9 ms·

I've been trying to listen to the whole thing (it's 5 hours!), and there are some really interesting moments. Albeit, a bit too much talk on old video games tha

by baby 4y ago

I've been trying to listen to the whole thing (it's 5 hours!), and there are some really interesting moments. Albeit, a bit too much talk on old video games that aren't from my generation, but I'm sure this will be interesting to some people to. What I found interesting: * he has insane hours and has never burnt out. He says that if you want to achieve big things in your life, you need to work a lot. He also says that as long as he's working, and making progress (and he always makes progress when he keeps trying, reminds me of Linus), then he can withstand his hours and pressure. * he learns a lot through reading computer science books * he is really big on simplicity, seems to appreciate Golang and its design, and he's not into metaprogramming on C++. I really like that he's focused on building things that work, and can be maintained, and not that interested in theory and advanced concepts that don't seem to bring him much. He also says he spent some time on the functional side, and that probably made him a better programmer, but he's back doing C++. * he talks about the sort of hacking community he felt part of, where you just wrote code and shared it and reused other people's code. It really feels like open source is something else, made me feel bad about all these patents, and weird licenses (even Apache 2 or MIT) and academic people whining about credits. Wish we could just share and use whatever and be happy with it :( * Agree with him, VSCode is THE IDE. It's much better than emacs IMO (I've tried using vim many times but couldn't). * 8-9 diet cokes a day. Holy fuck. That's a lot of caffein (and I'm guessing not good for the teeth)

