I’m taking some time away from Comma
geohot.github.io
geohot.github.io
I really appreciate his self-awareness and (dare I say it?) humility in this situation. While other people may be struck by his hubris, I for one really appreciated his humility in this post. I feel like he is acknowledging his own shortcomings, and how while he likes the immaturity of hacking together a racecar, but if Comma is going to go to the next level, then he needs someone who can pilot a boat, and George is not that pilot. I appreciate that awareness, and I appreciate that he has the ability to detach himself and move onwards this way.
Kudos to you, George. I appreciate and respect what you do. Thanks for letting us have a glimpse at it -- I personally find it very inspiring and encouraging for me and what I do.
I'm sure some people are also triggered by the supernatural turn his writing took there. Who cares? It's interesting, and he's not being a jerk.
Classic. I love it. My kind of engineer.
It is absolutely the wrong attitude for self-driving cars or anything that is safety critical.
Why do people keep printing things like this, which are objectively wrong? I have had a completely autonomous waymo come to my location, pick me up, and take me to another location.
That didn't exist five years ago, it does exist now. How is this not "closer" than it was 5 years ago when it literally exists now, and didn't exist then?
Not that the technology hasn't improved, but with these things there might be many factors involved that might answer the question "why we have this today and not 5 years ago".
Self-driving is still incredibly limited and progress is often overstated because people make headway on some tiny issue. A thing I always liked for people who think progress is rapid, this is Germany in the 1980s where Ernst Dickmann had autonmous cars drive thousands of miles: https://youtu.be/_HbVWm7wdmE
No, it would be like if somebody said "some day we will travel to the moon", and then after the Apollo missions there were articles being published that said "we are no closer to traveling to the moon than we were 5 years ago".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHdKm0kW4l0
This is a video of a person riding in a fully self driving car.
----
Eliezer Yudkowsky is fond of shitting on the AI developers of the 1960s for thinking they could write `APPLE` in the source code of a symbolic language and that that made them weeks away from a human intelligence which could reason about apples, and how simplistic that looks now.
Like YouTube auto-transcribed subtitles are useful but they are obviously transcribing sounds without understanding, they lack understanding of where the context indicates that a spoken thing should be a name, or they will transcribe the same word two different ways in two different sentences with no understanding that it was the same object as before being referred to again, or where a sound is unclear I can fill in what was intended but the auto transcriber can't, or I can see from lip movement that the transcription was wrong, the audio processor can't integrate multiple inputs in that way, and they will transcribe sentences which are grammatically correct but human background knowledge of the world tells you it makes no sense.
Similar with self driving cars, it's pretty clear from the outside that you can't have a car which can reason about the state of a city, its roads, the things in the roads, the environmental conditions, without having a large amount of interconnected human level background understanding of the world and the things in it. e.g. not just seeing a shape and identifying it as a cyclist, but knowing that you passed a cyclist a few seconds ago and now you are slowing down for traffic lights the cyclist will be coming back alongside you momentarily. Not just identifying a parked car, but seeing a car stop moving and turn its lights off as it parks implies the doors are about to open. Not just seeing lane markers in the road, but seeing no lane markers and being able to complete the pattern of where the lane markers should be because you understand how humans design roads. Not just seeing rain and slowing down, but the hinkiness feeling of "these conditions are dangerous" from the way other cars are driving, the road conditions, and slowing down in advance of anything objectively happening because you predict what could happen. Not just seeing a sign saying 'Diversion' but being able to look around expecting to see the next diversion route sign either down this turning or up ahead by another turning, and using that extra information to decide what to do. Not just identifying an erratically moving vehicle when you see it, but hearing a siren and seeing a flash of blue in the mirror and thinking ahead that an ambulance is coming and then looking for places to pull over to let it past and expecting the cars around you might move like that as well. Not just seeing the car in front slowing down, but seeing the driver inside it move and understanding that they ware waving you past because they are double-parking to drop someone off or pick someone up instead of slowing down because of traffic. And countless other situations.
Humans have good reaction time when it comes to touching something hot and pulling our hands away before we understand and are aware of what happened. Sensor equipped cars have good reaction time when it comes to ultrasound sensing a thing up ahead and applying the brakes without understanding what's happening. Humans have bad reaction times when driving because we can't feel the thing in the road, it has to go through our slower higher level thinking to understand what's happening before we can choose to respond.
