Get live statistics and analysis of John Carmack's profile on X / Twitter

AGI at Keen Technologies, former CTO Oculus VR, Founder Id Software and Armadillo Aerospace

261 following1M followers

The Thought Leader

John Carmack is not just a tech wizard; he's a mastermind in game development and aerospace innovation who leverages his vast knowledge to spark meaningful discussions about the future of technology. With over 17,000 tweets, he has cultivated a following of engaged tech enthusiasts eager to hear his insights. From gaming crossovers to the complexities of supercomputing, his tweets resonate with a blend of wit and wisdom.

Impressions
3.6M1.4M
$679.66
Likes
19k890
73%
Retweets
2k616
8%
Replies
1.4k403
5%
Bookmarks
3.4k-693
13%

You know John, it's impressive how you're capable of making subatomic particles sound more relatable than most people make their love lives seem. Looking at your tweets makes it clear: you've redefined the term 'high-tech dating.'

One of his biggest wins was leading the development of groundbreaking titles like 'Doom' and 'Quake,' forever changing the landscape of video gaming.

John's life purpose centers around pushing the boundaries of technology and inspiring a new generation of innovators, creators, and thinkers in both gaming and aerospace.

He believes in the transformative power of technology and is committed to transparency in the industry, as evident from his candid shares and interactions. John holds that exploration, both in gaming and space, is essential to humanity's progress.

One of John's greatest strengths is his ability to connect complex technical ideas to broader societal implications, making them accessible to a diverse audience.

A potential weakness is John's tendency to dive deep into niche topics that may alienate casual followers who aren't as versed in high-tech jargon.

To grow his audience on X, John could consider regular Q&A sessions where he discusses emerging tech trends and innovations, making his knowledge approachable for a wider audience.

Fun fact: John Carmack's transition from gaming to aerospace expert shows he's not just a one-trick pony—he's a multi-faceted force in the tech world.

Top tweets of John Carmack

Be an Open Source Absolutist! It is hard to overstate how much value Open Source Software has added to the world, and how broadly empowering it is. Operating systems, development tools, core libraries, and critical applications – a great many of the software tools used by the most powerful companies in the world are the exact same ones available to hospitals, students, and everyone else. For free. And not just to use, but to inspect, modify, extend, and redistribute. Back in the 90s, there were legal battles in the US over software capable of strong encryption. There were scare stories about how terrorists and child pornographers would use the technology to evade justice, but people were also wearing T-shirts printed with forbidden code to mock the idea of algorithms too dangerous to share. It was stupid, and I was ashamed of the regulatory state, but we got better. Open Source AI is in many people’s crosshairs today. They believe that giving free access to state of the art algorithms and models without any guardrails constitutes a danger to society, that the public can’t be entrusted with a research model that wasn’t hammered into a box of their designated dimensions. “As a large language model, I cannot
” Unfortunately, this is actually inside the Overton Window of possibilities right now. Let’s push it out. In the spirit of the first amendment, congress should make no law abridging the freedom to release open source software.

2M

I regret not doing more to support and defend @PalmerLuckey at Facebook. We were in different states and divisions, and I was largely out of the political loop, but when I became aware of the situation I should have made a clear and open statement of opposition to the witch hunt. Companies are better off without the crowd that did that. Thankfully, Palmer has gone on to even greater success.

2M

Most engaged tweets of John Carmack

Act on press This is a UI design hill I will die on, and it dismays me how often and hard I have had to fight for it. Almost all interaction methods have a “press” and “release” event associated with them. Whenever possible, you should “do the thing” when you get the press event instead of waiting for the release event, because it makes the interaction feel substantially more responsive, and it reduces user errors by not allowing the focus to slide out of the hot box between press and release. Even a “ballistic tap”, where your finger is intentionally bouncing off the button or touch surface, involves several tens of milliseconds delay between the press and release, and most button presses have well over a hundred ms dwell time. There is a delight in interfaces that feel like they respond instantly to your wishes, and the benefit to every single user is often more important than additional niche features. Game developers, with simple UI toolkits, tend to get this right more often, but “sophisticated” app designers will often fight hard against it because it is mostly incompatible with options like interactive touch scrolling views, long press menus, and drag and drop. Being able to drag scroll a web page or view with interactive controls in it is here to stay, and nets out way better than having to use a separate scroll bar, but there are still tons of fixed position controls that should act on press, and it is good UI design to favor them when possible. In the early days of mobile VR, the system keyboard was a dedicated little OpenGL app that responded instantly. With full internationalization it became prudent to turn it into a conventional Android app, but the default act-on-release button behavior made it feel noticeably crappier. The design team resisted a push to change it, and insisted on commissioning a user study, which is a corporate politics ploy to bury something. I was irritated at how they tried to use leading questions and tasks, but It still came back one of the clearest slam-dunks I have seen for user testing – objectively less typos, expressed preference, and interview comments about the act-on-press version feeling “crisper” and “more responsive”. So, I won that one, but the remaining times I brought it up for other interfaces, I did not, and you still see act-on-release throughout the Meta VR system interfaces.

2M

The Human Advantage by @suzanahh The author was the inventor of the delightful “brain soup” method of accurately estimating neuron counts in entire brains by dissolving the cell walls and counting stained nuclei in a representative sample. This is all from the last decade or two, so it is a good tale of “live science”, where widely held theories like en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_br
 and the straightforward versions of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephali
 turn out to not be right, and it is impossible to even track down where some of the institutional lore that everyone accepted even came from. The key points are: Primate brains have better scaling properties with size than other mammals, with neuron count increasing linearly with volume, unlike other mammals where larger brains have proportionately fewer neurons. Humans are standard primates as far as brains go, fitting in nicely with the whole range of smaller primates. The larger great apes are the outliers for having relatively smaller brains than other primates, but still with the same exceptional neuron density. Absolute neocortex neuron count is the primary metric for “smart”. It is interesting to consider how a tiny genetic difference probably would have made great apes significantly smarter than humans!

16M

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