Someone noticed that when you have hundreds / thousands of cores in a supercomputer, the individual utilization boxes in Task Manager start to look like pixels. People started making pictures by doing different amounts of work on specific processors.
It escalated quickly. t.co/hqogF8UVYM
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John Carmack
@ID_AA_Carmack
AGI at Keen Technologies, former CTO Oculus VR, Founder Id Software and Armadillo Aerospace
Dallas, TXJoined August 2010
John Carmack’s posts
My younger son said “coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”
I resigned from Meta, and my internal post got leaked to the press, resulting in some fragmented quotes. Here is the full thing:
I love seeing game crossovers — totally supportive of Doom Slayer in Fortnite!
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A troll was trying to get a rise out of me yesterday, suggesting that I should somehow feel bad about Elon's success after my failed aerospace venture. I can't overstate how alien that thought is to me -- my joy at these things being built is deep.
I still get nervous even for other people’s rocket launches. The knowledge that all your work could go up in a giant explosion is a special kind of frisson.
But for everyone that has ever drawn a spark of inspiration from visions of humanity expanding into space:This is the Way.
Starbase is extremely impressive. There is a lot of bemoaning that we culturally can't build physical things anymore, but this is China Speed and then some. Rows of engines, hangars full of structures, 24/7 shifts -- it is a sight to behold.
Great! I think Microsoft has been a good parent company for gaming IPs, and they don’t have a grudge against me, so maybe I will be able to re engage with some of my old titles.
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Xbox buys Bethesda parent Zenimax, including internal studios such as id Software and Arkane - but Bethesda will still publish its own titles
gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-
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I may be reading this incorrectly, but if you are actually deleting inactive accounts and all their historic tweets, I would STRONGLY urge you to reconsider.
Letting people know how many “active” followers they have is good information, but deleting the output of inactive… Show more
Last night I downloaded Quake III Arena on Steam. I always looked back at it as my favorite Id game, but it had been many years since I had actually played it. There are a few polish things that I would nitpick today, but it was like dropping a quarter in a classic arcade game.… Show more
It is interesting how multiple polls show that most respondents think Twitter will likely be somewhat better in the future, but the conversation on Twitter itself is dominated by confident predictions of catastrophe. I wish there were good prediction markets to advocate for.
So, 50 years old now. I am down a point of Str and Dex from my younger days, but I'm a more capable engineer than ever. I'm noticing more people in their 70s that seem sharp and spry, so I'm looking forward to at least a couple more decades of relevance.
It is hard for people today to comprehend how slow an original IBM PC was. By some measures, a 4090 is a billion times faster, which means a PC working continuously for 40 years could be replaced by one second of modern computing. And yet, this could be done.
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This is pure wizardry youtu.be/-xJZ9I4iqg8
I believe @ID_AA_Carmack will find this amusing.
I had been considering writing something along these lines myself. I'm surprised how many people are so eager to see brought low. I admire him.
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In Defense of @ElonMusk: The Tesla and SpaceX maestro is under attack for bad tweets, production woes, and strange behavior. But we need people who take risks. We need people who try.
The new cover story: popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/
When I first started getting successful in my 20s, I went through a period where I loaned money to anyone that asked me. Well into six figures went out — “emergency” expenses, start a business, make a down payment, etc. Most of the people just never spoke of it again, and \
I find it surprising that Windows considers it an acceptable default to just reboot users’ machines after applying an update in the middle of the night.
My kids asked me if I had heard of a YouTuber named Weird Al Yankovic.
If anyone from Apple wants to send me one of the new headsets, I’ll do a thorough review and offer suggestions. 😀
Last week, when my Uber driver asked where I had been and I said “watching a rocket launch”, she lit up with excitement, because she had watched it online. She was from Kenya, and filled with enthusiasm for space exploration, solar power, batteries, and electric cars. She was… Show more
Forgive me the dad-brag, but my son got a perfect SAT score on his first try, and I am very proud of him!
Anyone that has me on too high of a pedestal should see me fumbling around with git.
It is 's 20th anniversary today. It is hard to remember from today's perspective how viciously the idea of a publicly edited encyclopedia was mocked by many traditional gatekeepers of knowledge. It is hard to imagine a better refutation.
