One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom. I have no idea how accurate it is, but I did leave with the impression that John Carmack is an amazingly smart guy, who also has the potential to be a colossal asshole.
I was only five when Quake came out, so obviously I couldn't really have worked on it, but I'm pretty sure that (if Masters of Doom is to be believed) I would have probably told Carmack to go fuck himself about midway through the project. Quake is my favorite FPS from that era, and my favorite id game in general, but it sounded like a pain in the ass to work on.
If you haven't already, you should read John Romero's autobiography "Doom Guy: Life in First Person". There are some details from "Masters of Doom" that Romero disputes.
I also stalked Scott Miller from Apogee Software to ask him how accurate Masters of Doom was, and he told me to checkout the book "Shareware Heroes", as he claims it's more accurate [1]. I still haven't read it but that's the next thing I plan on reading.
Both Carmack and Romero have praised Masters of Doom as a good picture of what things were like, which seems like a good sign since a lot of it is about a time when the two were at odds.
> One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom.
Loved this book as well. Convinced me more than anything to stay out of game dev. It was also cool getting the inside story on why Ion Storm went belly up. I have huge respect for the games that the Austin office put out and IMO Warren Spector is one of the top game designers of our generation. But it seems like the Daikatana flop was one of those rare career ending failures. It took down the Dallas office which was the main HQ, left a black mark on many people's careers and was also ill timed with the popping of the Dot Com Bubble. Funding for new, risky ideas was essentially gone in the aftermath.
I do find it amusing, since I really don't think Daikatana is that bad. It's not great, but at least with the PC version I think there's some fun to be had. It was just way over-budget and overhyped with an extremely questionable marketing campaign. Also, the GBC version is a legitimately pretty decent game.
Deus Ex is of course much better, but to be fair most games fall short of Deus Ex.
I think the "John Romero is about to make you his bitch" campaign in particular was an incredibly bad call, especially in the "gay panic" era, and made people want to see it fail.
Not that it needed any help, but I think that contributed to the glee around the spectacular crash-and-burn.
Yeah, and I think they made it seem like it was going to be this revolutionary FPS, when it was basically a "B average" one. If you go in with basically no expectations to the PC version, I actually do think it can be a bit fun. It has a late-90s/early-2000's charm that I still find appealing.
The N64 version is irredeemably bad, but in 2026 I don't really see any reason to play the N64 version.
Agreed that the "John Romero is about to make you his bitch" was a pretty questionable marketing strategy. I guess it did get peoples' attention, but I don't think it was the attention that they wanted.
It's remarkable how often I hear about brilliant products being released by asshole personalities who were hard to work with, but still stayed engaged.
The other two extremes tend not to produce much of interest; the committee of people pleasers who have nothing passionate to argue about, and the group of absolute psychopaths, don't ever seem to be the origin story for industry-changing products.
Tangential, but how has the publishing process been for Typst?
I'm looking to write a paper on a recent project, but most of the places I've seen to submit has asked for TeX. I greatly prefer Typst because of the ridiculously fast compilation times but I haven't used it for anything outside of school assignments do to that restriction.
I know people like it, but I hate writing TikZ manually, to the point that I've mostly moved most of my technical-ish drawings to draw.io/diagrams.net, and then just export to a PNG. I feel like it's inelegant, but it works well enough and it's easy to make something that looks ok. Generally I'm all for text-defined stuff.
I have moved some of my stuff to Mermaid when I know my stuff is going to live in Markdown but I've not tried to get that working in TeX.
That said, I would like to use TikZ just because it's kind of the idiomatic way of doing diagrams in LaTeX, so a WYSIWYG might be useful.
One suggestion, I would like the arrows to be able to "attach" to the boxes, as in the arrow endpoints can move when you move the boxes. That's how draw.io does it.
> When using draw.io I’d suggest exporting to PDF instead of PNG so you keep it as vector graphics.
I had trouble getting that working (admittedly years ago) and as long as you have a high enough resolution people can't really tell a difference between it and SVG, though obviously it will make the filesize bigger.
Just tried the text nodes and indeed the arrows work. I guess I would also suggest doing the same for regular shapes.
I got rid of all my QQQ, which was substantial, but I didn't convert all my vulnerable portfolio because I wanted to minimize how much I pay in taxes.
I now use the Interactive Brokers MCP to make a "pseudo QQQ" which has all companies except Tesla and SpaceX in there, and I otherwise use the same weights as the official QQQ. In order to avoid tax overhead, my rebalancing is buy-only, no selling, so it's not a perfect analog to QQQ but it's close enough and I at least got some of my capital out of SpaceX.
