

John Carmack Quakecon 2013 Keynote Livestream - ivank
http://www.twitch.tv/bethesda

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justin66
"Kinect is sort of like a zero-button mouse with a lot of latency on it."

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jhickner
John Carmack talks at length about Haskell in this keynote. Definitely worth
watching if you're interested in that stuff.

~~~
Dewie
He seems to start talking about Haskell at 1 hour and 32 minutes into the VOD
of the talk [1] (don't think he mentioned it before that).

[1]
[http://www.twitch.tv/bethesda/b/439369577?t=1h32m](http://www.twitch.tv/bethesda/b/439369577?t=1h32m)

~~~
Dewie
He also talks about Lisp and functional programming in general.

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zanny
He talks at length about the recent years of Armadillo, I think it is really
interesting his gripe was a lack of oversight from his end when he wasn't
active on site, while he was spending a million a year funding the project. I
wonder how many of the startups around these parts could use that kind of
lesson (ie, inverse of the overbearing boss).

I also love that John Carmack and Elon Musk are email buddies, and that even
John Carmack isn't thinking big enough for Elon =P

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sillysaurus
_John Carmack isn 't thinking big enough for Elon_

A few years ago I had the same thought about Carmack. I wondered why he
seemingly abandoned his vision for space travel by returning to work in the
game industry on Rage. I figured Carmack probably realized that Elon's SpaceX
was going to "win the race" and gave up. Or maybe Carmack is just getting old.
Either way, he's still one of my heroes.

~~~
Todd
John is less than one year older than Elon. They are both hugely smart from a
technology standpoint but John's knowledge goes very deep. John's focus is
implementing the future of technology personally. Elon's focus is bringing
sufficient capital to bring the technological future to the present.

~~~
illumen
Both came from game dev backgrounds. Carmack announced he was getting into
rockets a couple of years before Musk sold paypay... and then got into rockets
:)

I wouldn't be surprised if Carmack heavily inspired Musk. If not just with
shareware, and online payments, then with rockets.

Also, the public .plan files he published in the 90s heavily inspired the web
log/blog craze :)

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
These are interesting points. I think the crowd that wasn't on the web in the
mid 90's may not understand just how influential Carmack was on so many of us.

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lispython
You could also watch Carmack's keynote from YouTube
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNWAcEu1jpU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNWAcEu1jpU)

~~~
sp332
Thanks! Just to note, Carmack doesn't come out until 15 minutes into that
video.

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pinchyfingers
I really enjoy that Carmack speaks so precisely. It makes it a joy to listen
to anything he has to say. He truly is a brilliant guy.

~~~
zanny
I would say I want him to make a podcast (and would pay like $5 a month for an
episode), but considering he thinks hes wasting his free time if all hes doing
is learning scheme and implementing Wolfenstein in Haskell, I definitely don't
want to take away of his time to educate muggles.

~~~
pinchyfingers
Right, but if it made enough money to fund Armadillo it might be worth his
time.

~~~
zanny
This is a good point, why doesn't he crowdfund Armadillo?

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dshankar
Link to the video to watch later:
[http://www.twitch.tv/bethesda/b/439369577](http://www.twitch.tv/bethesda/b/439369577)

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ksk
His talks are unstructured brain dumps that take a lot of effort to unpack.
Even so, they contain interesting experience/research/experimentation insights
that make it worth the effort. I have every single keynote right from 1998 and
its interesting to see how his thoughts have shaped over the years.

For people new to game dev don't miss these ..

Tim Sweeney's talk at POPL about the next mainstream programming language.

[http://www.st.cs.uni-
saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-...](http://www.st.cs.uni-
saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf)

and Jonathan Blow's column from gdmag.