Wow. That was really something! The entire building was shaking! Enormous levels of competency at SpaceX.
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The spinal cord has about the same number of neural connections as the optic nerve — to your brain, all of your body from the neck down is worth about one eye.
Just ordered a couple 1TB thumb drives for $30 each. I still find myself awestruck by tech progress -- I desperately wanted a 10MB hard drive for my IIGS as a teen, but didn't have the $399. One million times cheaper per byte, one thousand times faster, and 100 times smaller now.
Bigscreen Beyond feels like a prop for a futuristic movie, but it works! Far and away the smallest and lightest PC VR headset.
I mentioned this in the Lex interview, but it is official now:
Keen Technologies, my new AGI company, has raised a $20M round, led by and , with , , , , and Jim Keller participating.
I do not have “magical” discipline and focusing ability — I struggle with distractions like everyone else. Often it is better to just remove the option to distract yourself instead of fighting he urges. When I decided to get serious about my AI work, I made a few changes: \
It is true, I incorrectly recalled the tenth digit of Pi.
If a future Neuralink implant is to allow bidirectional communication between a human and an AI, it is unclear which entity would be the peripheral. Even today's narrow AI can be super-human at controlling balky, recalcitrant actuators, given feedback and enough trials.
It is Quake 3’s 20th Anniversary today. I still have one of the trade show launch props in my garage.
Hey -- How about Teslas as VR input devices. Add a 'controller mode' that allows a headset to pair with the car to get steering / pedal / switch input. Better than a dedicated racing cockpit for drivers' ed and gaming. I let my son drive my S around a bit today...
With all the GPT4-will-change-everything hype and fanfare happening now, it is worth mentioning that I just had to deal with some rural contractors that DIDN’T HAVE EMAIL ADDRESSES. The system of the world has more inertia than it sometimes seems.
I spent *hours* today debugging something that turned out to be a single wrong letter in the code: a .ge() should have been .gt(). Beginning programmers sometimes despair when debugging, but with experience it is just something to grind through.
I’m looking forward to the moon and Mars having indigenous people.
I don’t feel it, and I don’t think it is rational, but I do see it. The zeitgeist of the thought leaders does tend negative. I remember waving my flag of technological optimism in the 90s and getting smiling chuckles from people, while now I can count on at least some angry… Show more
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do you feel it too? the absence of any optimism for the future? it’s completely gone from the cultural zeitgeist. such a stark contrast compared to the early 00s. or is it just me getting old and jaded and looking at the past through a nostalgia filter?
I know there are decent odds something will go wrong with the launch today, but I'm not really nervous, because I know that even in the worst case, they will clean up the rubble, learn lessons, and get on with it. On the other hand, the best case is GLORIOUS!
I still feel pretty good about the commencement speech I gave a few years ago:
A common mistake I see in UI work is fades/transitions taking too long. UI should work in "game time", not "cinematic time". A transition should happen as fast as an impatient user can button mash -- a small-integer number of frames.
Docker containers are kind of neat. They are also kind of a craven surrender to the rotting mess of excessive software complexity.
I used to say that AI research seemed to have an odd blind spot towards automation of programming work, and I suspected a subconscious self-preservation bias. The recent, almost accidental, discovery that GPT-3 can sort of write code does generate a slight shiver.
By my mid 20s I had made some conclusions about myself like “I’m not a higher math guy” and “I’m not a Unix guy”, and I have let them color my work for decades.
I work with math and Unix, but I never feel fully aligned with those who are deeply enmeshed. I have had plenty of… Show more
Something I have been pushing on for years is going to come to pass soon:
We are going to make available an unlocked OS build for the Oculus Go headset that can be side loaded to get full root access.
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issues, so I knew it would be extra frustrating to keep pushing my viewpoint internally. I am all in on building AGI at Keen Technologies now.
The fact that sealed bottled gardens can last for decades with trivial effort makes it hard for me to credit the idea that space colony ecosystems will be extremely difficult to sustain.
All obstacles are cleared and all objections are dealt with – after several years of requests, I’m finally going on the show next month!
Old programmers instinctively recognize powers of two, but a younger generation of higher level programmers often don’t. I was pleasantly surprised when my young son was considering 16 and 32 ‘neat’ numbers. It was due to Minecraft.
