John Carmack interview

[Redglyph]

I wasn't sure whether to put this in Non-RPG, Off-topic or here. John Carmack, who worked at id Software, can easily get technical so I think it's best here.

I'd say the typical audience is programmers / IT / geek, though you can watch the more general topics even if you're not in that category. The whole video is quite big, more than 5 hours.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I845O57ZSy4


0:00 - Introduction
1:57 - Programming languages
33:01 - Modern programming
43:03 - Day in the life
50:53 - Hard work
54:06 - Pizza and Diet Coke
56:50 - Setup
1:22:08 - id Software
1:54:58 - Commander Keen
2:01:44 - Hacker ethic
2:09:24 - Wolfenstein 3D
2:29:21 - Doom
2:43:42 - Quake
3:08:02 - John Romero
3:15:49 - Metaverse
3:44:11 - Elon Musk
3:50:06 - Mars
3:59:09 - Nuclear energy
4:02:47 - AGI
4:49:59 - Andrej Karpathy
4:52:57 - Martial arts
5:01:57 - Advice for young people
5:10:57 - Meaning of life

 

[Drithius]

Nice! A legend!

 

[GothicGothicness]

Wow, I want to watch it, but it is sooooo long, when will I have time to ?

 

[Redglyph]

Wow, I want to watch it, but it is sooooo long, when will I have time to ?

Yeah, I wonder how they could talk so long. I'm nibbling at it bit by bit (no pun intended).

 

[Ripper]

Wow, I want to watch it, but it is sooooo long, when will I have time to ?

What I tend to do with these ridiculously long things that might interest me, is to treat them like podcasts and listen to them in chunks - as if it were something on the radio. The video can usually be safely ignored, and all the value is in the audio. Depending on what I'm doing, I often like to have something on in the background.

 

[DArtagnan]

Guy is obviously a talented coder - particularly when it comes to optimizing performance, but keep him away from game design

Also, his comments about Elon sort of tells me to take his insight into human behavior with a grain of salt. But I guess it's sort of in line with the (perhaps stereotypical) autism-spectrum profile (I consider it obvious that Carmack is on there somewhere), which is either partially ignorant of what human beings are actually like - or simply too trusting because things are taken at face value, instead of digging into the nuance.

In any case, I certainly don't agree that Elon "deserves" more respect or admiration from a utilitarian standpoint.

 

[Ripper]

In any case, I certainly don't agree that Elon "deserves" more respect or admiration from a utilitarian standpoint.

Ah. If that's what he's going on about, I might give it a miss, then.

 

[DArtagnan]

Ah. If that's what he's going on about, I might give it a miss, then.

It's just one segment of a very long conversation.

I guess they're friends and there's some kind of loyalty factor involved as well.

Carmack strikes me as a magnanimous individual overall - and I don't think he necessarily knows the darker side of certain people. He's also very generous in his comments about Romero - where he's going out of his way to present his criticism in the most polite way possible.

My take is that he's too busy doing his own stuff to really go super in-depth when it comes to human nature.

 

[Ripper]

Fair enough. Just that I find Musk almost supernaturally irritating, and the cult around him pretty delusional.

 

[DArtagnan]

Fair enough. Just that I find Musk almost supernaturally irritating, and the cult around him pretty delusional.

I know what you mean.

I initially knew nothing about him, and assumed he was probably pretty good at tech stuff - given his fanbase.

I think my scepticism started after a number of exchanges with some of his fans - and how they tried to persuade me to accept that Elon was trying to "change the world for the greater good" by way of Tesla.

I did some simple math and concluded that if you want to change the world in that way, you probably need to make your product affordable to more than the tiny minority.

I couldn't make that fit with his reputation - and there was something off about him in how he presented himself.

Like, say, a comment I heard about how he probably knows more about engineering than anyone else on the planet. He was obviously being serious.

Stuff like doesn't motivate a great deal of faith in me

Then I started digging a little deeper - and there's no shortage of well-documented and very non-favorable articles and videos about him.

Let's just say my original negative impression was incredibly mild compared to what I'm 99.9% convinced he "deserves".

Not that I'm big on preaching or moralizing - I just don't respond well to people being evaluated as more than other people, and especially not when it's so obviously baseless.

 

[Redglyph]

Fair enough. Just that I find Musk almost supernaturally irritating, and the cult around him pretty delusional.

That doesn't mean everything he does is worthless. What Carmack says on Elon going all in is not untrue, this guy is passionate and pushes a lot of things.

EDIT: It's also easy to get many detractors when one is successful or at least much more exposed. He's not my role-model but I wouldn't pay much attention to the extreme opinions either way.

 

[Ripper]

That doesn't mean everything he does is worthless.

No, I didn't suggest it was. Not having listened to the interview yet, I was merely reacting to the idea of it being a Musk adulation fest.

With regard to pushing things forward, the astronomer Martin Rees makes an interesting argument, which is that we should essentially let these billionaire dandies get on with it, and learn from the valuable information of their mistakes. When you have a publicly-funded space program like NASA, you have to be incredibly careful, and every time there is a disaster there will be a serious enquiry, questions over the legitimacy of the program, and so on. But if Jeffrey, Elon, and chums want to blow themselves up in a race to Mars, fair enough - it's a free country, and now we know more.

 

[Redglyph]

But if Jeffrey, Elon, and chums want to blow themselves up in a race to Mars, fair enough - it's a free country, and now we know more.

Haha, yes, that's one way to see it. ... up until the point it'll be deemed dangerous enough and it has to be put under peer review from a recognized authority.

I'm not too sure about the interest of space research. It's a bit like the bet on fundamental research, there might be important discoveries but it's mostly improving our perspective of the world. The cost, however, is gigantic.

I wonder who'll win the 2030 bet, but I wouldn't be surprised if Carmack did - for the Mars bet.

For the autonomous vehicles bet I'm really not sure, though what he says about short optimism and long-term pessimism seems true enough. I'm mostly sceptical about individual transport (even more in expensive AI-driven cars) getting any traction in 2030 with the population increase and cars being ousted from cities. I doubt we will even have the available energy for that.

 

[JDR13]

I think Elon Musk, like many ultra successful people, sometimes gets hated for being successful.

He's obviously more intelligent than the vast majority or he wouldn't be where he's at. That said, I 100% agree that he's full of himself at times, and it's easy to be put off by his persona.