531–540 of 1001 posts
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>has proven enough times in the past Past experiences do not mean future success. This isn't even about Carmack: past 'heroes' end up failing in their decision-making in the future many times, and they were followed for no other reason than 'they have a track record'. The sooner that myth dies, the better.
It does not ensure it but it is the best indicator we have.
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Throwaway because it could be easy to identify my position from my normal account name. Carmack is many thing, engineering genius above them. However, he would frequently wade into areas where he had no experience, demand others do what he said, ignore evidence he was wrong, bully people, and disparage entire teams who were doing good, and in some cases legally required, work. When data proved his idea was wrong, he…
Yeah well, you're anonymous, so you might as well be someone with a huge ego who got their idea shut down by Carmack once and is still bitter about it. More often than not, when people think they "prove something wrong with data" it's more that they're "taking some data and interpret in a way that fits their standpoint". Carmack has proven enough times in the past that he's able to deliver, that he can push technolog…
Nice fantasy you created there to support your argument. Have you heard of "don't shoot the messenger"?
I admire Carmack as much all other hackers around. I don't sympathize with many of Meta's practices. Still, it's entirely plausible that GP's experience holds truth.
I've been around the equivalent of people like Carmack in academia and all of them have their dash of arrogance and petulance, sometimes this leads them to take really bad decisions. Also, engineering skills and management skills are different things. And there's Peter's Principle as well, to which Carmack is not exempt either.
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At MegaCompanies, being right, having evidence, and trying to persuade just isn’t enough, as John Fucking Carmack figured out. It’s more like High School. You need to be in the right clique or have the ear of the right Very Important Person. When you send that E-mail and say “We should do X because Y and Z…” people stop reading at “because” and just go look in the company directory for your name. If you’re high enoug…
Modern capitalism has ushered in a new age of modern fuedalism, at first just inside big companies, but it’s spreading to society in general now.
”It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I'm evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I…
Throwaway because it could be easy to identify my position from my normal account name. Carmack is many thing, engineering genius above them. However, he would frequently wade into areas where he had no experience, demand others do what he said, ignore evidence he was wrong, bully people, and disparage entire teams who were doing good, and in some cases legally required, work. When data proved his idea was wrong, he…
I remember him overruling the Head of Design and enforcing Arial to be the typeface used for the corporate brand because it was the typeface was present on more computers than any other in the world. Suffice to say the original typeface was much better.
Self doubt is a really really important trait to have as a leader - don't automatically assume you're right outside of your area of expertise and that team members can come up with good solutions that aren't yours is the only way you can ever really scale.
The CTO ultimately was forced out and became a specialist consultant and that probably suited him.
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GPT-3 happened and showed that by throwing more computation at the problem you have better results.
As one of my AI profs said: it's like trying to teach pigs to fly, and say you're progressing because you're building higher towers.
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I don't work with John Carmack, but I had a meeting with him once. He is brilliant, no doubt, but he is exactly like every single engineer with no professional communications training. He struggles to make his points in everyday developer language, when he needs to speak more calculated, more measured, and with significantly more audience empathy. Just like 99% of us technologists. We're an industry of weak communica…
I think the notion of developers being 'weak communicators' is a bit too simplified. It suggests that if developers were better communicators, then things would move faster & better forward. But the fact is that the audience of non-developers tends to have a completely different mode of thinking, and indeed a different set of targets. Developers would like to see organizations as machines to give instructions to. Non…
That is exactly what would happen, within developer circles themselves at least. A huge amount of miscommunication and lack of communication routinely takes place within dev teams, and that process knot forming behavior would be eliminated by better communications.
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Throwaway because it could be easy to identify my position from my normal account name. Carmack is many thing, engineering genius above them. However, he would frequently wade into areas where he had no experience, demand others do what he said, ignore evidence he was wrong, bully people, and disparage entire teams who were doing good, and in some cases legally required, work. When data proved his idea was wrong, he…
I've watched many Carmack videos over the years and he never complained about the team not following him or people working for him being not good enough, he always praised the work done and explained in very fine details why the decisions where taken one way or another. When he wanted to remove a pebble from his shoe, he talked extensively of the company decisions, in the higher ups, which is more than fair given his…
Musk is the Donald Trump of coding if anything.
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Yeah well, you're anonymous, so you might as well be someone with a huge ego who got their idea shut down by Carmack once and is still bitter about it. More often than not, when people think they "prove something wrong with data" it's more that they're "taking some data and interpret in a way that fits their standpoint". Carmack has proven enough times in the past that he's able to deliver, that he can push technolog…
At risk of upsetting this thread’s balance and reducing it to negativity: I prefer your parent comment’s interpretation of the Go. “Ahead of its time”? Technology is the last space where a newfangled product would lose momentum by being released to early. I’m open to being proved ignorant here. Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Subscription music services like…
Basically Carmack is frustrated by: 1. Rate of progress on AR/VR at meta 2. People within Meta not "Giving a Dam!" / Poor decisions made within the org 3. Poor quality of the execution which I guess is related to #2 Relevant quote: "It pains me to hear people say that they don't even get their headset out to show off at the company because they know it's going to be a mess of charging and updating before they can mak…
The good VR games are really good, games like HL Alyx. But after almost 10 years of VR usage I still can't name more than 3-7 pieces of VR Software (games included) I would put into the "worth it" category. Anything else is just very short lived, feel like tech demos. Fun? Sure, but ultimately worse than regular software/games. Gimmicky overhead, so to speak.
Hence why my VR setup is collecting dust most of the time.
Seeing Facebook's vision for VR, which is just rebuilding products we had as far back as 2003 (Second Life) and even 2014 (VR Chat), but worse and riddled with ads and darkpatterns, is what has made me lose even more of my interest. I have to add that I was an Oculus owner in the past, I am now an Index owner, but what Facebook does is still relevant because they are the "VR believers", pouring the most money into it.
In short: There is just nothing interesting happening, my VR setup is collecting dust. Demoing it to my friends is basically the only thing I do with it nowadays but they lost interest too. I don't agree that it's a hardware problem, for me it's a software problem. Also: too much "vision", too little actual determined (software) projects.
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Throwaway because it could be easy to identify my position from my normal account name. Carmack is many thing, engineering genius above them. However, he would frequently wade into areas where he had no experience, demand others do what he said, ignore evidence he was wrong, bully people, and disparage entire teams who were doing good, and in some cases legally required, work. When data proved his idea was wrong, he…
It's just really weird to me that people are all shocked-Pikachu about Carmack wanting to be the auteur in this scenario and to wield Meta's effectively-infinite resources in the exact ways that he wanted. It's apparent from every interview and article about him that this is how he operates. It seems to have worked well for him in the past, but it was obviously going to be a major culture clash at Meta unless they ga…
I guess there's this idea that we'll wander into the right territory. That might work for other things but probably not for the most complicated organism on our planet.