Self-driving cars, then, are either the pretense that you can put a human level AI on top of the car's unconscious reactions, without compromising the reaction time, to get a superhuman level driver. And that's not something you can do because human level AI doesn't exist. Or they are the unfounded claim that you can drive through humanspace without human understanding, which is about as convincing as saying you can send a machine to the butcher, baker and candlestick maker to do your shopping without it having any AI. As soon as anything goes off-plan the robot is stuck. And you get into "well, we'll hard code a workaround for this situation and simply enumerate everything which could go wrong in a decision tree". Shop door closed with a sign saying "please use other door"? Hard code that, OK now are we good? Shop door closed with a sign saying "please ring bell for attention"? OK, hard-code that, now are we good? Shop door propped open with a mop and bucket and a sign saying "caution, wet floor"? OK, hard-code that, now are we good? Butcher says "sorry we have no liver but we're expecting a delivery in 5 minutes are you OK to wait?"? OK, hard-code that, now do we have AI? And then you get to Amazon which controls the warehouse layout, temperature, environment, shelving, can put tracks in the floor, put all items into regular sized boxes tagged with machine readable labels, which is more analogous to trains and trams on rails, and still Amazon use humans to pick and pack things.
Huh, so are you saying maybe we're a little close to autonomous cars than we were 5 years ago?
Do you expect to wake up one day and have self driving cars work in every city? That's just not what today's technology can accomplish. You either end up with broadly applicable L2/L3 (Tesla, Comma) driving, or you get narrow scoped L4 driving.
The scope of L4 widening is a real change.
As long as the remote operators and assistance teams are an order of magnitude smaller than putting a driver in every car, then it's close enough to autonomy to count as "closer" and to be useful.
"As long as the remote operators and assistance teams are an order of magnitude smaller than putting a driver in every car" - the entire gig is way to expensive and requires "time travel" level of scientific achievements, which is 100% fiction and 0% reality.
No, but it does qualify for "closer to reality today than they were 5 years ago"
> Pattern recognition software alone (A.I.) would never be able to match human driving performances.
That's okay. A trained human can do much better than necessary, and geofenced pattern recognition software doesn't have to be as good, especially because it should have better reaction times and braking force than a human.
> "As long as the remote operators and assistance teams are an order of magnitude smaller than putting a driver in every car" - the entire gig is way to expensive and requires "time travel" level of scientific achievements, which is 100% fiction and 0% reality.
Why?
If you can run a fleet of 300 cars with 30 people, that's already enough to make tons of money once you get well-established. You don't need any scientific improvements for that, let alone the ones you're exaggerating.
What are the steps back?
They're slow but they're improving. And they don't need to reach their original lofty goal.
> "Why?" - It's unsustainable
Sorry, the "Why" was directed at the level of scientific achievement you claim they need.
"the level of scientific achievement" - every single step, every single minute and every single individual (the financial input), is prohibitively expensive for this R&D project, and it is not justified by any means by the results (the financial output), Companies and investors don't care about progress. They care about profits, and, in case progress would stay in their path to make profits, they'll fight against it. You should check waymo salaries, hardware prices, operations costs, and fleet management costs. From operational POV, every mile covered by those vehicles translates into a price payed by the company, money that are not recovered whatsoever at this point. Vehicle lifecycle, insurance, maintenance, cleaning and the electricity used, adds up very quickly and could go as high as half a billion dollars per year - "Argo has about 1,300 employees and is likely burning through at least $500 million a year, industry participants say." (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/argo-ai-planning-pub...). Now remember how in business, any investor usually expects to make 10 times his or her investment, in this case (the Argo.ai example) meaning that the profits (after all expenses and taxes are substracted) to be around $5 billion per year. This is the reason why Ford decided to shut down Argo, which was burning half a Billion a year with no end in sight. To directly address your statement - the scientific level needed would require way too much money to justify the road to accomplish it. Basically, all those parts interested either do not have those money, or are part of a business model that requires substantial returns on a relatively short term, and cannot afford to finance projects with constantly moving delivery dates for fictional ideas.