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person, but he reached out and said that it had always weighed on him, his latest business was doing well, and he wanted to pay me back. I found this moving after all this time, and I get to push a nice positive update into my personal “model of how people behave.”
Watching YouTube often makes me feel good about humanity — so many people sharing lifetimes of skills and knowledge. Then ads come on that are so transparently snake oil, and I am saddened knowing that millions of people lack the critical thinking to see through them.
I don’t think I had ever seen the term “malinformation” — something that is true, but likely harmful from some points of view. It popped up twice today in different contexts, and I have a visceral negative reaction to the concept.
It is 18 months after Connect 2021, and my $10k bet that “Roblox will not be surpassed in revenue by a decentralized, web based metaverse” is handily won. Does anyone know Shaw Walters? He seems to have disappeared from Twitter.
A candle produces roughly the same amount of energy as a resting human — 80 to 100 watts, also consuming about the same amount of oxygen and producing the same amount of CO2. In an enclosed area, adding candles is about like adding people from an air quality standpoint.
I had suggested to Lex that he edit it down to a more manageable size, but we didn’t even cover half the things we wanted to talk about. It might make sense to factor me into independent gaming/rockets/VR/AI phases, but everything winds up overlapping.
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Here's my conversation with John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack), legendary programmer & engineer. At over 5 hours, this is officially the longest conversation I've had on the podcast, and we can talk many more times. This was really fun and a huge honor for me. youtube.com/watch?v=I845O5
Had a moment of panic when didn’t show up in my VR library today. Turns out you lose your freebie entitlements when you leave Meta. I am perfectly happy to give them an actual $29.99 for it! My scores remained, thankfully.
I listened to audiobooks at 1.5x speed for years. I had tried 1.75x, but found it a bit too fast for comfort. Recently, I tried going up 0.1x every couple books, and now 1.9x is perfectly usable. This is a substantial benefit!
AAA game dev often does a lot of analytics around where they lose players, and how “stuck” they get in various places. Amazon could provide similar info for kindle books, and authors could learn a lot from it — where are readers bored, and where are they binging?
I find myself impressed that I can scp a six terabyte file over the Internet and it just worked.
The old guard launch companies are on no trajectory to catch up to SpaceX. Continued denial is likely behavior, but it would be fun if they accepted it and took a hard turn away from conventional and tried some Crazy Plan C behavior — rotovators, SSTOs, heck, (space) Orion maybe!
Employee levels in tech are a pretty big deal for compensation and evaluation, but are usually hidden from general view. I wonder if it might work better if they were visible like military ranks, so you knew at a glance something of what should be expected from a person.
Sigh. 1.6 Kg of CO2 = 3.5 Kw/h with the US generation mix, so to consume that in a half hour implies that end-to-end streaming consumes 7000 watts, which is off by well over an order of magnitude. We can quibble about accounting with 2x, but 10x is just BS. twitter.com/bigthink/statu
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Has the feel of the old building-the-skyscrapers photos.
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As anyone who listens to my unscripted Connect talks knows, I have always been pretty frustrated with how things get done at FB/Meta. Everything necessary for spectacular success is right there, but it doesn't get put together effectively.
I remain easily optimistic in the face of everything happening. Consider the most amazing person you personally know, by any quality metric you choose. Odds are that there are literally millions of their caliber in the world, which is plenty to build a bright future.
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It is also an interesting lesson that after decades in the game industry, he is seeing his biggest success making plushies… mysterious.americanmcgee.com Always keep your eyes open for new opportunities!
My first QuakeCon in a decade! I’m so happy that everything is cool now and I am welcome.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with a post-COVID, no general admission event, but the BYOC was packed, and the energy was high even on day 3.
I am a quarter of the way through War and Peace, and I don’t like a single character in it.
I made a lifestyle change last year, adding a 3+ mile walk every day, rain or shine. It did take a bit out of my work hours, but covering 39 audio books and Great Courses has been valuable.
I wonder what the trade offs are for piggy backing other instruments on low orbit comm sat constellations. You aren’t going to get a Keyhole aperture, but being able to have 24/7 coverage of anywhere seems valuable.
