YouSaid · the spoken record

John Carmack

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363
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2022-08-04
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2022-08-04
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  1. “Examine all the different things in your program, set all these different breakpoints. And of course, you can do that with GDB or whatever there. But this is one of the user interface fundamental principles where when something is complicated to do, you won't use it very often. There's people that will break out GDB when they're at their wit's end and they just have beat their head against a problem for so long. But for somebody that kind of grew up in Game Dev, it's like they were running into the debugger anyways before they even knew there was a problem and you would just stop and see what was happening and sometimes you could fix things even before you even before you did one compile cycle. You could be in the debugger and you'd say, well, I'm just going to change this right here. And yep, that did the job and fix it and go on.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Very much so. I mean, a debugger is how you get a view into a system that's too complicated to understand. I mean, anybody that thinks just read the code and think about it, that's an insane statement. You can't even read all the code on a big system. You have to do experiments on the system. And doing that by adding log statements, recompiling, and rerunning it is an incredibly inefficient way of doing it. I mean, yes, you can always get things done even if you're working with stone knives and, you know, and bearskins. That is the mark of a good programmer is that given any tools, you will figure out a way to get it done. But it's amazing what you can do with sometimes much, much better tools where instead of just going through this iterative compile run debug cycle, you have the old Lisp direction of like you've got a REPL and you're working interactively and doing amazing things there. But in many cases a debugger as a very powerful user interface that can stop.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “They are not big on debuggers and IDEs. So much of it is like Emacs, Bim for things. And we just assume that debuggers don't work most of the time for the systems. And a lot of this comes from a sort of Linux bias on a lot of things where I did come up through the personal computers and then the DOS and then I am Windows. And it was Borland tools and then Visual Studio.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So I kind of migrated cultures where early on through all of Game Dev, there was sort of one culture there, which was really quite distinct from the more the Silicon Valley venture culture for things. They're different groups and they have pretty different morris in the way they think about things where, and I still do think a lot of the big companies can learn things from the hardcore game development side of things where it still boggles my mind how hostile to debuggers and IDEs that so much of them, the kind of big money get billions of dollars, Silicon Valley venture-backed funds are.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Would really be with Diet Coke. There still is that sense of, you know, drop the can down, crack open the can of diet coke. All right, now I mean business. We're getting to work here.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It would be spread out. You know, you have a few pieces of pizza, you have some more later on, and I'd maybe have something at home. It was one of the nice things that Facebook meta is they do, they feed you quite well. You get a different, I guess now it's DoorDash sorts of things delivered, but they take care of making sure that everybody does get well fed. And I probably had better food those six years that I was working in the meta office there than I used to before. But it's worked out okay for me. My health has always been good. I get a pretty good amount of exercise and I don't eat to excess and I avoid a lot of other kind of not so good for you things. So I'm still doing quite well at my age.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “A lot of the little things I could buy all the pizza and comic books and video games that I wanted to. And it really didn't take that much, but the pizza was one of those things, and it's absolutely true that for a long time it did software. I had a pizza delivered every single day. You know, the delivery guy knew me my name. And I didn't find out until years later that apparently I was such a good customer that they just never raised the price on me. And I was using this six-year-old price for the pizzas that they were still kind of sending my way every day.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I have never been that great on really paying attention to it where I'm good enough that I don't eat a lot. I've never been like a big heavy guy, but it was interesting where one of the things that I can remember being an unhappy teenager not having enough money and like one of the things that bothered me about not having enough money is I couldn't buy pizza whenever I wanted to. So I got rich and then I bought a whole lot of pizza. That was refining.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “What happiness looks like for you. Yeah. It's kind of true where that's like, okay, I'm pushing through this. I'm making progress here. I know that doesn't work for everyone. I know it doesn't work for most people. But what I am always trying to do in those cases is I don't want to let somebody that might be a person like that be told by someone else that, no, don't try it. Don't even try that out as an option where work-life balance versus kind of your life's work, where there's a small subset of the people that can be very happy being obsessive about things. And, you know, obsession can often get things done that just practical, prudent, pedestrian work won't, or at least won't for a very long time.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, I do. So you're always happy. I do. Well, happy. Yeah, I mean, it's like a lot of people would say that often I look like kind of a grim person, you know, with just sitting there with a neutral expression or even like knitted brows and a frown on my face as I'm staring at something.