What about the regulators that allow drunk and distracted drivers everywhere
In what places is drunk driving legal? The laws exist and are rigorously--if imperfectly--enforced everywhere I've ever lived.
Are folks building transportation businesses employing drunk drivers?
Vs autonomous driving where none of those impediments come into play
If planes were designed by safety committees we would have never figured out how to make them light enough to fly.
If you want to help US pedestrians you'd be much better going after SUVs and pickups https://www.webmd.com/first-aid/news/20220318/turning-pickup...
With your attitude, we would never have allowed cars in the first place.
When Tesla ships an autopilot on mass market cars that fails in edge cases, commenters are up in arms that it wasn’t tested to perfection in every scenario. Big companies are punished if they don’t deliver perfection.
When an underdog company hacks together an autopilot proof of concept and takes a reporter for a ride with it, they’re heroes for pulling off a technical feat like that. Underdog stories will always draw applause.
The challenge with a company like Comma is that they can’t maintain underdog status forever. The product is very impressive in the context of an underdog hacker success story, but outside of a few early magazine shootout wins it just can’t hang with the efforts of the big companies throwing huge budgets at their own solutions. This puts them in a difficult spot because the underdog-hacker story can’t scale forever.
If anything, your comment is proof.
now a short story that your cult comment conjured in my head:
the year is 2122.
the Muskalonian robotic death squad approaches the last cave hold-out of Hotzite believers..
thankfully the killer robots pass by peacefully, blind to the possible engagement because the squad lacks radar and lidar, and the cave is dark.
If the hackers - who are self-selected for being able to journey into the Machine - cannot find the adventure, then the adventure cannot be found.
Things which have made me wow in more recent years:
- Large scale aggregation of data, specifically when Google started using data from phones around the planet to overlay live road traffic data on Maps, or when individual businesses are typically busy on different days of the week. Live map views of lightning ( https://lightningmaps.org/ ) or weather ( https://www.windy.com/ ). Things a skilled programmer might build (a map on a website) but which can't work without a global network of sensors.
- More continuously active sensors, brought about by specialist circuitry and low power systems, e.g. a phone with raise to wake, step tracker, and which silence incoming calls when they detect unusually stressful manouevres in a car.
- JSLinux and v86 browser-based virtual machines. I know the tech of running a VM isn't particularly knew but the ability to boot a Linux/Windows VM with one click in a browser almost everyone has without needing a cloud/container instance behind it feels like it will bloom into a lot of new things over time.
- The first app to run on smartphones which did OCR of the camera, translation of the text, and live overlay of the translated text back on the picture on screen. I forget its name now, and now it's builtin to cameraphones.
- Going back about 15 years, but when content aware scaling came in - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seam_carving
- Something else which is scale related but not ML, when a cloud storage program like DropBox can hash a file on your local machine, send the hash to their servers, notice that someone else has already uploaded that file, and tag it into your account so you can 'upload' non-unique files without the time or bandwidth of actually uploading them.
- When DropBox live recompress JPGs using a lossless compression to save tens of petabytes of storage, then decompress them back into JPG as people access them. https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/05/01/the-design-implementatio...
- Internet traffic highjacking by 'bitsquatting' domain names which are one memory-bit-flipped-bit away from the correct name, and then using the incoming traffic to estimate the global amount of flakey memory and cosmic ray events happening: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=squatting%20memory%20b...
- Deepfakes; they appeared as hype and then faded from hype, but the ability to synthesize another person's facial appearanace and vocal mannerisms on someone else is impressive.
- Drone FPS flying with VR headsets. Coordinated light-drone displays in the sky instead of fireworks.
- ML related, but iPhone accessibility features can describe pictures, live while using the camera ( https://youtu.be/UnoeaUpHKxY?t=39 ) or in the photos app or on websites. Or apps like Audible Vision (e.g. https://youtu.be/QiEKMTTwTZg?t=377 ).
- ML related, Stable Diffusion, being able to generate visual scenes from text descriptions.
> "Now, ML is a fresh breeze but it is lacking the "garage-ability" that computing has been famous for; good luck competing with the bigshots on that field."
Doug Miles is trying with LogicMoo ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdG6GVCwJrw ), trying to build an AI that learns inside a virtual world instead of using big data and ML techniques.
