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George Hotz against the institutions

return.life

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Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#151

Post by [deleted] »

md2020 wrote: post #115
Traster wrote: post #111

To be honest, it's just a little sad that reading this article it seems that Hotz hasn't grown up much, and that attitude isn't great to see from a person working on a safety critical application. If you want to put your hands in the life of George Hotz fine, but keep the hell away from the public roads.

Comma has really good safety code. ISO26262 compliant, and they use MISRA C guidelines. Hotz talks about safety in the comma.ai discord server all the time, and frequently berates people for requesting unsafe features or making unsafe forks of openpilot. Afaik, comma auto-bans devices from using their servers if they detect that you’re running a fork that’s removed safety restrictions. It’s safe.

[deleted]

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#152

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

>> Once he achieves his goal of building a fully autonomous driving system, one sophisticated enough that the human “driver” can take a nap as the car navigates to its destination, Hotz says his ultimate ambition, which he settled on at age fifteen, is to “solve AI” That is, to “build something that can do everything a human can do.”

This has been the ambition of many people in AI research for a long time but I really have to wonder: isn't this ambition a little too ambitious? More than sixty years after Dartmouth, we still can't build "something" (a machine) that can do everything a _cockroach_ can do. We can't even build something that can do _anything_ a cockroach can do.

Aren't we putting the cart before the horses then? Surely, someone who can create autonomous vehicles and machines that "can do everything a human can do" should be able to create a machine with the autonomy and intelligence of a cockroach, or some other insect (not a eusocial one! Oh gods, no). So let's see anyone with the same great ambitions as George Hotz do that first. Then we can talk about autonomous vehicles and artificial humans.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#153

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #127
mark_l_watson wrote: post #99

George Hotz has been on Lex Fridman’s podcast a few times https://lexfridman.com/george-hotz/ Hotz has an interesting take on life and tech. If you have time, listen to one of Lex’s conversations with Hotz while you are getting exercise, gardening, etc. I like Hotz’s idea of generic equipment that works on multiple types of cars. Off topic a little, but the Honda Pilot we bought a year ago has some driver assist tech…

> If you have time, listen to one of Lex’s conversations with Hotz while you are getting exercise, gardening, etc. That’s a good way to do it. I really wanted to like Lex’s podcast based on the hype and his impressive guest list, but I walk away from every episode feeling like it was full of good vibes but empty calories. It seems his trademark is softball questions delivered in the gentlest possible format, which I…

Lex Fridma's podcasts are as good as his guests. If you want "hard-hitting" listent to his interviews with Vladimir Vapnik (two of them), Yoshua Bengio, Peter Norvig, Judea Pearl, Juergen Schmidhuber, Francois Chollet, Rodney Brooks, Michael I. Jordan, Stuart Russel - people who are in a position to speak and think critically and whose salaries and reputation do not depend on saying what everyone wants to hear. And who know a thing or two, of course.

Most of the rest is unfortunately a bit like guest show TV. Fridman is a likeable guy but he's as hard hitting as a fluffy kitten. Also, he takes forever to ask a question sometimes.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#154

Post by selimthegrim »

bko wrote: post #140

> Apart from a criminal streak, Hotz shares with Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s antihero, a predilection for instrumental reason and an urge to test his own mettle, to know himself by knowing his limits. As a young adult Hotz allowed himself to become addicted to prescription opiates almost as an experience in self-mastery. “I did it, I was addicted, and I quit,” he told me. “I think I had to have that experience. I don’…

I have to salute him. A lot of purely money based (even when they don't appear to be) incentive structures will just ride on autopilot (generalize his remarks about NGOs) and not even accomplish their stated charity tasks.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#155

Post by [deleted] »

beebeepka wrote: post #101
ecef9-8c0f-4374 wrote: post #46

I have an idea for a new religion. Imagine living your live and dying. Then realizing the world is a simulation (duh). The world is a training place for AIs. You exist to learn to think like a human. Now the time is come. You will get tested. Will you do the task? Will you do it well? No? Well then you get deleted/nirvana. But if you find satisfaction in the moment and in simple tasks, then you will get reborn .... a…

Isn't there an Asian religion like that? Something ending with "ism".

