Mastodawn

for those tracking John Carmack's descent into right wing total moral disorientation, he's now at "Palmer Luckey should buy Wired and do to it what Elon Musk did to Twitter".
he's full fash at this point. totally gonna deliver AGI by 2030 though.
increasingly disgusting that he named his shitass company after Commander Keen, a joyful little video game from before he became a millionaire and was empowered to become his worst self.

a hero is not a person; it is an image. heroes are not stocks you invest in or a religion you join.
a hero is a mental image of something you want to do or become, formed around a real person who likely shits their pants and fucks up constantly.
don't let any of that keep you from dreaming of and working for a good, kind, just world, and becoming the best person you can be.

@jplebreton A long time ago I stopped thinking of myself as having 'heroes'. It's the kind of thing you give up really early in life, I think. Or at least a lot of us with working faculties. But that doesn't stop it feeling extra sucking watching people turn out to be their worst selves.

Especially people with money and means whose efforts will make life worse for me and people like me.

datarama 7h ago

@vampiress @jplebreton I agree. I stopped having heroes a long, long time ago. There are still people I admire, of course. The distinction, I think, between having a hero and admiring someone is whether or not it becomes an attack on one's own identity to realize that the person in question is flawed (perhaps irredeemably so). It's painful to lose a hero.

I admired Noam Chomsky for many years. Then I found out that he not only remained friends with Epstein, but also advised him and thought he was a "victim of the press" after it became public knowledge that Epstein was a serial rapist. Someone with so spectacularly bad moral judgment is not a person I can admire, so I stopped admiring him. This wasn't painful at all.

(There are few people left in the tech / software sphere I admire.)

Jacob 0xFFF 5h ago

@jplebreton beatifully written.

if you see no value in having humanity or empathy or intellectual breadth, "being a powerful programmer" will just lead you to pour your talents down a hole, each decade more lost than the last. you'll pick bad collaborators and bad goals, you'll tolerate utter mediocrity outside your incredibly narrow notions of excellence, and ultimately you may just end up serving evil.

i really have no idea where his Atari stuff is headed, it might ultimately yield something interesting. but everything else about his work these days is so directionally rotten that i'm just assuming it'll go into missile guidance systems, concentration camp efficiency, etc.

Random Geek 11h ago

@jplebreton I stopped tracking Carmack when he went to Oculus. This update sounds exactly like where I expected him to go.

Adrian Marius 11h ago

@randomgeek @jplebreton

there was one red flag that made me reconsider his human side/moral backbone:
in the days of Quake-1, ID collaborated with Rendition to define what the hardware should look like; that's when
he did a 180*:

<<... Quake is not going to do Z-buffering.” ... And then halfway through Quake I said, “Well I changed my mind. We are using Z-buffering...>>

Rendition V1100 not having (performant) z-buffering contributed to the company failure.

Michael Eggers 🇺🇦🇪🇺10h ago

@Groleo @randomgeek @jplebreton I don’t know. No one knew how to do 3d the “right way”. Let alone hw 3d accelerators for consumers. It seems only natural to change your mind in a field that was constantly changing.

Adrian Marius 10h ago

@pythno @randomgeek @jplebreton
my point was to have the guts to say "i'm not totally sure about this".
instead, as seen over and over, it was: oh, this is the sh*t

Michael Eggers 🇺🇦🇪🇺10h ago

@jplebreton to be fair he was highly sceptical of the metaverse thing. But otherwise I fully agree. Very sad to see his trajectory.

Bartosz Taudul 7h ago

@pythno @jplebreton Hm? From what I recall, he was very fond of the Snow Crash book, from where the term sources?

I (tried to) read it, and jeez, the themes in that book are *ugly*. Another puzzle piece that fits, though.

Morten Hilker-Skaaning 5h ago

@wolfpld @pythno @jplebreton there is "Metaverse" as whatever the actual product was at Facebook. And "Metaverse" as a fiction in a book. I haven't read Snow Crash, so I took it to vaguely mean "cyberspace". I take it the Metaverse in Snow Crash has bad connotations?

