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George Hotz against the institutions

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Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#161

Post by mindentropy »

marcan_42 wrote: post #79
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.

Let's just say I've talked with people who have worked with him on comma.ai and... I heard his cars would be driving into everything if it were just his code running them without all the safety features the folks around him added. geohot isn't dumb, but he's also extremely good at making himself look like a lone genius, all the while he heavily relies on those around him. This has been a pattern his entire career. He…

It is very evident in his videos that he is trying to show off. There is a lot of code snippets that he copies and lots of pasting code which is kind of boring to watch. In fact I really like to watch your videos as it deals with a lot of low level stuff.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#162

Post by ge96 »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #153
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

> 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.

Yeah that must be a nice place to be.

The one be did with Jim Keller was a good one.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#163

Post by ge96 »

mindentropy wrote: post #161
marcan_42 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's just say I've talked with people who have worked with him on comma.ai and... I heard his cars would be driving into everything if it were just his code running them without all the safety features the folks around him added. geohot isn't dumb, but he's also extremely good at making himself look like a lone genius, all the while he heavily relies on those around him. This has been a pattern his entire career. He…

It is very evident in his videos that he is trying to show off. There is a lot of code snippets that he copies and lots of pasting code which is kind of boring to watch. In fact I really like to watch your videos as it deals with a lot of low level stuff.

I remember when Covid was new and he was messing around protein folding.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#164

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Barrin92 wrote: post #159
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…

Good point, clearly eusocial insects are intersting in a way that non-eusocial ones are not. But I'm thinking primarily of feasibility.

Individual eusocial insects can still act autonomously, so there's two levels of intelligent behaviour there, that of the individual and that of the society. Figuring out how to create the former is hard enough without having to think about the latter also. So an insect like a cockroach which (for the most part) goes around on its own is probably easier to begin with.

There may also be increased costs in creating many "artificial insects" compared to having just one. I don't know enough about robotics to be sure about this one.

Edit: Cybersyn - wow. I had no idea!

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#165

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

ge96 wrote: post #162
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> 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. Yeah that must be a nice place to be. The one be did with Jim Keller was a good one.

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll check it out.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#166

Post by knighthack »

Traster wrote: post #157
AlexAltea wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The "mediocre humans" you cite are the everyday folks who drive cars, most of whom do not get into accidents. That makes them quite a useful model to learn from.

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#167

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

Barrin92 wrote: post #159
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…

> something that's missing from the "I want a robot girlfriend" / George Hotz style takes

Wow. Nice projection/takedown.

> intelligence is a collective effort.

You're not totally wrong, but you might want to be careful with all that Collective Body stuff. I know it codes as "left" for legacy/historical reasons, but, like, superorganisms may not align with your political sympathies. Pretty soon you need a "head" and "arms" and "feet". Pretty soon you need an immune system to root out "contagion". Pretty soon the T-cells are smashing windows and looking for Anne Frank.

> an updated, actually working Cybersyn.

That's like Jira/Slack, right?

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#168

Post by [deleted] »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #167
Barrin92 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> something that's missing from the "I want a robot girlfriend" / George Hotz style takes Wow. Nice projection/takedown. > intelligence is a collective effort. You're not totally wrong, but you might want to be careful with all that Collective Body stuff. I know it codes as "left" for legacy/historical reasons, but, like, superorganisms may not align with your political sympathies. Pretty soon you need a "head" and "…

[deleted]

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#169

Post by WaffleIronMaker »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #153
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

I did enjoy Lex's episode with Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown [1], in which Lex attempted to ask softball questions, such as "isn't e^(pi*i)+1=0" the most beautiful equation in math?", to which Grant responded along the lines, "No, it's only considered beautiful because of our poor notation". Overall, I enjoyed Grant's answers to his questions.

His podcasts really are as good as his guests.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_6AYX42gkU

Re: George Hotz against the institutions

#170

Post by WaffleIronMaker »

mythrwy wrote: post #97
ehsankia wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he's a bit out of his depth with the self-driving startup and bigger projects he's undertaken, but when it comes to CTFs and hacking competition, he's pretty damn good. Idk if he still does, but for a while he competed until tomcr00se and he'd always be at the top of the leaderboards for nearly every competition. I don't think that's just luck or plagiarism. You can see him in top10 of US [0] during 2013-2015…

He's usually on leaderboard (top 100) in Advent of Code. I don't know if he was this past year.

He placed on the leaderboards on a few days, but did not make top 100 overall.

And, of course, solving programming questions quickly is not a direct qualification for everything he says he is.

For example (not exhaustive):

https://adventofcode.com/2021/leaderboard/day/4

https://adventofcode.com/2021/leaderboard/day/5

https://adventofcode.com/2021/leaderboard/day/6

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