Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#61

Post by orojackson » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 3:53 PM UTC

Pannoniae wrote: post #49

FacelessJim wrote: post #22

Terrific presentation. But I have a comment: His dismissal of the argument Knuth makes regarding the hot loops could have been explored a bit better. I found it weird he didn’t mention the difference of types of programs of then vs now. Even today, in scientific code it is still absolutely the case a lot of the time that a huge chunk of the runtime comes from a single very very hot loop. It might be hidden in a libra…

Being I/O bound is usually a result of bad engineering practices though. If you're I/O bound, that either means the problem doesn't require much computation - which is possible but fairly rare, or more likely that your code is so unoptimised that barely any computation gets carried out while your code is waiting on memory/disk/network. "I can't do anything because my program is I/O-bound" is more of an excuse / menta…

ETL processes are heavily I/O bound, especially when you're trying to shuttle data from one enterprise system to another enterprise system. It's also common when the culture of data exchange from the regulator all the way down to the companies doing the actual work is batch processing where large amounts of data are shared once a day as opposed to real time. Excel spreadsheets are the norm, not the exception. Requests for data to be sent over via XML or JSON are mainly because my employer wanted to make it easier to process the data ourselves, but the regulators actually expect spreadsheets.

Most of the stuff I work on is almost exclusively network I/O bound. I wouldn't say it's a _result_ of bad engineering practices, though. One group decided on a particular system that's also public-facing, and the group I actually support prefers a more internal-facing system. It also doesn't help that the budgets for both projects are completely separate and firewalled from each other by law. Growth opportunities don't apply here because I deal with a captive market with legally-forced customers.

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#62

Post by gessha » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 3:57 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #9

Personally I'm quite sure this is super interesting, but I don't really have 3 hours to listen to this, even 1.5h at 2x speed is too much. I would very much prefer something written down, so I could absorb this at my own pace. I know, gift horse, but still.

It’s on YouTube, pull the transcript and format it with an LLM. If there’s no transcript, there’s Whisper. All of this can be done with local models too.

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#63

Post by ggdG » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #9

Personally I'm quite sure this is super interesting, but I don't really have 3 hours to listen to this, even 1.5h at 2x speed is too much. I would very much prefer something written down, so I could absorb this at my own pace. I know, gift horse, but still.

I asked my clanker to summarize it for me:

https://rentry.co/2ttr46r9

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#64

Post by fantasizr » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

I took notice when he breaks down the ethics of gen ai as it pertains to online theft, that AI broke the natural order of putting content online where you'd trade exposure for use https://youtu.be/bjO-s4rNPlY?si=uAtBTb6V_Sw1puBU&t=2244

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#65

Post by layla5alive » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

Almondsetat wrote: post #15

I think Casey is currently the most informed person to make a series of books or articles summarizing the history of SW Engineering, all the lessons learned and forgotten, and all the good stuff that was published and still hasn't gained traction in the practice

You think there aren't other people equally or more qualified? I mean Casey may be the most visible person with those qualifications - but lack of visibility doesn't imply lack of competence, plenty of brilliant people work in the background..

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#66

Post by Almondsetat » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC

layla5alive wrote: post #65

Almondsetat wrote: post #15

I think Casey is currently the most informed person to make a series of books or articles summarizing the history of SW Engineering, all the lessons learned and forgotten, and all the good stuff that was published and still hasn't gained traction in the practice

You think there aren't other people equally or more qualified? I mean Casey may be the most visible person with those qualifications - but lack of visibility doesn't imply lack of competence, plenty of brilliant people work in the background..

Feel free to point to anyone doing these deep dives that specifically tackle the lost knowledge of the early decades of computer science and the ideas that have not yet come to fruition despite being extremely old

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#67

Post by tialaramex » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 4:06 PM UTC

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #58

inigyou wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they? Casey programmed the walk monster for Jon's game, a brute force tester to make sure you could always walk both ways and never get stuck, instead of building the walking system using a nav mesh. There was one place you could walk where you weren't supposed to, despite the walk monster, that would have been obvious if it was a nav mesh.

John Carmack is a legendary game programmer. If I can identify a superior algorithmic approach to something in Doom, does that disqualify Carmack's credentials?

First I think I'd want to see you identify a superior algorithm known when Doom shipped and then we can have that discussion about who's credentials should be disqualified.

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#68

Post by brewmarche » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 4:06 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #5

tl;dr the saying is that "premature optimisation is the root of all evil", and Casey burrows into contemporary data to show that really although the claim was 3% of the code takes up 90% of the runtime even then it was more likely 4% takes 50%. The best thing you could take away from this lecture is something a reasonable person should take away from the original "root of all evil" saying anyway. Measure. Measure. Me…

In other videos Casey argues against the profile–fix–repeat workflow (I’m not saying that you necessarily meant this by measuring), instead arguing for estimating the theoretical maximum, then trying to get close enough to it. His argument is that the former might push you towards a local minimum without realising that you could do much better

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#69

Post by sirwhinesalot » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 4:08 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #50

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legendary games programmer thing is a meme. Casey is professionally best known for his work at RAD game tools (a highly successful middleware provider for game development back in the day), not games he himself developed. What he is most highly regarded for is his teaching, particularly the Handmade Hero series on YouTube, which various programmers directly attribute as being responsible for their own professiona…

He mostly evangelizes non-pessimal software. He advocates that your program should only be a small factor like 3x slower than the hypothetical optimum - instead of 10000x slower as today's software often is. He compared Visual C++ 6's debugger on hardware from the time to current Visual Studio's debugger on current hardware, and found the former much faster when performing the exact same tasks on the exact same proje…

I have recently gotten a 45x on a shitty vibe coded Python project by using mypyc (2x), replacing datastructures with more CPU-friendly alternatives (15x) and using some smarter heuristics rather than just brute force on top of that (45x total).

And I never left Python, the slowest language around.

AI is only going to make the problem worse unless you know what to look for.

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#70

Post by dgellow » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 4:09 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #67

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John Carmack is a legendary game programmer. If I can identify a superior algorithmic approach to something in Doom, does that disqualify Carmack's credentials?

First I think I'd want to see you identify a superior algorithm known when Doom shipped and then we can have that discussion about who's credentials should be disqualified.

I think you’re both saying the same thing