[jamra]

I followed his posts internally before he left. He was strict about resource waste. Hand tracking would break constantly and he brought metrics to his posts. His whole point was that Apple has hardware nailed down and it’ll be efficient software that will be the differentiator. The bloat at Meta was the result of empire building.

[Fade_Dance]

I remember watching Carmack at a convention 15 years ago. He took a short sabbatical and came back with ID Tech 3 on an iPhone, and it still looks amazing well over a decade later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52hMWMWKAMk&t=1s

This is a guy who figures that what he wants to do most with his 3 free weekends is to port his latest, greatest engine to a Cortex-A8. Leading corporate strategy? Maybe not. But Carmack on efficiency? Just do it.

[markus_zhang]

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

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

[torginus]

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

[ezoe]

At that time, Rage was delayed forever I consider it vaporware, falling the same category was Half-Life 3 or Duke Nukem Forever.

Still, I saw this demo at that time and I felt it was impressive considering the toy level performance of 2010's smartphone.

[influx]

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

[ignoramous]

> were arguing against fucking John Carmack

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

[flr03]

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

[kelipso]

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

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

[monkeyelite]

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

[Aeolun]

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

[terribleperson]

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

[alpaca128]

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

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

[NBJack]

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

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

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

[osullivj]

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