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There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

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Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#201

Post by mrhottakes »

MyHonestOpinon wrote: post #164
_doctor_love wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a great admirer of the late Dr. Richard Hamming and he said basically the same thing. Math and science education is important, but humanities is missing for most engineers to their great detriment. I have a BA in Economics though I am a 20-year software veteran and I can honestly say that this degree has probably helped my career more than any CS knowledge I have. My family was also heavily into the humanities i…

I always thought that an Engineering degree with an MBA is a very good combination. You get very practical, useful things when you are younger. Once you have acquired enough life and work experience then you can appreciate the subtleties of cases that you study in an MBA.

Two degrees with practically zero education in the liberal arts, humanities, or philosophy. You're missing a big chunk there.

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#202

Post by Chu4eeno »

palmotea wrote: post #135
gtowey wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wisdom is not appreciated in our industry. Everyone in tech with a modicum of status or power thinks they got there because they're smarter than everyone else and there is nothing of value to be learned from others. Thus, our leaders blunder in to the same mistakes everyone else is making over and over again. We never learn.

> Wisdom is not appreciated in our industry. Everyone in tech with a modicum of status or power thinks they got there because they're smarter than everyone else and there is nothing of value to be learned from others. Thus, our leaders blunder in to the same mistakes everyone else is making over and over again. We never learn. It's not just people "with a modicum of status or power," it's almost everywhere in tech. J…

Mocking effective altruism is not really a difficult or complex philosophic endeavor though, even without pointing out how it's old ideas for a new audience.

And most philosophers aren't exactly immune to the quasi-Gell-Mann-Dunning-Kruger effect that plagues engineers.

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#203

Post by vasac »

AtNightWeCode wrote: post #106
CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the original thread Carmack was replying to, Sandy Petersen said Q3 was the only other great game they produced after that: https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959226489744192... Honestly I think Doom is where it came together the best, Quake was technically better (of course) but it was not a better game.

Quake was better for multiplayer though. Personally I enjoyed Quake 2 the most. Quake arena was designed for multiplayer but you had to practice with the cheating bots so it was kinda boring.

IIRC, my problem with Quake multiplayer was that one node acted as the server, so when I connected to a friend’s computer via modem, my lag was a serious disadvantage (neither my friend nor I ever won as clients). Doom, on the other hand, simply froze both computers whenever there was a communication issue.

Although, to be fair, we played Doom over an RS-232 cable - hauling a PC across the city every weekend was a testament to our love for the game :)

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#204

Post by mrhottakes »

ninkendo wrote: post #111
phaser wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could. But they rather get their "wisdom" from Steve Jobs trivia romanticizing the grind and being an asshole. Like Elon Musk, who once wrote in a company-wide email in 2018: "Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value"

> Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value I’d be interested to hear more about the context for this, since it sounds perfectly reasonable, enough that it’s triggering some cognitive dissonance with my general hatred for Musk. It’s a truism in most companies that meetings tend to have too many people for no good reason. It’s just too easy to add extra people “just in c…

What if you're needed at the end of the meeting but not the beginning?

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#205

Post by Chu4eeno »

a34729t wrote: post #143
_doctor_love wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a great admirer of the late Dr. Richard Hamming and he said basically the same thing. Math and science education is important, but humanities is missing for most engineers to their great detriment. I have a BA in Economics though I am a 20-year software veteran and I can honestly say that this degree has probably helped my career more than any CS knowledge I have. My family was also heavily into the humanities i…

Humanities in academia is just as bad as human factors. The biggest thing that can help is having a shitty low paying job or two early in one's career. And then working formal a stable, normal company where there is real mentorship.

The biggest problem with humanities in academia is that they sometimes seem allergic to epistemic humility (which I guess was Feynman's critique of parts of the humanities).

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#206

Post by TeMPOraL »

pgl wrote: post #186
JeremyNT wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rest of the context leading up to "Sorry, Sandy" has me a little confused, can anybody who knows more explain this bit? > One real problem that I don’t accept the blame for is that we were insisting that level designers be not just game designers, but also have strong visual design esthetics. They needed to make things that not only played well, but looked awesome, and it got more challenging as the technology pr…

The missing context is that he was quote-tweeting a thread by Sandy Petersen titled "How Quake ruined id software": https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/2069592209645785294 > How Quake ruined id Software. > There has been a lot of praise of Quake of late, with its 30th anniversary, and it's deserved. Quake is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design. I worked on it, and everything came together almost perfectly…

> ... [thread continues] ...

That's the interesting part that Twitter no longer lets us see without logging in...

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#207

Post by georgeecollins »

tejohnso wrote: post #4

Quake III Arena was pretty entertaining. Doesn't seem like it came from a company that had been ruined for years. I definitely noticed something around the Doom 3 release many years after Quake III Arena. The new game just didn't seem to have the same industry pushing, genre changing energy. Or maybe I was just older and had moved on, and didn't care as much.

Quake III Arena was super fun!

I think the point is that Quake (1) came out within months of Activision launching Mech Warrior 2, Blizzard doing Warcraft, and even a couple years before Valve did Half Life. And Quake / Doom were so much bigger.

They had terrific success but if you were handicapping US video game companies in 1995 it would be like EA, iD (and maybe Sierra Online!). Point is they were way ahead at that point.

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#208

Post by carabiner »

ameliaquining wrote: post #104
tombert wrote: post #21

One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom. I have no idea how accurate it is, but I did leave with the impression that John Carmack is an amazingly smart guy, who also has the potential to be a colossal asshole. I was only five when Quake came out, so obviously I couldn't really have worked on it, but I'm pretty sure that (if Masters of Doom is to be believed) I would have probably told Carmack to go fu…

Both Carmack and Romero have praised Masters of Doom as a good picture of what things were like, which seems like a good sign since a lot of it is about a time when the two were at odds.

Yeah Romero said they signed an agreement saying that it was accurate: https://qr.ae/pFH291

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#209

Post by Gracana »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #206
pgl wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The missing context is that he was quote-tweeting a thread by Sandy Petersen titled "How Quake ruined id software": https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/2069592209645785294 > How Quake ruined id Software. > There has been a lot of praise of Quake of late, with its 30th anniversary, and it's deserved. Quake is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design. I worked on it, and everything came together almost perfectly…

> ... [thread continues] ... That's the interesting part that Twitter no longer lets us see without logging in...

https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959220964578529...

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#210

Post by tracerbulletx »

jurgenaut23 wrote: post #148
gtowey wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wisdom is not appreciated in our industry. Everyone in tech with a modicum of status or power thinks they got there because they're smarter than everyone else and there is nothing of value to be learned from others. Thus, our leaders blunder in to the same mistakes everyone else is making over and over again. We never learn.

This is so true. It is a direct result of the American dream and the (misdirected) idea that one’s success is a direct (and inevitable) consequence of hard work, talent and intelligence. Flash news: it is not, and success is massively dependent on luck and initial conditions. Dumb, lazy a$$holes with a rich/powerful dad will beat smart, hard working poor bastards almost every time, barring some black swan events. Now…

Yeah every year almost 100 people win over a million dollars in a lottery. That's a lot of counter examples, but I don't recommend you make winning the lottery your financial strategy.
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