royjacobs 4y ago
I think Carmack was mostly talking about regular Visual Studio as his IDE of choice, though. Not VSCode.
- brtkdotse 4y ago
  Visual Studio is to VSCode what car is to carpet.
  - rfrey 4y ago
    So, one is too heavy to lift and the other one flies? (agreed though. VS has been a beacon of light inside MS even in its darkest periods.)
    - iKlsR 4y ago
      Not the worst comparison. VS has enough years of cruft and legacy options that it is one of the more complex software you will ever use as a dev and with the right extension, Code could fly ;)
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  Visual studio has been a great IDE from the early 90s when I used it. (Also game/graphics dev)
  - bogwog 4y ago
    I’ve never had anything but a terrible experience with it when doing C++ Either the whole thing freezes and becomes unresponsive, or intellisense stops working, or (often) both. Sublime Text + GDB + RR is my no-bullshit setup right now and I love it. A mouse interface to GDB would be nice, but I can live without it.
- pm3003 4y ago
  Yeah, he meant VS. He even mentioned using an older version (6) as it is much faster on modern computers. Maybe he was referring to a friend of his, I don’t remember. Most Windows programmers I know (not a lot) use VS for the ease of integration with all things .NET and Microsoft.
  - imron 4y ago
    VS6 was such a great product.
    - tpmx 4y ago
      I tried out VS 2019 last year on a whim. The last time I used VS before that was in the early 2000s (probably 6.0). It was a surprisingly bad experience - weirdly slow even on a high performance PC and so much clutter by default. Tried out VS 2022 just now. First impressions are better.
      - tren 4y ago
        2022 was the first VS in 64 bit, the increase in responsiveness was enough to make me switch back from rider
        tpmx 4y ago
        It's probably due to optimizations in high level code rather than the 32/64-bit aspect, but I'm just guessing. (To get that level of slowness you really have to fuck up at a higher level.) VS seems to be a WPF app nowadays, so I assume the UI is written in C#.
        pjmlp 4y ago
        Since Visual Studio 2010.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    Obligatory Casey Muratori rant about modern Visual Studio, complete with Visual Studio 6 running in a VM: https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U
- gitfan86 4y ago
  Yes and he is talking about coding in c++
jack_pp 4y ago
> he has insane hours and has never burnt out I think there's two major things you need in order to do that. Work on what you love/want and have no/little need for socializing.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  I think the point he made was rather the opposite. He works 10-12 hours a day, 60 hours a week, 6 days a week. He needs seven to eight hours of sleep, like a normal person. He specifically mentioned that he never was much into doing all-nighters and that he experimented with working different times of the day. So he'd start in the afternoon and then continue until deep in the night when he was younger whereas having kids and a family caused him to shift to having an early start instead and run a more normal schedule. That sounds like an intense schedule for sure but not really that insane. He's not super human and just staying in shape, and well rested is what has allowed him to do this for decades on end. Work life balance and taking care of his family is just part of that deal as well. I notice that the quality of my own work is simply much better when I'm well rested and that beyond a certain point, the most productive thing is for me to simply take some rest or do something non work related. The rare case that I need to work on something late, I pay the price the next few days. It all averages out in the end in terms of productivity. Grinding away at a problem for hours is simply draining. Often those problems melt away the next morning after I sleep a bit. Your brain doesn't stop working when you do. The hard work is immersing yourself in the problem and absorbing all its facets and then calmly reflecting on all the assumptions you are making. Generally, if you are stuck you need to find out which of your assumptions it is that is wrong. I've woken up with fully formed solutions in my head for seemingly unsolvable issues or bugs that I fought with the previous day so often that I actually rely on this happening a lot these days. So, I generally stop working around 6-7 pm and I'll park harder issues until I'm well rested in the morning or after a weekend. I don't work on the weekend. The weekend is for resetting my brain. Just as important as sleep is. The most productive use of that time is allowing that brain reset to happen. Getting frustrated and stressed is counter productive. It leads to poor sleeping patterns and stuff just piles up. Take a break, relax.
  - baby 4y ago
huntoa 4y ago
It's not that much caffeine, his 3 liters of coke contains about the same as 1 liter of brewed coffee. 1 standard can of diet coke (375 ml) contains 48 mg caffeine -> 128 mg/liter. So 3 liters (8 cans) contains 384 mg caffeine. Brewed coffee contains ~400 mg/liter.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  I feel like one litre of brewed coffee is a lot of caffeine!
  - ahartmetz 4y ago
    It is! I drink one 300ml mug of strong coffee (or two of thin coffee) a day and that feels like enough for sure.
- ycombinete 4y ago
  400mg is the suggested daily limit. It is a lot of caffeine.
  - justinlloyd 4y ago
    I should probably rethink my 8 to 14 espresso shots per day then.
- baby 4y ago
  I think I would probably die if I drank 1 liter of coffee
jillesvangurp 4y ago
I listened to the first two hours on a train yesterday. I'll likely finish it later. The discussion about tools and languages was particularly interesting. You might expect John Carmack to be pretty old school and dogmatic on using e.g. C and instead it seems he has a very broad taste and experience with different languages and tools. Just a very pragmatic person that switches between doing C, python, Go and other languages. For someone that is into hyper efficient graphics code, admitting that for the vast majority of code, using a garbage collector is perfectly fine is IMHO a very pragmatic and mature attitude. He doesn't have to prove anything to anyone anymore on that front of course. VS Code is indeed a very popular IDE. The Jetbrains ecosystem is also pretty interesting. I found his comments on debuggers to be pretty striking. GDB is so hard to use that programmers avoid using it. Having a proper debugging UI changes that. He was talking about how he just runs most things in the debugger by default to see if things work as he expects. In the same way having static code analyzers tell you that, no, actually your code wasn't perfect and is full of little time-bombs that could go off at any moment is a great argument against just pretending you are Buddhist monk that only requires a pen and paper to produce perfect code. Exaggerating here of course but I know some people and that on purpose avoid using, or even learning about tools that would allow them to be more productive and better engineers.