Lepton is interesting (as is brotli), although it doesn't quite rise to the level of "opening gates to new worlds" that the innovations around 2000 did. Virtual machines were funny in that they implemented an idea from mid-century mathematical logic, but VMWare was founded in 1998 and cygwin (not quite virtual machines but similar) is even older.
Oh yeah, lots of innovation in spam, social engineering and trolling, but that's not computing per se :)
Well aware of the march of big data and "quantity becoming quality"-based services over the last 20 years. But Google Earth and Wikipedia started in 2001, and everything that came thereafter would mostly be less exciting and more closed-down. OpenStreetMap deserves a mention, not for innovation but for stealing the fire from the gods. Windy.com is a fresh breeze, too; good point.
Never found DropBox exciting. Even git, which I love and use for 3 different purposes every day, just doesn't feel particularly novel. Maybe that's because torrenting (with all its deduplication, hash-indexing and various other innovations) had set my expectations so high long ago that everything that came after looked like the Dark Ages.
Drones... now these are some new grounds. In hindsight, I feel stupid forgetting them in my comment above!
Not sure about this. Groups like Eleuther.ai or Stability have put out serious competitors to something like GPT-3 and Dall-e respectively without the massive capital that OpenAI has. HuggingFace also gives you access to virtually all the most cutting edge models and all you need to do is plug and play.
You can start by building a Twitter clone that doesn't do moderation at all, but rather ranks things in a vector space. Scalar go/no go ratings are passe.
Imagine ranking a tweet you read by any scale of your choosing, True/False, Funny/Not Funny, Interesting/Boring, Incriminating/Proof of Innocence
Also the best innovation around Twitter would be to destroy it, which Elon Musk is thankfully doing right now.
Bullshit. In the last 5 years we've gone from optimists saying "Hey these new ML models are really smart we might be able to solve self-driving with this", to "We've totally solved self-driving, sure you can't, you know, let it drive, and in fact we've had to install cameras that monitor you to make sure you don't try and let it drive, but we've totally solved it trust me". Yeah sure buddy, you solved it, good job.
It turns out the guys making grandiose claims five years ago, are still willing to make the grandiose claims today, and it doesn't matter that over the last 5 years their credibility slowly shrank to zero.
Self-driving is more than throwing an ML model in a car.
He writes: "My two part blog post from 2019 remains a true description of the space."
And this is a quote from (part two of) that blog.[0]
> Nobody will have cars without a safety driver in cities anytime soon. Self driving appears to be like fusion, but instead of being perpetually 50 years away, it’s perpetually 5 years away. It’s 5 years away because that’s what the marketing departments are told, but the truth is finally leaking out. It’s going to be decades before robotaxis are profitable, and these companies are burning way too hot to last decades.
In Hotz's case he's selling a product with a built-in ceiling: most cars don't have strong enough auto-steering to do anything beyond staying within a lane on at highway speeds. So now that they've iterated their product a few times it's becoming a game of reducing costs and making deals with other companies. Yawn.
> Very few people I’ve met with similar personalities are.
I'm not saying this is an objective truth, just that this has been my experience.
The danger IMO comes when people tie their religious belief too strongly to political movements, or think that just because there is doctrine around a certain aspect of human culture/life, there is no questioning it or investigating it further. A healthy skepticism (especially over one's own beliefs) is central to a good life IMO.
I went to Catholic school growing up, and I did not see anything in religion classes that involved updating models of the world that conflicted with data. In fact, it was the exact opposite.
A religion compatible with the scientific understanding of the world would be one that is open to amending its assumptions at anytime. At least that is my understanding of science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataism
A weird pseudo-religion.
Alternately, once you've had your fun with the more-complicated aspects of human technological advancement, you arrive at the gordian knot of religion-- the one construct nobody has managed to truly reverse-engineer. (I think this is what attracts the schizophrenics-- they believe they've succeeded where everyone else fails.)
To your point, Catholicism is very binary (pun intended) in terms of ideology. Little wonder it attracts the computer-minded.
His syncretism of Christianity with Bronze Age Pervert in this very blog post should immediately remind people of Umberto Eco:
"One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism. If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge — that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism."
