I have not reason to defend these people or their actions, but can we know their future success was not formed by their formative experiences at Id?
I think we undervalue hardship and struggle as accelerants.
I find that initiative and grit combined is an exceedingly rare commodity, and it do power progress. We can always be picky about the worth or risks of the projects these souls end up realizing, but the function this provides to our society is critical.
Yeah. My point is that this is the double edged sword of youth vs. experience.
We’ll never know if the world would have been better of Id software were managed by more tempered, middleaged people, but (since I was merely the gamer) I’d rather not risk it.
That said, it is completely natural to reflect, as Carmack does, on what could have been different. I simply assume there’s a strong correlation between the result and the naivety of the people behind it.
I’m sitting here in Denmark having been affected by these geeks. They may not have built the Pantheon, but surely they have channeled a group of people’s creativity towards something we have integrated into our society?
Young energy shouldn’t be apologized. Apparently Bill Gates had that psycho energy too, Jobs and many others too.
On a civilizational scale it seems like a net benefit that young, eager and driven people give a bit more than they wanted to in retrospect. It do indeed change things for the rest of us.
The patriotic call of armed forces has been driven by this for millennia. At least Carmack and Co. chose their own missions, most soldiers are not so lucky.
I attend “The Party” in Aars, Denmark for a few years around 2000. It was at the crossroads of broadband, but got to taste the demoscene vs gamer experience. It was magnificent.
There were a real festival atmosphere, and afterwards you’d declare never to attend again - that was, until the tickets were released and you somehow couldn’t help yourself.
Thank you, great spotted. I did make a CLI tool for it, but it was a bit too cumbersome to distributed it via the App Store for the first release, so I dropped it from the release but forgot to update the help.
We did https://markant.md with TextKit 1, flies through multi-megabytes markdown files with latex rendering etc. took some scaffolding (like only rendering attachments when they are close to the viewport) to make it smooth, but it wasn’t really a big problem.
I have a feeling this goes waaaay back, but was covered by claims of authority, in a time where merit and authority were intertwined.
My pet peeve is that management is a transferable skill that supersedes industry expertise. It is such a convenient lie that offers MBAs, management consultants, burned out business executives and “retired” generals alike a new career without actually knowing anything about what they are doing.
Bullshittery of the finest quality.
If we see our contributions as brownian motion rather than preconceived trajectories, then, rather than focusing on the Gausses, Einsteins, Patons as providing singular progress, they become the the dominant least energy paths to what we recognize as truth. Without negating the individual’s contribution, the ones we see as truly important are the ones that supported by every other’s attempt, finds the path forward.
This should provide hope, if we can leave aside our egos and focus on humanity, we can, and do, all contribute even though a few seems to get all the credit.
This also goes for AI, it may be an accelerant in research, but the probability distribution of reality is large, large enough for humans to wonder, ask questions and stumble upon a new path forward, that computers alone don’t find.
I built a Markdown viewer https://markant.md to go with the flow rather than against it. I also cooked up a mew format, which basically bundles markdown and images into “Markbooks” https://markbooks.org. LLMs don’t even need an Agent Skill to understand the format, as it is just a zip with and index.md plus assets.
I’d love for people here to consider the idea.
The concept of “absorptive capacity” our ability to gain from the information presented to us, is a key factor in education. If we humans remain agents of our own lives (which I find axiomatic) we still need education to interact with AI, to ask the right questions and to make sense of the results.