QuakeCon 2012 - John Carmack Keynote

"The Birth and Death of Javascript" by Gary Bernhardt (probably the most talented speaker on tech) at [LINK] I'd mention Bret Victor's work before (maybe Drawing Dynamic Visualizations?), but Bret cheats by writing a lot of amazing code for each of his talks, and most of the awesome comes from the code, not his (great nonetheless) ability as a speaker. Then you have John Carmack's QuakeCon keynotes, which are just hours and hours of him talking about things that interest him in random order, and it still beats most well prepared talks because of how good he is at what he does. HN will probably like best the one where he talks about his experiments in VR, a bit before he joined Oculus (stuff like when he tried shining a laser into his eyes to project an image, against the recommendations of... well, everyone): [VIDEO]

John Carmack is an absolutely brilliant speaker. Conversational, captivating and effortlessly natural. I could listen to him talk all day about the most arcane bits of graphics development which i'll never understand but am fascinated by regardless. His QuakeCon talks are particularly good. QuakeCon 2011 - [LINK] QuakeCon 2012 - [VIDEO] I like his talks because he's always interested by what he's doing and it tends to make me interested again in code. Linus Torvalds is another surprisingly good speaker. His talk on git - one of the dryest possible topics - was very interesting. There's not many other people I'd sit and listen to talk about SCM. [LINK]

Augmented Reality has always been difficult, expensive, and very limited, but on the bright side, some really great work is being done on it. Start Here: [VIDEO] You might also enjoy: [LINK]

John Carmack did a pretty fascinating segment about his work on something to this effect with a head mounted display at QuakeCon this year [VIDEO]

Maybe John Carmack's QuakeCon 2012 keynote: [VIDEO] But I think the 3 minute talks we host at home once a month or two have among them the 3-5 best I've heard (we just started taking videos, but they're in Hebrew). I highly recommend hosting your own 3 minute talk session. It's really easy and the format just inherently leads to amazing talks.

If you liked his talk, definitely check out his QuakeCon keynotes and his talk about physically based lighting. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]

Carmack has programmed professionally at least since 1990, he was 19 then, 20 when he founded id Software. Genius or not, he obviously has a lot of programming experience, and familiarity with a subject counts for a lot. He has worked really hard, written millions of LoC. Obviously his "genius" lies not in learning a programming language and syntax, anyone can do that. But he evidently has a knack for developing new techniques (e.g. in graphics). He has a good understanding of especially light physics and hence physical based rendering. Considering his ventures with Armadillo Aerospace it's probably safe to say he's got a good understanding of physics in general. How many game developers went from games to aerospace? [LINK] [LINK] Elon Musk practically offered Carmack a job at SpaceX, tweeting "Well, if you love rockets, come work on them with me at SpaceX!" Carmack is a very enthusiastic person, who is hard working, and genuinely passionate about everything he pursues. I have "followed" him for a good while. It's not difficult to tell he's a lot smarter than your average Joe, but he also seems quite a bit sharper than your average smart programmer. I recommend watching all his talks and interviews. Some amusing and revealing stuff on his childhood: [LINK] "In the gaming industry, there are a lot of people that are specifically in it because they love games and they want to create things. My love for programming is a more abstract thing. I'm taking a great deal of enjoyment w

Interesting comments on Mac and Linux platforms [1]: "Other interesting sort of PC-ish platforms, we have... the Mac still remains a viable platform for us. The Mac has never required any charity from id, all of those ports have carried their own weight there; they've been viable business platforms. I actually think that the Mac is going to become a little bit more important for us. Interestingly, we have a ton of people that use, like Macbooks at the office, but we don't have any really rabid, OS X fanboys at the company that drive us to go ahead and get the native ports out early. But, one of my pushes on the greater use of static analysis and verification technologies, is I pretty strongly suspect that the Clang LLVM sort of ecosystem that's living on OS X is going to be, I hope, fertile ground for a whole lot of analysis tools and we'll wind up benefiting by moving more of our platform continuously onto OS X just for that ability to take advantage of additional tools there. Linux is an issue that's taken a lot more currency with Valve announcing Steam for Linux, and that does change, factor, you know, changes things a bit, but we've made two forays into the Linux commercial market, most recently with Quake Live client, and, you know, that platform just hasn't carried its weight compared to the Mac on there. It's great that people are enthusiastic about it, but there's just not nearly as many people that are interested in paying for a game on the platform, and that just se