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The tiny corp raised $5.1M

geohot.github.io

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Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#281

Post by 93po »

YOJ wrote: post #228
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.

are you trolling? comma is the only profitable company you mentioned while its the opposite for way and cruise, both of which are not scalable.

> both of which are not scalable

which is the critical element everyone is in denial about, even to the point of saying Tesla has a long way to catch up.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#282

Post by hnfong »

varjag wrote: post #206
mach1ne wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, infinity is not a concept that is in any way well understood or defined.

It is quite thoroughly studied in mathematics, and that particular issue has a definitive answer.

It only has a definitive answer in the mainstream interpretation of mathematics.

On the relative fringes, there are serious studies on alternative interpretations. See for example

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...

(You can skip to the part that discusses Cantor's arguments, but I suspect that if you haven't heard about related concepts you probably want to understand what it is first.)

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#283

Post by rsynnott »

hnfong wrote: post #279
zamnos wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It's certainly not _just_ engineers; you see it in the hard sciences and medicine to an extent, as well. Someone recently posted a study purporting to show harm caused by masks to HN, say; while its authors didn't appear to include anyone with expertise in the relevant medical specialties, they did include a chemist and a veterinarian. And, if you're a fan of Matt Levine, you'll know that dentists stereotypically tend to think of themselves as being experts at high finance.

But it definitely does seem to be especially pronounced with engineers.

(NB. I am a software engineer, and not a sociologist, so, argh, this is potentially getting a bit meta.)

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#284

Post by rsynnott »

herval wrote: post #263
rsynnott wrote: post #259

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"

I think, and, well, here's a phrase I've never used before, that may be slightly unfair on Trump. Trump does actually take 'expert' advice; he's just astonishingly bad at choosing experts (witness the amazingly weird lawyers he surrounds himself with). But he does seem to at some level realise that he doesn't know everything.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#285

Post by andrewmcwatters »

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…

This is a pretty disingenuous take on a guy working with others to create solutions in spaces where there is literally no other comparable competitor.

What kind of comment is this on a site that used to be called Startup News? Even if that doesn’t resonate with you, isn’t what he’s talking about pure hacker ethos anyway?

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#286

Post by extasia »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #41
Mistletoe wrote: post #8

Can anyone comment on the TinyBox they are taking preorders for? The tinybox 738 FP16 TFLOPS 144 GB GPU RAM 5.76 TB/s RAM bandwidth 30 GB/s model load bandwidth (big llama loads in around 4 seconds) AMD EPYC CPU 1600W (one 120V outlet) Runs 65B FP16 LLaMA out of the box (using tinygrad, subject to software development risks) $15,000

What is the cost of an equivalent setup using A100s? I have no idea what I am doing but here goes! By [1] we have 156 FP16 TFLOPS, taking their non "*" (* = with sparsity) value. So you need 5 So $40,000? pls the other stuff, and someone to make a profit putting it together say $50,000? So this setup is 3 times cheaper for the same. If I am allowed to use the sparsity value it is 1.5 times cheaper. [1] https://www.nv…

Fwiw, I can't think of a single popular neural net architecture that takes advantage of sparsity.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#287

Post by mhh__ »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #247
mhh__ wrote: post #38

Good idea. I don't think George Hotz has the skill set to actually deliver on a lot of this stuff (specifically I suspect trying to replace the compiler for the GPU is something that he will probably make a song and dance about with some simple prototype but then quietly scrap it because even for AI workloads its still a very very tricky problem) but he has the strength of vision to get and direct other people to do…

do you think those talented workers will accept giving him ownership over that work and its value?

Traditionally the way startups entice people is by giving them equity

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#289

Post by groby_b »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #230
gettodachoppa wrote: post #211

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…

There have been outages, just not as catastrophic as predicted.

I think that depends on who did the predicting :)

There was a lot of "ooh, it will catastrophically fail within weeks", which was fundamentally an assumption that the previous team was entirely incompetent. (Any halfway decent team tries their hardest to build resilient systems, not things that need hand-holding all the time.)

The current trajectory is exactly on the expected failure path predicted by anybody who does actually work on large systems - a steady increase of smaller failures, punctuated by the occasional large failure. (Cf. DeSantis announcement)

In essence, a reduction in staff will result in worse SLO results. It will result in less coverage of edge cases (technical and UX). Smaller teams are more constrained to travel on "the happy path". And the fact that marginal utility of additional engineers decreases means you can usually reduce teams a lot before impacting that path.

In complex systems, reductions also mean you're more vulnerable to a black swan event being irrecoverable, but that still requires a black swan first.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#290

Post by jimmydddd »

rsynnott wrote: post #283
hnfong wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's certainly not _just_ engineers; you see it in the hard sciences and medicine to an extent, as well. Someone recently posted a study purporting to show harm caused by masks to HN, say; while its authors didn't appear to include anyone with expertise in the relevant medical specialties, they did include a chemist and a veterinarian. And, if you're a fan of Matt Levine, you'll know that dentists stereotypically ten…

Re: dentists. I have a few friends who are MD's who say they went into it to "help people," and that if they "just wanted to make money," they would have been "one of those tech CEO's." But when you look at how they run their offices and finances, you see that there is very little crossover between their medical skill into business. They just assume that they would be a successful CEO.
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