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# John Carmack

John Carmack (born 1970 in Kansas, US) is a brilliant legendary programmer that's contributed mostly to computer graphics and stands behind engines of such games as Doom, Wolfenstein and Quake. He helped pioneer real-time 3D graphics, created many hacks and algorithms (e.g. the reverse shadow volume algorithm). He is also a rocket engineer. He had some trouble with the law as a young and dropped out of university.

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ASCII art of John Carmack

He is kind of the ridiculously stereotypical nerd with glasses who just by the way he talks gives out the impression of someone with high functioning autism. You can just sense his IQ is over 9000. However it appears he's the kind of very narrowly focused robot, a calculator capable of superhuman programming and math calculations who knows little to nothing about unrelated areas -- for example he doesn't seem to be able to speak any other language than English or know much about empathy (judging from his conformance to entrepreneurship). { If I'm incorrect, let me know please. I searched if he speaks any languages but haven't found any clues about that being true. ~drummyfish } Some nice shit about him can be read in the (sadly proprietary) book Masters of Doom.

Carmack is a proponent of "FOSS" and has released his old game engines as such which gave rise to an enormous amount of modifications, forked engines and even new games (e.g. Freedoom and Xonotic). He's probably leaning more towards the dark side of the source: the open-source. In 2021 Carmack tweeted that he would have rather licensed his old Id engines under a permissive BSD license than the GPL, which is good.

Tragically Carmack sold his soul to Facebook in 2013 to pursue work on VR (in a Facebook owned company Oculus). Sometimes he is sadly not so based -- in one interview he admitted he was an "amoral little jerk" as a kid, but he probably kept a bit of that amorality still as he in general supports business, in the 90s even praised some features of Microsoft Windows etc., not very cool. But he's an american after all, so what would you expect.

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