John Carmack
986,683 followers
Michael Connolly 
The Ledger Law Firm 
lazereyes_ 
Spear of Destiny turns 30! The commercial version of Wolfenstein 3D, it was a blast to make with the early id-ers and featured a really fun surprise ending!
Retweeted by John Carmack 
It is a little distressing how you can have an ML model that looks like it just isn’t working at all, but if you let it train for two days, it suddenly starts getting good.
It’s that time of year again; what do you want to hear me talk about in my unscripted talk this time? There will be an hour of talk, and a separate Q&A, both done in VR from horizon. twitter.com/Oculus_Dev/sta…
I just got locked out of Twitter for the first time due to a DMCA notice from the National Music Publishers’ Association over the MR Beat Saber capture I did with, I think, a Panic! song. Just a stern warning, but a bit of a shock. twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/…
Apple’s “share web page from phone to iPad” feature is neat. I expected it to have some extra confirmation steps, but it just went ahead and did it with one tap. I find myself arguing “just do it!” in VR often, but so many designers want to add extra dialog steps just in case.
This article about how poor VOX is on two way radios had me thinking how a little bit of ML to recognize “speech” along with a tiny buffer would solve it. Eventually, even tiny margin things like this will benefit. buytwowayradios.com/blog/2022/09/t…
It would be interesting to make a crossword puzzle with no clues that still had a unique solution based just on letter positions in valid English words.
Join us for Meta Connect on Oct 11 to learn from experts and innovators about their collective vision for the metaverse, and discover how AR/VR is evolving to create more connected worlds. Learn more: metaconnect.com
Retweeted by John Carmack With all the CPU cores we have now, it seems like the OS could safely start doing real work in interrupt service routines instead of just scheduling a kernel thread to do it. Paging from flash could get a lot more efficient, for instance.
A strident socialist resurrected a thread I was in two years ago. The conversation continued mostly civilly.
I continue to stand by “wealth inequality is not intrinsically bad”, despite it making many people reflexively aghast. twitter.com/ananthr909/sta…
My first hire at Keen Technologies was Gloria Kennickell, who I have worked with for over a decade across Id and Oculus. I will probably hire a couple more people next year, but my intention is to stay a very small team - I’m not going to compete with Google and OpenAI on scale.
I am terrible at interviewing people. Past a relatively low bar of obviously-a-bozo, I tend to imagine that almost anyone could make the right choices and succeed, and I am loathe to say otherwise after an hour of conversation. \
I was a good chunk into this book amazon.com/Talent-Identif… before I realized that the co-author was the same @danielgross that co-led my new company funding round…
Getting the right people into the right places is arguably the foundational problem of the age, but \
I haven’t gotten to the keys on a legit, non-turbo PacMan since I was a kid!
I was proud of the Dreamcast version of Quake 3: Arena, with online multiplayer! twitter.com/PeterMooreLFC/…
Today, Mad Max would be electric, but If you really want your combustion engines to work 20 years after an apocalypse, you should probably use propane or alcohol.
I was just trying to buy a gallon of iso-octane for an experiment — I was wondering if it could be used as (expensive) gasoline that never goes bad sitting in a dirt bike. I am aware of stabil, but it is interesting to consider indefinite life solutions.
I really dislike regulations around chemical sales. I don’t know if it is still the case, but it used to be a problem even to buy big glassware because “drug labs”. Ah, the good old days when you could buy dynamite from Sears.
<grumpy libertarian sign>
Mark your 📅—Meta Connect is returning to the virtual stage on October 11! Join us as we dive into the next wave of innovation in VR and AR, including progress and updates from the past year. For updates please visitmetaconnect.com9.6
Retweeted by John Carmack turn out to be a bit dodgy, but these are great. The bottom shelf has books I have already read, although mostly not recently. If anyone has really strong opinions on the others to guide my reading order, let me know!
opening and reading the liner notes for them one at a time. This bulk collection mostly contains less well known titles — presumably the popular ones were sold off individually, but that suits me fine. The physical quality is indeed very good. Some “leather bound books” \
I bought a collection of the Easton Press Masterpieces of Science Fiction a couple months ago. I am not that well read in pre-80s SF outside the biggest names, and someone here recommended this series as high quality. They arrived individually wrapped, so it has been fun \
I have a little demo app with true 120 fps immersive video content that I hope to release if the content owner allows -- that does offer an additional level of smoothness, but not nearly the difference of going from 30 fps to 60 fps.
120 fps has been an "experimental feature" on Quest 2 for a long time, and we are finally going to make it default-on. Any app that plays 60 fps video should consider 120 fps display -- it avoids the flicker of 60 fps display, and makes imperfect release tempo less harsh.
