John Carmack Leaves Meta • Hacker News Board

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#791

Post by grahar64 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:30 PM UTC

monero-xmr wrote: post #649

I’m a strong believer in dictatorship at companies. Every team has someone with ultimate decision making power, as does every project with a project leader, and above teams are leaders who have authority above them, and so on. Of course there are meetings and discussions but there is always someone with the authority to make a decision that everyone has to respect. Honestly it benefits everyone. ICs like that authori…

Sure you can have a good dictator, but there is much greater room for a bad one.

Carmack (by his own admission) doesn’t want to be a manager, he wants to be a programmer. So he would probably not make a good dictator. He might have had less sway precisely because someone above him is a dictator who didn’t like his input, no room for decent in a dictatorship.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#792

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:33 PM UTC

nvarsj wrote: post #588

JohnBooty wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem. I feel like this is definitely the elephant in the room everybody is ignoring. Almost nobody gives a hoot about VR! I'm a software engineer with a lot of (surprise, surprise) nerdy/geeky/whatever friends and interest in VR is close to zero. A few friends vouched for various games like Half-Life:Alyx and Beat Saber, but nobody was claiming it was a life alterin…

I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve. It's a kind of gameplay that can't be repeated with 2d screens. I really do think it could be revolutionary, based on playing that game alone. If you can get ahold of a headset and a powerful gaming PC - I recommend giving it a try. The problems right now are very fundamental. The quest 2 out of the box is supre…

> I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve. It's a kind of gameplay that can't be repeated with 2d screens.

Every time I read something like this about VR I hear the same stuff I hear from like, audiophiles talking about gold plated cables and shit. I have a Rift, and I get a lot of use out of it for Beat Saber and VTOL VR, but there's no reason the latter can't be non-VR and I would categorize nearly everything I've ever played with it as a gimmick.

The experience is a little more immersive than a screen, but in my opinion not that significantly so especially considering all the drawbacks.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#793

Post by roninghost » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:37 PM UTC

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #743

gompertz wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> trying to be convincing on technical issues when you can't understand fundamentals of English is not persuasive at all. Note to disprove your point but there are plenty of very technically capable people who learn English as a second, third, fourth language. In fact I would say in technical settings, such as here, that this is statistically more common than a native English speaker with poor writing skills.

I've noticed this error more on natives than people that learn English more formally as a second or third language.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#794

Post by cactusplant7374 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:40 PM UTC

sinenomine wrote: post #609

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was likely to have more success at Meta than his AGI startup. When it comes to intelligence and cognition no one even knows where to begin. The same for studying the brain. And the neural networks in the brain don't resemble anything like the neural networks in current AI. 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 complicate…

> When it comes to intelligence and cognition no one even knows where to begin Is it true, though? There is quite nice literature out there, surely John has read these papers during his bootstrap period: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27683554/ https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15556v1

Are those papers breakthroughs in understanding human cognition? It feels like there must be some philosophical underpinning to creating human-like intelligence.

I suppose there are two approaches: 1) understand the brain in all its complexity 2) wander upon something that seems like human cognition but isn’t (i.e. GPT)

Carmack and everyone else is taking the latter approach. Carmack may end up building something that seems intelligent — if that’s what you mean by intelligence.

Consider Chomsky’s view on current AI. He may disagree with me but he certainly disagrees with the idea that actual intelligence or something like AGI will result from current efforts.

See the chapter on deep learning in this interview with Chomsky: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cMscNuSUy0I

If you type in AI and Chomsky into YT you’ll see many relevant interviews. The web summit one might be the most recent.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#795

Post by GeorgeTirebiter » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:41 PM UTC

kubb wrote: post #466

throwaway_8989 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

HN is all about that cult of personality, we want to believe in heroic programmers (or founders) who singlehandedly change the world with their geinus clarity. Paul Graham said this, John Carmack said that and we lap it all up. It's been this way since the ancient times, and the stories of Hercules and Theseus. We mythologize these personalities, and in our mind they become demigods. But there's a reason the folk wis…

Theseus was the name of the mechanical 'learning' mouse that Claude Shannon built https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/19/138508/mighty-mo...

Also: https://youtu.be/_9_AEVQ_p74 (It would be great it some AI could upscale this...)

I had the privilege of meeting Claude, at the CMU Robotics Institute, and showed him how to use (what turned out to be) an early incarnation of of Boston Dynamics -- a hopping pogo stick. Here you can see an operator using the same control box that Claude Shannon used: https://youtu.be/mG_ZKXo6Rlg?t=34 p.s. yes, that 'operator' in the video is me.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#796

Post by dang » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:43 PM UTC

poszlem wrote: post #757

dang wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. Regardless of which you're for or against, it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34030063 .

Thank you for explaining, I will take this into account for sure. Could you let me know if my comment would be allowed to stay on the site if I only posted its first part? (and omitted the "left-wing" remark) Not trying to argue with your decision, just want to change how I write future posts.

Yes, your comment would have been fine with just the first paragraph. It's the second paragraph that broke the guidelines.

(I often mention that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - just forgot to do it in this case.)

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#797

Post by nickersonm » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:47 PM UTC

vertis wrote: post #444

mattlondon wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That term predates Reddit. https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?date=all&q=Instit...

Was going to say the same thing. I don't think it was coined on Reddit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I like your use of trends though to prove it.

It's even older; there's a decent blip in the 1830s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=institutional+...

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#798

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:48 PM UTC

Jolter wrote: post #663

tlarkworthy wrote: post #656

Seems a little off to be calling out perf metrics when the whole system hasn't found product-market fit yet

5% is a metaphor. Read that part again.

[deleted]

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#799

Post by namuol » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:49 PM UTC

monero-xmr wrote: post #649

I’m a strong believer in dictatorship at companies. Every team has someone with ultimate decision making power, as does every project with a project leader, and above teams are leaders who have authority above them, and so on. Of course there are meetings and discussions but there is always someone with the authority to make a decision that everyone has to respect. Honestly it benefits everyone. ICs like that authori…

I’m blanking on the name of the essay, but there’s a compelling argument for the only viable alternative to a Benevolent Dictator being a very thoroughly and precisely defined shared terminology of the underlying product/software system. Basically you can achieve a shared vision only by relentlessly checking the assumptions of the group and codifying everything, or using a singular visionary as the stand-in for a cohesive shared vision. Hoping someone here can share the original essay since it does a much better job than I can…

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#800

Post by snovv_crash » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:58 PM UTC

krisoft wrote: post #781

snovv_crash wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low GPU utilisation is a serious issue. Either you massively over-specced your hardware and should have chosen something cheaper and with less power consumption, or your graphics quality is far below what it could be. Let's not beat around the bush: wasted resources are expensive, in some way or another.

> Low GPU utilisation is a serious issue. Maybe? Maybe not? If you have a low GPU utilisation while loading a new level and only displaying a loading bar, that's not a serious issue. If a CAD software has a low GPU utilisation after loading that's not a serious issue. (It just means that the software GUI is written efficiently and can handle complicated assemblies.) If a chat application has a low GPU utilisation tha…

Meta has been heavily criticized on the poor quality of the graphics in VR. In this context poor GPU utilisation is a Very Serious Issue.

Carmac has been working with GPUs at a low level for 25 years. He's going to make a GPU analogy . Frankly, based on organizational dynamics, GPUs map fairly well. Work distribution, caches, warp fronts (aka 'sprints'), instruction sets.