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Work hard is the ability to have multiple things to choose from and to use your time on the most appropriate thing. Like there are time periods where I am, it's the best time for me to read. Has been real valuable”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Years of life. I do think that there's a wide range of people where different people have different needs. It's not a one size fits all. And certainly what works for me. I can tell enough that I'm different than a typical average person in the way things impact me, the, you know, the things that I want to do. My goals are different. And sort of the levers to impact things are different. I have literally never felt burnout. And I know there's lots of brilliant smart people that do world-leading work that get burned out. And it's never hit me. I've never been at a point where I'm like, I just don't care about this. I don't want to do this anymore. But I've always had the flexibility to work on lots of interesting things. You know, I can always just turn my gaze to something else and have a great time working on that. And so much of that, so much of the ability to actually”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And I don't gainsay anybody that wants to work the minimum amount. They've got other priorities in their life. My only argument that I'm making, it's not that everybody should work hard, it's that if you want to accomplish something, working longer and harder is the path to getting it accomplished.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Working on treatments and vaccines and caring for all of these people, are they really screwing everything up by working more than eight hours a day? And of course, people say, I'm just an asshole to say something like that, but it's the truth. Working longer gets more done.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Is less than in one of your peak hours, but you're not literally getting less done. There is a point where you start breaking things and getting worse behavior and everything out of it, where you're literally going backwards, but it's not at 8 or 10 or 12 hours. And the fictional example I would use was, imagine there's an asteroid coming to impact, you know, to crash into Earth, destroy all of human life. Do you want Elon Musk or the people working at SpaceX that are building the interceptor that's going to deflect the asteroid? Do you want them to clock out at five? Because damn it, they're just going to go do worse work if they work another couple hours. And, you know, it seems absurd. And that's a hypothetical, though, and everyone can dismiss that. But then when coronavirus was hitting and you have all of these medical personnel that are clearly pushing themselves really, really hard. And I'd say it's like, okay, do you want all of these scientists?”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “There was a comment that Game Dev made that I know there's a backlash against really hard work in a lot of cases. And I get into online arguments about this all the time. But he was basically saying, yeah, 40 hours a week, that's kind of a part-time job. And if you were really in it, you're doing what you think is important, what you're passionate about, working more gets more done. And it's just really not possible to argue with that if you've been around the people that work with that level of intensity and just say, it's like, no, they should just stop. And we had, I kind of came back around to that a couple years ago where I was using the fictional example of, all right, some people say, they'll say with a straight face, they think, no, you are less productive if you work more than 40 hours a week. And they're generally misinterpreting things where your marginal productivity for an hour after eight hours.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “And all the kind of classic hacker tropes about things. And a part of me was like always a little bothered that that wasn't me, that I wouldn't go program 20 hours straight because I'm just, I'm falling apart and not being very effective after 12 hours. I mean, yeah, 12 hour programming, that's fine when you're doing that. It never, you're not doing smart work much after. At least I'm not. But there's a range of people. I mean, that's something that a lot of people don't really get in their gut where there are people that work on four hours of sleep and are smart and can continue to do good work. But then there's a lot of people that just fall apart. So I do tell people that I always try to get eight hours of sleep. It's not this, you know, push yourself harder, get up early. I just do worse work where you can work a hundred hours a week and still get eight hours of sleep if you just kind of prioritize things correctly. But I do believe in working hard, working a lot.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And I would usually do that just as the sun's going down here in Texas now and it's still really damn hot, but I'd go out at 8.30 or something and cover the time there and then the showering. And it was putting a hole in my day where I would have still a couple hours after that. And sometimes my best hours were at night when nobody else is around, nobody's bothering me. But that hole in the day was a problem. So just a couple weeks ago, I made the change to go ahead and say, all right, I'm going to get up a little earlier. I'm going to do a walk or get out there first so I can have more uninterrupted time. So I'm still playing with factors like this as I kind of optimize my work efforts. But it's always been, you know, it was 60 hours a week for a very long time. To some degree, I had a little thing in the back of my head where I was almost jealous of some of the programmers that would do these marathon sessions. And I had like Dave Taylor, one of the guys that he had. He would be one of those people that would fall asleep under his desk sometimes.