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Comment by mgiannopoulos | Hacker News Reader

Honest question on the difficulty of this :

>> In some ways, this challenge was easier than I expected. In fact, my running challenge (I also set out to run 365 miles in 2016) took more total time <<

At a casual pace of 10 minutes per mile, that's around 60 hours. Does needing 60 hours to build all that sound plausible to anyone familiar with the task?

Edit: at the end he notes that "I spent about 100 hours building Jarvis", so Mark is a really slow runner :)

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Change into running clothes, go to a trail/track, and shower afterwards and you easily add that much overhead.

The grumpy snarky HN user in me says that a lot of the "I deployed a server to do X" and "I wrote code to do Y" in this blog post should actually say "A Facebook engineer provided me with direct API hooks to do X and Y", but it's anyone's guess.

API hooks to what though? It doesn't seem like he's integrating with much if anything from Facebook. TBH, he seems happy enough getting his hands dirty that I would imagine he purposely did it unaided just for the satisfaction of it.

He did reuse things that exist inhouse, like the face recognition piece. To rebuild a service with Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon level accuracy in that task, it is definitely more effort than 100 hours by itself.

To use an existing private service, not nearly as much effort.

That being said: Of course he could have learned how to train a model himself, but even in that case he is using training infrastructure and data that is available to him that is not public. I highly doubt he had the time to build those sorts of things himself. But his goal was more talking to his home and using tools to build an interactive home assistant. Sounds like he was very successful at doing that. He wasn't out to build the individual AI pieces, doesn't make it not cool or interesting.

In his world "finding the time" to do the running counts as part of the effort. I swim farther than that each year an see no acomplishment in such a distance.

Still, Mark Zuckerberg writes about a total of 100 hours on this project, is that plausible?

I find it implausible.

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