John Carmack

The list traces back to a 2024 tweet with 876k views, not to any statement from Ilya himself. As the reader who found it shrugged, that barely matters: AlexNet, attention, ResNet and the Transformer are landmark reading no matter who assembled the set.

The 'beginner friendly format' promise drew the sharpest fire, from broken LaTeX to a three-line review ('beginner friendly format / looks inside / math'). But the author, posting openly and taking the hits, shipped toggles for the animations within a day.

Carmack's admission is structural: Quake bundled a new renderer, a client-server netcode layer, and the QuakeC scripting engine at once, bottlenecking the whole studio on his graphics work while the rest shipped Doom expansions.

The thread refuses the apology. Several argue the leap was the point, that the next-gen engine was id's job, and that second-guessing a masterpiece is the wrong lesson.

The praise came wrapped in qualifiers — "almost certainly a better overall programmer than I am" — and a commenter called out the hedging directly.

Then a counter-voice landed: Bellard hasn't touched FFmpeg in over 20 years, none of his original code survives, yet he alone still controls who may use the FFmpeg name.

The book covers the 80286, EGA hardware, the engine architecture and the CGA port, with source on GitHub and a free high-res PDF. The author calls it a return to debugging C and assembly as a teenager.

The context one reader added is the real lesson: dedicated console hardware rendered sprites for free, so a 'more powerful' PC had to invent tricks to fake what a SNES did in silicon. Several others noted the site looks a lot like Fabien Sanglard's.