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Comment by kubb | Hacker News Reader

HN is all about that cult of personality, we want to believe in heroic programmers (or founders) who singlehandedly change the world with their geinus clarity.

Paul Graham said this, John Carmack said that and we lap it all up.

It's been this way since the ancient times, and the stories of Hercules and Theseus. We mythologize these personalities, and in our mind they become demigods.

But there's a reason the folk wisdom tells you to never meet your heroes. When you do, you painfully realize that the stories didn't focus on their humanity but instead were spinning the myths of their divinity.

The person in your head is a source of inspiration. The person in the world, on which the former is based, is a source of disappointment.

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More than that, I think it's important to remember that no one, even a technologist as strong as Carmack, is going to get more right than wrong.

Carmack has been a huge inspiration for me over the years. I grew up eagerly reading his plan files.

But if we look at the big picture, a lot of his big calls haven't in fact worked out.

His vision for the future of graphics was to stick closer to the original OpenGL state machine, and just make it so blazing fast you could do complex lighting and materials via accumulating 100's of passes per frame. The world chose shaders instead, and I don't think they got that wrong.

Stencil buffer shadows were a dead end.

iD tech used to set the standard for the entire industry, but long term its totally lost out to Unreal and Unity.

Carmack's ideas around sparse voxel trees were really interesting to me at the time, but now with hindsight I can see he totally misunderstood what artists want/need. They don't want to uniquely paint every bit of the game world, they want tools that let them use instancing and smart materials/shapes. In comparison Unreal's Nanite gets this totally right. Artist productivity is the key constraint in both film and games.

I don't say this to be pointlessly negative. As I said JC is one of my personal heros. But the problem with the "superman" approach to coding is no one is in fact superman, even someone like JC. It's just not possible to get complex calls like this right long term. If you don't pay that some respect in your interpersonal behavior, you are gonna end up alienating people.

> Carmack's ideas around sparse voxel trees were really interesting to me at the time, but now with hindsight I can see he totally misunderstood what artists want/need. They don't want to uniquely paint every bit of the game world, they want tools that let them use instancing and smart materials/shapes. In comparison Unreal's Nanite gets this totally right. Artist productivity is the key constraint in both film and games.

Aren't voxels and instances/shapes orthogonal? Do artists really care if the shapes are textures or pictures wrapped on triangles or pictures wrapped on voxels?

The real argument for Voxels is analogous to the argument for raytracing. It is more accurate at describing how the world works, but we currently don't have the computational power to do it in anything close to realtime in advanced games -- even with lots of optimizations.

If you have a single world representation made out of voxels, you can't trivially edit instanced objects and have the changes propagate out to the whole world where all the instances were. Or if you get that feature, it comes at the cost of the voxels being a secondary representation, and now the instance updates potentially trample some custom textures/geometry that were placed on top of the instances. It changes the workflow a lot.

Adding more realistic lighting also completely changed workflows from adding random pseudo light sources to having to describe how light should work on various things (this is before considering ray tracing). Those changes were better for realism which was better for users and that trumps artists having to learn new things.

> iD tech used to set the standard for the entire industry, but long term its totally lost out to Unreal and Unity.

Unless you fault Carmack for selling id to Bethesda, this isn't so much Carmack's fault. He always proposed more sharing of id tech. Look at the older versions of the engine that are available under GPL. Unreal really took over when they started their cheap licensing with source available. Bethesda was asleep.

iD tech was already floundering before the acquisition. I obviously don't fault JC for taking the bag.

Unreal was always far cheaper and way better supported than iD tech. This is something iD got very wrong from the very beginning. iD was "give us 500k, here's a cd rom, and never talk to us again." Epic was considerably less (I forget exactly but I want to say 100k), and was all "ok, here's the email list, here's the news group, here's the IRC channel, and here's some folks you can talk to when you get stuck."

All the Unreal licenses collaborated and helped each other underneath Epic's umbrella. iD licensees had to do again working around iD's hostility/apathy.

There was no comparison in the quality of the toolchains either. Quake's kit did the job, but with a ton of flaky behavior and horrible UX. The BSP code had so many numerical issues level designers were constantly reworking stuff to prevent leaks. Unreal was an absolute dream in comparison.

Cliffy B sending you unsolicited porn pics over IRC was more of a "perk." /s

Source: was contracted on an Unreal port to the Playstation 1 by Infogrames back in the day.

Again, JC is one of my personal heroes, but I think people are reluctant to point out he got a lot of stuff just wrong vs choices others made. His tendency towards contrarian independence is a double edged sword.

Is it possibly because he lacks the academic rigour? I don't think casually reading math (or any) texts as a $50M+ net worth individual is remotely the same as having to study and pass tests like a regular person.

I'm an autodidact and that's something I definitely struggle with. I'm good at getting the "gist" of something by scanning fast, but then I get hung up in the details because I didn't go back and actually work through the formalisms in the paper.

JC strikes me as someone that would do the math however, or at least would code up something that probed it real quick.

Just to ramble about another point I wish I'd made in my post above: I've had some success in my career by depersonalizing these kind of debates. Instead of "my plan" vs "your plan" try to frame it as everyone enumerating the possible plans as a group, brainstorming on benefits vs risks on each of them, etc. So if I set myself up as facilitator on the white board aggregating everything, without pushing my own view much, I find it tends to get less into back and forth arguments. Not a silver bullet but that depersonalization is a big part of how I think about these dilemmas now.

Agree. I’ve been on both sides of this. Forced to learn things as a student as well as rushing through self curated material for a particular purpose. There is definitely some value in simply being a student. Spending 8 years studying to get a phd in math doesn’t guarantee that you will be an outlier (like Carmack) but you will have a solid foundation. I think both types of people are needed to make progress realistically.