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  He's previously done one of the fairest analyses of the state of functional programming (specifically Haskell) and its pros/cons particularly with respect to building games I've seen as well. It's very refreshing.
- baby 4y ago
  There really is a learning curve to using these tools, and the investment might not be worth it. I use GDB so unfrequently that I have to re-learn it every time I want to do something. Coupled with the fact that it's not integrated with the language (I can't run `cargo debug` or `cargo gdb` or something) and not the default on Mac (why should I relearn lldb), I end up just printing stuff instead of using it.
  - 4y ago
matwood 4y ago
Did he define 'work' during the podcast? Since he also mentions reading CS books, perhaps he isn't defining work as literally typing at the computer, but instead always improving. Think of what people could do if they took part of the 3 hours of TV watched per day and instead read a book. He's also a high level grappler (nerd worlds collide if I ever had a chance to roll with Carmack :) ), which is not an easy feat.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  He does talk about always being able to work on something interesting. Working on a different aspects of a project to keep motivated. And that definitely includes research.
  - matwood 4y ago
    Listening now. Great so far, but 5 hours will probably take me all week.
mariusmg 4y ago
>Agree with him, VSCode is THE IDE. Lol, he said Visual Studio is THE IDE, not VSCode. Compared with VS, VSCode is a toy.
- baby 4y ago
  > Compared with VS, VSCode is a toy Is it still true today? I don't really do C++ so I have no use for VS, but I have a hard time imagining not having access to everything to do C++ dev with VSCode
  - bergheim 4y ago
    Yes. If you are doing something serious in C++, VSCode does not hold a candle to VS.
api 4y ago
> It really feels like open source is something else Open source was like that and was created to be like that. Parts of it still are, but much of it has degenerated into fiefdoms and lots of developers of larger open source projects have been soured by the prospect of just being free labor for surveillance capitalist mega-corps. The good corners of the OSS world tend to be small communities doing interesting things. It's just like how the small topical subreddits are still okay while the big areas on Reddit are complete trash.
justin66 4y ago
> 8-9 diet cokes a day. Holy fuck. That's a lot of caffein (and I'm guessing not good for the teeth) It's not that much caffeine and it won't do anything to your teeth. > Agree with him, VSCode is THE IDE. Nothing in that interview suggests he's ever used VSCode.
- Ciantic 4y ago
  > It's not that much caffeine and it won't do anything to your teeth. I'm sorry, but diet coke (and most sugar free drinks) causes dental erosion. It's not the sugar that causes it, but usually the citrus acid. Even some flavored sparkly waters have citrus acid in them.
  - justin66 4y ago
    Ah! That’s interesting. I guess my only knowledge in this area (other than the big thing - sugar and corn syrup are really the enemy, I would have thought) is that the magic ingredient that differentiates Diet Coke and Coke Zero is citric acid. I never thought about the tooth decay angle of that.
- mikedelago 4y ago
  Why wouldn't it be bad for his teeth? It's my understanding that soda is typically acidic, and after you drink it the soda coats your enamel, in turn wearing it down.
  - baby 4y ago
    I once read that soda is one the worst thing you can do for your teeth, hope I'm not helping propagate a falsehood
- fantod 4y ago
  He does discuss VSCode towards the end of that clip.
- pzh 4y ago
  The quantity of artificial sweeteners (aspartame, sucralose, etc.) in that many cokes, many of which were shown to be carcinogenic in experiments with rats, can’t be good for him…
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Arisaka1 4y ago
On the subject of books, there's an advisory email Carmack wrote to a kid years ago, telling him that his methods may be outdated compared to the modern advances in learning, but when he studied books he would read multiple resources describing the same thing because sometimes one resource may not transmitting information in a way that clicks to him. I remember how insane it sounded to me that someone as talented as Carmack would look up for a second or a third resource describing a concept just because he couldn't clearly understand it on first try because, contrast to how we react when a student fails to grasp pointers. Our kneejerk reaction to someone not understanding a concept on first try would be "You want to re-read that again? Guess you're not talented. And you keep making mistakes after an hour? Sigh you're a lost case". And here you have literally Carmack himself not caring how many books he has to reference, because all that it matters is that it will eventually click, he will own it, he will make progress and that's all that matters.
- drbojingle 4y ago
  The talent was realizing his challange and finding a way to deal with it.
- VogonPoetry 4y ago
  I think that a lot of technical books are written from the perspective of already knowing the material or expecting a particular learning path. A lot of important details or framing get left out. The technique of reading multiple sources is very clever because it can fill in these defects - I think I might have subconsciously done this in the past and not fully realized why it worked.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
it is tough on the teeth, pepsi and coke are as far as I can tell the worse with phosphoric acid and around 2.5 pH and on the order of stomach acid. Obviously -volume- counts too. however at least he's avoiding sugar which also contributes to building up a lot of plaque which is a constant supply of acid rather than a diet coke which the saliva would neutralize pH up pretty quickly back to 7
snowpiercer 4y ago
How is it possible that he has never burned out before?? Doesn't sound human to me

