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Comment by useruser125524 | Hacker News Reader

Carmack is absolutely not the norm from a brain chemistry perspective. His level of obsessiveness is not naturally achievable for the vast majority of individuals. That whole post is very short-sighted and solipsistic

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Having a hyperactive brain often requires unhealthy coping mechanisms and eccentric fuel sources. In his case, way too much processed food, soda, etc. There's no bottomless reservoir. some people prioritize their health. Other people prioritize other things, at the expense of their personal health or longevity.

He's pretty fit - I think he's just way smarter than average and able to pair that with extreme focus (rare). It comes across in Masters of Doom.

Personally I'm pretty distrustful of documentaries. To be entertaining, they usually have to do some amount of narrative manipulation or propagandizing. There are many out there that open a small window into someone's life to make them look extremely evil or heroic while the reality is much more mundane. Some even manipulate interviews with credible people to prove the earth is flat or other nonsense. I love the book Blood Sweat and Pixels and find it very entertaining and inspiring, but I don't trust that it's a nuanced objective look on the 5 stories it covers or that the characters within are as perfect irl as they come off.

Reasonable, his intelligence also comes across in his tech talks too - similar to Andrej Karpathy in clarity and bandwidth for talks.

There’s also a lot of other commentary on his capabilities outside of that one account, so it seems likely to be true imo.

Didn't that book mention how, at the time, he used to live on pizza and cola?

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