It was insane to me that a company that had less than thirty-billion in revenue was valued at more than a trillion. I'm not sure how the People in Charge didn't call bullshit.
The way exponential maths works, if a company really can grow at (for example) 10% per annum then it can grow into what looks initially like a very high PE multiple on current earnings surprisingly quickly.
This is why people sometimes use forward P/E but that does have the obvious drawback of the denominator not actually existing yet.
However with SpaceX the valuation is extreme and also can they grow at that rate for years on end? Potentially not
Reading their IPO prospectus seemed to imply that they planned on getting 100% of the entire AI market.
Considering how far behind Grok is (revenue-wise, but also quality-wise [1]), that seems very unlikely to me, and while this might be overly optimistic I think there's a chance that with SpaceX being public, Elon's drug addiction and pathological lying might catch up with him.
[1] Disclaimer, I've only used the free version of Grok. Maybe the paid one is great but I doubt it's better than Claude or OpenAI and I don't want to give Elon money since he seems to have done a pretty good job buying the executive branch with it.
I think it's much simpler. A lot of funds are tied to things like the NASDAQ-100, which SpaceX figured out how to get fast-tracked for. Once it's officially on the NASDAQ-100, stuff like QQQ has to buy it, whether or not people like the idea of it.
Of course active investors could do something like short Space X by exactly the amount that their funds have to more or less "cancel out" their investment, but most people aren't active investors.
It's not exactly new for Microsoft to slide themselves in somewhere and become the "standard" before anyone has really thought about how terrible their products are.
I always forget that these things aren't for me. My immediate thought is always immediately "just build your own NAS with a vanilla Linux box and set up Samba or something because then you can make it however you want".
But of course, if I'm someone who knows how to build a NAS and is inclined to do such a thing, then I'm sort of inherently not the kind of person that would be interested in such things and not the audience they're marketing towards, which is obviously fine.
I've been a sysadmin for decades, dealt with *nix based servers since the late 90s, yet for the most part I've used devices like Synology servers, simply because I don't want to have to manage technology to that degree at home.
I've built my own NAS when my last synology died, and I'm not sure I'll build one again. I've dealt with all sorts of issues that I just haven't had to deal with with a packaged solution, and I really just want to not think about that stuff when I'm not working.
Yes, I can absolutely do it for cheaper, better, and with more flexibility myself. Doesn't mean I actually want to.
> I really just want to not think about that stuff when I'm not working.
This is my exact attitude but I don't have decades of sysadmin experience to lean on so I'm completely lost on what approach to take setting up my first NAS.
My requirements are simple: (1) Should be plug and play (hardware + software) (2) Must support ZFS since I already set up a pool in my beefy desktop PC.
What would you recommend? I've looked into Synology's offerings and they look perfect except for the fact that they don't support ZFS only Btrfs. I clicked into this thread expecting Ubiquiti's offering would be what I want, but all I see here is hardcore enterprise gear for the prosumer crowd.
What kind of issues? I just set up a very home tier NAS setup for my home server.
Got a 4 bay usb hard drive enclosure and then just set up a btrfs raid array since my drives are all different speeds and capacities. The thing is only about as fast as a single hard drive but it does pool all the storage in to one unified storage and is way faster than google drive.
Companies are also much more inclined to spend money to solve a problem while hobbyists are much more likely to get enjoyment out of the process of building. I'm firmly in the latter category, having built a rather robust ZFS array on NixOS with a pretty gnarly NVMe cache hierarchy built on LVM. It was fun to do.
I don't have the NVMe cache but I too have quite a robost ZFS array on NixOS. I feel less guilty about running it now since it is powered almost exclusively off solar in my backyard :)
I threw twenty bucks into DeepSeek just to see how it compared to Claude.
Pretty well, actually! It wasn't quite as good (at least with the coding tasks I threw at it), but it was so much cheaper per-token that it almost doesn't matter; if it screws up something, just correct and try again.
It is a little impressive how actively bad they are at this.
I haven't had that much respect for Elon since he called the cave diver a pedophile, but something I didn't realize until the 2025 administration started is how lazy everyone involved with it is. As far as I can tell, no one in that administration has, at any point in their life, ever examined any of their own opinions or actions, or looked up the "why" of any of the programs that they declared as "wasteful".
I was only five when Quake came out, so obviously I couldn't really have worked on it, but I'm pretty sure that (if Masters of Doom is to be believed) I would have probably told Carmack to go fuck himself about midway through the project. Quake is my favorite FPS from that era, and my favorite id game in general, but it sounded like a pain in the ass to work on.
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