John Carmack

You may have heard that an average human breathes out roughly 1kg of carbon dioxide a day. Gas masses are kind of abstract, and most of the mass is oxygen than you breathe in, but that is still 273 grams of carbon that your metabolism draws out of your body every day, even if…

This is good advice.

While noting some compression artifacts in a water scene on TV, I started thinking— for a given set of compression parameters, what is “the most cursed macroblock”. Not the worst looking, which is a squishy perceptual metric, but the set of pixels that takes the most bits to…

I had several phrases highlighted in bold on a post that I saved to drafts, but when I returned to post it, the formatting was gone.

I pitched this idea to Meta for @BeatSaber , but there are other games it could also work for. The Global Frequency The fuzzy abstract vision of the Metaverse, and cinematic visions like Ready Player One, almost always involve crowds of people having a great time. While I…

Are modern recommendation systems treated like a reinforcement learning problem, with a sum of discounted future rewards, or as strictly single step transactions? Many products do significant offline data analysis on actions taken to inform changes, but it seems under…

I find it surprising when decisions about things like the number of runs with different random seeds wind up with “round numbers” like 10 or 50 instead of system friendly powers of two like 8 or 32. You know something about the background of a programmer by their constants!

I like em dashes, and I hate that some people now take them as evidence of text being AI generated.

I had an interesting set of connected artist experiences yesterday. I became a fan of @LiamRSharp after spending a lot of time with his work in the (late and lamented) Madefire VR app, so I was excited to read Starhenge. Trista was reading something else, but kept glancing over…

A chunk of this is just @Project2501_117 dressing me in tighter shirts, but I did put on several pounds of muscle this year after switching my random grab bag of vitamins and supplements over to @bryan_johnson ‘s Blueprint system. I was probably not getting enough protein to take…

I never saw an official video, so here is my little bit from the induction of Quake into the Strong Museum’s World Video Game Hall of Fame last month.

The video of my talk at Upper Bound 2025 is up: youtu.be/rQ-An5bhkrs?si…

The beta 3D photo integration with Instagram is very well done! Every static photo becomes an AI generated stereoscopic 3D photo, and there is a “3D” button that lets you toggle the feature on and off for comparison. Every photo I looked at “just worked”, with no glaring…

It would be interesting to see usage stats for every page of executable code in an OS distribution — each installation will inevitably have many dormant pages, but are there pages that are never referenced by ANY user?