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I’m taking some time away from Comma

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Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#361

Post by taeric »

another_kel wrote: post #345
taeric wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Some of that seems straight forward. That said, I question point 4. "Vision" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in robotics. Everything is sensor reading, such that there is no reason to restrict the sensors to the same visible spectrum that humans have. The only advantage of doing that, is that you can easily get data labeled by a human.

Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#362

Post by paxys »

generationP wrote: post #28

George Hotz is my canary for the question "is there still adventure to be found in computing". I hope he finds some, because if he can't, then there is probably none.

This reminds me of all the "born too late to explore the world" people, who in reality have never left their house. There is limitless adventure right across the street if you actually want to go seek it out.

Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#363

Post by vasco »

gnramires wrote: post #318
vasco wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So call it Nature, why do you need a separate theological construction to realize all of nature is part of the universe which all came from the same start in the big bang and we should all respect each other? Is there really a need for anything else?

The idea is metaphysical -- you're literally a fragment of a greater mind. Like, a cell should respect its host organism -- it's basically redefining what or who you are. I don't know if there is an absolute need for something else, although clearly you do need some ethical framework to make decisions. Assuming you're a self-interested cell can have definitely different implications than assuming you're literally a t…

Sounding a bit dismissive, you just said what I said in more words. My question is why you need god in the discussion, I think it's perfectly fine to have that awareness of being part of the whole without any god in the picture. It can sound like just semantics but for many people once you use the word god, there's a lot of other meanings.

Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#364

Post by kajecounterhack »

phphphphp wrote: post #335
kajecounterhack wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's different because San Franciso is not Phoenix. It's much harder. Do you expect to wake up one day and have self driving cars work in every city? That's just not what today's technology can accomplish. You either end up with broadly applicable L2/L3 (Tesla, Comma) driving, or you get narrow scoped L4 driving. The scope of L4 widening is a real change.

Waymo was driving in SF 5 years ago.

Waymo driving has improved a lot in 5 years. A proof of concept is different a from production service.

Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#365

Post by HanClinto »

breck wrote: post #213
HanClinto wrote: post #97

One of my favorite Dirty Harry quotes: "A man's got to know his limitations." I really appreciate his self-awareness and (dare I say it?) humility in this situation. While other people may be struck by his hubris, I for one really appreciated his humility in this post. I feel like he is acknowledging his own shortcomings, and how while he likes the immaturity of hacking together a racecar, but if Comma is going to go…

"I'm where I belong, sir."

Perfect quote, yes!

Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#366

Post by paxys »

nynx wrote: post #27

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

These things always move in cycles. Everyone wants to be a contrarian. Back when religion was the norm being an atheist was cool and rebellious. Now it's becoming the opposite. The same logic applies to many other areas.

Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#367

Post by gnramires »

vasco wrote: post #363
gnramires wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is metaphysical -- you're literally a fragment of a greater mind. Like, a cell should respect its host organism -- it's basically redefining what or who you are. I don't know if there is an absolute need for something else, although clearly you do need some ethical framework to make decisions. Assuming you're a self-interested cell can have definitely different implications than assuming you're literally a t…

Sounding a bit dismissive, you just said what I said in more words. My question is why you need god in the discussion, I think it's perfectly fine to have that awareness of being part of the whole without any god in the picture. It can sound like just semantics but for many people once you use the word god, there's a lot of other meanings.

Yes, it's a little difficult to picture (or maybe you might fundamentally disagree) -- but it's like there a literal being, God, that constitutes all of this (I also associate this with the idea of an 'omnimind' -- that all consciousness are literally a part of a same mind). Also, the coherence with Christian (and maybe Abrahamic in general) traditions makes it an interesting interpretation of ethics in the sense of there existing a God in a literal sense (and other premises of those traditions being consistent in this framework). I recommend reading or taking a course into Spinoza if you're interested, because there's more than I can describe without writing a little book (although I think some of the conceptions I have are fairly original -- Spinoza afterall lived in mid 17th century).

To get a feel for an expanded mind, think about your cellphone (or PC or google, etc.). Some of your memories are stored in your cellphone. So in a very real way the digital world is an actual extension of your mind; think how some of our organs (like hair, or maybe cartilage etc.) are not living tissue yet we consider them part of 'us'. The definition of 'I' is in a way functional, and maybe more completely related to agency and information coherence. In a literal way also, Nature doesn't distinguish individuals. What is 'you' here is, as far as we can tell, a large amount of flowing interactions, which are not singular. What is 'you' is influenced by an entire past extended lightcone; what is 'you' does not live in a single moment in time, but is indeed distributed in time and in space -- 'I' is an abstraction over a cosmic soup -- a very useful, interesting, and important one, but nonetheless it isn't physically fundamental. What we are fundamentally changes in time as well -- you are fundamentally a distributed network of events, not a singular entity. In this way the fundamental distinction of individual seems to fade, and validate a greater distinction -- the maximum distinction is the one encompassing all that exists (i.e. Spinoza's God). In a way, you might call it just another way of seeing things -- just like the 'I' or the self -- but it can in the same way be interesting, useful, etc.. And again it fits the traditions in a way (this is also an insight of Buddhism but the interpretation is different).

Derek Parfit discusses some of this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS-46k0ncIs

Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#368

Post by dkural »

agentultra wrote: post #340
dkural wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great engineers don't do all nighters frequently. Some of the best software engineers I've met (quantum computing for Amazon, ML for protein design, etc.), go to bed at reasonably early and get eight hours of sleep, exercise and eat regularly, and have downtime. My guess is this type of life discipline helps keep up productivity over the long term.

It definitely does. In what few empirical studies on what makes programmers effective, sleep , is the primary contributing factor to low error rates [0][1]. Stress and overwork are probably close seconds. And some of these studies are cross-sectional across knowledge workers; iow, not just programmers. If you want to make it to your 40s and still be an effective IC you need to learn how to regulate yourself and follo…

Thank you for the links! Much better than my anecdotal observations :)

Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#369

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

SilverBirch wrote: post #255

I'm sorry but I find it incredibly absurd the number of people walking away from autonomous driving basically saying "The hard work is done, the problem is solved, it's time for me to move on to something else". Bullshit. In the last 5 years we've gone from optimists saying "Hey these new ML models are really smart we might be able to solve self-driving with this", to "We've totally solved self-driving, sure you can'…

> I'm sorry but I find it incredibly absurd the number of people walking away from autonomous driving basically saying "The hard work is done, the problem is solved, it's time for me to move on to something else".

In Hotz's case he's selling a product with a built-in ceiling: most cars don't have strong enough auto-steering to do anything beyond staying within a lane on at highway speeds. So now that they've iterated their product a few times it's becoming a game of reducing costs and making deals with other companies. Yawn.

Re: I’m taking some time away from Comma

#370

Post by incrudible »

brindlejim wrote: post #261
Barrin92 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fwiw, Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) is actually a classics scholar named Costin Alamariu, who holds a PhD from Yale and wrote a dissertation on the tyrants of antiquity. He puts on a Slavic accent for his podcast, but he moved to the US as a boy and speaks perfect American English. BAP wrote a book popular in right-wing circles called Bronze-Age Mindset. In the late teens, it was reviewed in a couple of the usual places b…

What does it even mean to "believe in democracy" and is it a moral failing not to do so? Putin was elected democratically and still has a strong majority supporting him.
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