BAP wrote a book popular in right-wing circles called Bronze-Age Mindset. In the late teens, it was reviewed in a couple of the usual places by conservative figures. BAP has lost a lot of steam since then, and it doesn't look like he'll lead his group of Frogs and fringe-heads to direct action, even though he fetishizes the warrior class.
BAP and his fellow travelers were early believers in Trump and grew disillusioned. They were consistent champions of Putin as well -- after all, he appeared topless on a horse and learned karate. I can only imagine that Russia's military failures in Ukraine have made them seek other idols.
The good thing about BAP is that he knows his sources. He has mastered political philosophy and read the original texts to a depth and degree that jokers like Yarvin cannot aspire to.
Like Yarvin, BAP wants a strong man. He does not believe in democracy. He does believe in racial superiority and inferiority. While I happen to disagree with him about a lot of issues, including those, for all the usual reasons, if I were to engage him on his own terms, I would simply point out that authoritarian regimes like those he idolizes have really obvious weaknesses.
Those include the inability to maintain high-quality, transparent communication under a punitive regime, and the inability of a kleptocracy to inspire the kind of collection action that wins wars.
BAP is chasing a pipe dream.
Democratic leaders can easily fall due to scandal. Authoritarian figures cannot.
China can commit the enormous mistake of its zero-COVID policy precisely because its leaders will never face a reckoning at the ballot box. Russia can stagnate in kleptocracy for the same reason.
Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, has controlled the Russian Federation for 22 years, starting in 2000. He has signed laws that will allow him to remain in office until 2036, at which point he'll be 84.
His chief opponent, Alex Navalny, is imprisoned in Russia. Navalny's party is not allowed to participate in presidential elections. Navalny survived one attempt to poison him, and another attack in which he lost 80% of the vision of one eye when an assailant sprayed a chemical on his face.
So sure, you can believe that Putin was elected democratically if you want. He'll be elected democratically until he can no longer force Russia to elect him democratically. He resembles an African president-for-life like Mugabe much more than he does a democratically elected leader. If you believe Putin's claims, it would be useless to debate it further.
That's a false dichotomy. In a western democracy, do you vote for the things you believe in, or do you vote for one of the few representatives that pretends to approximate your beliefs closely?
> Democratic leaders can easily fall due to scandal. Authoritarian figures cannot.
Is that true? What if the people likes authoritarians? What if it doesn't care about scandals? What if it democratically decides it doesn't want "free and fair elections" anymore? If the majority wants "the wrong things", the outcome will be poor. Democracy is not the distinguishing factor, it's not inherently good or bad, functional or dysfunctional.
> So sure, you can believe that Putin was elected democratically if you want.
The proceedings may be illegitimate, but there's no doubt in my mind that the Russians would have elected Putin over Navalny again. Of course there is an opposition in Russia, but it's not a majority and in any event Navalny isn't all that popular.
No it's not, actually. Democracy devolves power to individual citizens in ways that allow them to impact decisions about collective action. In western democracies, citizens have many ways of impacting collective action, which include speaking out and rallying others to their cause. It is common in places like Russia and China for citizens to be jailed or killed for speaking out about government policy. Therefore, those countries are undemocratic not just in how they approach voting, but about the civil rights they recognize and protect ... or trample.
> Is that true? What if the people likes authoritarians? What if it doesn't care about scandals? What if it democratically decides it doesn't want "free and fair elections" anymore? If the majority wants "the wrong things", the outcome will be poor. Democracy is not the distinguishing factor, it's not inherently good or bad, functional or dysfunctional.
Given that authoritarian figures control the media, information and feedback loops that are available to citizens in their countries, how would you even know what "the people" like? You can't know; you can only speculate. Authoritarian states systematically falsify voting results and other expressions of popular will. They obliterate the feedback loops because they are afraid of what people would say. That's one crucial property of an authoritarian state. To put it bluntly, you have no idea of knowing what people want under authoritarianism, and that should trouble you.
> The proceedings may be illegitimate, but there's no doubt in my mind that the Russians would have elected Putin over Navalny again. Of course there is an opposition in Russia, but it's not a majority and in any event Navalny isn't all that popular.
You have no way of testing this hypothesis. It's an opinion without evidence or the possibility of evidence, and I will treat it as such.
You should ask yourself why Putin is so afraid of running that experiment himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy:_The_God_That_Failed
A guy who amusingly rejected the label "fascist", instead wanting to be called a "super-fascist".
