Lex Fridman
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2022–2024
5:14:51 · 1.9M views · Aug 4, 2022
A five-hour Lex Fridman interview with John Carmack covering Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, programming, games and rockets.
HN mines it for Carmack's views on AGI, debuggers, tooling and the metaverse, and recommends it as worth the full length.
12 comments from Hacker News
Lex Fridman. He does long form interviews (~4 hours) on more than just tech, and all of the guests he interviews are fascinating. He simultaneously approaches his interviews from a scientific background (MIT AI lecturer) and a love for humanity. If you like tech, one episode I'd like to recommend is episode #309 with John Carmack. this video
link for people that want to watch it: this video i would also recommend another two of his interviews: Todd Howard [LINK] Guido van Rossun [LINK]
The interview with Lex Fridman that he was referring to: this video The entire video is worth viewing, an impressive 5:15h!
Carmack is no doubt brilliant and it shows through Oculus as a product. But AGI is not about algorithm optimization the way 3D graphics were in the 90s. I am not sure the approach he takes (let’s find a way to write this in assembly) can apply here. He’s said before that AGI is going to be a few thousands of lines of code, ultimately [1], and it’s hard to believe that’s really the case. That said, I did get a chance to speak with him one on one last year and he really emphasized a few things; the need for being product oriented and giving customers what they want rather than chasing cool engineering (über)solutions; not being careless with resources just because we have more power with modern hardware (he poked fun at React where you spin up a new thread just for an interactive button); and being aware of the inefficiencies brought on by infinite resources (# of engineers and/or funding, which make you think less critically about timelines and delivering within bounded means) [1] this video
I was listening to the Lex Fridman interview of John Carmack[1] the other day and find myself agreeing with Carmack. Essentially, building the metaverse is insanely difficult but also desirable for a variety of reasons. I'm glad that someone (sucks that it is FB) is investing heavily into the R&D to make it a reality. As for the new avatar, it's just the first draft so to speak. Given the talent at Reality Labs, I'm certain that things will look much better a few years from now. People often have this vision of what VR/AR should look like and will be disappointed that v1.0 does not live up to those expectations. As long as incremental progress is made, it will compound over time and eventually we'll get there. [1] this video