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George Hotz against the institutions

return.life

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Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#51

Post by icelancer »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #44
icelancer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? geohot broke the SIM lock on the iPhone, first to do it. Broke the PS3. Broke Android. Developed qira. Say what you want about the other stuff, but Hotz's resume is impressive.

So, for that matter, is Kanye's, even if you don't care for his music or his personal issues. The GP was a pretty unenlightened comment(er).

The Kayne comparison, while ridiculous, is not the contention I have with the post.

"He is a tech influencer with half-baked ideas..."

Is patently false.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#52

Post by xiphias2 »

taneq wrote: post #40
xiphias2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be true, but during the coding videos on YouTube he's extremely smart. My favorite saying of him is that they don't have a cone guy because a self driving system shouldn't contain the knowledge of a cone explicitly. Guess what happened in the last Tesla update: the car went into a cone because it wasn't the usual color.

That’s not a problem with Tesla’s “cone AI”, it’s a problem with their self driving stack’s lack of a “do not drive into solid objects” feature. It doesn’t matter what a static object is, you don’t drive into it unless you’re dang sure it fits in the class of “things that are safe to collide with.”

In comma.ai the solution is to just not run into things / go around things how a human would do and learn to peioritize what things to go around and where to be extra careful.

The important part of the thinking is at that point knowing whether a thing is a cone or not is just a technical debt in the code base, as it shouldn't be acted upon. At the same time those cones are perfect test to see if the software can learn to go around things or not, so that extra code hinders development of the final software.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#53

Post by AlexAltea »

hatware wrote: post #34
marcan_42 wrote: post #8

Reminder that geohot wasn't the first person to jailbreak an iPhone; that's an oft repeated myth. He was the first person to publicly carrier unlock an iPhone, which he did using information and methods he mostly learned from others.

You can say that about anybody, doing anything. Weird way to show you have a vendetta against someone you likely don't even know.

> someone you likely don't even know

You are replying to marcan from fail0verflow; he likely does. Many people from the early PS3 hacking days did.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#54

Post by gurjeet »

thowaway673y wrote: post #16
CyberRabbi wrote: post #9

Interesting discussion of AI and the decline of civilization. His allergies to power are a bit naive though not completely unfounded, at least Stallman comes to mind as an example of someone who was able to change the course of history without much personal power, instead he crafted ideas that had power. Some ideas are powerful enough to compel enough people to act in line with them. Ultimately accomplishing anything…

RMS is no normal human, he can match with 5 or 6 100x programmers from symbolic company which they have admitted.

Just a note that this comment, and the thread below it (hopefully excluding the one you're reading), produced zero value to the readers of the thread. Writing these comments must've taken a lot of care and energy for the authors of the comments. But because the whole thread was essentially just a quarrel, and speaking over each other, all that effort was wasted.

Restraint: I believe this is the HN way. Hold back your comments, think about how many people are going to read it. Now think if your comment will add value to the lives or knowledge of those readers. If the answer is "No", then please exercise restraint, and try to overcome your desire to say something smart (or, intentionally, dumb) just because you have the opportunity and the time to respond.

Disclaimer: I have no relationship with HN, apart from being just another user. So my claims of "the HN way", should not be taken to mean that I know anything about HN, or the community.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#55

Post by nullptr_deref »

> “Modern Silicon Valleyism is a grotesque ideology formed by psychopaths. Fuck you, I’m not a fucking piece of data. I will not be optimized, integrated, or transformed.”

That is one hell of a powerful line! I have been looking into hacker culture and silicon valley of the past. What used to be great paradise of hack culture and innovation, now seems like a huge ponzi scheme of invest, make, sell and repeat. There are so many companies out there, selling things to another company. Is it really good for the society to be reformed around some vision of tech bros who never know what lies beyond the hills of the valley?

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#56

Post by CipherThrowaway »

Can we please stop lionizing the "maverick genius." It should be clear to everyone at this point that the Nth brilliant asshole with an untamed superiority complex who hates institutions and fixates on sci-fi tail risks is not going to be making the world a better place.

We are facing unprecedented global challenges this century that will benefit from humble and cooperative thinking at institutional scales. Not more myopic nerds motivated by ressentiment and delivering disruption with zero consideration of social impact.

>“To truly understand what I am. If you want to understand what a radio is,” he said, “build it from scratch. If you want to understand what a microprocessor is, build it from scratch. If you want to understand what a human is, build it.”

This sounds like a joke about the things men will do instead of just going to therapy. It's a level of grandiosity that is indistinguishable from satire.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#57

Post by jeffreygoesto »

He's a brilliant kid, but also boasting about things he has no clue about. We built 120db cameras into series production cars since 2005. Took one guy being brilliant in FPGAs and me implementing HDR tonemapping it down for processing on those small CPUs we had back then.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#58

Post by vasco »

rank0 wrote: post #41

I generally like this dude and his antics…but becoming dependent on opiates as an “experiment” is the stupidest shit I’ve ever read. It sounds like he wanted some adversity to overcome and couldn’t find any so he manufactured his own. Hopefully George understands that premeditated physical opioid dependence is not the same kind of struggle which addicts face. The homeless dudes shooting smack under a bridge have terr…

He stopped himself and said this wasn't applicable to others.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#59

Post by CipherThrowaway »

nullptr_deref wrote: post #55

> “Modern Silicon Valleyism is a grotesque ideology formed by psychopaths. Fuck you, I’m not a fucking piece of data. I will not be optimized, integrated, or transformed.” That is one hell of a powerful line! I have been looking into hacker culture and silicon valley of the past. What used to be great paradise of hack culture and innovation, now seems like a huge ponzi scheme of invest, make, sell and repeat. There a…

It's not clear to me that early tech culture is at odds with modern tech culture. To me it feels like the values of that early culture provided quite fertile ground for the situation we have now.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#60

Post by DantesKite »

rank0 wrote: post #41

I generally like this dude and his antics…but becoming dependent on opiates as an “experiment” is the stupidest shit I’ve ever read. It sounds like he wanted some adversity to overcome and couldn’t find any so he manufactured his own. Hopefully George understands that premeditated physical opioid dependence is not the same kind of struggle which addicts face. The homeless dudes shooting smack under a bridge have terr…

I have a suspicion that was just a rationalization for his curiosity. There are many people who become addicted because they wanted to experiment and don’t understand what they’re getting into.
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