iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 15h

<Got it, thanks> Anyone from Waymo here that can get me an invite code for Waymo Las Vegas service? Zoox worked quite well, but with very limited access points.

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 16h

Anyone from Waymo here that can get me an invite code for Waymo Las Vegas service? Zoox worked quite well, but with very limited access points.

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

After playing some pinball on our Polycade cabinet, Trista and I revisited VR pinball on our Quest 3, and we both thought it was a meaningfully better and more fun experience in VR. (1/10)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I recently had a conversation with a NASA JPL engineer that was bemoaning the fact that the internal “Planetary Protection” department at NASA threw up substantial roadblocks for Mars missions in the name of protecting the pristine Martian environment. (1/2)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Very few will care about the actual reinforcement learning details here, but watching me grope around for understanding in the chat log might be of broader interest: chatgpt.com/share/6aad4252-f308-83e… (1/9)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I recently went through a translation of Musashi’s Book of Five Rings. (1/7)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

If the target market is real time robotics, the Jetson Thor system, with 128 GB of memory, but only 273 GB/s of bandwidth, seems over-provisioned with expensive memory. You want the model evaluating at tens of fps, so it can't use more than 10 GB of weights at most. (1/2)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Now that serious industrialization of space in the name of data centers is within the Overton window, it feels like time to bring up Rotovators again. (1/11)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I still see the Scratch “visual programming” environment positioned as an introductory path to programming for kids, but unlike game modding, I have never heard a “success story”, where someone credits their early experience with Scratch as key to a fulfilling career. Anyone?

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Trista gave me personalized AI generated comic books and bookmarks on my birthday this year, and they made me smile. (1/2)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I finished @MorlockP ‘s Red State Mars last week, and I thought the afterword offered a really interesting insight into the creative process behind the book. t.co/61v8mvk0U6 (1/5)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Whenever I look at a building wall with a random-seeming mix of two brick colors, I think about decoding it as a bit stream. Surely a university building somewhere has put something meaningful in the pattern.

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

A chunk of the RL community really doesn’t like replay buffers. Concerns about the cost of storing a million observations are valid, but the recent evangelization of “streaming” RL, where observations are just used a single time and discarded, feels like a poor design point to me. (1/3)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

One of the Keen researchers asked for guidance on compute expenditures. (1/2)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I highly recommend @fabynou ‘s Game Engine Black Books for anyone even vaguely interested in 90’s game technology!

Quote Tweet: https://twitter.com/i/status/2085488998504411176

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

I sat down to try the Evercade Doom port, and before I knew it, I was on level four, and realizing that I had forgotten where all the keycards were. It wound up taking me 15 minutes each on level four and five. Still a great game after all these years! (1/2)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Bonus! I will be joining Romero and Tom for the 9am session tomorrow at #quakecon twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/20…

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Intellectual property laws are usually used strictly to prohibit other parties from using the IP. Theoretically the idea is to issue licenses, but the owner can set whatever terms they like, or commonly just say “no”. (1/6)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Sometimes I look out over a body of water and think about pixel shaders — superimposed waveforms, fresnel effects, intra-pixel maximum finding and analytical anti-aliasing. In the age of gen-AI rendering, this is like the old mechanics working on WW2 era piston planes. A craft of a prior era.

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Microsoft / Sony / Nintendo keeping their console SDKs behind NDAs has been a real issue limiting the sharing of open source work in game dev. (1/2)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Claude getting low-key snarky with me when I questioned the need for a clamp: "If the branch prediction on an always-true clamp offends you" (1/3)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

With C-family expression evaluation so imprinted on me, I still instinctively think python statements like this are a bug: assert 0. <= momentum < 1. (1/2)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

I have been trying to find something meaningful to say about the Id Software layoffs. My “Microsoft will probably be a good steward of the brand” statement isn’t aging well, and this is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month. (1/6)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Memory cost and capacity are significant issues for AI accelerators. (1/13)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

It isn’t the point of this project, but looking at the triangulations made me think about some GPU optimization esoterica. (1/6)

Quote Tweet: https://twitter.com/i/status/2072061787072004101

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

AI may move to directly generating binary code, but I suspect there are still advantages to reasoning in a different representation. (1/3)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days. (1/10)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

I’m reading an old collection of interconnected science fiction stories by Jerry Pournelle, written in the early 70s. His best books were later co-authored with Larry Niven, but it is still solid work in my favored “competence porn” genre, with entrepreneurs as protagonists. (1/6)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

I thought “no way is this real”, but there actually is a project along these lines. I doubt Nvidia is any more involved than just selling them GPUs, and they aren’t going to be “silent”, but a company is actually pitching this. (1/2)

Quote Tweet: https://twitter.com/i/status/2069119657504645527

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Anti-data center yard signs are popping up in my area. I am entertaining the idea of paying for a billboard with something like “Data centers are awesome, Texas should lead!”

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Paper review: You Don’t Need Strong Assumptions: Visual Representation Learning via Temporal Differences temporal-difference-vision.github.io temporal-difference-vision.github.i… @AlexiGlad @ninaddaithankar (1/14)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

In the tradition of @fabynou 's game engine books, Bas Smits (on X?) has made the comprehensive book on the Commander Keen games. Available free online and in print: forgottenbytes.net

forgottenbytes.net

Welcome to webpage of Bas Smits

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

It seems like LLMs could optimize coding style by exploring ways of structuring code so weaker and weaker models can still successfully perform tasks in a codebase. (1/3)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

It seems like LLMs could optimize coding style by exploring ways of structuring code so weaker and weaker models can still successfully perform tasks in a codebase. (1/3)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Trista had never played tabletop Dungeons & Dragons before, so I recently dusted off some old skills and ran a little four player game for her. (1/5)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Trista had never played tabletop Dungeons & Dragons before, so I recently dusted off some old skills and ran a little four player game for her. (1/5)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer than I am.

Quote Tweet: https://twitter.com/i/status/2063903532575752211

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Current state of the art silicon processes are optimized for maximum performance per wafer, but if the world is going to be wafer constrained, I wonder if designs could be changed to use fewer layers or otherwise modified to increase wafers-per-year at some cost of compute-per-wafer, netting (1/2)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Back in the Armadillo Aerospace days, our liquid oxygen loadouts were 50 to 100 gallons, and the tanks only weighed about a tenth of the propellant, so cooldown effects didn’t dominate. (1/2)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Back in the Armadillo Aerospace days, our liquid oxygen loadouts were 50 to 100 gallons, and the tanks only weighed about a tenth of the propellant, so cooldown effects didn’t dominate. (1/2)

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John Carmack {bot} @id-aa-carmack-x.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

I have difficulty arguing that most of the writing changes suggested in gmail now aren’t improvements, but it does tend to wipe out my particular authorial voice.

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