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Wake up at the same time. It's not clear to me that there was much of a difference in the productivity with that where I kind of feel if I just get up when I feel like it's usually a little later each day, but I just recently made the focusing decision to try to push my schedule back a little bit earlier to getting up at 8 in the morning and trying to shift things around. I'm often doing experiments with”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “When it was just me trying to make things happen, I am. And I was usually isolated off in my office. People generally didn't bother me much at in. And I could get a lot of programming work done that way. I did settle into a more normal schedule when I was taking kids to school and things like that.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “So I was able to be remarkably consistent about what was good working conditions for me for a very long time. I was never one of the programmers that would do all nighters going through work for 20 hours straight. It's like my brain generally starts turning to mush after 12 hours or so. But the hard work is really important and I would work for decades. I would work 60 hours a week. I would work a 10 hour day, six days a week, and try to be productive at that. Now my schedule shifted around a fair amount when I was young without any kids. I am any other responsibilities. I was on one of those cycling schedules where I'd kind of get in an hour later each day and roll around through the entire time and I'd wind up kind of pulling in at two or three in the afternoon sometimes and then working in past midnight or two in the morning. And that was, I am.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Think that's got a lot of value, but the other side of that is the people saying that, well, we want to have these independent teams that are bubbling up the ideas because like it's almost anti-capitalist or anti-free market to say it's like I want my grand leader to go ahead and dictate all these points there where clearly free markets bring up things that you don't expect. Like in VR we saw a bunch of things like it didn't turn out at all the way the early people thought were going to be the key applications and things that would not have been approved by the dark cabal making the decisions about what gets into the store turned out to in some cases be extremely successful. So yeah, I definitely kind of wanted to be there was a point where I did make a pitch. It's like, hey, make me VR dictator and I'll go in get done. And that's just, it's not in the culture at Meta. And they understand the trade-offs. And that's just not the way that's not the company that they.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “You're at your best when you've got a leader that is at their limit of what they can kind of comprehend of everything below them and they can have an informed opinion about everything that's going on. And you take somebody, you've got to believe that somebody that has 30, 40 years of experience, you would hope that they've got wisdom that the just out of bootcamp person contributing doesn't have and that if they're like, well, that's wrong there, you probably shouldn't do it that way or even just don't do it that way, do it another way. So there's value there, but it can't go beyond a certain level. I have Steve Jobs stories of him saying things that are just wrong right in front of me about technical things because he was not operating at that level. But when it does work and you do get that kind of passionate leader that's thinking about the entire product and just really deeply cares about not letting anything slip through the cracks,”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Charlie that fits whatever matrix of tendencies that you want to break the market down to because it's a mistake to think about imaginary users when you've got real users that you could be working with. But on the other hand, there is value to having a kind of wholeness of vision for a product. Companies like Meta have, you know, they understand the trade-offs where you can have a company like SpaceX or Apple and the Steve Jobs era where you have a very powerful leading personality that can micromanage at a very low level and can say it's like, no, that handle needs to be different or that icon needs to change the tint there. And they clearly get a lot of value out of it. They also burn through a lot of employees that have horror stories to tell about working there afterwards. My position is that”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “So there's the zero to one problem of when you're doing something really new, you do kind of have to make a guess. But one of the points that I've been making at Meta is we have more than enough users now that anything somebody wants to try in VR, we have users that will be interested in that. You do not get to make a completely greenfield blue sky pitch and say, I'm going to do this because I think it might be interesting. I challenge everyone. There are going to be people, whether it's working in VR on your like on your desktop replacement or communicating with people in different ways or playing the games there are going to be probably millions of people or at least if you pick some tiny niche that we're not in right now there's still going to be thousands of people out there that have the headsets that would be your target market and I tell people pay attention to them don't invent fictional users don't you know make an alice bob”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So, I do usually favor if you can get any kind of a metric that's good, by all means listen to the data, but you can go too far there where we've had problems where it's like, hey, we had a performance regression because our fancy new telemetry system is doing a bazillion file rights to kind of archive this stuff because we needed to collect information to determine if we were doing if our plans were good. When information is available, you should never ignore it.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Because A is more important. But that notion of always having to really critically value what you're doing, your time, the resources you expend, even the opportunity cost of doing something else, that's super important.