Joe Rogan Experience #1342 - John Carmack
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a wide-ranging Carmack interview, noted for his views on work ethic and AGI.
What it is
A long Joe Rogan podcast conversation with John Carmack covering his career, work habits, open source, AGI, quantum computing and CPUs.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2019 to 2020.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec puranjay · 2019-10 · on “The SpaceX Starship is a big deal”
I'm an idiot. I wrote John Cusack when I wanted to write John Carmack. I don't know how I could even confuse the two names. Here's the Carmack podcast where he talks about it. Fantastic listen for anyone honestly. Carmack is a fascinating guy. [this video]
Recommends adnzzzzZ · 2019-08 · on “John Carmack on the Joe Rogan Experience [video]”
Interesting perspective on work-life balance, certainly contrary to the usual discussion online on these issues [this video]
Recommends tosh · 2019-08 · on “John Carmack on the Joe Rogan Experience [video]”
On open sourcing Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake: [this video] Neuralink: [this video] Artificial General Intelligence: [this video] Quantum Computing: [this video] “Engineering is figuring out how to do what you want with what you’ve actually got”: [this video] End of Moore’s Law / On CPU architecture: [this video] 5G and streaming (games & video): [this video] edit: like already mentioned there are a lot of topics covered, some even for just a few sentences, the conversation flows, worth watching the whole thing
Cites leftyted · 2019-08 · on “John Carmack on the Joe Rogan Experience [video]”
He talks about AGI at [this video] I wonder if all the really smart people who think AGI is around the corner know something I don't. Well, clearly they know a lot of things that I don't, but I wonder if there's some decisive piece of information I'm missing. I'm a "strict materialist" too, but that doesn't mean I think we can build a brain or a sun or a planet or etc within X years, it just means that I think it's technically possible to build those things. I don't see how we get from "neural net that's really good at identifying objects" to "general intelligence". The emphasis on computational power also makes no sense to me. If we had infinite compute today , what steps would you take to build
Cites nickjj · 2019-11 · on “John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence”
John Carmack is practically a machine. He's openly talked about his work ethic in a bunch of places. He's the type of guy who after a life time of coding calculated he's 100% efficient up until 13 hour work days and then he drops off[0]. Although he did mention working those long hours is often best working on multiple things instead of 1 topic but maybe with AGI there's a bunch of different avenues to explore. [0]: [this video]
Cites adventured · 2020-08 · on “How Shopify reduced storefront response times with a rewrite”
They have a very good thing going. Perhaps there is no great reason to bite off so much at one time. They can take their time and do that later if it makes enough sense. I would expect it would require a very substantial effort to rebuild their platform in a different language. If you're 75/100 of where you want to be on performance, it can be easy to lose immense amounts of time chasing a 95/100 type ideal performance outcome when you can maybe far more easily get to 90/100 by making eg straight-forward caching improvements to what you already have and not have to rewrite all of your code. Good enough is almost always underrated in tech. People destroy opportunity, time, money, and entire b