Formal training can be a disadvantage when innovating, since it trains one to think the same as others.

You know, maybe he just has a huge blind spot when it comes to optimization: Because he's so good at it, he overestimates others' ability (and possibly appetite for - I personally find optimization grueling and soul deadening work though of course needs to be done)

Carmack aside, I think the "never meet your heroes" thing is even simpler: no one's perfect. Your hero could have cured cancer but maybe they're a nervous wreck in public. Or aren't native to your area and may commuicate badly face to face for culture clashing reasons. Or maybe they are great in a small intimate team but completely fall apart in a large setting. Heck it could be as simple as finding out they are a heavy smoker or an alcoholic.

The common stereotype is "heroes are narcissitic and have skeletons in the closet", but there are valid reasons for an otherwise good person to fail in what may be common sense to others.

To me it would be the opposite; we all have our faults, so how do they manage the feats that they do?

There's no point idolizing people for their accomplishments in the "they must be perfect" kind of way.

Ie I look at John and see someone amazingly fit for their age (very close to mine - only a few years older, yet he appears younger); I'd like to learn more about his routines (running and judo?) to see how I might benefit from the same.

I’m curious too, in the Lex Friedman podcast/interview, John described he oftens “runs on” a diet of pizza and Diet Coke.

https://lexfridman.com/john-carmack/

This is part of the reason I like Steve Jobs so much. The stories around him never failed to mention his legendary penchant for downright nasty behaviour. And yet people loved him anyway, even when they lived in fear of stepping into an elevator with him! It’s bizarre and entertaining stuff!

Personally I’d rather work with boring, reliable, friendly people in an low-stress job and focus my passion on my hobbies. I recognize that others might want to take risks and try to make something big.

I don't think many people loved Jobs, and a good few hated him.

But unlike most narcissistic assholes he was unusually good at certain things [1]. And he could be persuaded to change his mind when he was dead wrong, at least some of the time.

So that made him tolerated.

[1] Finding good people, understanding that computing is about services and UX and not just boxes, and having a goal for commodity computing that was at least as aesthetic as technological.

If you are really good at something, people will like you inspite of your drawbacks however big they may be.

The people with those stories typically made a lot of money thanks to Jobs. The people who didn't, just have a negative opinion of him.

Theseus was the name of the mechanical 'learning' mouse that Claude Shannon built https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/19/138508/mighty-mo...

Also: https://youtu.be/_9_AEVQ_p74 (It would be great it some AI could upscale this...)

I had the privilege of meeting Claude, at the CMU Robotics Institute, and showed him how to use (what turned out to be) an early incarnation of of Boston Dynamics -- a hopping pogo stick. Here you can see an operator using the same control box that Claude Shannon used: https://youtu.be/mG_ZKXo6Rlg?t=34 p.s. yes, that 'operator' in the video is me.

Well said but we don’t know for sure if the above is true. Carmack is a genious programmer and rather than trash him right away we should acknowledge that his job was hard- very hard. In any biography the failures are way more interesting than the successes. The ancient greek understood that pretty well.

As you mention, the world is about cult of personality, not just hacker news. Look at the situation with influences and such and why brands are following over themselves to link there products with some personality.

We like to think it's some super human person that is some for of genius, but there are very real limits to human intelligence and while there are some admittedly great and lucky people in that regard, they are still very limited and would likely be disappointing if we knew what the rest of there lives were like outside of what we see.

In some ways we seem to love the idea that others are just somehow more gifted than we are and then idolize them, we don't like to accept that everyone is just making it up as they go along all the time, maybe it's a defense mechanism in some ways as it keeps us from doing some of the more exciting things that we could do, because that's only for these special people that we somehow idolize and of course to make it worse, these people generally love the attention so play up to that even more.

A young fan of James Joyce once asked the Irish maestro, "May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?" The novelist replied: "No, it did lots of other things too."

There are many people lurking on HN who do not fall for the cult of personality and stick to technical and personal topics. You should look around for them! They’re cool.

PG has been an inspiration but he gets things wrong all the time. Most famous Silly Valley leaders are people I’d steer well clear of.

If you want a hero to idolize, select someone who's been dead for at least 100 years. Most of their foibles will be public knowledge by that time, so you probably won't be in for any rude surprises.

Even that might not be entirely safe, as Schrödinger's behaviour has only become widely known in recent years for example. (Although he died around 60 years ago, so not quite 100.)

Was he mean to his cat?

Yes and no. I'll see myself out.

> HN is all about that cult of personality, we want to believe in heroic programmers (or founders) who singlehandedly change the world with their geinus clarity.

I'm not one to defend the culture here but this isn't fair. Everyone is like this and it has nothing to do with HN. They do it with politicians, rock stars, capitalists, etc. Just look at the cult of Elon Musk. And they do it because all of those people put a lot of money and work into making sure they do it. Worship is paid for. That's what PR and image firms do, not to even mention that it's the default culture of the media in pretty much every country on the planet.

I’m pretty sure that people like John Carmack, Donald Knuth, or Fabrice Bellard are not spending money on PR firms.

I'm pretty sure you don't know what you're talking about. Carmack has been covered by multiple PR departments, sometimes simultaneously, throughout his career. Knuth literally has publishers doing that work and I don't know what you think the Nobel committee or ACM Turing Awards are for. That's their entire purpose, to promote these people for their accomplishments. It's not like they hide that. And what do you know, Bellard isn't even remotely as popular as those others. I wonder why.

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