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.
I 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.
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.
Please 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.
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.
I’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.
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).
I was one month into my first full-time job, when I've (unknowingly of his rank) challenged the CTO in a technical discussion - in a public email exchange. Regardless of the outcome - I've been treated like an equal. This one short exchange has influenced not only the rest of my career, but my entire worldview.
I mean to some extent sure. But also you need to respect expertise and experience. So much of what we do is subjective, and neither side going to have hard data to support their arguments.
If it comes down to someone saying “I’ve been doing this for 30 years, I’ve shipped something very similar 5 times, and we ran into a problem with x each time”. Unless you have similar counter experience, you should probably just listen.
What happens in tech is you get a very specific kind of junior who wants to have HN comment arguments at work constantly and needs you to prove every single thing to them. I don’t know man it’s a style guide. There’s not going to be hard quantitative evidence to support why we said you shouldn’t reach for macros first.
Ugh. Can we as an industry stop blowing people up like this? It’s a clear sign that the community is filled with people with very little experience.
I remember this guy wanted $20 million to build AGI a year ago (did he get that money?), and people here thought he would go into isolation for a few weeks and come out with AGI because he made some games like that. It’s just embarrassing as a community.
Carmack's best work was between Keen and Quake, and it was mostly optimizations that pushed the limit of what PC graphics could do. He's always been too in-the-weeds to have a C-level title.
He is just a guy who can write game code well and has good PR skills online. I wouldn’t give him a cent if he promised anything in the AI field, no matter how much a bunch of online people gas him up.
He's a guy that knows a lot of math and how to turn that math into code. I don't know if he'd be able to come up with some brand new paradigm for AI but I'd want him on my team and I'd listen to what he has to say.
AI math is not game code math. There are plenty of actual experts in AI who know “how to turn math into code” with years of experience. I would not want this guy, his ego, his lack of social skills, his online fanbase, and his lack of experience in AI to be anywhere near my AI team.
In 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.
I 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.
