George Hotz against the institutions
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It felt simultaneously very impressive for a grassroots effort, but it felt like the underdog status was doing all the heavy lifting in the owner’s perception of how great it was.
When something like Tesla’s autopilot makes a mistake, everyone harshly criticizes them. When Comma makes a mistake, if feels like their fan base is quick to forgive and wants to point out that it’s an impressive effort from a small company.
Also, openpilot has gotten much better over the past year, you might be surprised if you get the chance to try it again. They’re not even using the whole field of view of the new wide angle camera in the model currently, although it’s coming in openpilot 0.8.14. Their rate of improvement now that they’re developing for the Comma 3 is really impressive.
Hotz has an interesting take on life and tech. If you have time, listen to one of Lex’s conversations with Hotz while you are getting exercise, gardening, etc.
I like Hotz’s idea of generic equipment that works on multiple types of cars.
Off topic a little, but the Honda Pilot we bought a year ago has some driver assist technology, and we love it. I like driving myself, but having safety backups like monitoring blind spots, lane changes, staying inside lanes, etc. That said, I am willing to wait for full autonomous driving until they really get it right.
With ever increasing globalization, the entire planet might one day become unified under a dictatorship. So with this fear in mind, we could categorically reject any sort of tech and social progress. But will that prevent it from happening? How are isolation and traditionalism going for the uncontacted indigenous peoples of the Amazon?
The way I see it, but please correct me if wrong, we need to have the biggest spear, we need to have all the latest tech including self-driving, while simultaneously making sure we have political checks and balances in place and debate the risks as a society. The people have to be aware of what can happen when they aren't vigilant. Free societies are constantly threatened not just by outsiders but also from within. More often than not from within. Currently I'm rather pessimistic about the state of consciousness in supposed liberal democracies, the populace isn't paying attention and isn't involved enough and that's very dangerous. Don't need autonomous vehicles to establish a fascist rule, it would just be an added bonus.
That’s a good way to do it. I really wanted to like Lex’s podcast based on the hype and his impressive guest list, but I walk away from every episode feeling like it was full of good vibes but empty calories. It seems his trademark is softball questions delivered in the gentlest possible format, which I suppose is disappointing given his positioning as a hard-hitting intellectual.
The Hotz episode was great for getting a sense of his energy and ambition, which are both impressive and hard to match. However, it’s lacking if you’re expecting more serious discussion, as is typical for Lex’s podcasts. Go in with the right expectations and it’s still enjoyable, though.
Most of the rest is unfortunately a bit like guest show TV. Fridman is a likeable guy but he's as hard hitting as a fluffy kitten. Also, he takes forever to ask a question sometimes.
Yeah that must be a nice place to be.
The one be did with Jim Keller was a good one.
His podcasts really are as good as his guests.
This tells you the kind of personality Hotz is. I wouldn't want to compete against this guy. He might self-destruct, but there is something to say about his extreme personality that's beneficial to solving hard problems
I think Tesla could do with higher dynamic range cameras, in adverse lighting conditions you end up with a lot of blown out details otherwise. The AR0231’s comma use are like $300-400, not that much
I’ve changed my opinion about Hotz over the last few years, like the guy. He came across a bit of a Randroid on Fridman but he’s entertaining and smart
Comma implemented driver attention monitoring into their device before Tesla did, and George had been advocating Tesla do it for a long time before they finally did. He talks about this in the most recent podcast with Lex Friedman.
That doesn't sound like someone who is too immature to work on a safety critical application to me.
What do you mean by "growing up"? Hopefully not embracing the pervasive mediocrity of institutions and defending the current status quo.
The guy sometimes goes on 10+ hour long livecoding marathons.
Ride or Die: George Hotz against the institutions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30607829 - March 2022 (3 comments)
The last time I messed around with digitizing video, you got 8 bits of each R/G/B component and you were happy about it.
The trick is that you get some log like sensitivity curve and not a linear one. This is ok for almost all applications, since you don't need the super fine greyvalue resolution in bright areas.
I think but obviously can't confirm it might have been this bit:
> ... at least Stallman comes to mind as an example of someone who was able to change the course of history *without much personal power, instead he crafted ideas that had power.*
To me this might be construed as Stallman could be replaced by anyone, since he had little personal power and only crafted ideas; anyone could craft ideas.
I might be wrong though but that would be my guess
> instead he crafted ideas that had power
The emphasis is on the idea rather than the individual.
Restraint: I believe this is the HN way. Hold back your comments, think about how many people are going to read it. Now think if your comment will add value to the lives or knowledge of those readers. If the answer is "No", then please exercise restraint, and try to overcome your desire to say something smart (or, intentionally, dumb) just because you have the opportunity and the time to respond.
Disclaimer: I have no relationship with HN, apart from being just another user. So my claims of "the HN way", should not be taken to mean that I know anything about HN, or the community.
