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I’m taking some time away from Comma

geohot.github.io

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Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#321

Post by yongjik »

conradev wrote: post #167
giancarlostoro wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to talk to him on one of those IRC networks for iOS hacking, forgot the name, but a good old friend of mine was involved in the scene, so I dropped in. He is definitely a skilled individual, but he lacks the key thing I think all true senior engineers need: humility. Without humility you're going to find yourself bikeshedding and wasting time and effort on things that may actually not be attainable within your…

> but the fact it’s not far more pervasive in our every day The joke I heard was that AI only refers to technology in the future, and not the past. We use plenty of machine learning models every day: - Every time you use dictation - Every time you use biometrics, like face scanning, to unlock your phone - Every time you use any sort of search engine, news feed, or see an ad - It is an integral part of the field of co…

I've seen it unfolding real-time with the famous Lee Sedol / AlphaGo match. On the day before the first match, people were saying how the match would be a joke, as machines would never understand the deep philosophy of go. A few days later, people were saying that it was a matter of calculating stuff very fast and the match was clearly rigged because Lee only had one brain while AlphaGo had thousands of GPUs. (Yes, someone actually said that. Facepalm.)

Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#322

Post by WanderPanda »

ramesh31 wrote: post #189
nkingsy wrote: post #67

Didn’t know this guy was a Christian, but his theology seems muddled to me. No I don’t think non-Christians think the Bible is a useful origin story. No there is no chosen one, and the idea doesn’t come from Christianity (unless he means second coming?), but rather the narrative form (as hotz seems to somewhat understand with the heroes journey mention). I’d suggest some strong psychedelics to crack the ego and take…

>I’d suggest some strong psychedelics to crack the ego and take a look at what’s inside. I'd submit that his use of psychedelics is precisely the issue. There was a really odd "/r/Im14AndThisIsDeep" talk he did a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ It's been a pretty steady decline into run of the mill schizo "demons and angels" talk from him since then.

I found that talk quite interesting/thought provoking (still thinking about some parts years later), is something wrong with me as well?

Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#323

Post by andrewmcwatters »

Eridrus wrote: post #199
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean you can say that all you want, but the proof of the self-driving pudding is in the driving, and SAE Level 2 is the most practical self-driving we are ever going to get. I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to refine that approach as much as openpilot did, and honestly if there was fruit in SAE Level 3 and above, I feel like we would have seen it by now, but we haven't. I have no idea what you mean…

Not even geohot is asserting that "SAE Level 2 is the most practical self-driving we are ever going to get", his assertion is that he thinks nobody is going to get there in the next 10 years. He may be right that we won't get there broadly for 10 years, but I think that's a rationalization of how things have gone for him, and the fact that the methods he has worked on don't have a chance of getting there, rather than…

You don't have to tell me about Waymo. I live where they operate. I'm one of the few people in the United States who can actually use their service. They limit where you can go by an approximate 4x9 city block area, and actually less than that, I'm being generous.

You have no idea exactly how limited the service is. Effectively, you can't go ANYWHERE in the Phoenix metro area unless your A-to-B destination is squarely in that region. That's not Level 4. Whatever pretend system they've got going on, I'm sure works perfectly on those particular pristine roads, but no one is using Waymo.

There are no real, coast-to-coast Level 4 systems.

Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#324

Post by thundergolfer »

Barrin92 wrote: post #143
thepasswordis wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this change dramatically in the last few years. The people I knew 10 years ago who were the sortof frighteningly brilliant hackers have almost all become religious (mostly traditional Catholics). I'm not saying this is an objective truth, just that this has been my experience.

Peter Thiel / Curtis Yarvin adjacent folks have in recent years heavily pushed these kinds of views in certain parts of the tech scene, Hotz tends to quote them frequently. It's not really religious Catholicism as much as an aesthetic for reactionary politics because you're more likely to find many of these newly minted Catholics at an 'Eyes White Shut' party than at mass. His syncretism of Christianity with Bronze A…

> Julius Evola

A guy who amusingly rejected the label "fascist", instead wanting to be called a "super-fascist".

Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#325

Post by serf »

thepasswordis wrote: post #82
nynx wrote: post #27

It strikes me as surprising that George Hotz is religious. Very few people I’ve met with similar personalities are.

I've seen this change dramatically in the last few years. The people I knew 10 years ago who were the sortof frighteningly brilliant hackers have almost all become religious (mostly traditional Catholics). I'm not saying this is an objective truth, just that this has been my experience.

I've had a similar experience, but rather than a religion they've turned to homesteading and 'near-Amish' living-behavior.

It's kind of fascinating to me; it feels like another fork one can take in response to burnout -- something I know they all ran into at one point or another.

Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#327

Post by runlevel1 »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #44
awestroke wrote: post #3

Hotz has always come across as very arrogant to me. Claims everyone else is doing things the wrong way, claims he can do it himself in 24h, then never delivers on his words.

Hotz's story is our story. He is the embodiment of the top comment of every HN thread in existence. "Of course the author doesn't know a damn about what their writing about. They're wrong. And no I won't deliver a better solution," is Hotz in a nutshell. To be critical of him is to be critical of us. It's great if we can do that, but I'm not sure we can. There's a certain essence of digital rhetoric that runs through…

> He is the embodiment of the top comment of every HN thread in existence.

Occasionally, but I think HN comments are usually more cynical than arrogant. More often, it's pointing out flaws without saying, "I could do better."

I do think that we, as a community, would be better off if we approached those flaws with more open-ended curiosity rather than mere dismissal.

Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#328

Post by PartiallyTyped »

RobertDeNiro wrote: post #250

Seems like he came to the same realization as Karpathy. Any problem of the scale of self driving requires massive organization and work, its not a short term project. There's a ton of managing and planning involved, and if what drives you is the engineering then its simply not for you.

I'd argue that any ML project of that scale is a monumental task, and without good organization and resources, people are bound to burn out.

Unfortunately with ML, there's only so much one can do with just code. The many loops of hypothesis testing that involve endless training hours are just exhausting since the response is just so far away and involves constant context switching.

Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#329

Post by andrewmcwatters »

agentultra wrote: post #33

I used to like watching his streams but he seems to have become somewhat unhinged in recent years. Perhaps he is believing too much about what people have said about him. The arrogance and aggrandizement was the turn-off for me. Well that and his belief, while at comma, that how fast you can code is the most important metric when assessing software engineers. Competition programming is fun to watch but a poor indicat…

> Programming all night in a do-or-die mode is fun and all until you get a bit older. For many people who lived this life they realize only too late that they didn't spend enough time making friends and building a community around themselves of genuine relationships.

I feel like this is a false dichotomy that bad engineers tell themselves to justify not working hard at being a good engineer and instead screwing off.

Believe it or not, you can actually be a world class engineer and have a healthy life, who would have known? Weird.

Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#330

Post by aidenn0 »

criddell wrote: post #211
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bold claim against fully-autonomous driving. Does operating a motor vehicle require qualia? If not, what else makes a human uniquely capable of doing it? It may be a hard problem to crack, but asserting that it's impossible is pretty unfounded.

You're not asserting that everything that doesn't require qualia can be done by a machine, are you?

That seems like a reasonable assertion to me. Not that it can be done by a machine today or in ten years but eventually.
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