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The tiny corp raised $5.1M

geohot.github.io

271–280 of 331 posts

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it was when he said that the cardinality of integers is the same as real numbers. Then I saw his twitter and all the politics and crazy stuff about QM.

Some light, coffee reading "Cardinality of the continuum" [1]: in short, the cardinality of real numbers (ℝ) is often called the cardinality of the continuum, and denoted by 𝔠 or 2^ℵ_0 or ℶ_1 (beth-one [2); whereas, interestingly [3], the cardinality of the integers (ℤ) is the same as the cardinality of the natural numbers (ℕ) and is ℵ_0 (aleph-null) [perhaps what was meant initially?]. Related: the Schröder–Bernste…

adding upon this comment to why the two cardinalities are not equal, on one hand we have the set of integers {..., -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, ...} and they can be put into a bijection with the set of natural numbers {1, 2, 3, 4, ...}, this is done by rearranging the set of integers like {0, -1, 1, -2, 2, -3, 3, ...}. so this is a countably infinite set (one that has a cardinality of ℵ_0)

As for the set of real numbers, we have the subset of irrational numbers which are uncountably infinite (see cantors diagonalization argument) thus making the whole set of real numbers, a set whose cardinality is ℵ_1.

The annotated turing book goes into this pretty well in the first couple pages.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#272
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good thing everyone lives in Phoenix and SF XD

If it works in Phoenix there's no reason it wouldn't work in a large part of the US, they just haven't rolled it out yet. Proving that it works is the hard part.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#273

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…

His attitude towards society appears not to be one of being serious, and legally correct, at all times.

It's likely there was some humor and bravado, as is the culture of his east coast origins.

The truth of his engagement with Twitter was, Just based on my watching him and his live streams during that time, that he was looking for a thing to do while he ceded control over comma AI, to a new executive leadership group.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#274

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…

For reference, comma released a new version of openpilot today, and we now sell comma threes. https://blog.comma.ai/092release/

Congratulations, sincerely.

I'm glad that the company exists. I'm glad that smaller car manufacturers were exploring integrating the self-driving software, too.

And, from a celebrity media perspective, I think your engagement at Twitter was underreported especially in gossip mongering pseudo serious technology fan sites like this one.

It was an interesting shift for you, as you mature out of your first big startup into kind of a journeyman phase, in my view. (Tasting different experiences.) Something that is relatable to large numbers of us.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#275
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did you see the news about DeSantis yesterday? Musk convinced him to announce his presidential candidacy on Twitter, and the live stream just didn’t work. I don’t think that qualifies as “nothing happened” when features used in high-profile events fail, with the CEO and a potential future president left on the line. Any other platform wouldn’t have struggled with a stream of this size. I guess you might say that’s ju…

Google also recently had a total failure in a public event. It's not necessarily saying much about Twitter.

https://mashable.com/article/google-ai-maps-search-event-bin...

> the AI falsely said the James Webb Space Telescope took the first ever picture of an exoplanet

> During the announcement about a new Lens feature, the demo phone was misplaced and the presenter wasn't able to show the demo

> Google seemed to say, "let's pretend this never happened," and immediately made the livestream recording private after the event

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#276
post #196

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…

> they've been assuming Twitter is the way it is because it was staffed by technically incompetent leftists

I don't think anyone argued Twitter was run by technically incompetent people. Where was this, if so? By leftists, yes, and by far too many people, yes. Both were argued repeatedly. But those things are now proven objectively true. The Twitter files showed just how systematic their enforcement of left wing orthodoxy was, and Musk fired most of the staff yet the site kept trucking and even launching new changes which is more or less the definition of having been over-staffed.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#277
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a certain type of person, particularly common in tech, who thinks this way about _everything_; "oh, that's way easier than what I do, how hard could it be". A kind of reverse impostor syndrome. See the cryptocurrency space; it's more or less been 15 years worth of crypto people accidentally repeating all the failures of conventional finance from the last couple of centuries, because, after all, how ha…

> Technical people suffer from what I call "Engineer's Disease". We think because we're an expert in one area, we're automatically an expert in other areas. Just recognizing that helps. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812804

you could also call it 'the halo effect'.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#278

Why wouldn't AMD throw a few million at this? Worst case they lose a small amount of money, but best case they finally get good software for their hardware. The past decade or so, they haven't been able to create any good software for their hardware. They made small improvements but the competition, Nvidia, has also made improvements to their already good software. It too the point where their software is the reason…

AMD can't be bothered. They've had literally years to fix the SW issue that allows Nvidia to stomp them in the space quarter after quarter with no fix in sight.

Being able to make stable software isn't just a matter of wanting it though. It's possible to be both bothered about something and still fail.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#279
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a certain type of person, particularly common in tech, who thinks this way about _everything_; "oh, that's way easier than what I do, how hard could it be". A kind of reverse impostor syndrome. See the cryptocurrency space; it's more or less been 15 years worth of crypto people accidentally repeating all the failures of conventional finance from the last couple of centuries, because, after all, how ha…

> Technical people suffer from what I call "Engineer's Disease". We think because we're an expert in one area, we're automatically an expert in other areas. Just recognizing that helps. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812804

I think the more interesting question is why this symptom mostly happens to "engineers".

I've seen enough engineers presume they can easily become experts in law; I haven't seen many lawyers presume they can easily become experts in engineering.

Why?

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#280
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely similar, but I think it's _subtly_ different (though it's often found in the same people). Dunning-Kruger is, approximately "I'm good at the thing I do" (by someone who is actually incompetent). What I'm talking about is "That thing that other people are doing is really easy; I'd be good at it" (the thing is not easy, and they would not be good at it). If the person in the latter case actually ends up…

100 years from know, it'll be known as "the musk-trump complex"

the "Musk-Trump complex" is more commonly known as "narcissism". I think what is being discussed here is somewhat different.
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