Andre Weissflog 4h ago

@morten_skaaning @wolfpld @pythno @jplebreton Snow Crash's Metaverse is pretty much exactly how you imagine it, a virtual space where you log into as an avatar. The interesting part is rather how the "remains" of the US is depicted.

Also important to know when 'judging' the quality of the book: it was supposed to be a comic project, which was then "salvaged" into a novel. Explains a lot of the writing style ;)

Bartosz Taudul 4h ago

@floooh @morten_skaaning @pythno @jplebreton The book setting is basically everything that's wrong with the US, but turned up to 11. I wrote about it shortly some time ago, here's the translation.

For context, you might have heard who Korwin is from the EU parliament already: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39152562

The tubeworms quote is a reference to his direct-to-meme, 100% serious rant about "social parasites who do nothing" or something like that.

The movie is https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780622/

Andre Weissflog 5h ago

@wolfpld @pythno @jplebreton for being written in 1992 Snow Crash nailed the "trajectory" of the US as a future failed state pretty well though. I remember that when I read it first (around 2005 maybe?) that I found that aspect of the story quite unbelievable. In the last decade or so it got a lot more believable.

But yeah, shame about Carmack.

@floooh @wolfpld @pythno @jplebreton Snow Crash really was written with more than a small amount of tongue-in-cheek. I mean, heck, the main character's name is pronounced as "Hero." The biggest, strongest mafia arose around, of all things, pizza delivery services.

But yeah, that's it alright. Late stage capitalism gone out of control and government completely gone so the mafia are the closest thing to rulers left. The only difference is it seems we're going to get nazis instead.

Tom Forsyth 13h ago

@jplebreton This is particularly distressing to me. I rather liked both of them, personally. I guess people change.

@TomF @jplebreton big sigh.

@lritter @TomF @jplebreton From what I gather there is nothing particularly interesting about his AI research either. I think when people become too rich or too much of a celebrity it's very easy for them to get surrounded by sycophants and assholes. That'll change a person. It's sad to realize the person you liked so much might no longer be around.

@mirth @TomF @jplebreton i always keep a mouse door open in case he trips and wakes up. you never know.

David Frank 13h ago

@jplebreton the world needs to show me a man who hasn't been corrupted by massive amount of money.

@bitinn @jplebreton José ‘Pepe’ Mujica

?

David Lejeune 13h ago

@jplebreton if anything could make me believe that 'neuro-linguistic programming' is actually real it's the way that becoming a billionaire or apparently spending any significant amount of time rubbing elbows with billionaires turns otherwise intelligent peoples' brains into useless mush.

@DKesserich the "magic" is out there in society, in the incentive structures, the leylines of capital and power and influence.

brennen 12h ago

@jplebreton i admired this guy so much. he was part of making some things that were really beautiful, maybe more beautiful than most of the people making them really understood. anyway, fuck him. what a piece of shit.

@jplebreton here goes another idol. Thanks for sharing for those of us who aren't on Twitter anymore.

I'm starting to believe modesty is the greatest virtue in a man. As soon as a guy goes "why, I am actually smarter than everyone else", this happens ^.

@isagalaev on one level i don't think the problem is with his faculties of self-assessment at all, i think he's still probably relatively humble and self-critical. on another, yeah he believes in the bell curve and that inequality is natural and fine, and with that comes the deep glaring inhumane vanity of the 20something millionaire. his axioms about humanity and society are so flawed it invalidates practically every well-formed thought that's ever come into his head.

Hartmut Seichter 11h ago

@jplebreton not unexpected. Every talk by him is/was choke full of arrogance and ignorance. As a VR veteran i could even attest him scientific misunderstanding. I don’t get why people worship him.

doragasu 10h ago

@retrakker @jplebreton He was a legend in the days of early 3D graphics, up until the days of MegaTexture (Clipmapping) tech in idTech4. This is specially distressing for me because he also had a hacker spirit: he released the source of his games when they were on top, and while nobody else was doing it, because he believed in free information and source was an extension of it.