The Mad Max post-apocalyptic muscle car esthetic needs to be updated — a bunch of jacked up Teslas recharging from solar panel farms works a lot better than a hacked together oil refinery.
Almost four years after it was initially discussed, I am finally doing the podcast with tomorrow! The path to my episode was equally long, but it turned out great; I'm looking forward to the conversation.
I looked up the budget for a small town library: Under $180k covers three employees, facility maintenance, and all the collections. Served population of 9k, so $20/resident. 13k visits, so around $14 per visit.
Someone gave me a rather prophetic heads up on the GME excitement two and a half months ago.
It has been 18 years since I first talked with about his Falcon 1 plans. If this was a sci-fi novel it would have happened in a third the time, but aside from that, this is a golden age story playing out before our eyes. Scoffing at Mars should be getting hesitant.
I skipped a generation of GPUs on my desktop. With the completely unoptimized model I am currently working on:
Single Titan RTX: 156s
4090: 62s
DGX Single A100: 42s
It is hard for less experienced developers to appreciate how rarely architecting for future requirements / applications turns out net-positive.
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As someone who ends up building a lot of architectural and infrastructure code, there's one thing I cannot emphasize enough: do the simplest thing that works. Do not try to imagine future requirements, or support ill-defined potential use cases. It will always change later.
Everyone knows that when you have similar code repeated several times that you should consolidate into a loop or function, but changing discrete variables into arrays and adding loops can have a small readability cost, so sometimes it can feel like a debatable choice for… Show more
I'm still completely in the excited-newbie honeymoon phase, but writing Rust code feels very wholesome.
A lot of indie game devs want to do everything themselves, either by leaning on the asset store, or by becoming a polymath coder/artist/modeler/sound designer. It isn't impossible, and everyone has their favorite example, but it definitely isn't the high-probability path to \
Happy 25th Doom Anniversary!
My intro for amazon.com/Game-Engine-Bl
Freedom of speech is not “natural” for societies; speech has power, and reducing the agency of your opponents is an obvious play. I am happy that it is part of the US constitution, and I support defending it.
Evil Dead was one of the inspirations for Doom.
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So close! Green is the color of a copper rocket combustion chamber eating itself. That final part is well trod ground for SpaceX and won't hold things up; it looks like they succeeded in the areas that were really unknown.
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There is a strong temptation to find “just the right amount” of free speech, carving out what seems to be clearly harmful. I recognize that such an optimum can exist, but I am dubious about our ability to stand on exactly the right point on a slippery slope, so I tend absolutist.
The notion that AGIs will “think 10,000 times faster than us” isn’t as obviously true as it seems at first glance. It is under appreciated that the self driving teams struggle to make their systems operate at barely real time rates, and they are not close to AGI systems. Step… Show more
The “speed of thought” (neuron conduction speed) is only 110m/s, which isn’t that fast. 9 ms of latency just in your arm!
Rather than random programming problems and contrived tasks as interview tests, how about curating a list of issues on open source projects and judging candidates on how they attack them, turning the interview process into a public good?
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I thought that the "derivative of delivered value" was positive in 2021, but that it turned negative in 2022. There are good reasons to believe that it just edged back into positive territory again, but there is a notable gap between Mark Zuckerberg and I on various strategic \
Just gave Jordan Mechner a very late $40 for the pirated copies of Karateka and Prince of Persia in my youth.
When I started at Oculus, I didn't have any experience with the practicalities of video at scale, and I was a little surprised when I found that all the giant companies used the open source ffmpeg project in their backends. I expected some unique combination of commercial and \
GPUs are built with more memory bandwidth, but higher latency and lower capacity than CPUs. AI accelerators could usefully make a different memory trade — the bandwidth of a GPU (or more), but the capacity of a CPU, in exchange for even higher latency.
For inference, all the… Show more
Using React (JavaScript) has turned out to be a bigger win for VR app development than I expected -- UI dev is several x faster than Unity.
Unlike apparently so many people, I find twitter inspiring! So many smart people and interesting things — a little pruning required now and then, but it is more a problem of limiting the amount of quality versus finding it.
It is a shame that I find it so remarkable, but remains the only major publication that consistently has a fact checker reach out to me when I show up in an article.