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John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

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Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point he made was rather the opposite. He works 10-12 hours a day, 60 hours a week, 6 days a week. He needs seven to eight hours of sleep, like a normal person. He specifically mentioned that he never was much into doing all-nighters and that he experimented with working different times of the day. So he'd start in the afternoon and then continue until deep in the night when he was younger whereas having…

> He works 10-12 hours a day, 60 hours a week, 6 days a week > Work life balance and taking care of his family is just part of that deal as well. I don't judge anyone for how they like to spend their time (and certainly admire Carmack), but what work/life balance? There isn't much except work there.

Well he did have enough spare time to build a working rocket, or did that count as work also?

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#172
post #168
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried out VS 2019 last year on a whim. The last time I used VS before that was in the early 2000s (probably 6.0). It was a surprisingly bad experience - weirdly slow even on a high performance PC and so much clutter by default. Tried out VS 2022 just now. First impressions are better.

2022 was the first VS in 64 bit, the increase in responsiveness was enough to make me switch back from rider

It's probably due to optimizations in high level code rather than the 32/64-bit aspect, but I'm just guessing. (To get that level of slowness you really have to fuck up at a higher level.)

VS seems to be a WPF app nowadays, so I assume the UI is written in C#.

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#173
post #11

Such a joy to listen to Carmack talk about just about anything. Not sure if it's an age thing but there is a particular feeling common to contemporaries of that era, growing up in our formative years as computers grew from their humble beginnings to the incredible machines we have now. At that time, each new improvement brought astounding differences in capability. In the space of 10 years we went from 8k to 64k of m…

Era aside, Carmack is a special guy, he can talk articulately and gently for hours. He did a talk few years ago (quakecon ? .. I forgot), basically a 3h long monologue about thinking while coding, there was only a single 5min pause to sip some water, incredible.

I can speak just like that. Problem is I'm an uninformed idiot. But people who don't know that seem to think I'm pretty smart.

*this post does not contain an implication about Carmack. He is actually real smart.

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He works 10-12 hours a day, 60 hours a week, 6 days a week > Work life balance and taking care of his family is just part of that deal as well. I don't judge anyone for how they like to spend their time (and certainly admire Carmack), but what work/life balance? There isn't much except work there.

100 hours a week is no life. If you can eliminate the average 90 minutes a day commuting Americans do, along with the average 20 hours a week spent cooking and cleaning et cetera by hiring people to do that for you, a rich person can have more life working 60 hours a week than a poor person has working 40. Carmack is a high level martial artist. That would have required a significant time commitment.

> Carmack is a high level martial artist. That would have required a significant time commitment.

Interestingly, it might not be the that significant of a commitment in terms of raw hours although it certainly is in terms of consistency and persistence. Quick googling reveals that it might take around 2500 training hours to get to BJJ black belt (I guess if you're pretty talented). Over 10-year period, that's just under 5 hours/week. And BJJ black belt is a pretty big deal.

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He works 10-12 hours a day, 60 hours a week, 6 days a week > Work life balance and taking care of his family is just part of that deal as well. I don't judge anyone for how they like to spend their time (and certainly admire Carmack), but what work/life balance? There isn't much except work there.

Work/life balance applies to people who would ordinarily not do their work if they did not have to.

That binary classification doesn't make much sense. What amount of work? I'm pretty sure many people would willingly work 10-15 hours/week (or 24/32/whatever) even if they didn't have to, but not necessarily 40.

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#176
post #11

Such a joy to listen to Carmack talk about just about anything. Not sure if it's an age thing but there is a particular feeling common to contemporaries of that era, growing up in our formative years as computers grew from their humble beginnings to the incredible machines we have now. At that time, each new improvement brought astounding differences in capability. In the space of 10 years we went from 8k to 64k of m…

There was such a magic to ega games, then vga, that I think was lost a bit in the transition to 3d engines. I count myself lucky to have experienced the surprise he mentions about doom and a monster jumping out at you, the land unfolding worlds of sierra games, and quirkiness of Lucas arts stories. It's a good reminder that graphics capabilities can change, but our human software can be entertained by all the old tricks.

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#177
post #18

I've been trying to listen to the whole thing (it's 5 hours!), and there are some really interesting moments. Albeit, a bit too much talk on old video games that aren't from my generation, but I'm sure this will be interesting to some people to. What I found interesting: * he has insane hours and has never burnt out. He says that if you want to achieve big things in your life, you need to work a lot. He also says tha…

I listened to the first two hours on a train yesterday. I'll likely finish it later. The discussion about tools and languages was particularly interesting. You might expect John Carmack to be pretty old school and dogmatic on using e.g. C and instead it seems he has a very broad taste and experience with different languages and tools. Just a very pragmatic person that switches between doing C, python, Go and other la…

About GDB: I really like using KDevelop on linux, and they have a pretty good GDB front-end built in. It's pretty similar to VS debugger, with a panel showing local variables and their values, etc. It's definitely not as full featured as VS, and IIRC there was some instability, but if you're on linux and using C or C++ I highly recommend trying it.

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#178
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Carmack was mostly talking about regular Visual Studio as his IDE of choice, though. Not VSCode.

Yeah, he meant VS. He even mentioned using an older version (6) as it is much faster on modern computers. Maybe he was referring to a friend of his, I don’t remember. Most Windows programmers I know (not a lot) use VS for the ease of integration with all things .NET and Microsoft.

VS 6 is great, honestly, if you're just hacking c89 or a narrow subset of c++98. Look out, though, the compiler isn't fully standards compliant.

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#179
post #45
post #18

I've been trying to listen to the whole thing (it's 5 hours!), and there are some really interesting moments. Albeit, a bit too much talk on old video games that aren't from my generation, but I'm sure this will be interesting to some people to. What I found interesting: * he has insane hours and has never burnt out. He says that if you want to achieve big things in your life, you need to work a lot. He also says tha…

> he has insane hours and has never burnt out I think there's two major things you need in order to do that. Work on what you love/want and have no/little need for socializing.

Many if not most productive academics have such insane schedules. They’re not necessarily asocial. I think the important distinction is in what I’d call “bullshit socializing.” A lot of what regular people do in the name of socializing is probably not helping them in any way. Academics get trained to not need this to relax necessarily.

I did my PhD in a lab that demanded it: we were expected to put 6 days, 12 hours a day. It’s possible for maybe 30% of population maybe? Especially if you’re privileged and don’t have to worry about other things in life (like kids, parents, money, physical health, chronic issues, mental health, etc). So in some ways the ability to train and be able to adopt this more “productive” life is a bit exclusionary and even discriminatory. In the end I chose not to continue in academia primarily because of this demand, I just didn’t feel like it was worth it.

Now I’m in tech and I do get bored, but happy that I have the choice to set my hours.

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#180
post #18

I've been trying to listen to the whole thing (it's 5 hours!), and there are some really interesting moments. Albeit, a bit too much talk on old video games that aren't from my generation, but I'm sure this will be interesting to some people to. What I found interesting: * he has insane hours and has never burnt out. He says that if you want to achieve big things in your life, you need to work a lot. He also says tha…

>Agree with him, VSCode is THE IDE.

Lol, he said Visual Studio is THE IDE, not VSCode. Compared with VS, VSCode is a toy.

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