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.
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.
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.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Meta, don't know Carmack, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also: https://youtu.be/_9_AEVQ_p74 (It would be great it some AI could upscale this...)
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.
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.
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.
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'.
The sooner that myth dies, the better.
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?
There's plenty of other variables at play.
e.g.
Jim built two huge public companies, while Alice reached "the goal" of selling them early and fast.
Jim's on food while Alice's on real estate, and the new bet has to do with food.
Jim's bootstrapped while Alice is not.
Jim's on hard tech while Alice does web3 stuff.
There's a reason why "past performance is no guarantee of future results".
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.
Of course, it matters if the experience is directly relevant, and that's where hero worshiping often gets it wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
Sometimes a smug frog like Facebook just needs a good poisonous stab in the back.
It's not like they should be shocked after hiring a guy who was famous for making a game about shooting Nazis.
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.
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.
Lots of such examples in history.
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.
Seems like Meta has done that
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.
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.
Oculus without facebook would have probably sold me multiple pieces of hardware right now.
With Facebook however, I'll never touch the stuff.
So VR is still 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.
Of course Alan Kay's Dynabook was the original gangsta "ahead of its time" laptop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook
And the GRiD Compass laptop was even ahead of the Data General/One's time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General/One
>The Data General/One (DG-1) was a laptop introduced in 1984 by Data General.
The GRiD had a fanatical niche following in the government and military and space and spook industries.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28736510
>Old school hackers, military generals, special forces paratroopers, and space shuttle astronauts who are sensitive to social status use a GRiD Compass.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/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:
https://computerhistory.org/profile/glenn-edens/
Hey Glenn!
Did you ever hear the rumor about the Mossad agent whose GRiD stopped a bullet?
I was writing about the GRiD on Hacker News, but can't find any citations for that rumor. But it sounds like it could be true!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28736200
>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.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3527036
>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.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/nasas-original-laptop-the-grid-com...
>NASA’s Original Laptop: The GRiD Compass Rugged and well designed, the first clamshell laptop flew on the space shuttle
https://web.archive.org/web/20080625004757/http://www.netmag...
>GRiDs In Space
https://groups.google.com/g/ba.market.computers/c/w5KVg1Igdt...
>GRiD Compass laptops, peripherals, and software
https://medium.com/l-a-t-o/invece-di-guardare-avanti-prova-a...
>[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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQgoAQq7bP4
>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.
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.
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.
They didn’t let us mensch engineers near the thing.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
Is this a joke?
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.
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.
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).
Webvan. 2000 era shopping as a service. Predates instacart, uber eats, etc. World wasn't ready for it.
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.
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.
TabletPC and Newton before it.
Google glass as an AR device
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.
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.
There are vastly more people with at best second hand information and at worst willing to make stuff up than there are people directly involved.
This is why people are allowed to confront their accusers in court and we are suspicious of hearsay.
Have others in the past said similar things about Carmack?
>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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 statiscally more common than a native English speaker with poor writing skills.
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).
One can get quite paranoid on the internet, you know.
(I am not a dog).
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.
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
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?
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.
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!
LOL, you won't fool me.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Could be an attempt to throw something like that off
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."
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.
All from Carmacks own mouth.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have VR and it is immersive, but way too uncomfortable.
Marc Zuckerberg's head is already uncanny in real life, but his avatar's head should be guilleitened.
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.
Is it true, though? There is quite nice literature out there, surely John has read these papers during his bootstrap period:
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.
See the chapter on deep learning in this interview with Chomsky: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cMscNuSUy0I
If you type in AI and Chomsky into YT you’ll see many relevant interviews. The web summit one might be the most recent.
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.
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.
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.
Musk is the Donald Trump of coding if anything.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3nxd3/how-kindness-saved-th...
"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."
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/stormy-weather-6427649?s...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Was that a rule though? If you give advice in 100 different meetings, you'll be wrong in some of them for sure, even if you're a domain expert.
If he was the CTO and co-founder it seems that his approach worked well, at least to get him and the company to that level.
It seems like a reasonable product decision given that most people don’t care about typeface history.
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.
https://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/
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 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.
I think an example of a bad logo is Arial is this one:
https://www.designworkplan.com/wp-content/font-arial-everywh...
The A has too much space around it and it looks "uneven".
The bottom one of this one is Helvetica.
https://cdn0.tnwcdn.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2009/10...
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.
https://www.linotype.com/1264130/neue-helvetica-75-bold-prod...
While I get the point you're making, I remember reading somewhere that successful people (in terms of their career) tend to exhibit less self-doubt.
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!
In corporate there are bunch of neat areas but AR is defintely more useful right now. E.g. support, meetings, teaching
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).
So every VR headset is also an AR headset.
Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's virtual reality, to me.
Meta’s bread-and-butter is selling peoples data, irrespective of whether teens are committing suicide on their platforms.
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.
fwiw - you can install anything you want on your Quest.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
Compute should be offloadable with "5G E" (low lag, 500Mbps+, already out).
I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx
opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve.
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.
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.
Not seeing the first one delivered within 5 years for sure and probably not within 50.
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 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.
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.
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.
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".
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
their*
I do not believe you worked where you say solely from this.
The comments on his internal post elucidate where the conflict is, but it's a larger strategic choice about where Meta should be investing. It is more about his comments here: https://venturebeat.com/mobile/oculus-cto-carmack-downplays-...
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.
And your example in a way backs up what Carmack is saying -- nobody listened, and Oculus sucks, as you pointed out.
Are we talking EMI compliance or surveillance backdoors? :)
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.
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.