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The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

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Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#211

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A typical woodhead's thought. "Accelerate your business's growth". Hahaha. Hard things have to be done solo because explaining to others is slowwwwwwww.

Hard things have to be done solo because explaining to others is slowwwwwwww. A million times this. I never really understood how hard it was to explain a (in my mind) simple new technology to the lay person until I had to do it. This is even after spending years as a technical briefer for high power executives.

What I was meaning is actually not about external investors or so. My point is, sometimes even putting more equally competent technical collaborators won't work; it's like digging a tunnel: the working surface is only that wide, an extra worker can do little more than staring at the working man's ass.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#212

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"I know everything there is to know." I kind of took that to be like how Musk talks about needing to know first principles. In the article you can see that he was humble about what he thought he knew, took jobs here and there and eventually confirmed that he was at the cutting edge, that he knew 'everything there is to know' about this special area. That's when he realized that he was qualified to try this. IMO, anyw…

On a smaller scale, I remember one day realizing that I, a self-taught programmer, knew more than my boss. Within six months I left to start my own company.

Nice. I'm still struggling to feel I know enough to do my own thing other than lead gen and optimization for others.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#213

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From the article: “I live by morals, I don’t live by laws,” Hotz declared in the story. “Laws are something made by assholes.”

i wonder where he believes laws came from ...

From assholes. i.e. other people.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#214
post #4

> “I understand the state-of-the-art papers,” he says. “The math is simple. For the first time in my life, I’m like, ‘I know everything there is to know.’ ” Yep, he's still in his twenties.

I wish I could upvote this more. A person in their 20's knows nothing, but thinks they've outsmarted the world. It's not until your 30's that you realize how big of an idiot you were/are and how much of the world you actually understand (read: little).

Isaac Newton invented calculus in his early 20s

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#215
post #86
post #70

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How on earth is this a peaceful thought?

I don't see any reason why I'd love my (true-AI) artificial children any less than my real children :)

You won't love them less, but they will grow up in a world where they are not necessary. They will struggle to feed themselves, and the value of their effort will be low. They will be relegated to mundane, highly simplified tasks. Economics are cruel.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#216
post #155
post #69

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I cringed. Saying "the math is simple" -- ouch. The writer must have been barely able to suppress his glee when that one popped out.

I don't doubt it at all. Keep in mind that "simple" is relative, we have to ask "simple compared to what?" For lots of people, I be that the math involved in these neural nets is the most complicated math they've ever done. They would never say it is simple, because they themselves barely grasp it. But in my experience, topics in mathematics have a funny way of becoming very simple the moment you "graduate" to thinki…

As a general observation, what you say has some truth to it.

But the particular quote is referring to learning rates in autonomous robotics, especially visual classification in complex real-world scenes.

I have worked and published in ML since the early 1990s, was a program chair for the learning track at NIPS one year, participated in the same DARPA learning-to-drive program that Yann LeCun did, and don't consider the math behind "state-of-the-art papers" to be simple.

Just taking deep learning: there are a lot of tricks and recipes (e.g., rectified-linear activations, number of layers, staged training) that are not mathematically understood. It's exciting, but mathematically still a jungle. Just because a neophyte can code and optimize a network does not mean that the math that explains why it actually works is simple. As engineers, we need to understand why it works before using it in a safety-critical situation.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#217

"His self-funded experiment could end with Hotz humbly going back to knock on Google’s door for a job." The biggest thing here IMO is this is self-funded. Any startup trying to do what he is doing in this environment would have raised $50 Million, hired 100's of engineers from top notch schools, become accepted in YC, and have Marc Andreessen, Paul Graham, Sam Altman and all singing their praises. Kudos to him for be…

Could not help thinking about the stark contrast between Hotz and the Theranos "entrepreneur": a. self-funded vs. VC friend funded b. demo-ing the product (try it and 'feel' it) early on vs. hiding behind a ton of marketing legalese

The funny thing is he's the type of person you'd want to put your VC behind.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#218
post #93
post #70

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How on earth is this a peaceful thought?

Because wage slavery is ultimately not much better than slavery, and its abolishment does not necessitate the collapse of society. A world where no one is forced to work is a better world.

Wage slavery is just fine as long as I can feed myself. Time has proven that the fantasy that we will all kick back and let the machines do all of our work is a fallacy.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#219

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I've thought about this a lot before actually. In my opinion, the last people with jobs will be mathematicians. If you think about everything that would be hardest to automate, I think deep mathematical theory would be the most difficult (automated theorem provers have their limits).

And chess players. Computers will never beat the best chess players.

I believe this is not true. There are chess engines with ELO ratings several hundred above Magnus Carlsen's.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#220
post #37

Prototypical case of the 80/20 rule. He has implemented the happy case. But that system is nothing people realistically would want to drive their cars. What he did is impressive. But the results are not that outlandish for a talented person. 1) Hook up a computer to the CAN-Bus network of the car [1] and attach a bunch of sensor peripherals. 2) Drive around for some time and record everything to disk. 3) Implement so…

Great observations and references @jpfr.

Learning for the AI does not have to be from real world experiences only. Simulated/controlled emergency situations would help as well! Further even if the 2K lines of code stretches a bit more to deal with unknown situations that isn't so bad either

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