In the same way, he can’t define what a good story is, but he knows it’s a story he wants to read. “If you give a version of myself frozen in time the story of the rest of my life, and that version of me would rather read a different book… what am I doing wrong?”This has been the ambition of many people in AI research for a long time but I really have to wonder: isn't this ambition a little too ambitious? More than sixty years after Dartmouth, we still can't build "something" (a machine) that can do everything a _cockroach_ can do. We can't even build something that can do _anything_ a cockroach can do.
Aren't we putting the cart before the horses then? Surely, someone who can create autonomous vehicles and machines that "can do everything a human can do" should be able to create a machine with the autonomy and intelligence of a cockroach, or some other insect (not a eusocial one! Oh gods, no). So let's see anyone with the same great ambitions as George Hotz do that first. Then we can talk about autonomous vehicles and artificial humans.
That might actually be a very good starting point because eusocial species show something that's missing from the "I want a robot girlfriend" / George Hotz style takes, which is that intelligence is a collective effort.
Less anthropomorphizing and thinking of intelligence more of trying to bring individual actors together and building tools for this seems much more realistic. Sort of an updated, actually working Cybersyn.
Individual eusocial insects can still act autonomously, so there's two levels of intelligent behaviour there, that of the individual and that of the society. Figuring out how to create the former is hard enough without having to think about the latter also. So an insect like a cockroach which (for the most part) goes around on its own is probably easier to begin with.
There may also be increased costs in creating many "artificial insects" compared to having just one. I don't know enough about robotics to be sure about this one.
Edit: Cybersyn - wow. I had no idea!
Wow. Nice projection/takedown.
> intelligence is a collective effort.
You're not totally wrong, but you might want to be careful with all that Collective Body stuff. I know it codes as "left" for legacy/historical reasons, but, like, superorganisms may not align with your political sympathies. Pretty soon you need a "head" and "arms" and "feet". Pretty soon you need an immune system to root out "contagion". Pretty soon the T-cells are smashing windows and looking for Anne Frank.
> an updated, actually working Cybersyn.
That's like Jira/Slack, right?
My favorite saying of him is that they don't have a cone guy because a self driving system shouldn't contain the knowledge of a cone explicitly. Guess what happened in the last Tesla update: the car went into a cone because it wasn't the usual color.
You can see him in top10 of US [0] during 2013-2015 when he was most active, that's not a trivial feat.
And, of course, solving programming questions quickly is not a direct qualification for everything he says he is.
For example (not exhaustive):
https://adventofcode.com/2021/leaderboard/day/4
It doesn’t matter what a static object is, you don’t drive into it unless you’re dang sure it fits in the class of “things that are safe to collide with.”
The important part of the thinking is at that point knowing whether a thing is a cone or not is just a technical debt in the code base, as it shouldn't be acted upon. At the same time those cones are perfect test to see if the software can learn to go around things or not, so that extra code hinders development of the final software.
geohot isn't dumb, but he's also extremely good at making himself look like a lone genius, all the while he heavily relies on those around him. This has been a pattern his entire career. He started out pretty clueless and relying on others; these days he's pretty good but still relies on others, and at no point did he learn to humble himself a bit and credit everyone else.
I personally experienced this when we gave a presentation on Sony's PS3 ECDSA screwup, and a week later he posted the root keys obtained using our method. I had to email him to ask him to give us credit since he literally just implemented what we described in our talk, and made no mention of it. Then Sony sued us all (my name was on the lawsuit next to his, even though I had nothing to do with his idea of posting the keys outright).
The reality is "lone geniuses" don't exist. I'm pretty good at what I do (and I also have 15-hour coding marathon live streams on YouTube, FWIW), but to accomplish something great you have to work with others, whether you give them credit or not. The major projects I've worked on aren't "my" projects (even those which I lead/led); they've all been a team effort.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/28/comma-ai-cancels-the-comma...
And it’s great that you found out that PS3 uses XKCD’s random generator for nonces (or maybe XKCD stole the random generator function from Sony, Sony should sue them).
Elon likes to take his teams ideas as well and present it as his: the gigacasting was a documented example where the Italian company had the idea years before Elon started talking about it, and they met Tesla at an auto show. Elon presented as he was looking at his Tesla matchbox and thought that it would be the best to scale it up.
Probably this similarity between Elon and George was the reason why they couldn’t work together.
I still love the idea that he (and his team) wants self driving cars to drive as an average human driver as possible, just with non-stop focus, while if you look at Tesla, they care about accident rates. The problem with Tesla’s approach is that on the videos nobody knows if the human driver should take it over or not, and I think that’s what’s really dangerous, and not the optimal way to get to full self driving. At the same time Tesla has orders of magnitudes more money.
Weird way to show you have a vendetta against someone you likely don't even know.
You are replying to marcan from fail0verflow; he likely does. Many people from the early PS3 hacking days did.