by baby 4y ago

royjacobs 4y ago

I think Carmack was mostly talking about regular Visual Studio as his IDE of choice, though. Not VSCode.

brtkdotse 4y ago
Visual Studio is to VSCode what car is to carpet.
- rfrey 4y ago
  So, one is too heavy to lift and the other one flies? (agreed though. VS has been a beacon of light inside MS even in its darkest periods.)
  - iKlsR 4y ago
    Not the worst comparison. VS has enough years of cruft and legacy options that it is one of the more complex software you will ever use as a dev and with the right extension, Code could fly ;)
jbverschoor 4y ago
Visual studio has been a great IDE from the early 90s when I used it. (Also game/graphics dev)
- bogwog 4y ago
  I’ve never had anything but a terrible experience with it when doing C++ Either the whole thing freezes and becomes unresponsive, or intellisense stops working, or (often) both. Sublime Text + GDB + RR is my no-bullshit setup right now and I love it. A mouse interface to GDB would be nice, but I can live without it.
pm3003 4y ago
Yeah, he meant VS. He even mentioned using an older version (6) as it is much faster on modern computers. Maybe he was referring to a friend of his, I don’t remember. Most Windows programmers I know (not a lot) use VS for the ease of integration with all things .NET and Microsoft.
- imron 4y ago
  VS6 was such a great product.
  - tpmx 4y ago
    I tried out VS 2019 last year on a whim. The last time I used VS before that was in the early 2000s (probably 6.0). It was a surprisingly bad experience - weirdly slow even on a high performance PC and so much clutter by default. Tried out VS 2022 just now. First impressions are better.
    - tren 4y ago
      2022 was the first VS in 64 bit, the increase in responsiveness was enough to make me switch back from rider
      - tpmx 4y ago
        It's probably due to optimizations in high level code rather than the 32/64-bit aspect, but I'm just guessing. (To get that level of slowness you really have to fuck up at a higher level.) VS seems to be a WPF app nowadays, so I assume the UI is written in C#.
        pjmlp 4y ago
        Since Visual Studio 2010.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  Obligatory Casey Muratori rant about modern Visual Studio, complete with Visual Studio 6 running in a VM: https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U
gitfan86 4y ago
Yes and he is talking about coding in c++

jack_pp 4y ago

> he has insane hours and has never burnt out I think there's two major things you need in order to do that. Work on what you love/want and have no/little need for socializing.

jillesvangurp 4y ago
I think the point he made was rather the opposite. He works 10-12 hours a day, 60 hours a week, 6 days a week. He needs seven to eight hours of sleep, like a normal person. He specifically mentioned that he never was much into doing all-nighters and that he experimented with working different times of the day. So he'd start in the afternoon and then continue until deep in the night when he was younger whereas having kids and a family caused him to shift to having an early start instead and run a more normal schedule. That sounds like an intense schedule for sure but not really that insane. He's not super human and just staying in shape, and well rested is what has allowed him to do this for decades on end. Work life balance and taking care of his family is just part of that deal as well. I notice that the quality of my own work is simply much better when I'm well rested and that beyond a certain point, the most productive thing is for me to simply take some rest or do something non work related. The rare case that I need to work on something late, I pay the price the next few days. It all averages out in the end in terms of productivity. Grinding away at a problem for hours is simply draining. Often those problems melt away the next morning after I sleep a bit. Your brain doesn't stop working when you do. The hard work is immersing yourself in the problem and absorbing all its facets and then calmly reflecting on all the assumptions you are making. Generally, if you are stuck you need to find out which of your assumptions it is that is wrong. I've woken up with fully formed solutions in my head for seemingly unsolvable issues or bugs that I fought with the previous day so often that I actually rely on this happening a lot these days. So, I generally stop working around 6-7 pm and I'll park harder issues until I'm well rested in the morning or after a weekend. I don't work on the weekend. The weekend is for resetting my brain. Just as important as sleep is. The most productive use of that time is allowing that brain reset to happen. Getting frustrated and stressed is counter productive. It leads to poor sleeping patterns and stuff just piles up. Take a break, relax.
- baby 4y ago

