[HN Gopher] John Carmack visits Starbase
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John Carmack visits Starbase
Author : amrrs
Score : 113 points
Date : 2021-08-23 21:17 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| modeless wrote:
| He must be tempted to join. I think there are few places in the
| world where one could make a bigger impact as an engineer. He
| already has experience in rocketry. He's located in Texas. And I
| bet he'd be interested in the stuff Tesla's doing with AI too.
| wolrah wrote:
| In a previous twitter thread linked from the post here Elon
| mentions having tried many times to get John to join.
| adventured wrote:
| The big problem is that Carmack is an elite software engineer,
| and he's not at that same tier in rocketry/aerospace despite
| being good at it. Elite vs good. Which is to say, he'd have to
| take a back seat at SpaceX (which is running at full speed;
| Carmack would have to try to get back up to speed in aerospace
| just to contribute, difficult by itself). His ability to
| contribute beyond that of other industry specific talent is
| very questionable, and there are far better people - at
| rocketry/aerospace - working there than him. Carmack knows that
| without question. It simply doesn't make sense for him to spend
| his time doing that; it's not the best use of his time given
| that SpaceX already exists (vs trying to start what SpaceX has
| become, in his Armadillo effort).
|
| It's the equivalent of Michael Jordan spending the remainder of
| his athletic career trying to play baseball. Sure, he could
| have done that. If the White Sox had allowed him on the team
| (ignoring the strike for a moment), more than likely all he
| would have been doing is taking the job of someone better at
| playing professional baseball than him; while his greatest
| ability by far rests in his basketball prowess.
|
| Carmack already did a deep run at aerospace. He has N time
| left. Where can he combo make the greatest impact and enjoy the
| work. I'd guess that's something close to the equation, it
| seems to be for most people in that position/stage of life.
| Working at SpaceX is unlikely to be that place all things
| considered. What might have happened if Carmack had joined in
| the early days instead of doing Armadillo is an interesting
| thought (it's hard to see how the SpaceX outcome could be much
| better than it has been though, realistically).
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Tempted, perhaps, but not enough to join. Carmack's working on
| AGI, and he's committed to a decade-long time horizon.
|
| The impact of AGI is far greater than rockets, too.
| modeless wrote:
| Elon is working on AI too, and Dojo is one of the most
| exciting things in the field if you ask me. Carmack has
| always been good at leveraging hardware to do amazing things
| on the graphics side, and AI hardware is not so dissimilar to
| graphics hardware.
| qeternity wrote:
| > and Dojo is one of the most exciting things in the field
| if you ask me
|
| Why do you think this?
| modeless wrote:
| I believe that the major limiting factor to AI
| performance is hardware, not software. Now and for the
| foreseeable future. The most important projects in AI,
| therefore, are the ones pushing hardware performance as
| high as it can go.
| gpm wrote:
| Not the person you're asking, but
|
| - Long iteration time kills productivity, a lot of AI
| work has long iteration time because hardware is slow.
|
| - It's possible that bigger models on faster hardware are
| actually all we need to solve some problems. For example
| see GPT-3.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Elon is working on ML, not AGI.
|
| Carmack is working on artificial general intelligence. As
| far as I know, that's well outside of anything Elon is
| doing.
| modeless wrote:
| I mean, Elon just announced that they're building a
| literal android that is supposed to take verbal
| directions and perform everyday tasks for you. If that's
| not AGI, I don't know what is. It may not be very likely
| to happen anytime soon, but the ambition is there at
| least.
|
| If you haven't watched the Tesla AI presentation, I
| highly recommend it. The dancer in a spandex robot suit
| is getting all the headlines but the technical
| presentations are the real deal. Karpathy in particular
| is an excellent technical presenter and he didn't hold
| back.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| > Elon just announced that they're building a literal
| android that is supposed to take verbal directions and
| perform everyday tasks for you. If that's not AGI, I
| don't know what is.
|
| It's not AGI. An AGI is something that can think for
| itself, the way you can.
| modeless wrote:
| Elon described this robot as taking directions like "go
| to the store and get me this list of groceries", implying
| that it would be able to, like, drive a car to the store,
| locate the groceries, go through checkout, etc. And more
| generally he described replacing human labor to the point
| that a universal basic income becomes necessary. AGI is
| definitely the ambition here.
| gpm wrote:
| Elon's been giving some lip service to closer-to-GI
| capabilities anyways, e.g. when describing how it would
| be optimal to be able to control Tesla's humanoid robot
| by saying "please go to the store and get me the
| following groceries"...
|
| https://youtu.be/j0z4FweCy4M?t=7775
|
| Whether Tesla wants to fund serious work towards that may
| be a different question (but they do seem to be serious
| about at least building the robot).