ADAS isn't self driving, and as you say it may never get there, but they did in fact deliver a working quality ADAS product.
After reading that review, I was somewhat tempted to retrofit one into my 2017 Chevy Bolt, but was dissuaded by the thought of changing the accelerator wiring.
Except that all current so-called "self-driving" systems are just glorified ADAS that are nowhere near the advanced SAE levels.
However, I'd wonder if progress on the beneficial use case has to come from solving first for malign one, where the only way to get to "kill no humans," is to start with "kill all humans." Sort of like throwing yourself at the ground, but missing.
Even to the point of where cars learn to set traps for humans, where we think it's parked, and then it pounces and runs them down, misdirects them into thinking they're turning one way, and then swerving to take them out. Maybe the infotainment system has access to social media data that implies someone will be in a place at a given time, and like Appointment in Samara, there is no avoiding your fate, determined at birth, of meeting your maker via being run down by an autonomous car. They could even co-ordinate, where one can signal to the other that a cyclist is coming, flash its lights and honk, while the other opens its door into the cyclists path. They could hunt in packs, where data about pedestrians they didn't hit gets passed to oncoming vehicles who might still have the opportunity. The presence of a school in the area would enable cars to reduce human populations by both preventing them reaching maturity, but also imposing catastrophic costs on humans who had already invested in making new ones. They could linger around known bus routes at peak times and co-ordinate to select routes based on their lifecycle whether to sacrifice one of their own against many humans on a bus.
These are obviously horrific, but the counter-cases for them yield features and that pop out of serial 1:1 sensor array development, and into a general strategy for "self driving," that is not a replication of human abilities at all, but an entirely new logic of transportation that optimizes for risk reduction, based on the contra strategies for the hunter/killer use case.
I'd wonder if to make anything remotely human or resembling a living being at all, you need to equip it with the capabilities of a successful predator in its environment, and then have it choose to not exercise them for some higher order incentive.
Hotz is definitely iconic and I agree a lot with him. Talking about business: I think the fastest way to human level artificial intelligence is through biology. If we synthesised a human brain (or maybe just partially developed a human embryo, if we care more about science than a human life) and tried to connect it to digital signals maybe we could train it and eventually come up with automatic ways of doing so.
Those manufacturers are working on their own autonomous driving programs in various stages.
None of those manufacturers want crash statistics for their vehicles being driven autonomously.
Comma is clearly the unwanted guest in the room... the only positive outcome for them is acquihire when one of the manufacturers realizes how hard FSD is. Their business model standing alone is built of kerosene and straw.
I want to say "peak HN" but that would be doing the HN community a disservice, so I'll say "peak 'peak HN'" instead.
Reminds me more of Hindu Dharma. I like his take.
That is one hell of a powerful line! I have been looking into hacker culture and silicon valley of the past. What used to be great paradise of hack culture and innovation, now seems like a huge ponzi scheme of invest, make, sell and repeat. There are so many companies out there, selling things to another company. Is it really good for the society to be reformed around some vision of tech bros who never know what lies beyond the hills of the valley?
Perhaps not so relevant, but here is a nice read about Girard: https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/deceit-desire-and-literatur...
http://www.imitatio.org/brief-intro
Then you can read the link above, which assumes you're familiar with this stuff and pokes fun at it in the in the most verbose way possible.
This could be a hagiography or a joke, it works either way.
“It’s not greed that moves the world, but envy.”
“I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.”
and of course:
“If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.”
It sounds like he wanted some adversity to overcome and couldn’t find any so he manufactured his own. Hopefully George understands that premeditated physical opioid dependence is not the same kind of struggle which addicts face. The homeless dudes shooting smack under a bridge have terrible lives. George is a software genius with loads of money and opportunity at his disposal.
> This documentary by Leo Regan follows the life of his friend, photographer Lanre Fehintola, as he becomes part of the hard drug scene through researching it for his book
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0876261/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_9
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PFRIGx69bw (scenes of drug taking)
He's clearly an intelligent man, but he should try to understand that he no longer needs to prove himself, or outdo his previous famous achievements. It will be a crack to the ego, but a healthy one, in the long run.
The interviewer just kinda sat on this for four months before writing the article?
We are facing unprecedented global challenges this century that will benefit from humble and cooperative thinking at institutional scales. Not more myopic nerds motivated by ressentiment and delivering disruption with zero consideration of social impact.
>“To truly understand what I am. If you want to understand what a radio is,” he said, “build it from scratch. If you want to understand what a microprocessor is, build it from scratch. If you want to understand what a human is, build it.”
This sounds like a joke about the things men will do instead of just going to therapy. It's a level of grandiosity that is indistinguishable from satire.
He's a nerd, he likes engineering, AI and crypto, dislikes universities, sees himself as a genius and thinks the unabomber manifesto is deep philosophy. Wow. How original.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."