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John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets | Lex Fridman Podcast #309

Lex Fridman

5M subscribers • 39 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 3 people: 3 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by John Carmack, co-founder of id Software

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

1.8M views4 years ago3 recommendations

Game developmentAI and machine learningUnity, Unreal and GodotRetro games and consolesTransformers and LLMs

John Carmack discusses his career in game development, virtual reality, rocket science, and his current pursuit of artificial general intelligence.

John Carmack is a legendary programmer, co-founder of id Software, and lead programmer of many revolutionary video games including Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and the Commander Keen series. He is also the founder of Armadillo Aerospace, and for many years the CTO of Oculus VR. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - InsideTracker: insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off - Indeed: indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit - Blinkist: blinkist.com/lex and use code LEX to get 25% off premium - Eight Sleep: eightsleep.com/lex and use code LEX to get special savings - Athletic Greens: athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil EPISODE LINKS: John's Twitter: twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack Books mentioned: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution: amzn.to/3SkNZER Game Engine Black Book Wolfenstein 3D: amzn.to/3QlOqg8 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/3LddnZjkpflldHXnRZ0rrw RSS: lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ Full episodes playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 Clips playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41 OUTLINE: - Introduction - Programming languages - Modern programming - Day in the life - Hard work - Pizza and Diet Coke - Setup - id Software - Commander Keen - Hacker ethic - Wolfenstein 3D - Doom - Quake - John Romero - Metaverse - Elon Musk - Mars - Nuclear energy - AGI - Andrej Karpathy - Martial arts - Advice for young people - Meaning of life SOCIAL: - Twitter: twitter.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: facebook.com/lexfridman - Instagram: instagram.com/lexfridman - Medium: medium.com/@lexfridman - Reddit: reddit.com/r/lexfridman - Support on Patreon: patreon.com/lexfridman

Why it's here

3 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a fascinating and deep five-hour interview covering game engine history, debugging, AGI, and software engineering philosophy.

Moments people linked to

kkenon Hacker News • Recommends

On “John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round”

The interview with Lex Fridman that he was referring to: link to this video The entire video is worth viewing, an impressive 5:15h!

joblaznyon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Which tech podcasts would you recommend to a friend?”

Lex Fridman. He does long form interviews (~4 hours) on more than just tech, and all of the guests he interviews are fascinating. He simultaneously approaches his interviews from a scientific background (MIT AI lecturer) and a love for humanity. If you like tech, one episode I'd like to recommend is episode #309 with John Carmack. link to this video

fernandotakaion Hacker News • Recommends

On “Commander Keen's Adaptive Tile Scrolling”

link for people that want to watch it: link to this video i would also recommend another two of his interviews: Todd Howard link Guido van Rossun link

u/r0ck0in r/typescript • Mentions

On “Do I put enums in types.ts?”

Big issue for me too. [Am slowly coming to the realization that this often works better than trying to get it perfect first-time...] I learn more (especially considering how subjective this stuff usually is), and somewhat ironically... sometimes just redundantly doing the same thing twice (or more) is quicker than doing it once (when bikeshedding along the way). On your question specifically... I do a mix. Some files only have types (typically if there's lots of small related types). Others have a mix of types + runtime code. e.g. putting config object args above the function.
5View on Reddit

mikewaroton Hacker News • Mentions

On “Lex Fridman Podcast #309 – John Carmack”

Carmack says he wasn't the first to find it1, and the other person had "done that somewhat before" 1 link to this video

pengaruon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Apple tells employees to work at the office three times per week starting Sept”

Lately I've been wondering if the army of 100% remote folks realize their shift to entirely virtualized interactions creates opportunity for AIs to compete on equal grounds. An AI assistant won't be taking your place in the office anytime soon. But the writing's on the wall for AI assistants to start appearing in your Zoom meetings 0. Once they can churn out code 24x7 without eating or sleeping, glwt. 0 link to this video

vlodon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: Why are we not using debuggers more?”

John Carmack's view 0 on debuggers (from Lex Fridman Podcast podcast video) TLDR: He doesn't understand why a lot of SV big-tech companies are hostile to debuggers. 0 link to this video

flat-plutoon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Zuckerberg unveils new metaverse avatar after getting mocked for creepy version”

…speak. Given the talent at Reality Labs, I'm certain that things will look much better a few years from now. People often have this vision of what VR/AR should look like and will be disappointed that v1.0 does not live up to those expectations. As long as incremental progress is made, it will compound over time and eventually we'll get there. 1 link to this video…

poszlemon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Vim After 15 Years (2017)”

This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently, especially since listening to John Carmack interview ( link to this video ) and him saying that almost nobody uses IDEs at Meta. I think it is totally possible to be (even very) productive in VIM. I do think, though, that a person who is productive in VIM would be more productive if he used a proper IDE. This is my experience after I had been using VIM for about 10 years and switched to an IntelliJ IDE (and actually learned it) (This, of course, assumes that there is a proper IDE for your language)

rajman187on Hacker News • Mentions

On “John Carmack on the Similarity of Human Learning and LLMs Training”

…th resources just because we have more power with modern hardware (he poked fun at React where you spin up a new thread just for an interactive button); and being aware of the inefficiencies brought on by infinite resources (# of engineers and/or funding, which make you think less critically about timelines and delivering within bounded means) 1 link to this video…

adamddev1on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Commander Keen's Adaptive Tile Scrolling”

Carmack talked about how they released those first games on the Lex Friedman podcast. Having a previous framework and pipeline seemed to help get them out really quick. link to this video

Geeeon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Daily Coffee Habits May Affect Brain Plasticity and Learning”

Sorry, but I don't believe this. Surely someone would have noticed that coffee drinkers are slow learners. I'd say that on the contrary many life-long learners like computer programmers are known to consume copious amounts of caffeine. John Carmack drinks 8-9 cans of diet coke a day 0, and he said that he is still as sharp as he used to be 1. 0 link to this video 1 link to this video

owenpalmeron Hacker News • Mentions

On “A ChatGPT clone, in 3000 bytes of C, backed by GPT-2 (2023)”

"I am not a madman for saying that it is likely that the code for artificial general intelligence is going to be tens of thousands of lines of code, not millions of lines of code. This is code that conceivably one individual could write, unlike writing a new web browser or operating system." - John Carmack, Lex Fridman Podcast (August 4th, 2022) This was around 3 months before ChatGPT's initial release. Timestamped: link to this video

u/pedersenkin r/C_Programming • Mentions

On “When is it appropriate to use GOTO?”

I find having a read through the OpenBSD wd driver helps to get a "feel" for where a `goto` can be used to good effect. Additionally, one of the first questions to John Carmack in the interview here is about gotos. Personally I think it was a bit cheesy to ask him this but nonetheless you might find it fun.

u/gospunin r/dotnet • Mentions

On “Does MVC still have a place in 2023”

One of the best programmers said it best about complexity without clarity link to this video