I understand why people value the code John Carmack has released but I do not understand why people value his public statements.
"eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id"[0]
"Great! I think Microsoft has been a good parent company for gaming IPs"[1]
By sheer coincidence, John Carmack is peddling machine generated code.[2]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20081003111457/http://www.linuxg...
[1] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1308069857913720832
[2] https://80.lv/articles/john-carmack-s-agi-startup-keen-techn...
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It makes more sense to read his 'public statements' and judge them individually rather than in aggregate. No one is correct all the time.
As for this current post (just a tweet really, public statement sounds overly official), I think he's making sense. If you don't follow industry trends, you'll eventually be out of touch. Whether you're a senior software engineer or engineering manager, keeping current with the evolution of tech will make you better at your job. Today that happens to be related to following AI developments, but it applied equally to learning higher level programming languages in the 90s, or big data engineering practices in the 2010s.
1st link is broken
https://web.archive.org/web/20081003111457/http://www.linuxg...
I have a new theory as of this moment.
Elon Musk, Paul Graham, Steve Yegge and now, sadly John Carmack. Your average hacker scoffs at the idea of religion or faith, but somehow is comfortable with complete unquestioning fealty to whichever person who did something interesting with technology in the past and made enough money to afford drugs you don’t get arrested for and then they started prophesying.
Before you stone me, remember every prophet was downvoted in their own forum.
I see it as those who learn to use AI effectively are seeing massive benefits. Those that haven't seen those benefits are still skeptical.
Someone who's seen the benfits, knows, with proof, the benefits exist. They're like Copernicus who realized the plants go around the sun, not the earth. The others are still like those who look up, see the planets go around the sky, and can't believe the earth is not at the center. They then shout "you're lying, you're crazy, burn the hertic!"
The nice thing about religious faith is that most minds can hold only one at a time. I may believe in an oddly resurrected deity who took the shape of a man, but I don't have room for anything crazier.
"We are fools for Christ's sake." 1 Corinthians 4:10
Sure, but it is that Christ, Buddha or any of the other incarnations of the same idea? I am right there with you, believe it or not, but don’t John 3:16 the wrong football game.