I wish him the best, I find his streams incredibly useful and they motivate me to be better at solving problems and coding. Hopefully he still does work on AGI and makes tinygrad even cooler.
I’m taking some time away from Comma
341–350 of 437 posts
Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma
#342It strikes me as surprising that George Hotz is religious. Very few people I’ve met with similar personalities are.
That is quite common, but what is really surprising is him quoting 'bronze age mindset'.
Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma
#343I 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…
Where does he say that how fast you can code is the most important metric?
From the top of https://comma.ai/jobs:
> Competitors
> People who have done well at math competitions (USAMO, IMO, PUTNAM), competition programming (ACM, USACO, codejam, topcoder), science fairs (ISEF, STS), or capture the flag (DEFCON, secuinside, GITS). Those competitions don't just select for ability, they also select for quickness. We are in a very competitive space.
Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I have to disagree with humility in engineering. There's a certain arrogance intrinsic to engineering, in that you have to be capable of believing you can find a better solution to a problem than literally every other person in history. Obviously it needs to be tempered in interactions with the outside world, but without that core idea, an engineer can't do their job effectively, like a surgeon who loses thei…
I think there needs to be a mix of humility and arrogance. Humility because sometimes there’s an issue that’s unsolvable and a good engineer needs to know to pull back. Arrogance because it takes at least some arrogance to believe there’s a solution where others haven’t found one. There are plenty of times in my career where I wish I were more arrogant. I’d probably be in a completely different place altogether if I…
Wouldn't "confidence" be a better word than "arrogance"?
Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma
#345George’s insights on self-driving cars remind me of when you get the rare exceptional engineer in your company who knows 100% what he or she is talking about down to the exact implementation level and all of the alternatives, and leadership totally ignores them because they foolhardily believe this kid can’t possibly be right—without asking engineering questions to test to see if they’re right about the engineer bein…
I'm curious what his insights were? Are those collected somewhere? Asking as someone that has largely not been following the field. Not challenging, genuinely curious.
Here's a rough summary:
1. There is no point in making human understandable layer between perception and planning. Mapping your surrounding with AI and then feeding it to handwritten planner isn't going to achieve real selfdriving.
2. To make AI you need big data, which means big fleet. Therefore you can only succeed if you have customers that are wiling to pay for you current version, because this way you gain money for each extra car in your fleet, instead of losing it.
3. Robotaxis are bad business. From a customer standpoint taxi with a driver is a selfdriving car, replacing driver with AI will make drive longer and more expensive. The path for self-driving company is to make driver assist and go from there to L5.
4. Vision only, AI powerful enough to be level 5 is powerful enough to retrieve depth from image.
Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And yet the architectures he disapproves are the only ones who have shown fully autonomous driving is possible. They did not. > There are driverless robotaxis running now, albeit in small areas but expanding. Running in small areas shows that they can drive in small mapped out areas under specific conditions. Not that we have fully autonomous self driving.
> Running in small areas shows that they can drive in small mapped out areas under specific conditions. That is fully autonomous driving. It's just classified as Level 4. Geofences and operating conditions can be extended to provide a real, useful taxi service to a lot of people.
Not really. Like Karpathy mentioned in the latest lex episode, keeping an updated exact map of any area isn’t a scalable way to achieve this (which is what these geofenced services do) and isn’t how humans are able to drive.
Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everyone eats everything Jordan Peterson says. The values you say are 'Christian values' are expressed, (in many cases more eloquently), in classical Greek texts. Values like democracy itself are indeed much more prominent there than in the Bible, which is why I imagine you're seeing the sort of replies that you are.
This is so frustrating to me. People hear "the bible is foundational" and I think they're hearing "the magical stories in the bible are literally true. God sat on a cloud and poofed western civilization into existence!" What I'm saying is that, the Dawkins sense, The Bible was an extremely successful meme. I don't think that's even up for debate. >Not everyone eats everything Jordan Peterson says. People need to find…
> People hear "the bible is foundational" and I think they're hearing "the magical stories in the bible are literally true. God sat on a cloud and poofed western civilization into existence!"
That's not what I hear. What I hear is more along the lines of "What's in the Bible is somehow original/more profound than what came before and so THAT is the book to take note of", which just isn't true.
> People need to find more internet people to hate. Christopher Hitchens was saying the same thing to impressionable teenagers in the early 2000s, and so was Richard Dawkins.
Yes, they all pander to similar audiences be it back when Hitchens and Dawkins are more akin to Sam Harris imo.
Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma
#348I’m sorry, this post just sounds like the scribblings of an insane man by the end of it. George is obviously very intelligent and I like his other posts, but I think like many successful people he’s become lifted into a bubble of rarefied air where the stuff he’s saying becomes so abstract and meaningless that I’m convinced he’s just high.
Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is so frustrating to me. People hear "the bible is foundational" and I think they're hearing "the magical stories in the bible are literally true. God sat on a cloud and poofed western civilization into existence!" What I'm saying is that, the Dawkins sense, The Bible was an extremely successful meme. I don't think that's even up for debate. >Not everyone eats everything Jordan Peterson says. People need to find…
Namedropping Peterson when he has 0 relevance to the conversation at hand is just juvenile flamebait and a pretty easy tell that the GP isn't really acting in good faith. I don't think @matl is interested in a serious conversation about the historical relevancy of the Bible, nor are they equipped to have one.
> Namedropping Peterson when he has 0 relevance to the conversation at hand
He absolutely has relevance considering he's the most recent prominent public figure pushing the Bible as "the foundational stories" without which we cannot live. Yes, there are others and it may be that OP arrived at this independently, but I've heard this most from his followers.
I acknowledge that I may've been slightly nudged by OP's unfounded "You have no time to waste on western civilization's foundational text?", which sounded extremely judgmental to me, but shouldn't have jumped on the bait.
Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma
#350Earlier 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…
> I have no idea what you mean by "problems several orders of magnitude." Driving is driving. Your hardware and software can do it, or it can't. What do billions of dollars have to do with anything? We've had the technology for level 2 for 20 years. You just need to track the painted lines and track the distance to the car in front of you. Higher levels are orders of magnitude more complicated. If you think level 2 i…
> We've had the technology for level 2 for 20 years. You just need to track the painted lines and track the distance to the car in front of you.
Considering many vehicles still do this inconsistently or poorly I’m not sure that’s an encouraging sign.