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

Someone noticed that when you have hundreds / thousands of cores in a supercomputer, the individual utilization boxes in Task Manager start to look like pixels. People started making pictures by doing different amounts of work on specific processors. It escalated quickly.

I love seeing game crossovers — totally supportive of Doom Slayer in Fortnite!

I still get nervous even for other people’s rocket launches. The knowledge that all your work could go up in a giant explosion is a special kind of frisson. But for everyone that has ever drawn a spark of inspiration from visions of humanity expanding into space:This is the Way.

From a DM, just in case anyone else needs to hear this.

A troll was trying to get a rise out of me yesterday, suggesting that I should somehow feel bad about Elon's success after my failed aerospace venture. I can't overstate how alien that thought is to me -- my joy at these things being built is deep.

“Coding” was never the source of value, and people shouldn’t get overly attached to it. Problem solving is the core skill. The discipline and precision demanded by traditional programming will remain valuable transferable attributes, but they won’t be a barrier to entry. Many

Starbase is extremely impressive. There is a lot of bemoaning that we culturally can't build physical things anymore, but this is China Speed and then some. Rows of engines, hangars full of structures, 24/7 shifts -- it is a sight to behold.

Great! I think Microsoft has been a good parent company for gaming IPs, and they don’t have a grudge against me, so maybe I will be able to re engage with some of my old titles.

The AI behavior guardrails that are set up with prompt engineering and filtering should be public — the creators should proudly stand behind their vision of what is best for society and how they crystallized it into commands and code. I suspect many are actually ashamed. The

Last night I downloaded Quake III Arena on Steam. I always looked back at it as my favorite Id game, but it had been many years since I had actually played it. There are a few polish things that I would nitpick today, but it was like dropping a quarter in a classic arcade game.

Surprising stat — general anesthesia for healthy patients has five times the fatality rate of bungee jumping or skydiving.

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.

It is interesting how multiple polls show that most respondents think Twitter will likely be somewhat better in the future, but the conversation on Twitter itself is dominated by confident predictions of catastrophe. I wish there were good prediction markets to advocate for.

So, 50 years old now. I am down a point of Str and Dex from my younger days, but I'm a more capable engineer than ever. I'm noticing more people in their 70s that seem sharp and spry, so I'm looking forward to at least a couple more decades of relevance.

I’m sad to see the glee that some on the right have at the opportunity to deploy cancel culture over post-assassination-attempt comments. I’m a hard core free speech advocate, and I look at it like germ warfare – it’s bad for the whole ecosystem. People like to think that they would fight and die for their sacred principles. This is low stakes practice. The actors will say “THOSE aren’t MY sacred principles, I’m going to punch back at my enemy”, but to the people at the margin – Maybe the principle is important to you? Maybe you shouldn’t cheer for an online mob?

It is interesting how multiple polls show that most respondents think Twitter will likely be somewhat better in the future, but the conversation on Twitter itself is dominated by confident predictions of catastrophe. I wish there were good prediction markets to advocate for.

It is exciting that Argentina has elected a hard core libertarian, but I am almost completely ignorant about the situation there — any good pointers for English reading to get up to speed?

“Coding” was never the source of value, and people shouldn’t get overly attached to it. Problem solving is the core skill. The discipline and precision demanded by traditional programming will remain valuable transferable attributes, but they won’t be a barrier to entry. Many

Last night I downloaded Quake III Arena on Steam. I always looked back at it as my favorite Id game, but it had been many years since I had actually played it. There are a few polish things that I would nitpick today, but it was like dropping a quarter in a classic arcade game.

I remain unconvinced that mixed reality applications are any kind of an engine for increasing headset sales. High quality pass through is great, but I just don’t see applications built around integrating rendering with your real world environment as any kind of a killer app. I

Considering that muffin tops are the best part, it occurs to me that in zero gravity on the ISS, you could bake spherical muffins that are “all top” by just floating a ball of dough in the oven with no pan.

I find it surprising that Windows considers it an acceptable default to just reboot users’ machines after applying an update in the middle of the night.

I still get nervous even for other people’s rocket launches. The knowledge that all your work could go up in a giant explosion is a special kind of frisson. But for everyone that has ever drawn a spark of inspiration from visions of humanity expanding into space:This is the Way.

Great! I think Microsoft has been a good parent company for gaming IPs, and they don’t have a grudge against me, so maybe I will be able to re engage with some of my old titles.

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.

I occasionally consider the people that have gained more wealth by just getting into bitcoin / nvidia / etc at the right time than I have through my entire career of diligent work and significant success. I look at it a bit and always decide that I am just fine with it. Good for them! Courage and commitment in investing is admirable, but there is nothing wrong with just getting lucky. I like the fact that such outsized returns are possible in our society.

Surprising stat — general anesthesia for healthy patients has five times the fatality rate of bungee jumping or skydiving.

I’m looking forward to the moon and Mars having indigenous people.