huntoa 4y ago

It's not that much caffeine, his 3 liters of coke contains about the same as 1 liter of brewed coffee. 1 standard can of diet coke (375 ml) contains 48 mg caffeine -> 128 mg/liter. So 3 liters (8 cans) contains 384 mg caffeine. Brewed coffee contains ~400 mg/liter.

LAC-Tech 4y ago
I feel like one litre of brewed coffee is a lot of caffeine!
- ahartmetz 4y ago
  It is! I drink one 300ml mug of strong coffee (or two of thin coffee) a day and that feels like enough for sure.
ycombinete 4y ago
400mg is the suggested daily limit. It is a lot of caffeine.
- justinlloyd 4y ago
  I should probably rethink my 8 to 14 espresso shots per day then.
baby 4y ago
I think I would probably die if I drank 1 liter of coffee

jillesvangurp 4y ago

I listened to the first two hours on a train yesterday. I'll likely finish it later. The discussion about tools and languages was particularly interesting. You might expect John Carmack to be pretty old school and dogmatic on using e.g. C and instead it seems he has a very broad taste and experience with different languages and tools. Just a very pragmatic person that switches between doing C, python, Go and other languages. For someone that is into hyper efficient graphics code, admitting that for the vast majority of code, using a garbage collector is perfectly fine is IMHO a very pragmatic and mature attitude. He doesn't have to prove anything to anyone anymore on that front of course. VS Code is indeed a very popular IDE. The Jetbrains ecosystem is also pretty interesting. I found his comments on debuggers to be pretty striking. GDB is so hard to use that programmers avoid using it. Having a proper debugging UI changes that. He was talking about how he just runs most things in the debugger by default to see if things work as he expects. In the same way having static code analyzers tell you that, no, actually your code wasn't perfect and is full of little time-bombs that could go off at any moment is a great argument against just pretending you are Buddhist monk that only requires a pen and paper to produce perfect code. Exaggerating here of course but I know some people and that on purpose avoid using, or even learning about tools that would allow them to be more productive and better engineers.

bigDinosaur 4y ago
He's previously done one of the fairest analyses of the state of functional programming (specifically Haskell) and its pros/cons particularly with respect to building games I've seen as well. It's very refreshing.
baby 4y ago
There really is a learning curve to using these tools, and the investment might not be worth it. I use GDB so unfrequently that I have to re-learn it every time I want to do something. Coupled with the fact that it's not integrated with the language (I can't run `cargo debug` or `cargo gdb` or something) and not the default on Mac (why should I relearn lldb), I end up just printing stuff instead of using it.
- 4y ago

matwood 4y ago

Did he define 'work' during the podcast? Since he also mentions reading CS books, perhaps he isn't defining work as literally typing at the computer, but instead always improving. Think of what people could do if they took part of the 3 hours of TV watched per day and instead read a book. He's also a high level grappler (nerd worlds collide if I ever had a chance to roll with Carmack :) ), which is not an easy feat.

bryanlarsen 4y ago
He does talk about always being able to work on something interesting. Working on a different aspects of a project to keep motivated. And that definitely includes research.
- matwood 4y ago
  Listening now. Great so far, but 5 hours will probably take me all week.