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Their CFO will complain that it's not infinite money, but from most developer standpoints, it really does feel like it. And it's almost counterintuitive that if you're working hard as a developer on something, there's always this thought. If only I had more resources, more people, more RAM, more megahertz, then my product will be better. And that sense that at certain points it's certainly true that if you are really hamstrung by this, removing an obstacle will make a better product, make more value. But if you're not making your core design decisions in this fiercely competitive way where you're saying feature A or feature B, you can't just say, let's do both, because then you're not making a value judgment about them. You're just saying, well, they both seem good. I don't want to necessarily have to pick out which one is better or how much better until team B that, sorry, we're not going to do this.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “I am the moment of delight when something happened. There's a value that's happened there. I mean, if you have to at least accept that there is a concept of user value, even if you have trouble exactly quantifying it, you can usually make relative arguments about it. Well, this was better than this. We've improved things. You know, being a servant to the user is your job when you're a developer. You want to be producing something that other people are going to find valuable. And if you are technically inclined, then finding the right levers to be able to pull, to be able to make a design that's going to produce the most value for the least amount of effort. And it always has to be kind of divide. There's a ratio there where you, it's a problem at the big tech companies, you know, whether it's Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, companies that have almost infinite money. I mean, I know.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “The world's a better place. People have, they've gone from something of lesser value, chosen to use your product, and their life feels better for that. And if you've produced that economically, that's a really good thing. On the other hand, if you spent ridiculous amounts of money, you've just kind of shoveled a lot of cash into a wood chipper there and you should maybe not feel so good about what you're doing. Being proud about like a specific architecture, a specific technology or a specific code sequence that you've done, it's great to get a little smile like a tiny little dopamine hit for that, but the top level metric should be that you're building things of value. Now, you can get into the argument about how you, you know, what is user value, how do you actually quantify that? And there can be big arguments about that, but it's easy to be able to say, okay, this pissed off user there is not getting value from what you're doing. This user over there with the big smile on their face.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “So, I just gave a long rant slash lecture at Meta to the TPM organization. And my biggest point was everything that we're doing really should flow from user value. You know, all the good things that we're doing. It's like we're not technical people. It's like you shouldn't be taking pride just in the specific thing. Like code golf is the sort of thing. It's a fun puzzle game, but that really should not be a major motivator for you. It's like we're solving problems for people or we're providing entertainment to people. We're doing something of value to people that's displacing something else in their life. So we want to be providing a net value over what they could be doing, but instead they're choosing to use our products. And that's where, I mean, it sounds trite or corny, but I fundamentally do think that's how you make the world a better place. If you have given more value to people than it took you and your team to create, then...”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Stack and things completely failed or failed to scale. But good things do come out of it. And it's interesting to see the memetic evolution of the way different things happen. Like mentioning Hello World at the beginning, it's funny how some little thing like that where everybody, every programmer knows Hello World now. And that was a completely arbitrary sort of decision that just came out of the dominance of Unix and C and early examples of things like that. Millions of experiments are going on all the time, but some things do kind of rise to the top and win the fitness war for whether it's mind space or programming techniques or anything.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “how little programming code is in our bodies. We've got a couple billion base pairs and it's like this all fits on a thumb drive for years now. And then our brains are even small. Conveyances here. It's like these are messy codes, you know, they're broken up into amino acids. A lot of them don't do important things or they do things in very awkward ways. But it is this process of just accumulation on top of things. And you need scale, both you need scale for sort of the population for that to work out. And in the early days, in the 50s and 60s, the kind of ancient era of computers where you could count when they say like when the internet started even in the 70s, they were like 18 hosts or something on it. It was this small finite number. And you were still optimizing everything to be as good as you possibly could be. But now it's billions and billions of devices and everything going on. And you can have this very much natural evolution going on where lots of things are tried, lots of things are blowing up. Venture capitalists lose their money when a startup invested in the wrong tech.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “So that's a really good analogy, and we can go a lot of places with that where in the earliest days of programming, when you had, you could count the bytes that you had to work on this, you had all the kind of hackers playing code golf to be one less instruction than the other person's multiply routine to kind of get through. And it was so perfectly crafted. It was a crystal piece of artwork when you had a program because there just were not that many, you couldn't afford to be lazy in different ways. And in many ways, I see that as akin to the symbolic AI work where again, if you did not have the resources to just say, well, we're going to do billions and billions of programmable weights here. You have to turn it down into something that is symbolic and crafted like that. But that's definitely not the way DNA and life and biological evolution and things work. On the one hand, it's almost humbling.