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Any sufficiently advanced ML is indistinguishable from
| AGI.
| gpm wrote:
| https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1429930662652485632
|
| > I did kind of volunteer to help them fix what I consider very
| poor user interface performance on the older model S (that I
| drive). Their engineers have been sharing data with me.
|
| That sounds like kinda sorta starting to join...
|
| Working with Tesla on AI actually sounds more like what he's
| been working on recently... at least if he can convince them to
| give him a lot of flexibility on what exactly he works on.
| ctvo wrote:
| If you sold Carmack, you sold me. I have my opinions on Tesla as
| a company, but have always been impressed with SpaceX. Godspeed.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Carmack has been sold by SpaceX right from the start.
|
| Musk and Carmack are both rocket nuts. Carmack ran a rocket
| company: Armadillo Aerospace, mostly as a hobby. From engineer
| to engineer, Carmack has a lot of respect for Musk, and Musk
| tried to offer Carmack a job at SpaceX, as in "stop playing
| with your toys, we have serious rockets here".
| wil421 wrote:
| I concur and I'm very vocal about the vapor ware that Tesla
| spews from time to time. SpaceX has delivered and I watched in
| complete awe when two rockets touched down near simultaneously
| a year or so ago.
|
| I still think the whole passenger part of spacex might be a
| pipe dream but who knows.
| losvedir wrote:
| Ooh, this is a fun crossover episode.
| DantesKite wrote:
| I wonder where Elon Musk would be without Twitter.
|
| Still wildly successful, but man that platform is an amplifier.
| gpm wrote:
| For those wondering, Carmack founded the now defunct Armadillo
| Aerospace (as well as being a well known video game developer).
| ctvo wrote:
| John is one of the great engineering minds of our generation.
| Don't forget Oculus.
| neartheplain wrote:
| He was years ahead of the curve [0] on mobile-first VR. By
| that I don't mean "stick a phone in Google Carboad," but
| truly self-contained and portable VR built on mobile
| chipsets. The success of the Quest and Quest 2 is proof of
| that, especially in the context of years of slow PC-only VR
| user growth.
|
| [0] https://venturebeat.com/2016/10/07/oculus-john-carmack-
| argue...
| Thaxll wrote:
| Who doesn't know Carmack on HN?
| jstx1 wrote:
| Other people don't know all the things you do and vice versa.
| I would bet that less than half of the monthly active users
| on HN know who John Carmack is.
| gpm wrote:
| And I'd bet that half of those that do know who John
| Carmack is don't know he spent awhile building rockets,
| it's not exactly what he is known for.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Thanks for sharing these obscure facts with us, man. I guess it
| does not harm. At the very least you made a lot of people
| giggle
|
| In any case, it's funny he's still using the I'd handle on
| twitter. Whatever happened to that lawsuit
|
| Finally somewhat on topic: I really thought they had a chance
| when armadillo won that NASA moonlander prize.
| avmich wrote:
| > I really thought they had a chance when armadillo won that
| NASA moonlander prize.
|
| Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.
|
| I'd really wish John would put fingers to the keyboard and
| write the history of Armadillo Aerospace. From buying a
| peroxide engine from Juan Lozano (?) to decision not to
| continue, even with that grand CNC behemoth as a birthday
| gift.
| bane wrote:
| IIR, Carmack spent a lot of his own money on Armadillo
| Aerospace and most of the people who worked on it were
| volunteers. They had many ideas including custom designed
| rocket engines and self contained composable pieces that could
| be built into large systems.
|
| It was very up Musk's "first principles" alley, but wildly
| underestimated the capital needed to be successful.
| hamburgerwah wrote:
| "game developer"... He created a couple of small time indie
| titles : DOOM, Quake, with a hobby company called ID software
| creddit wrote:
| Are those not games he developed?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Actually, Commander Keen could be called an indie title by
| today's standards. The success put them in a position to make
| DOOM.
|
| At least, I think that's how the history went. I could be
| wrong.
| psyc wrote:
| Everyone always skips Wolfenstein 3D
| datameta wrote:
| Ah, yes. FPS #0 People tend to seem to start from #1
| gpm wrote:
| I did say "well known"
|
| But seriously, is there a better title to give him for that
| part of his work?
| titzer wrote:
| Pioneer? God?
| gpm wrote:
| Pioneer is a good suggestion, thanks :)
| masswerk wrote:
| Pioneer - thirty years after Spacewar? Hum...
