Blair Foster

Computer Security Researcher, Developer, and World Traveller. Mostly on Twitter to troll you..

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days.

Quake was overly ambitious technically. We could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of rug-pulling everything out from underneath them a couple times. The follow up game could have then brought in full 6DOF environments and characters.

I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Quake was also where I really had to accept my personal limits. I was working pretty much as hard as humanly possible, and I was still slipping past my goal points.

On all of the founders’ shoulders, our original corporate stock arrangement and buy/sell agreement was a mistake, and resulted in bad incentives. We wanted to ensure that all ownership rested in the hands of people working hard on current projects, but the Silicon Valley standard approach of vesting stock would have worked out better.

One real problem that I don’t accept the blame for is that we were insisting that level designers be not just game designers, but also have strong visual design esthetics. They needed to make things that not only played well, but looked awesome, and it got more challenging as the technology provided a richer palette. Romero covered that well, which set our company expectations early on.

We should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier, but there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t.

Sorry, Sandy.

[dax @thdxr]

everyone's talking about their teams like they were at the peak of efficiency and bottlenecked by ability to produce code

here's what things actually look like

- your org rarely has good ideas. ideas being expensive to implement was actually helping

- majority of workers have no reason to be super motivated, they want to do their 9-5 and get back to their life

- they're not using AI to be 10x more effective they're using it to churn out their tasks with less energy spend

- the 2 people on your team that actually tried are now flattened by the slop code everyone is producing, they will quit soon

- even when you produce work faster you're still bottlenecked by bureaucracy and the dozen other realities of shipping something real

- your CFO is like what do you mean each engineer now costs $2000 extra per month in LLM bills

[Blair Foster @bfosterjr]

@shinynoses

[Blair Foster @bfosterjr]

The botched foreign policy in the last century is undeniable. China is a threat that has gone unabated for far too long. More people need to wake up to this fact.

[Blair Foster @bfosterjr]

@DAlperovitch - embarrassed to say it took me this long to read your book. As someone who has lived the intelligent mission in 3 of the 5 eyes countries over the last two decades, its not shocking to read “the why” is deeply rooted in centuries of failed
foreign politics.

[Blair Foster @bfosterjr]

@yarden_shafir What an idiot. You don’t deserve this nonsense. 👊🏻

[Blair Foster @bfosterjr]

@__apf__

[Blair Foster @bfosterjr]

@aionescu

[Blair Foster @bfosterjr]

@lilhoser

[Blair Foster @bfosterjr]

@notnotaspy @tomgreenlive

[Blair Foster @bfosterjr]

@dwizzzleMSFT

[Chris D. Jackson @ChrisDJackson]

Wow. This post from a Ukrainian soldier says it all.

[Blair Foster @bfosterjr]

@argvee before and after photos of @parityzero plz

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

Colin Jost and Michael Che’s SNL Christmas Joke Swap this year included Scarlett Johansson as a special guest.

“I’ve been eating roast beef every night since my wife had the kid!”

[Kansas City Chiefs @Chiefs]

NOT IN OUR HOUSE 👆

[TFHypeGuy @TFHypeGuy]

The Greatest Scene of 2024.

The Fall.

[Blair Foster @bfosterjr]

@lilhoser

[Blair Foster @bfosterjr]

@argvee and here I thought you were just ignoring me.. 😂

[Blair Foster @bfosterjr]

@33y0re @preludeorg Best of luck! It was a pleasure working with you!