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The tiny corp raised $5.1M

geohot.github.io

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Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#211

Post by gettodachoppa »

pavlov wrote: post #196
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion of geohot definitely dropped after he started tweeting how easy it would be to fix Twitter, and then he started soliciting free work. He obviously underestimated the difficulty of shipping a feature across web and mobile. Hacking a prototype is trivial. Making it work well for all platforms, fully accessible, and across all supported languages is a bigger hurdle. It just gave me the impression that he thou…

Why is Twitter such a Waterloo for all these obviously accomplished people? It seems like they've been assuming Twitter is the way it is because it was staffed by technically incompetent leftists, and if only they could apply their own get-things-done attitude and "neutral" politics, then the problem would be trivially fixable. Where does this fallacy come from? Is it because of the illusory simplicity of the tweet f…

Well, when Elon Musk took over and gutted half the staff, I distinctly remember HN full out of outrage and predicting (in hindsight, "impotently wishing" would be more accurate) doom and how Twitter will go down any day now.

Then nothing happened. At least, nothing that I personally observed as a casual Twitter reader. The goalposts were moved to "it will go down with the New Year's Eve spike", and once again nothing happened. Then the narrative became "the cracks will only be noticeable in a few months", and here we are and yet again, nothing.

So Musk and Geohot came out as the saner voices of that whole debacle. Of course Geohot said exaggerated things like "you only need 40 engineers to run Twitter", but if it turns out it takes 300 engineers, then I would consider this as Geohot being proven mostly right.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#212

Post by ilyt »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #109
thesausageking wrote: post #88

For background, "geohot", is George Hotz, who's a known hacker / tech personality[0] This project fits the pattern of his previous projects: he gets excited about the currently hot thing in tech, makes his own knockoff version, generates a ton of buzz in the tech press for it, and then it fizzles out because he doesn't have the resources or attention span to actually make something at that scale. In 2016, Tesla and s…

My opinion of geohot definitely dropped after he started tweeting how easy it would be to fix Twitter, and then he started soliciting free work. He obviously underestimated the difficulty of shipping a feature across web and mobile. Hacking a prototype is trivial. Making it work well for all platforms, fully accessible, and across all supported languages is a bigger hurdle. It just gave me the impression that he thou…

To be entirely fair many things would be easy to fix if you can throw away everything and make clean implementation. It's the existing codebase and data that makes that difficult.

Of course, he should know better than to throw claims like that.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#213

Post by ilyt »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #202
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion of geohot definitely dropped after he started tweeting how easy it would be to fix Twitter, and then he started soliciting free work. He obviously underestimated the difficulty of shipping a feature across web and mobile. Hacking a prototype is trivial. Making it work well for all platforms, fully accessible, and across all supported languages is a bigger hurdle. It just gave me the impression that he thou…

People completely forget how complex things can get when you have to serve millions of users across platforms, devices, countries, and accessibility settings, and all of it needs to work because you've got hundreds of millions of advertising dollars paying for views and engagement.

The first part is also probably far easier than the second, and lawyer work to comply with various laws so you can actually get paid.

...that doesn't change a fact there are some failures where developers really should know better and design it less shit

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#216

Post by orra »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #209
orra wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite. Then there is the question, is the cardinality of the continuum the first cardinality bigger than the cardinality of the naturals? It turns out the 'continuum hypothesis' can be true or it can be false. Neither contradicts standard ZFC set theory: the hypothesis is 'independent'.

One way to think about it would be to replace or with and : the continuum hypothesis can be true and false: it is a 'polycomputational object' [1]. [1] Using the concept of polycomputing from There’s Plenty of Room Right Here: Biological Systems as Evolved, Overloaded, Multi-Scale Machines : "Form and function are tightly entwined in nature, and in some cases, in robotics as well. Thus, efforts to re-shape living sys…

Interesting, that's not a concept I have come across before. But to be honest, I wasn't sure which conjunction to use (and, or or).

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#217

Post by smasher164 »

redox99 wrote: post #181
smasher164 wrote: post #170

Turing-completeness != un-optimizable! Literally the areas of type systems and compilers exist to serve this endeavor. It's gotta be a meme at this point every time someone brings up the halting problem or rice's theorem.

I don't think anybody claims it's unoptimizable. It's just a harder task, compared to a more constrained system.

Right, but the type system is the constraint. Nobody's gonna take the untyped lambda calculus and run it on an accelerator. Even something like turing-completeness can be a type annotation, for example, the totality effect provided by languages like Koka.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#218

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

orra wrote: post #216
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way to think about it would be to replace or with and : the continuum hypothesis can be true and false: it is a 'polycomputational object' [1]. [1] Using the concept of polycomputing from There’s Plenty of Room Right Here: Biological Systems as Evolved, Overloaded, Multi-Scale Machines : "Form and function are tightly entwined in nature, and in some cases, in robotics as well. Thus, efforts to re-shape living sys…

Interesting, that's not a concept I have come across before. But to be honest, I wasn't sure which conjunction to use (and, or or).

Here is Michael Levin, one of the paper's author, speaking at length about the polycomputing concept and more: "Agency, Attractors, & Observer-Dependent Computation in Biology & Beyond" [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whZRH7IGAq0

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#219

Post by godelski »

sanxiyn wrote: post #195
godelski wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is geohot. He knows how to build software, and how to fix problems. This is a nonsequitor. This feels like when my uncle learns that I know how to program he asks me to build a website. These are two different things. I do ML and scientific computing, I'm not your guy. Hotz is a wiz kid but why should we expect his talents to be universal? Generalists don't exist. And we're talking the guy who tweeted about be…

geohot wrote tinygrad. This is not about believing his skills to translate to other domains. It is his domain. You definitely shouldn't trust what geohot says about infinitary mathematics or (god forbids) quantum mechanics. On the other hand, you generally should trust what he says about machine learning software stack.

Tinygrad isn't a big selling point. I'd expect most people to be able to build something similar after watching Karpathy's micrograd tutorial. Tinygrad doesn't mean expertise in ML and it similarly doesn't mean expertise in accelerator programming. I wouldn't expect a front end developer to understand Template Metaprogramming and I wouldn't expect an engineer who programs acoustic simulations to be good at front end. You act like there are actually fullstack developers and not just people who do both poorly.

This project isn't even about skill in ML, which demonstrates misunderstandings. The project requires writing accelerator code. Go learn CUDA and tell me how different it is. It isn't something you're going to pick up in a weekend, or a month, and realistically not even a year. A lot of people can write kernels, not a lot of people can do it well.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#220

Post by chpatrick »

rvz wrote: post #182
thesausageking wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're slowing burning through their VC money trying to make a business out of the hobbyist market while Cruise and Waymo have fully autonomous cars deployed in SF and are scaling up.

> Cruise and Waymo have fully autonomous cars deployed in SF and are scaling up. Is that it? SF only? After billions invested? There is a laundry list of those that tried and failed especially with burning an insurmountable amount of VC money even with billions of their own money. Lyft: Scrapped and sold their self-driving project. [0] Uber: Scrapped their robot-taxi project and sold it off. [1] Zoox: Once valued at…

Anyone can call a Waymo robo-taxi right now in Phoenix and it works really well. It's a modified electric Jaguar. That's a pretty big difference from the others.
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