John Carmack
959,689 followers
New Thinking 
sma_04 
viniciuscr__ 
FYI, refurbished Quest 2 are available at a discount: store.facebook.com/quest/products…
For people that want to see the titles. I have whole other rooms for hardbacks, technical, and non-fiction books. In some significant ways, I am “made of books”.
I unpacked a bunch of paperback books that had been in boxes for years and had a pleasant couple of hours sorting them. I still have most of the books I bought as a teenager 35+ years ago, minus a couple boxes that mice nested in.
I did not know that diamond heat spreaders were a thing, but it makes perfect sense! twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/…
Unlike most previous ML game-playing headlines, this model plays all the games (and everything else!) with the same trained model, not separately trained versions for each game. twitter.com/DeepMind/statu…
Some of the early Atari 2600 games may have been played more by reinforcement learning agents now than they were ever played by humans. Some papers report BILLIONS of (rep 4) frames in just their final results.
Seeing the Google I/O cast with 25% of the screen devoted to a sign language translator makes me wonder -- is that actually preferable to, or even as good as, text subtitles?
Reading @tfadell ‘s new book Build (good so far), I did a double take at this part. I was big into the //GS, but I only associated the 65816 with WDC, and I didn’t recall ASIC. Google turns up contemporary 1990 Usenet posts about it, but no accounts of actual usage. Did it ship?
If the 30th anniversary of Wolfenstein 3D sparks any technical nostalgia or curiosity, check out @fabynou ‘s Black Book for an extremely in-depth exploration! amazon.com/Game-Engine-Bl…
30 years ago today, id Software and Apogee released Wolfenstein 3D. It shocked the world and catalyzed the FPS genre
I spoke with creators @ID_AA_Carmack, @romero, and @ThatTomHall about what made it special:
howtogeek.com/802248/how-wol…
What did you think when you first saw it?
Retweeted by John Carmack This is a great set of tips (by @jmechner ) and a process I’ve also followed naturally over the years. If you’re in game dev you need to embrace these. Ironically the only time I break these rules is when dealing with publishers 🤣 Let’s go through them one by one! (LONG POST)f
Retweeted by John Carmack So much of machine learning feels like the early days of steam engines, with lots of inventors coming up with random clever ideas that move efficiency up from 0.5% to 1.5%. At some point we will get the equivalent of the laws of thermodynamics and start making gas turbines. twitter.com/DeepMind/statu…
From Maze War to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, this video shows you the evolution of first-person shooter games [read more: buff.ly/3OGiyTw] [source, HD: buff.ly/37PabEB]
Retweeted by John Carmack This book ends very well -- I didn't put it down from that point.
This paragraph from @eliotpeper’s book REAP3R makes me think about all the DALL-E renderings going around.
A common narrative is that we are getting progressively more regulated and losing freedoms. There is some truth to that, but I find it crazy that from 1934 to 1975 it was illegal for Americans to own gold, which sounds bizarre today. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Rese…
I am often irritated at the reporting around climate change, but the actual IPCC reports are generally much less inflammatory. The scientists aren't saying the world is on track to be "unlivable". un.org/en/climatechan…
to not have panels connected to anything at all, just raw photovoltaics and a little blob of sealant over a tiny chip. Do maximum power point tracking by scaling the frequency of the chip. Hashing is a trivial use case, but there might be others.
An article about solar powered bitcoin mining made me think about an interesting limit case: you can get a decent amount of silicon for less cost than the wire going between two solar panels, and that trend is only going to increase. With local mesh networking, it might be best \
Doing anything pixel-at-a-time is generally hopeless in Python. When I build big composite images it usually takes me a few tries to get the tensor as_strided() parameters right to stamp full images in with a single operation.
MSPaint doesn't open up 16384 x 16384 RGB images. There are plenty of other options that do work, but it is a little amusing to bump into the limits of old tools.
Better late than never! twitter.com/TheOfficialACM…
Retweeted by John Carmack One-hot encoding just makes network training easier versus having to learn ranges. I wonder how much additional categorical feature engineering can help -- adding zero-hot, or all 2^catagories possible logical-or values and their negations.