[deleted]

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#156

Post by Traster »

md2020 wrote: post #115
Traster wrote: post #111

To be honest, it's just a little sad that reading this article it seems that Hotz hasn't grown up much, and that attitude isn't great to see from a person working on a safety critical application. If you want to put your hands in the life of George Hotz fine, but keep the hell away from the public roads.

Comma has really good safety code. ISO26262 compliant, and they use MISRA C guidelines. Hotz talks about safety in the comma.ai discord server all the time, and frequently berates people for requesting unsafe features or making unsafe forks of openpilot. Afaik, comma auto-bans devices from using their servers if they detect that you’re running a fork that’s removed safety restrictions. It’s safe.

I've worked with ISO26262 before, it's not some utopia, it's a very basic set of requirements, and these requirements are bourne of hard-learned lessons, lessons Hotz seems to publicly dismiss constantly. It doesn't matter if he points out the safety cocerns he has, it's about having a system in place to address safety concerns you don't have. It's the things that aren't obvious that are going to go wrong, and even if they go wrong in 1/10000 cases that's still once per person per year. To be clear, these standard are literally about not assuming the designer is a genius, which absolutely seems to be a premise that Hotz doesn't want to accept.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#157

Post by Traster »

AlexAltea wrote: post #149
Traster wrote: post #111

To be honest, it's just a little sad that reading this article it seems that Hotz hasn't grown up much, and that attitude isn't great to see from a person working on a safety critical application. If you want to put your hands in the life of George Hotz fine, but keep the hell away from the public roads.

> it seems that Hotz hasn't grown up much What do you mean by "growing up"? Hopefully not embracing the pervasive mediocrity of institutions and defending the current status quo.

His architecture for designing a machine that can drive is for it to learn from mediocre humans.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#158

Post by civildude »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #103
krapp wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, it's basically an argument about whether RMS is a god or merely a prophet.

Nowhere in this thread is there an argument or dispute over Stallman’s status.

i can dispute that with this blog i archived somewhere in 2004 about this very matter: link.com/blog/what-the-world-got-wrong-about-me/

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#159

Post by Barrin92 »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #152

>> Once he achieves his goal of building a fully autonomous driving system, one sophisticated enough that the human “driver” can take a nap as the car navigates to its destination, Hotz says his ultimate ambition, which he settled on at age fifteen, is to “solve AI” That is, to “build something that can do everything a human can do.” This has been the ambition of many people in AI research for a long time but I reall…

>not a eusocial one! Oh gods, no

That might actually be a very good starting point because eusocial species show something that's missing from the "I want a robot girlfriend" / George Hotz style takes, which is that intelligence is a collective effort.

Less anthropomorphizing and thinking of intelligence more of trying to bring individual actors together and building tools for this seems much more realistic. Sort of an updated, actually working Cybersyn.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#160

Post by jeffreygoesto »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #138
jeffreygoesto wrote: post #57

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.

120 dB of dynamic range -- meaning one pixel is ~20 bits hotter than the one next to it -- sounds pretty amazing. I had no idea modern image sensors were capable of anything close to that. Is that the correct interpretation of "dynamic range" in this context, or is there a more specialized definition that leave some room for handwaving? The last time I messed around with digitizing video, you got 8 bits of each R/G/B…

Your interpretation is correct. You need multiple exposures or so called "partial resets" for high dynamic imagers. Having an ADC with more than 8 bit should be accompanied with proper gain and offset compensation, minimum for the columns. If you search for those keywords, you can find articles like https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4621212

The trick is that you get some log like sensitivity curve and not a linear one. This is ok for almost all applications, since you don't need the super fine greyvalue resolution in bright areas.

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