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A week-long programming retreat

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Re: A week-long programming retreat

#51
post #42

I find it peculiar about people's continued good feelings towards Carmack. During the Zenimax/Oculus case: He claimed that he never wiped his hard drive: An independent court expert found that most of his hard drive was wiped after Carmack heard about the lawsuit. So Carmack lied in his affidavit. He claimed that no source code from Zenimax ever got transferred over to Oculus. Then later admitted that the emails he h…

Yeah, Carmack has a history of unethical behavior. From the book "Masters of Doom":

> Late one night Carmack and his friends snuck up to a nearby school where they knew there were Apple II machines. Carmack had read about how a thermite paste could be used to melt through glass, but he needed some kind of adhesive material, like Vaseline. He mixed the concoction and applied it to the window, dissolving the glass so they could pop out holes to crawl through. A fat friend, however, had more than a little trouble squeezing inside; he reached through the hole instead and opened the window to let himself in. Doing so, he triggered the silent alarm. The cops came in no time.

> The fourteen-year-old Carmack was sent for psychiatric evaluation to help determine his sentence. He came into the room with a sizable chip on his shoulder. The interview didn’t go well. Carmack was later told the contents of his evaluation: “Boy behaves like a walking brain with legs ... no empathy for other human beings.” At one point the man twiddled his pencil and asked Carmack, “If you hadn’t been caught, do you think you would have done something like this again?”

> “If I hadn’t been caught,” Carmack replied honestly, “yes, I probably would have done that again.”

> Later he ran into the psychiatrist, who told him, “You know, it’s not very smart to tell someone you’re going to go do a crime again.”

> “I said, ‘if I hadn’t been caught,’ goddamn it!” Carmack replied. He was sentenced to one year in a small juvenile detention home in town. Most of the kids were in for drugs. Carmack was in for an Apple II.

Re: A week-long programming retreat

#52
post #42

I find it peculiar about people's continued good feelings towards Carmack. During the Zenimax/Oculus case: He claimed that he never wiped his hard drive: An independent court expert found that most of his hard drive was wiped after Carmack heard about the lawsuit. So Carmack lied in his affidavit. He claimed that no source code from Zenimax ever got transferred over to Oculus. Then later admitted that the emails he h…

How does this comment critique the posted write up?

People fawn over John because he shows a great spirit of the hacker. A hacker should be judged by his/her hacking.

Re: A week-long programming retreat

#53

Pretty awesome! If I ever had to say the one thing that differentiates successful people from unsuccessful people it wouldn't be intelligence, or even perseverance, or passion. It'd be focus. With focus, you can be amazingly successful in so many types of occupations. (That being said, passion / perseverance / intelligence can often lead to focus)

IQ tests seem to suggest otherwise.

Re: A week-long programming retreat

#54
post #29
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question becomes; if its not C++, then what is the first class citizen on OpenBSD. Being an UNIX derivative the answer is quite easy, C.

Sure, but is there a popular, modern C compiler out there that doesn't compile C++ as well? Clang, GCC, Intel, MSVC... all of them compile C++ as well as C. I don't think it's possible to have first-hand support for C and not C++ any more unless you ship your own compiler. It sounds like the issue here is that OpenBSD is shipping older versions of LLVM/Clang and GCC.

OpenBSD's base ships the most recent LLVM and Clang (5.01), but there's no LLDB yet and gdb is outdated (6.3, the last GPLv2 version).

He would have had a much better time using C99 than C++11, especially since he didn't want to install a newer gdb from ports.

Re: A week-long programming retreat

#56
post #52
post #42

I find it peculiar about people's continued good feelings towards Carmack. During the Zenimax/Oculus case: He claimed that he never wiped his hard drive: An independent court expert found that most of his hard drive was wiped after Carmack heard about the lawsuit. So Carmack lied in his affidavit. He claimed that no source code from Zenimax ever got transferred over to Oculus. Then later admitted that the emails he h…

How does this comment critique the posted write up? People fawn over John because he shows a great spirit of the hacker. A hacker should be judged by his/her hacking.

I 100% agree that hackers should be judged by his/her hacking.

On the other hand, I found that many people consider me wrong when I judge a hacker by his/her hacking when he/she is accused of sexual abuse. But apparently they are okay with someone accused of IP crime.

Re: A week-long programming retreat

#57
post #49
post #42

I find it peculiar about people's continued good feelings towards Carmack. During the Zenimax/Oculus case: He claimed that he never wiped his hard drive: An independent court expert found that most of his hard drive was wiped after Carmack heard about the lawsuit. So Carmack lied in his affidavit. He claimed that no source code from Zenimax ever got transferred over to Oculus. Then later admitted that the emails he h…

I don't know anything, at all, about this case or much about him except the standard. But is there any point in bringing it up now? I mean, whether or not he did something illegal/unethical, does this now mean that literally every single time he writes something, someone feels the need to chime in with "but remember that bad thing he did once?". I'm not saying this isn't a legit conversation or that you're unethical…

I agree with you, but I also think there is some kind of double standard going on, say, compared with the case of Jacob Appelbaum, etc.

Re: A week-long programming retreat

#58

The man is a genius but why openBSD? FreeBSD would have been my choice.

From the post: > a relatively minimal and opinionated system with a cohesive vision and an emphasis on quality and craftsmanship

While I dont't believe that one could argue that FreeBSD isn't focused on quality, nor craftsmanship, it always struck me as lacking a consistency. FreeBSD on the surface seem focused, because the base system is bundled, like with the other BSDs. They don't however seem to have a clear syntax for tools and configuration files. The worst offender, and this is just my personal opinion, is ZFS. ZFS makes no attempts to hide that it's bolted in. In terms of configuration there's no doubt that it was lifted from Solaris.

OpenBSD have less features that FreeBSD, or Linux, but the features that are available are clearly made by one team with the same focus and direction.

That being said, I don't think we should put to much emphasis on Carmacks choice of operation system in this case.

Re: A week-long programming retreat

#59
post #22

Master of Doom contains an anecdote on this aspect of John Carmack's life. On page 252, it mentioned how he had sequestered himself in a "small, anonymous hotel room somewhere in Florida" as he researched Trinity. He had a dolch portable computer with pentium II and full length PCI slots, while subsisting only on pizza and Diet Coke. That bit for some reason made a big impression on me when I read it on the bus ride…

Agreed, I guess that the trick to selecting a location is to be in a location the the inside the hotel/cabin room is much more attractive that on the outside.

I had a colleague that told me that his most productive period was when he was stuck at the hospital for a couple of weeks but was able to do some coding.

Re: A week-long programming retreat

#60
If anybody else is interested in doing something similar, I highly recommend Michael Nielsen's online book: Neural Networks and Deep Learning[1]. He gives really good explanations and some code examples.

I ended up writing the most basic feed-forward network in C[2]; although I didn't use base libs like Carmack :(

[1] http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap1.html

[2] https://github.com/cluoma/nn_c2

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