He was too diplomatic to say anything was impossible, but he expressed skepticism or distaste for many things, so a good way to test your metaverse forceasting chops is to place your anti-Carmack bets on those things, since that's where, by Clarke's law, he's likely to be wrong.
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I think he's wrong about the early VR version of the metaverse replacing many other things, including possibly one of your primary existing screens like a laptop or phone. That won't happen until we get to proper all day AR/MR, which by his own analysis is far too hard right now
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He expressed distaste for a "high level" solution to stereo 3d (basically taking 2 povs in-universe and synthesizing) and talked about how he then did it the right way, using low-level system calls. Interesting to see what lessons he drew from that...
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For him the lesson was there needed to be more low-level access and faster product management. I don't think that will happen. I suspect the hardware will instead get good enough that the crappy high-level solutions will proliferate. Moore's law driving "worse is better."
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The larger point there is, the fraction of programmers that can solve problems in his idea of the "right way" is probably like <100 in the world right now. "Carmacking" hard problems is just not scalable.
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Which means ways of solving basic metaverse problems that use *mediocre* programmers working with *superior* hardware is actually likely the least-effort path evolution will take.
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It's funny because he recognized that in a different context, arguing against feature-rich expensive hardware, and arguing essentially for cheap, least-common denominator hardware that is minimally reliant on fast wifi (and therefore cloud processing and costs). But...
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... you know what's even more expensive than high-end hardware? Carmack-grade programmers. Even though they are highly leveraged by orgs around them, it still requires amortizing.
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Carmack reminds me of another legendary engineer from another era: Butler Lampson, who pretty much invented most of the hardware side of personal computing single-handed at PARC.
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After PARC imploded, he ended up at DEC and eventually Microsoft. But perhaps the biggest impact of PARC was Lampson's student and PARC colleague, Simonyi leaving for Microsoft and figuring out how to scale things with relatively mediocre engineers. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_S
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I suspect things like this may unfold in the future of VR/metaverse. People at Carmack's level, but with different tastes/philosophies heading elsewhere to do things off the Carmack roadmap. Makes me wonder... who are the Carmack proteges worth keeping an eye on today? 🤔
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Anyhow, of the major tech strands evolving today, this is probably the least personally interesting to me because of purely physiological reasons... my eyesight is getting worse (and more easily strained) faster than the tech is getting better. When it's good enough, I won't be.
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I don't actually know the scene and dramatis personae beyond Carmack at all. Do you have a list of names? Never heard of Abrash.
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He got redpilled and then pwned by Palantir crowd to make killbots sadly. He coulda done so much more imaginative stuff with his talents. Sad.
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