mariusmg 4y ago

>Agree with him, VSCode is THE IDE. Lol, he said Visual Studio is THE IDE, not VSCode. Compared with VS, VSCode is a toy.

baby 4y ago
> Compared with VS, VSCode is a toy Is it still true today? I don't really do C++ so I have no use for VS, but I have a hard time imagining not having access to everything to do C++ dev with VSCode
- bergheim 4y ago
  Yes. If you are doing something serious in C++, VSCode does not hold a candle to VS.

api 4y ago

> It really feels like open source is something else Open source was like that and was created to be like that. Parts of it still are, but much of it has degenerated into fiefdoms and lots of developers of larger open source projects have been soured by the prospect of just being free labor for surveillance capitalist mega-corps. The good corners of the OSS world tend to be small communities doing interesting things. It's just like how the small topical subreddits are still okay while the big areas on Reddit are complete trash.

justin66 4y ago

> 8-9 diet cokes a day. Holy fuck. That's a lot of caffein (and I'm guessing not good for the teeth) It's not that much caffeine and it won't do anything to your teeth. > Agree with him, VSCode is THE IDE. Nothing in that interview suggests he's ever used VSCode.

Ciantic 4y ago
> It's not that much caffeine and it won't do anything to your teeth. I'm sorry, but diet coke (and most sugar free drinks) causes dental erosion. It's not the sugar that causes it, but usually the citrus acid. Even some flavored sparkly waters have citrus acid in them.
- justin66 4y ago
  Ah! That’s interesting. I guess my only knowledge in this area (other than the big thing - sugar and corn syrup are really the enemy, I would have thought) is that the magic ingredient that differentiates Diet Coke and Coke Zero is citric acid. I never thought about the tooth decay angle of that.
mikedelago 4y ago
Why wouldn't it be bad for his teeth? It's my understanding that soda is typically acidic, and after you drink it the soda coats your enamel, in turn wearing it down.
- baby 4y ago
  I once read that soda is one the worst thing you can do for your teeth, hope I'm not helping propagate a falsehood
fantod 4y ago
He does discuss VSCode towards the end of that clip.
pzh 4y ago
The quantity of artificial sweeteners (aspartame, sucralose, etc.) in that many cokes, many of which were shown to be carcinogenic in experiments with rats, can’t be good for him…

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Arisaka1 4y ago

On the subject of books, there's an advisory email Carmack wrote to a kid years ago, telling him that his methods may be outdated compared to the modern advances in learning, but when he studied books he would read multiple resources describing the same thing because sometimes one resource may not transmitting information in a way that clicks to him. I remember how insane it sounded to me that someone as talented as Carmack would look up for a second or a third resource describing a concept just because he couldn't clearly understand it on first try because, contrast to how we react when a student fails to grasp pointers. Our kneejerk reaction to someone not understanding a concept on first try would be "You want to re-read that again? Guess you're not talented. And you keep making mistakes after an hour? Sigh you're a lost case". And here you have literally Carmack himself not caring how many books he has to reference, because all that it matters is that it will eventually click, he will own it, he will make progress and that's all that matters.

drbojingle 4y ago
The talent was realizing his challange and finding a way to deal with it.
VogonPoetry 4y ago
I think that a lot of technical books are written from the perspective of already knowing the material or expecting a particular learning path. A lot of important details or framing get left out. The technique of reading multiple sources is very clever because it can fill in these defects - I think I might have subconsciously done this in the past and not fully realized why it worked.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

it is tough on the teeth, pepsi and coke are as far as I can tell the worse with phosphoric acid and around 2.5 pH and on the order of stomach acid. Obviously -volume- counts too. however at least he's avoiding sugar which also contributes to building up a lot of plaque which is a constant supply of acid rather than a diet coke which the saliva would neutralize pH up pretty quickly back to 7

snowpiercer 4y ago

How is it possible that he has never burned out before?? Doesn't sound human to me