Reading a book that references classic video games like Mario and Ms. Pac Man, part of my brain pounces on little inconsistencies with a strident THAT’S WRONG, but someone pointed out that in my Lex interview I said Super Mario 3 on SNES (not NES), so glass houses and all that.
With button presses it is necessary to make a trade off with volume granularity, but it shouldn’t be with voice control.
Alexa, volume 1.5.
Alexa, volume one and a half.
Alexa, volume 15%.
Sigh.
well as crypto hashing workloads, that really don’t need much host bandwidth, and a sea of free standing GPUs with just USB would be interesting. A 2D mesh of NVLink connected free standing GPUs much more so.
Especially on GPUs with a USB-C port, it would be neat if you could apply power to it without plugging it in to a PCIE bus and get an internally generated video signal. You could plug in a USB keyboard and have a BusyBox or something. There are some ML workloads, as \
forcing a local evolutionary equilibrium, because a slow walk towards something better gets “cut off at the pass” in a way that doesn’t happen when optimizing in a stationary environment.
Highly successful invasive species, like rabbits in Australia, highlight limits of evolutionary optimization. The local fauna had thousands of generations, why couldn’t they get to the clearly more successful solution? The presence of actively adversarial forces wind up \
There is a general perception that C/C++ is only for peak performance cases, so API can be ugly — if you wanted easy and clear, you would be using a different language. I think that is unfortunate. It is possible to make “joyful API” in C.
I did not know aligned_alloc() was a standard thing in C11 and C++17!
I would caveat the suggested API as being worse than the standard API for 99.99% (completely seriously) of the users, putting more burden on the caller, so I don’t think “bad” is quite fair. twitter.com/foonathan/stat…
Coming out of general anesthesia seems like a fairly clean “reboot” of the brain’s dynamic state, without even the continuity of dreaming. There are probably a lot of interesting psychology experiments to be done there.
The best visual presentations are analyzed in frames, not continuous time. twitter.com/AntonHand/stat…
VR devs: I am happy to see compositor overlays getting used now for high quality text, but please remove the layer when nothing is on it, and crop the rectangle tightly — don’t just make a “full screen” layer. They cost performance!
Given that taste and smell involve chemical effects, which almost always increase in rate with temperature, I wonder how much of the experience of hot food and drinks is that they “taste faster”.
It feels like the x86 / ARM trade off for power efficiency in the data center isn’t being made as aggressively as it could be — lots of work loads could live with 1/4 the scalar performance if it cut power consumption in half.
I wonder what the relative information content of tokens in English is when read in reverse order, and does it vary from a simple first order Huffman predictor up to something GPT like. Does the relation hold for all scripts — can you tell the reading order by statistics?
Online package tracking was a huge advance over the old Mystery Mail, but it would be nice to level up to something like Uber now, so you could see *exactly* where your package is. Hesitant to take a shower with an incoming signature-required package.
Of course, easily replaceable batteries can also address the problem!
As I look at electronics with weakening batteries, I wonder when they would be better with bulkier lithium iron phosphate batteries — 40% less energy density, but 10x the lifetime. Not much demand for ten year lifespan consumer electronics.
On the topic of discipline — @akirathedon and @jockowillink have a new album out: youtube.com/watch?v=nVBfAj…
For the people that think “That gym bro motivational stuff doesn’t apply to my knowledge worker life”, I give you Richard Hamming: cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAnd… Similar message.
I go for a four mile walk every day (audiobooks!), but doing it when the sun went down to avoid the 100+ heat was punching a hole in my work day, so I adjusted my schedule to wake up earlier and do it in the morning.
I love Twitter, and I learn a lot from my feed, but starting an experiment running and switching to a Twitter tab is not ideal, so I killed the DNS route to twitter on my AI PC to remove the ability. I have screen time enabled on my iOS devices to stay in check. \
I have been officially “one day a week” at Meta for a couple years now, but I still wound up checking in on groups and email every day, which was often a distraction when I should be concentrating on AI. Now I put my Meta laptop in the garage at the end of my VR day. \
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: \
I know it doesn’t bother most people as much as it does graphics programmers, but all the menu images being displayed without mip maps, having everything alias and fizzle, drives me crazy. Create mip maps and enable trilinear filtering, or resize the images so they just fit.
I like the use of the Meta avatars, but the lighting is very flat. I suggest an image based lighting approach. The Avatar SDK should provide that as a baseline, along with default reference images, for apps that don’t have their own high quality lighting. \
With multiple people, it is usually good “gamification” to break the scoring up as much as possible. You can have a grand total, but also displaying the results of each “stage” gives more opportunities for each person to win something, even if not the overall. \
I went through four @weareFitXR workouts yesterday. It was a good experience, and I am pleasantly sore this morning. A few app comments:
The multiplayer was a big draw, but we wanted to be able to go through multiple workouts as a group without creating new rooms and rejoining.\
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