Hartmut Seichter 10h ago

@doragasu @jplebreton sure about his technical wizardry early in his career. However, I wouldn't take OSS as a hint towards somebody with positive traits. Its just code. And examples for OSS advocates gone rogue are amass. In my book he would be a legend if he would have actively passed things on and built a open community around him welcoming everybody. Just dropping off some code is not enough in my book.

doragasu 10h ago

@retrakker @jplebreton It was not "dropping off some code". It was releasing the sources for the most advanced and best performing 3D gaming engines of their time. It's unfortunate money corrupted him to descend into "moral disorientation" as the OP says, but if you read books like "Masters of Doom", it is for me clear his hacker spirit was there back in the day, he was the kind of person that just wanted to do cool things with computers.

Florian 'floe' Echtler 7h ago

@jplebreton Sigh, another datapoint in the list of "people who may have been decent once and got turned into assholes by too much money". 🙄

datarama 7h ago

@floe @jplebreton Another reason billionaires should not exist - for the sake of the billionaires too.

Face Thumb 6h ago

@jplebreton He's done a real Carmack reverse since working on Wolfenstein.

@jplebreton Him starting to work at Oculus and not leaving after the umpteenth Facebook scandal was a signal already.

MegatronicThronBanks 6h ago

@jplebreton I always knew Carmack was going to snap. Some types of nerd should NOT be allowed contact with the real world.

@jplebreton Surely, he's being sarcastic here, right? ... Right?

@jplebreton I'm sad. Carmack is my favorite game developer

@jplebreton I've only spoken to the guy once, about 25 years ago -- he gave me advice on how to deal with texture priorities in an OpenGL driver I was writing for BeOS (his advice: ignore it).

Rather than wealth itself, or an intrinsic personality flaw, I think the greater influence leading him down this dark path was simply *being* at Facebook, five days a week, around all those other people who see nothing wrong with what they're doing at Facebook.

@jplebreton If you are up for a challenge: try to name just one self-identified libertarian tech millionaire who has not yet adopted fascism

@trobador oh i know exactly where that leads 😑

Western Infidels 3h ago

@jplebreton Carmack was a literal juvenile delinquent, id software was birthed from larceny, and what self-awareness Carmack displayed came well into adulthood. Then he married a Randroid. He's long been a poster child for "Engineer's Disease," telling himself "I'm logical about software development, so obviously all my opinions and biases are also based on logic."

He may be especially vulnerable to the charms of the hermetically-sealed thought-bubble of TESCREAL, but the real problem is the system that shuttles vulnerable people into that thought-bubble.

@WesternInfidels right yeah, capital has this vast cultural substrate out there that's ready to absorb kids who grow STEM-affine brains and funnel them towards becoming proudly selfish, politically oblivious and incurious, empathy-free young adults, at which point they're making good enough money that they see that system as the best possible outcome for humanity, no matter how much evidence piles up to the contrary as history unfolds.

@jplebreton Had to look him up. Sent to juvie at 14 for psych eval after master-minding a theft of taxpayer-funded computers supplied for students. Yeah, that does start to suggest some kind of pathology, even at that age.

Made his name and fortune on various v-game tech advances, and good for him. That doesn't suggest he should be running society, though.

There seems to be a rather childish edit war on his vaguely hagiographic WP article, and I strongly suspect he's involved in it.

Torbjörn Norinder 2h ago

@jplebreton he came up during the “end of history” period when deferring to nihilism and not taking a side was possible. His new position is a direct outcome of class interests formed during that era.

@jplebreton f*ck f*ck f*ck f*ck

Shark Attak 8m ago

@jplebreton
"Technological Triumphalism" Yeeah like there was not a lot of cautionary tales about going blindly all-in into something, all praises and blind to faults.

diana 🏳️‍⚧️🦋🌱7m ago

That's some Epstein Island level fash behavior

@jplebreton JFC is there literally *anything* not being ruined by nazis right now?

I know we're supposed to separate the art from the artist, but JFC, we just lost Commander Keen to the nazis.