What's the Meaning of Life?

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John Carmack: "I don't find a lot of value in trying to go much deeper than that I have my motivation, some of which are probably genetically coded" He says the process of getting there is usually done. It's like the magic of gradient descent. People just don't believe that just looking locally gets you to all of these spectacular things,. That's been, you know, the decades of looking at. Hi, really some of the smartest people in the world who would just push back forever against this idea and say little tiny steps, local information winds up leading to all the best answers. And now let me leave you with some words from John Carmack himself. Focused

John Carmack is a legendary programmer, co-founder of id Software, and lead programmer of many revolutionary video games including Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and the Commander Keen series. He is also the founder of Armadillo Aerospace, and for many years the CTO of Oculus VR. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
John’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack
Books mentioned:
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution: https://amzn.to/3SkNZER
Game Engine Black Book Wolfenstein 3D: https://amzn.to/3QlOqg8

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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(09:49) – Programming languages
(40:53) – Modern programming
(50:55) – Day in the life
(58:45) – Hard work
(1:01:58) – Pizza and Diet Coke
(1:04:43) – Setup
(1:30:01) – id Software
(2:02:50) – Commander Keen
(2:09:36) – Hacker ethic
(2:17:16) – Wolfenstein 3D
(2:37:14) – Doom
(2:51:34) – Quake
(3:15:55) – John Romero
(3:23:42) – Metaverse
(3:52:04) – Elon Musk
(3:57:59) – Mars
(4:07:01) – Nuclear energy
(4:10:39) – AGI
(4:57:51) – Andrej Karpathy
(5:00:50) – Martial arts
(5:09:49) – Advice for young people
(5:18:49) – Meaning of life