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Think of it as what it might sound like to a Christian if
| you called Jesus a "well known" religious figure.
| skohan wrote:
| As well as being a carpenter
| psyc wrote:
| Father of the First Person Shooter and Patron Saint of Low
| Latency
| TchoBeer wrote:
| You can say "Creator of Doom and Quake" and/or "Founder of
| ID software"
| matmatmatmat wrote:
| They're very underground, you've probably never heard of
| them.
| kulix425 wrote:
| China speed?
| jimbob45 wrote:
| What is China speed? Are the Chinese known for fast
| manufacturing?
| zbrozek wrote:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-the-u-s-can-learn-from-chi...
| hamburgerwah wrote:
| In the sense that if you abandon all concern for safety,
| engineering, the environment, human rights, money and use
| concentration camp slaves for labor you can achieve massive
| scale public works very quickly. Yes I think Nazi China is
| known for it's speed.
| keewee7 wrote:
| China's dominance in manufacturing comes from speed and
| agility. Cheap cost of labor is a distant third benefit of
| manufacturing in China.
| dangus wrote:
| To me, "speed and agility" are code words for a culture that
| tolerates long work weeks and hours:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
|
| With a society that had been dealing with famine, poverty,
| and labor opportunities consisting of subsistence farming in
| living memory, working 72 hours a week to receive a steady
| paycheck and a full belly seems like a pretty decent trade.
|
| When you look at the history of the Industrial Revolution and
| the Western labor movement, I have to have doubts that this
| "speed and agility" will last. People who are prosperous
| start to have higher standards, especially as new generations
| enter the labor market. There is already significant pushback
| against the 996 system.
|
| It's not hard to out-produce when the average person is
| working almost double the Western standard.
|
| I thought the documentary "American Factory" was an
| interesting window into the lives of Chinese and American
| factory workers. My own analysis/opinion: the factory workers
| in China were indeed shown to be working quickly, obediently,
| and working long hours. The Americans looked lazy at times.
|
| I thought the reasoning for this difference was that American
| workers used to union protections already had generations of
| knowledge about why they need not become slaves risking their
| health and safety for their capitalist employers, despite
| having few other options in a town where most of the factory
| jobs left.
|
| I personally wonder when the typical Chinese worker will wake
| up to that same reality: that speed, agility, and fast
| innovation aren't really worth selling your weekends and
| joints and tendons away just so that the boss can buy a third
| vacation home.
| nos4A2 wrote:
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-s-coronavirus-hospi...
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-20/beijing-r...
| xvf22 wrote:
| I mean, they built the world's largest high speed rail network
| pretty damn quickly.
| cdstyh wrote:
| That had always been the advantage of communism and
| dictatorships. When something needs to be done, you can just
| force people to do it.
| DashAnimal wrote:
| Who was forced to work on the high speed rail? Do you have
| a source?
| neartheplain wrote:
| Maybe GP meant forced in the sense of giving right-of-
| way, which is arguably the biggest impediment to long
| distance rail construction. As of this January,
| California's High Speed Rail project still did not have
| all necessary right-of-ways [0].
|
| [0] https://www.city-journal.org/high-costs-construction-
| delays-...
| yokoprime wrote:
| Yes
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| SpaceX will now be renamed Union Aerospace Corporation (like in
| Doom).
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| Somebody call Dwayne Johnson, now!
| yann2 wrote:
| There are no aerospace factories that aren't impressive. Like
| termite nests, whether they are builing anything useful or not is
| another matter.
| seriousquestion wrote:
| You think John Carmack, a legendary engineer who had his own
| aerospace company and has likely toured others, is wrong that
| it's extremely impressive? Which would be relative to others.
| quest88 wrote:
| The commenter is not questioning the impressiveness of the
| factory.
| datameta wrote:
| The commenter was stressing the fact that Starbase is not
| exceptionally unique or an advanced outlier in its
| impressiveness.
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