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Comment by intelVISA | Hacker News Reader

if Carmack's in I'm in. Has he ever been drastically wrong?

Sure (According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack ):

> During his time at id Software, a medium pepperoni pizza would arrive for Carmack from Domino's Pizza almost every day, carried by the same delivery person for more than 15 years.

C’mon man, Domino’s?!

Does this qualify?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace

>Has he ever been drastically wrong

Has he ever made a prediction with as drastic a consequence and transformative potential as the one he is currently making about AGI? Actually, is there any track record of predictions he has made and how they have panned out?

The jury is still out on VR and Meta but it hardly seems promising.

Fair point, though I think VR is going to be solid for games once hardware properly catches up in a decade or so.

You think Meta's VR systems aren't promising? My read on the situation is that they are making incredible progress, and doing so at scale. They're already delivering good revenue growth on a product that no one would say is "done". VR isn't a "build a good product" problem, it's a deep tech/hardware R&D problem before you can even open the door to building a good product.

Not sure he was right about the "putting down his own cat because it was annoying" thing.

Good lord. I dislike cats, but this is vile. Totally lost any respect I had for Carmack.

Don't meet your heroes.

To be fair, Carmack wasn't ever a hero to me.

Newton worked on alchemy for much of his life.

Has Carmack made a time bound prediction on AGI?

He can't ever be "wrong" on AGI if he hasn't even made a disprovable claim about AGI.

Throughout the Wolfenstein codebase, he spelled "column" with two "l"s.

No one can argue he doesn't know how to summon demons

When he went to go work on VR at Facebook?

Wrong in the moral sense?

He's still there though, right?

edit: he is not still

edit: he is still a consulting CTO

* To his credit Carmack is a one-person brand and attaching your (good) brand to a tainted brand (Facebook) isn't great

* Many believe Occulus isn't succeeding fast enough, and so the years Carmack spent on Occulus/Metaverse could have been spent on any number of interesting projects. Although I'm sure the money was amazing and I can't object to him taking it.

* If Occulus/Metaverse succeeds it will be a ultra-monetized environment (re: Farmville) and encourage a huge amount of consumer-hostile policies like unlimited tracking (since Facebook owns the hardware now). No gamer wants that. The whales who will be justifying its existence won't benefit from that.

Carmack joined Oculus before the Facebook acquisition, so it's misleading to say he attached his brand to Facebook's.

I doubt Carmack is motivated that much by money. He has way more than he'll ever spend.

His reply to this tweet is that he didn't want to spend $20million of his own money on this venture. When you have the option to throw 20m on projects, you can spend it reasonably quickly.

His actual claim is that spending other people's money helps his focus because it makes him feel responsible. That's a plausible argument.

The first thing you want to hear as an investor is that the person you're investing into has as much skin in the game as possible so opening up with "I'm putting other people's money in this instead of mine" is not great.

He's not stll there

Isn't he still there part-time?

Ah, thanks. Looks like he still consults for them, but probably not as an employee?

What was wrong about that?

That's misleading. Oculus wasn't originally Facebook, and it wasn't Facebook when Carmack joined. Carmack was working on the Oculus hardware around the time Oculus was founded in 2012. He joined Oculus in 2013. Facebook didn't acquire Oculus until 2014. You could criticize him for not leaving, but he didn't "go to work on VR at Facebook."

What about his bet on MegaTextures?

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