other people to work on was a valid direction.”
https://m.slashdot.org/story/7828