Apropos of my recent tweet about optimization, here is a real pro at work: twitter.com/rygorous/statu…
My headset strap broke. I’m going to go full nerd and wrap it with duct tape.
The secret to optimization is changing the problem to make it easier to optimize!
Little thing I just learned: I have had problems in the past where a kernel tightly optimized for release builds would fail to launch in debug mode. Using the __launch_bounds__ annotation fixed it for me today.
After dialing everything in for occupancy and memory traffic it usually winds up 6x+ faster, unless it really leans on GPU features like tensor ops or texture filtering, which can go much higher. Of course, I only bother with functions I know will turn out well. Many won't. \
CUDA is not my go-to go-fast tool -- with a modern, big CPU, it is pretty great how much performance you can trivially get with #pragma omp parallel for. The last couple times I have done it, my first cut at a CUDA kernel was slower than the C++ running on 128 threads. \
When I let myself spend a day doing CUDA work, I'm usually quite happy afterwards. Optimization is a grand puzzle game with an objective score function! I have to make myself stop at a wise point, despite all the intriguing rabbit holes left to pursue. \
This is a good line of reasoning. I smile when this email I wrote 15 years ago gets passed around in support of the usually-controversial position of linear code. number-none.com/blow/john_carm… twitter.com/ChristerEricso…
Really pleased to say that a small team within @ImaginationTech have worked to make our Series 1 drivers open source!
Great for anyone looking to tinker with old hardware, and an important look back at the company's history.
#graphicscards #retrogaming
github.com/powervr-graphi…
Retweeted by John Carmack Here's a look at the sacrilegious turbo Ferraris commissioned by video game legend @ID_AA_Carmack—the father of the FPS genre, basically—back in the 1990s:
thedrive.com/news/44421/a-l…
Retweeted by John Carmack For years, I thought the naming of "Metropolis sampling" was some kind of analogy with big busy cities that I didn't quite understand. Eventually I found out that it was named for en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_…
Energy efficiency in thermodynamic systems (jet engines, air conditioning, etc.) is often associated with higher stress and lower robustness -- it is not purely positive. If energy gets much cheaper, the optimal design points would shift on many things.
There is a type of extra-fat water-tight pass-through gland that opens up so that you can put it around a cable with an already assembled RJ-45 connector on the end. I can't find the right search term to locate these, what are they called?
My initial response to required certification tests is usually mild umbrage, but after taking even easy tests, there is some level of pride. Amateur radio, high power rocketry, license to carry, etc. twitter.com/paulg/status/1…
"That means that in the time that Python can perform a single FLOP, an A100 could have chewed through 9.75 million FLOPS" twitter.com/cHHillee/statu…
I often run the thought experiment of “If I was transported to <earlier time> with all the knowledge of today, what could I accomplish?” twitter.com/karpathy/statu…
McCarthy’s The Road is grim reading. I’m fond of post-apocalyptic fiction, especially the “competence porn” elements, but competence is to no avail for McCarthy’s protagonist. amazon.com/Cormac-McCarth…
I should have Watched The Docs before playing 😁twitter.com/BeatSaber/stat…U
OST-V is hard! I failed out on half of the E+ runs. Garsh got multiple perfectionists on E+ while I was failing... On another level!
I wonder if there is ever a case where instead of spinning a fan to move air over a heat exchanger, it was better to make a fan(ish)-shaped heat exchanger and spin it directly.
Going through storage boxes on a Sunday... a 1996 tech time capsule: "Can they do it again with Quake?" @defcon @ID_AA_Carmack @WIRED
Retweeted by John Carmack The 2030 Self-Driving Car Bet blog.codinghorror.com/the-2030-self-…
Retweeted by John Carmack SCANALYZER: CONTEXT: History of the “Jerry Can” scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/history-of-t… #SCANALYST
Retweeted by John Carmack bets are fun -- I won't be shocked if I lose, but I am willing to go on record and stake some reputation (and some cash) on a prediction. twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/…
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