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Comment by RunSet | Hacker News Reader

I understand why people value the code John Carmack has released but I do not understand why people value his public statements.

"eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id"[0]

"Great! I think Microsoft has been a good parent company for gaming IPs"[1]

By sheer coincidence, John Carmack is peddling machine generated code.[2]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20081003111457/http://www.linuxg...

[1] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1308069857913720832

[2] https://80.lv/articles/john-carmack-s-agi-startup-keen-techn...

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Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It makes more sense to read his 'public statements' and judge them individually rather than in aggregate. No one is correct all the time.

As for this current post (just a tweet really, public statement sounds overly official), I think he's making sense. If you don't follow industry trends, you'll eventually be out of touch. Whether you're a senior software engineer or engineering manager, keeping current with the evolution of tech will make you better at your job. Today that happens to be related to following AI developments, but it applied equally to learning higher level programming languages in the 90s, or big data engineering practices in the 2010s.

1st link is broken

https://web.archive.org/web/20081003111457/http://www.linuxg...

I have a new theory as of this moment.

Elon Musk, Paul Graham, Steve Yegge and now, sadly John Carmack. Your average hacker scoffs at the idea of religion or faith, but somehow is comfortable with complete unquestioning fealty to whichever person who did something interesting with technology in the past and made enough money to afford drugs you don’t get arrested for and then they started prophesying.

Before you stone me, remember every prophet was downvoted in their own forum.

The nice thing about religious faith is that most minds can hold only one at a time. I may believe in an oddly resurrected deity who took the shape of a man, but I don't have room for anything crazier.

"We are fools for Christ's sake." 1 Corinthians 4:10

Sure, but it is that Christ, Buddha or any of the other incarnations of the same idea? I am right there with you, believe it or not, but don’t John 3:16 the wrong football game.

Is that the nice thing about religious faith? Polytheism seems somewhat more tolerant of others. And religious pluralism takes in one step further.

I am sure about few things, but it seems to me that monotheism and religious exclusivism at some times represent the worst aspects and outcomes of religious faith.

Whatever your view of religion, you are not very good at literary analysis. The verse you quote, in full:

"We have given up our wisdom for Christ, but you have insight because of Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are honored, but we are dishonored"

Not quite the same of what you imply is it?

But now I don't know what you think it means. Who do you think "you" and "we" are in this quote?

Go read Corinthians? I'm just pointing out it was quoted halfway through to make it sound like Paul just wrote "we dumb" in a letter.

Right. But you didn't quote it in full either, so I couldn't figure out what you thought it said.

So yeah, there's a base unit of meaning which is well beyond one or two verses (something I wish the church would learn).

> most minds can hold only one at a time. [...] I don't have room for anything crazier.

I feel you aren't accounting for exactly how much "crazier" churches/sects can be, both currently and historically.

I think you got downvoted unfairly because I really think you're sincere. My brain heard your comment in the voice of Nightcrawler from X-Men—and as the descendant of German Catholics, he's become one of my favorites.

I love that and want to know what that voice sounds like.

Also I want to add some Claremont era flourish to my response, ja?

Like the animated series version: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U7cMZPklcn0

I see it as those who learn to use AI effectively are seeing massive benefits. Those that haven't seen those benefits are still skeptical.

Someone who's seen the benfits, knows, with proof, the benefits exist. They're like Copernicus who realized the plants go around the sun, not the earth. The others are still like those who look up, see the planets go around the sky, and can't believe the earth is not at the center. They then shout "you're lying, you're crazy, burn the hertic!"

The story of the discovery of heliocentricism is a lot more complex than this; the people who didn't immediately accept heliocentric theories (including the ancient Greeks - look up Aristarchus) often had good, scientific reasons for doing so. Or just look up at the sky at night yourself and ask yourself how you, personally, would confirm it if someone told you that what you see in the sky is better explained by the Earth moving around the sun than the sun moving around the Earth.

> those who learn to use AI effectively are seeing massive benefits

The massive benefits should be visible to outside observers as well, but where are they?

Yes. People see orgs tackling more problems and resolving bugs faster.

I don't agree that people do see that, and if they do, it's hardly an overwhelming trend.

I see my org delivering twice as many features and implementing way more tools that actually solve problems.

The issue is that doesn’t necessarily mean that customers will pay more, as most of the features of software are not actually core.

Would that really count as a 'massive benefit' then?

For the customers? Yes. For engineers building tools that increase their quality of life? For sure. For removing legacy cruft? Absolutely.

Even if we just look at public markets: manufacturers and hyperscalers stocks are through the roof, while they finance private model providers that are ever pushing their IPO into the future.

Doesn't look very much like growing prosperity as much as vacuuming value into the core of the corporate world system.

> Elon Musk, Paul Graham, Steve Yegge and now, sadly John Carmack. Your average hacker scoffs at the idea of religion or faith, but somehow is comfortable with complete unquestioning fealty to whichever person who did something interesting with technology in the past and made enough money to afford drugs you don’t get arrested for and then they started prophesying.

Why do you characterize people you disagree with as having "complete unquestioning fealty" to any of these figures who did something interesting with technology in the past? Seriously, why do you think that accurately characterizes anyone's view? I think this observation that John Carmack made on Twitter has some merit to it - it doesn't mean that I worship John Carmack as my god, or even that I think he's necessarily correct about any other issue. And why would I need to do either of those things to think that the one specific observation of his that we're talking about in this thread has merit to it?

I am not lumping everyone in, more observing we are still amplifying the signal from radio stations that should have ceased broadcasting years ago.

I don't think that John Carmack or any of the other people you mentioned are categorically not worth listening to because in some cases the accomplishments that originally made them famous are decades old. If you think that Carmack is wrong on this specific point, make an argument for why; I for one don't think he's wrong, and I think that putting him into a category of people who "should have ceased broadcasting decades ago" is simply avoiding engaging with what he actually said.

One of the great joys of following guys I admire like Carmack is the little smile I get when I see one of his tweets and go, "yeah, John Carmack was totally wrong about that." For example he argued that UI buttons should act on press rather than waiting for the release, and it's been a UI principle for decades that once a button is pressed you wait for the release on the button, giving the user one last chance to back out of a destructive operation by letting them move the pointer off the button and release. And I was like no, I don't care if you wrote Quake, or the Principia Mathematica, don't fuck with my UI expectations.

Carmack has cheerfully admitted to being wrong in the past, for example admitting that the Saturn port of Doom should have used the Saturn's hardware primitives for a smoother experience rather than a faithful replication of the PC's BSP renderer which made it slow. When brilliant guys like him are wrong, they often are in profound ways.

I would suggest that last line is both wildly indulgent and dangerous. Inventing reasons why someone being completely wrong is actually helpful is a level of freedom no one really deserves.

Someone being wrong almost always offers an opportunity for them or others to learn. If someone extremely smart is wrong, the gaps in their knowledge may point to interesting directions for the curious. Einstein was wrong to doubt the principles of quantum mechanics, but the conflicts with relativity he elaborated helped point the way for future physics work.

Of course, it's important to be right when there are consequences on the line, but being wrong isn't ipso facto something bad.

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