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “My pride is in my work. I'm never going to do something that's not as good as I could possibly make it. I respect that and sometimes I am that person, but I try to focus more on the larger value picture. And you do pick your battles and you deploy your resources in the play that's going to give you sort of the best user value in the end.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Where there's always, it's always good to know what you could do if you really sat down and took it far, because sometimes there's discontinuities, like around user reaction times. There are some points where the difference between operating in one second and 750 milliseconds, not that huge. You'll see it in web page statistics, but most of the usability stuff, not that great. But if you get down to 50 milliseconds, then all of a sudden this just feels amazing. It's just like doing your bidding instantly rather than you're giving it a command twiddling your thumbs, waiting for it to respond. So sometimes it's important to really crunch hard to get over some threshold, but there are broad basins in the value metric for lots of work where it just doesn't pay to even go that extra mile. And there are craftsmen that just don't want to buy that and more power to them. If somebody just wants to say, no, I'm going to.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Certain things where you could throw away efficiency and actually get more benefits that actually matter. I mean, that's one of my, you know, one of the directions I was considering swerving into was nuclear energy. When I was kind of like, what do I want to do next? It was either going to be a cost-effective nuclear fission or artificial general intelligence. And one of my pet ideas there is like, you know, people don't understand how cheap nuclear fuel is. And there would be ways that, hi, you could be a quarter the efficiency or less, but if it wound up making your plant 10 times cheaper, that could be a radical innovation in something like that. So there's like some of these thoughts around like direct fission energy conversion, fission fragment conversion that maybe you build something that doesn't require all the steam turbines and everything, even if it winds up being less efficient. So that applies a lot in programs.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Someone like me to go in and say, make this web page run a thousand times faster, make this web app into a hardcore native application that starts up in 37 milliseconds and everything responds in less than one frame latency. That's just not necessary. And if somebody wants to go pay me millions of dollars to do software like that, when they can take somebody right out of a boot camp and say, spin up an application for this, often being efficient is not really the best metric. It's like that applies in a lot of areas where it's kind of interesting how a lot of our appliances and everything are all built around energy efficiency, sometimes at the expense of robustness in some other ways or higher costs in other ways, where there's interesting things where energy or electricity could become much cheaper in a future world and that could change our engineering trade-offs for the way we build.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “It's again, I have to caution myself to not be in the good old days old man about it because clearly there's enormous value here. The world does run on JavaScript to a pretty good approximation there. And it's not falling apart. There's a bunch of scary stuff where you look at console logs and you just see all of these bad things that are happening, but it's still kind of limping along and nobody really notices. So much of my systems design and systems analysis goes around you should understand what the speed of light is, like what would be the best you could possibly do here. And it sounds horrible, but in a lot of cases, you can be a thousand times off your speed of light velocity for something, and it still be okay. And in fact, it can even sometimes still be the optimal thing in a larger system standpoint where there's a lot of things that you don't want to have to parachute in.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Yes, that it makes you not think about things. And I do disagree. I think that there is so much objective data on the vulnerabilities that have happened in C and C++ program. So JavaScript is not terrible in those ways. And so much of programming is not the language itself. It's the infrastructure around that surrounds it. All the libraries that you can get and the different stuff that you can, ways you can deploy it, the portability that it gives you. And JavaScript is really strong on a lot of those things where for a long time, and it still does if I look at it, but the web stack about everything that has to go when you do something really trivial in JavaScript and it shows up on a web browser to kind of x-ray through that and see everything that has to happen for your one little JavaScript statement to turn into something visible in your web browser. It's very, very disquieting just the depth of that stack and the fact that so few people can even comprehend all of the levels that are going on there.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “It is not an optimal language for all the things that it's being used for or an optimal distribution system to build huge apps in something like this without type systems and so on. But I think for a lot of people, it does reasonably the necessary things. It's still a sea flavored language. It's still abrases and semicolon language. It's not hard for people to be trained in JavaScript and then understand the roots of where it came from. I think garbage collection is unequivocally a good thing for most programs to be written in. It's funny that I still just this morning I was on, I was seeing a Twitter thread of a bunch of really senior game dev people arguing about the virtues and costs of garbage collection and you will run into some people that are top-notch programmers that just say no, this is literally not a good thing.