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I followed his posts internally before he left. He was strict about resource waste. Hand tracking would break constantly and he brought metrics to his posts. Hi
by jamra 1y ago
I followed his posts internally before he left. He was strict about resource waste. Hand tracking would break constantly and he brought metrics to his posts. His whole point was that Apple has hardware nailed down and it’ll be efficient software that will be the differentiator. The bloat at Meta was the result of empire building.
- Fade_Dance 1y agoI remember watching Carmack at a convention 15 years ago. He took a short sabbatical and came back with ID Tech 3 on an iPhone, and it still looks amazing well over a decade later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52hMWMWKAMk&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52hMWMWKAMk&t=1s This is a guy who figures that what he wants to do most with his 3 free weekends is to port his latest, greatest engine to a Cortex-A8. Leading corporate strategy? Maybe not. But Carmack on efficiency? Just do it.
- markus_zhang 1y agoImpressive. JC is always one of the engineers I look up to and read up to when depressed. John Carmack, David Cutler, Tom West, Cameron Zwarich, etc. There are about maybe 50 of them.
- Fade_Dance 1y agoCarmack and Jim Keller for me. Hardware engineering for the latter!
- markus_zhang 1y agoHW is kinda too magical for me at this age :)
- jkestner 1y agoWhere are the good war stories on Keller?
- morganw 1y agoComputer History Museum interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh8nhK7WS80 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh8nhK7WS80 Worked on DEC Alpha, AMD K7 & K8, Broadcom, P.A. Semi, was in turn purchased by Apple. Jim spent four years at Apple before first returning to AMD, then on to Tesla, Intel and finally Tenstorrent. Keller keynoting TSMC's 2022 Open Innovation Summit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32CRYenTcdw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32CRYenTcdw
- cherrycherry98 1y agoTim Sweeney of Epic is up there for me too.
- markus_zhang 1y agoI’d really love to hear his story from the beginning. I believe his first published game was a Blue Disk one, ZZT, in 1991, and he went forward to write the Unreal engine which was released in 1998. People like Tim and John really could bag a huge amount of knowledge in half a decade.
- rand593843 1y agoPlease name them all. Would love to read and watch their content. I usually come across a decade later and like, whaaat.. how did i miss this. Man i could have had better time watching them instead of doom scrolling.
- osullivj 1y agoZachary's Showstopper book is a great account of Dave Cutler and WinNT.
- torginus 1y agoThe quality you can achieve with simple painted textures and computed lightmaps never ceases to impress.
- ezoe 1y agoAt that time, Rage was delayed forever I consider it vaporware, falling the same category was Half-Life 3 or Duke Nukem Forever. Still, I saw this demo at that time and I felt it was impressive considering the toy level performance of 2010's smartphone.
- influx 1y agoI followed his posts internally too. It's amazing how many people were arguing against fucking John Carmack. What a waste of talent.
- ignoramous 1y ago> were arguing against fucking John Carmack I am sure Carmack himself encourages debates and discussions. Lionizing one person can't be expected of every employee (unless that person is also the founder or the company is tiny).
- Aeolun 1y agoCan’t really imagine a better person to argue against?
- monkeyelite 1y agoI disagree that you should just defer - but it’s sad that politics was obviously consuming and inhibiting his ability to help the product.
- influx 1y agoNo one should just defer, but you better be right. In the end do they have a better product without him? Don’t think so.
- flr03 1y agoDamn, that's medieval. Anyone should be able to challenge anyone regardless of status.
- terribleperson 1y agoThe software for the Quest 3 is unreliable and breaks often. A team that attacks attempts to hold them accountable makes a lot of sense.
- alpaca128 1y agoIn my experience the one big problem on the Quest 3 is the user interface. I am still puzzled why they made a floating taskbar with tiny buttons that you have to hit with VR controllers. I have good eyes, decent hand-eye coordination and don't have shaky hands, yet I manage to hit a button at first try maybe 40% of the time. They made a cut-down 2D desktop interface that makes up a small fraction of the field of view for a VR device and called it a day, and then put the user into some virtual room with zero interactable elements. Meta Quest 3 feels like sci-fi tech with badly executed UI design from the 90s.
- NBJack 1y agoI saw a few of those. He really leaned in on just how much waste was in the UI rendering, with some nasty looking call times to critical components. I think it was close to when he left. Dude just seemed frustrated with the lack of attention to things that mattered. But...that honestly tracks with Meta's past and present.
- osullivj 1y agoWould love to hear Carmack's thoughts on render cost...