John Carmack Leaves Meta • Hacker News Board

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#871

Post by bb88 » Sun, Dec 18, 2022, 2:31 AM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #837

richliss wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with someone who was a bona fide development genius about 10 years ago and he was a CTO and co-founder at the time and considered himself to be able to input into any conversation with people who were domain experts in fields that he wasn't. 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 computer…

What’s wrong with Arial? I mean I know it is disliked by typography fans because it is a ripoff of the popular Helvetica. But like, moral concerns aside or whatever, as a slightly worse ripoff of a good and popular typeface, it is unsurprisingly fairly visually appealing… It seems like a reasonable product decision given that most people don’t care about typeface history.

I find Arial slightly discomforting, because the kerning is not as nice as with Helvetica. Helvetica feels "denser".

But more to the point, for a corporate logo, Arial feels like a cheap knock off to the more polished Helvetica. You can see this yourself, by looking at corporate existing corporate logos designed in helvetica and then redesigned in Arial.

https://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/

Admittedly this is personal preference in the end, but I feel like if HR is going to give someone bad news, they're going to do it in Arial. If Apple is going to release a life changing technology, they're going to do it in Helvetica.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#872

Post by outworlder » Sun, Dec 18, 2022, 2:32 AM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #837

richliss wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with someone who was a bona fide development genius about 10 years ago and he was a CTO and co-founder at the time and considered himself to be able to input into any conversation with people who were domain experts in fields that he wasn't. 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 computer…

What’s wrong with Arial? I mean I know it is disliked by typography fans because it is a ripoff of the popular Helvetica. But like, moral concerns aside or whatever, as a slightly worse ripoff of a good and popular typeface, it is unsurprisingly fairly visually appealing… It seems like a reasonable product decision given that most people don’t care about typeface history.

It's a typeface that was designed to be legible in monitors, more than two decades ago. There are better choices today.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#873

Post by hajile » Sun, Dec 18, 2022, 2:44 AM UTC

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #570

kubb wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

More than that, I think it's important to remember that no one, even a technologist as strong as Carmack, is going to get more right than wrong. Carmack has been a huge inspiration for me over the years. I grew up eagerly reading his plan files. But if we look at the big picture, a lot of his big calls haven't in fact worked out. His vision for the future of graphics was to stick closer to the original OpenGL state m…

> Carmack's ideas around sparse voxel trees were really interesting to me at the time, but now with hindsight I can see he totally misunderstood what artists want/need. They don't want to uniquely paint every bit of the game world, they want tools that let them use instancing and smart materials/shapes. In comparison Unreal's Nanite gets this totally right. Artist productivity is the key constraint in both film and games.

Aren't voxels and instances/shapes orthogonal? Do artists really care if the shapes are textures or pictures wrapped on triangles or pictures wrapped on voxels?

The real argument for Voxels is analogous to the argument for raytracing. It is more accurate at describing how the world works, but we currently don't have the computational power to do it in anything close to realtime in advanced games -- even with lots of optimizations.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#874

Post by bee_rider » Sun, Dec 18, 2022, 2:54 AM UTC

bb88 wrote: post #871

bee_rider wrote: post #837

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with Arial? I mean I know it is disliked by typography fans because it is a ripoff of the popular Helvetica. But like, moral concerns aside or whatever, as a slightly worse ripoff of a good and popular typeface, it is unsurprisingly fairly visually appealing… It seems like a reasonable product decision given that most people don’t care about typeface history.

I find Arial slightly discomforting, because the kerning is not as nice as with Helvetica. Helvetica feels "denser". But more to the point, for a corporate logo, Arial feels like a cheap knock off to the more polished Helvetica. You can see this yourself, by looking at corporate existing corporate logos designed in helvetica and then redesigned in Arial. https://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/ Admittedly this is pe…

I should have thought more about the experiment. I was trying to identify the helvetica ones, looking for example for logos that looked slightly unusual or janky.