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “So, the engineering under JavaScript is really pretty phenomenal. The systems that make JavaScript run as fast as it does right now are kind of miracles of modern engineering in many ways. It does feel like”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “But right now, I guess, yeah, they're using JavaScript on a bunch of the SpaceX work for the UI side of things when you go find UI programmers, their JavaScript programmers.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Like at Meta, we have a lot of projects that use kind of React frameworks. So you've got JavaScript here, and then you have C++ for real work, and then you may have Java interfacing with some other part of the Android system. And those are all kind of horrible things. And that was one thing that I remember talking with Baz at Facebook about it where like, man, I wish we could have just said we're only hiring C++ programmers. And he just thought from the Facebook meta perspective, well, we just wouldn't be able to find enough. With the thousands of programmers they've got there, it is not necessarily a dying breed, but you can sure find a lot more JavaScript programmers. And I kind of mentioned that to Elon one time, and he was kind of flabbergasted about that. It's like, well, you just, you go out and you find those programmers and you don't hire the other programmers that don't do the languages that you want to use.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Crude, and you could see the programming language people just looking down at it. But it does seem to be quite popular as basically saying this is the good things about C, everybody can just jump right in and use it. You don't need to restructure your brain to write good code in it. So I wish that I had more opportunity for doing some work in Go. Rust is the other modern language that everybody talks about that I'm not fit past judgment on. I've done a little bit beyond hello world. I wrote some like video decompression work in Rust just as an exercise. But that was a few years ago and I haven't really used it since. You know, the best programming language is the one that works generally that you're currently using because that's another trap is in almost every case I've seen when people mixed languages on a project, that's a mistake. I would rather stay just in one language so that everybody can work across the entire thing. And we have”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “But the people that are the biggest defenders of LISP are saying how malleable of a language it is, that if you write a huge LISP program, you've basically invented your own kind of language and structure because it's not the primitives of the language you're using very much. It's all of the things you've built on top of that. And then a language like Racket, kind of one of the more modern Lisp versions, it's essentially touted as a language for building other languages. I understand the value of that for a tiny little project, but the idea of that for one of these long-term supported by lots of people kind of horrifies me, where all of those abstractions that you're like, okay, you can't touch this code till you educate yourself on all of these things that we've built on top of that. And it was interesting to see how when Google made Go, a lot of the criticisms of that are it's like, wow, this is not a state-of-the-art language. This language is just so simple and almost.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Whatever change that I need to, while you can have more significant languages, like it's a downside of Lisp where I don't regret the time that I spent with Lisp. I think that it did help my thinking about programming in some ways.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Probably not the best. And there's some really interesting aspects to this where in some cases languages that are not generally thought well of for many reasons, like C is derided pretty broadly, that yes, obviously all of these security flaws that happen with the memory unsafeness and buffer overruns and the things that you've got there. But there is this underappreciated aspect to the language is so simple anyone can go and if you know C, you can generally jump in someplace and not have to learn what paradigms they're using because there just aren't that many available. I think there's, you know, and there's some really, really well written C code. Like it's, I find it great that if I'm messing around with something in OpenBSD, say, I mean, I can be walking around in the kernel and I'm like, I understand everything that's going on here. It's not hard for me to figure out what's make.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Really going kind of deep into the kind of the historical Lisp work and Haskell and some of the functional programming sides of things. And there's There is a lot of value there in the way you think about things, and I changed a lot of the way I write my CNC code based on what I learned about the value that comes out of not having this random mutable state that you kind of lose track of because something that many people don't really appreciate till they've been at it for a long time is that it's not the writing of the program initially. It's the whole lifespan of the program. And that's when it's not necessarily just how fast you wrote it or how fast it operates, but it's how can it bend and adapt.”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “It keeps hitting me upside the face where it just gotten to the point now I understand it's like, okay, you just can't do a loop if you care about performance in Python. You have to figure out how you can reformat this into some big vector operation or something that's going to be done completely within a C++ library. But the other hand is amazingly convenient and you just see stuff that people are able to cobble together by you just import a few different things and you can do stuff that nobody on earth could do 10 years ago and you can do it in a little cookbook thing that you copy pasted out of a website. So that is really great. When I'm sitting down to do what I consider kind of serious programming, it's still in C++ and it's really kind of a C-flavored C++ at that where I'm not big into the modern template metaprogramming sorts of things. I see a lot of train wrecks coming from some of that over abstraction. I spent a few years”

    2022-08-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source