[http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=971590](http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=971590)

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agumonkey
Was just discussing Tim Sweeney on reddit when someone told me that he was
publishing papers on dependently typed languages (found a public one in pdf)
[http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1jj40p/john_carmack...](http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1jj40p/john_carmack_talking_at_length_about_haskell_in/cbfj4qv)

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petercooper
Always a pleasure to see John wax lyrical on graphics tech. I used to love
reading his .plan files back in the day and recently found a link to a PDF
version of some of them here on HN: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/14192/John-
Carmack-Archive-plan-19...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/14192/John-Carmack-
Archive-plan-1998) \- via
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3367230](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3367230)

~~~
gcr
That is _not_ a link to a PDF. Would you mind sharing the original PDF if you
have it? I can't/won't read scribd documents.

Edit: As an HTML document:
[http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/plan.html](http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/plan.html)

~~~
saidajigumi
FWIW, here's a link to a PDF version:

[http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc-
plan_1997.pdf](http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc-plan_1997.pdf)

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bownanaking
He is really into Haskell. Would love to see some practical example from him.

ps:he can speak for hours.

~~~
breckinloggins
This is probably not as fun as the stuff Carmack is up to, but if anyone out
there wants to see some examples of "real" stuff done in Haskell (for "typical
startup" values of "real"), check out _Real World Haskell_. I found it to be a
great read, especially after working through _Learn You a Haskell_.

[http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/](http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/)

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zanny
Is anyone doing anything related to a universal memory abstraction in the
Linux kernel? He speaks for around 5 minutes at the 20 minute mark about a
unified memory architecture, and I just say _hell yes_. I think it might
become one of the largest problems in the apu / dedicated card world, and just
in general it is always an issue in a transition from dedicated plug in
hardware cards with their own memories to integrated solutions using system
memory. Having real universal reference would make all that a non problem.

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matthudson
He actually started talking about unified memory architecture at about the 51
minute mark. (If anyone else is curious.)

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zanny
I meant after he started talking, my bad. I was watching it live. In the vod
that might not make sense.

~~~
matthudson
Oops! No, that's my bad. I liked your comment by the way. I was just trying to
give people a reference time if they were curious.

I'm still watching the VOD because I didn't catch it live. I didn't realize
the timing doesn't sync. In the VOD he first talks about unified memory
architecture at about 51 minutes.

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rartichoke
His keynotes are always so good. I'm really looking forward to watching it a
bit later.

~~~
rartichoke
This year's speech made me think what it might have been like to listen to
visionaries in the past give a talk out in the middle of a town's square.

It was like the room was dead silent (not even random people coughing or
opening bags of snacks) for 3 hours while one of the smartest game devs talked
about various topics.

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bobbles
Is it possible to get a permalink to the talk so that I can watch it later?
(or will this link work for that?)

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ufo
[http://www.twitch.tv/bethesda/b/439369577?t=15m](http://www.twitch.tv/bethesda/b/439369577?t=15m)

This is the automatic twitch vod they were mentioning, with the timestamp. By
the way, Carmack has been going at it for more than 2 and a half hours now.
Impressive!

~~~
Tyrant505
How impressive? He is impressive and just talking about what he does and loves
is easy :)!

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nawitus
Could someone post timecoded highlights? I probably can't watch a 3h keynote
as I'm not a gamer, but I'd like to watch the bits I'm interested in (like
about rockets, Haskell etc).

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
It's an extremely monolog, and he tends to follow connections in his thinking
between the various topic areas, so it's difficult to index.

And honestly, I'd say only 20% of the talk is directly about gaming. Most of
it is about what he thinks the future will be like in terms of programming and
hardware.

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38leinad
if you are interested in rendering, don't miss out John's talk at 5pm dallas
time today: "Principles of Lightining and Rendering with John Carmack"
[http://www.quakecon.org/event-schedule/](http://www.quakecon.org/event-
schedule/) Should also be streamed on the quakecon twitch stream. according to
the keynet video, it is supposed to be a talk he has given internally at id
before and was urged to redo it at quakecon.

"John will present a lecture-style presentation on the physics of light
transport and rendering. He will discuss how light behaves in the real world,
and the approximations and compromises that are involved in simulating the
behavior with computers. Note: not for the technically faint at heart."

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gnarbarian
Lots of big hints there for developers to pick up on. Haskell for a large
simulation project , GPGPU advancement, 120 hz clock with physics
interpolation, benefits of functions without side effects, performance
benefits from elegant design rather than complicated optimization kludges.