I guess it would fit your point a little more if I just looked for whichever I thought was more aesthetically pleasing.

Anyway, I got about 50% (accidentally closed the window, I think it may have been 51%?) so at least if I was the customer, the company would not seem to gain any advantage from licensing the superior font.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#875

Post by nopenopenopeno » Sun, Dec 18, 2022, 3:00 AM UTC

throwaway_8989 wrote: post #452

Arjuna wrote: post #111

”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…

It would be slightly easier to take you seriously if you could spell correctly.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#876

Post by cleak » Sun, Dec 18, 2022, 3:09 AM UTC

throwaway_8989 wrote: post #452

Arjuna wrote: post #111

”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…

FWIW, my interactions with Carmack have shown him to be extremely pragmatic when it comes to tech. Going quickly from “we absolutely shouldn’t do that” to “ok it makes sense in that context”.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#877

Post by ugh123 » Sun, Dec 18, 2022, 3:11 AM UTC

From his tweets..

>I see no reason to expect that Meta could build a better CPU/GPU than Qualcomm (at much lower volumes!), and there isn't as much opportunity for full custom special units in VR as people think. This leads people to propose lots of MR features, which are of unproven value. https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1603936133632905216...

I wonder if John is just not a believer in MR (mixed reality) that this is what actually led to him leaving. I could see him advocating strongly for pure VR, as its his bread-and-butter and where he probably believes is the most innovation. MR presents challenges and ideas he might not be well suited for.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#878

Post by CamperBob2 » Sun, Dec 18, 2022, 3:12 AM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #750

gompertz wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Perhaps the poster is trying to befuddle identification of their main account through stylography? One can get quite paranoid on the internet, you know. (I am not a dog).

Likely. I can't find it now, but there was an HN story not long ago where someone used fairly rudimentary techniques to identify former/alt HN accounts based on stylometric similarity. It worked VERY well.

If I were going to post from a throwaway account for some reason, I would probably launder it through an intermediate language on Google Translate for one or two cycles. Otherwise, if I didn't bother with that, I'd certainly scatter some intentional errors here and there that I don't usually make.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#879

Post by aswanson » Sun, Dec 18, 2022, 3:19 AM UTC

richliss wrote: post #534

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…

I worked with someone who was a bona fide development genius about 10 years ago and he was a CTO and co-founder at the time and considered himself to be able to input into any conversation with people who were domain experts in fields that he wasn't. 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 computer…

It's hilarious the CTO was enforcing corporate logo aesthetics. Talk about nanomanagement. Sheesh.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#880

Post by CamperBob2 » Sun, Dec 18, 2022, 3:25 AM UTC

comfypotato wrote: post #516

iforgotpassword wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted

Mobile devices with clunky resistive touchscreens come to mind. The iPhone was hardly the first "smartphone," but Jobs's key insight was to have people sitting by the river waiting for decent touchscreen technology to come floating by. When capacitive multitouch happened, it was a classic example of apparent "good luck" being equal to "preparation meets opportunity." Musk is obviously trying to camp the same spawning grounds with Neuralink.

Teletext might be another example, as the predecessor to the WWW. Putting a lot of money into advancing Teletext development would have resulted in WebTV at best, and more likely just an expensive waste of time.

Any of dozens of personal computer models in the 1980s, some quite advanced, that weren't made by Apple or IBM.

Navigation and infotainment in cars -- Buick's early CRT touchscreen and Honda's "electric gyrocator" for navigation come to mind. There was no point trying to do either of those things at the time.

Minidisc as an early embodiment of advanced DSP techniques for lossy audio compression. ATRAC could have been MP3 but wasn't, because Sony.

Analog laserdiscs as a home video format. It was the right basic idea, and boasted some exotic technology under the hood -- but disc-based A/V needed to wait for digital techniques before it really made sense.

Not hard to come up with examples that answer this question, for sure.