Moore's Law, Microprocessors, Abstractions, First Principles [video] | Hacker News Reader

Moore's Law, Microprocessors, Abstractions, First Principles [video]

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70 pointsJabavuAdams6 comments

I found this interview very frustrating to listen to. Lex keeps asking questions about magic, consciousness, AI, and all that stuff... and Jim's a chip designer. Beyond that, Jim doesn't seem very forthcoming about his thoughts on novel architectural improvements other than that Moore's law will hold.

For those interested, a low level technology interview that I scratched the itch I hope'd the Jim Keller one would: https://oxide.computer/blog/on-the-metal-1-jeff-rothschild/

On this episode of On the Metal, we interview Jeff Rothschild. Jeff has had a fascinating journey solving all sorts of fun problems at various levels of the stack. He is most widely known as being a co-founder of Veritas Software and the first VP of Engineering at Facebook, but his story does not start there. Join us as we hear Jeff’s stories from his impressive technical endeavors including disassembling MS-DOS, editing machine code in an octal editor, trolling coworkers in error messages, the origin story of ftruncate, and more.

I agree, Lex is overall a very competent interviewer who clearly spends a lot of time prepping before each interview (for example his interview with Stephen Kotkin) but he should really reconsider the value of those deadend philosophical questions he asks every guest (what is the meaning of life? Do you think we will have AGI? Will AI eventually end human civilisation?). I have yet to see an interesting conversation follow from those questions, and quite frankly I don't find them interesting at all, certainly not 10-15 minutes of each interview.

Maybe you're just not the right audience for that interview, and that's fine.

If you listened to the interview Jim isn't just a chip designer, he is an extremely well educated and well informed person, that has learned a lot throughout the years on it's own and with great minds.

Jim doesn't emote much, but I found he kept dropping gold nuggets of experience. Not necessarily about chip design -- but that's not what I was looking for.

I agree: I'm finding Keller to be very closed-minded in his worldview. He has "cooked-rock" thinking; his idea of computation is completely oriented around the physical design of silicon circuitry, and he's completely forgotten how surprising it even is that computation can be physically embedded. I'm going to listen to the entire interview, but this is definitely a disappointing listen.

Edit: Feeling a little ill. Asked whether he feels responsibility for the social impact of smartphones, he says that there's literally millions of folks like him working on technology like his, and that if he didn't do it, somebody else would.

I personally like that Lex asks things like that. He has a pretty unique style which sometimes gets you some philosophical questions, but he also doesn't take things too seriously, so I think even a humorous response would do the trick.

I found Jim's responses to be at times rude or dismissive and thought that was a bit disrespectful.

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