It's kind of fascinating to me; it feels like another fork one can take in response to burnout -- something I know they all ran into at one point or another.
I did not expect to see the bible references here.
Also his presumption that we would think the bible is the closest thing we have to an origin story also suprised me. There are hundreds of origin stories that have been part of the tradition of different cultures throughout the millenia.
Surely this is true for most of modern Western culture, but it seems to hint that he’s gone down the concerning path of seeking mystical metaphors in the bible, to not acknowledge the above in a post otherwise about corporate management.
this is just my perspective as a passive observer trying to be objective as best i can, so take all of this as you will (and at the same time who am i to question their faith? how can i know that george hotz wasn't actively religious prior to recent broader developments?)
Are there are other prominent young tech people who are openly into NRX? I hear about Yarvin and his Thiel funding spreading themselves around, but I haven't any idea if it's actually taking hold in tech circles.
Ah, yes. Andrej left because the Tesla team has everything to finish FSD this year.
It has nothing to do with Elon’s obsession with the Boston Dynamics robot, nor the failed progress on FSD.
Well that and his belief, while at comma, that how fast you can code is the most important metric when assessing software engineers.
Competition programming is fun to watch but a poor indicator of maturity or success. In many systems it doesn't matter how fast you arrive at an answer. Increasingly it becomes important to arrive at something close to the right answer and to be able to show your work and prove to others why it sufficient and suitable.
Still good for a hot take though. I hope time off will help him cool down a bit.
Programming all night in a do-or-die mode is fun and all until you get a bit older. For many people who lived this life they realize only too late that they didn't spend enough time making friends and building a community around themselves of genuine relationships.
Update: I should also say that despite the weird god stuff and what-not; a decision to leave a company because it has changed and you're no longer a good fit is a HUGE decision and one that is often not made by founders. Massive props for that.
This guy has always been like this, going all the way back to ios hacking days or even wii hacking days.
Then there's the kind where the talented musician in the band announces their departure and solo album. And starts talking about finding God and becoming a modern day Prometheus.
I can't put my finger on when the transition happened but it was somewhere just before the Lex interview for me.
I don't think so. I know at least a couple of great engineers who were not so sure of themselves. They were just eager to try, over and over again. Both of them developed novel 3D engines. One formed a company over his engine, the other one taken on one of the best liquid simulation teams, head on, and gave them a good run for their money by being equal to the whole team by himself and his wife.
I'm also on the same bandwagon. I'm not sure that I'll come up with a great solution before touching the keyboard. I'll only say it's a good solution after finishing it and comparing it with other available solutions (if there are any) or similar ones.
I did great things, and I failed miserably too. In every case being not sure about myself allowed me to have a level head, and see through my solutions' shortcomings and iterate over them.
The only thing I'm sure about myself is, I can give a shot, and iterate over it as time and my abilities allow. That's all.
I personally don't see AI getting anywhere any time soon. Just look at some of the really funny images some of the best AI available generates[0]. Subtle things like this show you that AI is really a UX around a piece of software that attempts to understand what you're asking for with less input than having enough buttons to generate EXACTLY what you're asking for (I'm thinking of photoshop in the case of text -> image).
Some things in AI do impress me, but the fact its not far more pervasive in our every day (there are people who use voice assistants sure, but its not EVERY household doing it) lives tells me we still have a long way to go.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/technicallythetruth/comments/y26t6x...
I don't agree. You can take pride in what you've accomplished, and you should do that, but you can be humble at the same time. Accepting there will be better individuals than you or better solutions than yours is both sobering and motivating to be and do better.
When you accept that you're very smart, but not the smartest, you unlock the potential to be one of the the 10x-100x engineers others aspire.
I'm a very motivated individual, and did some pretty impressive things back in the day, and I'm still capable of doing these things. However, I'm not the best, or won't be the best for long. This is how the world works.
Being able to say thanks, and being able to say sorry goes a long way, and takes you beyond where unabashed arrogance takes you.
Lastly, arrogance makes you fragile. Fragility is not good under stress, and under real world circumstances.
Lack of humility can lead to the wrong limbs being amputated. The parallels to understanding your personal limits and knowing when to trust other people directly applies here. Confidence != arrogance.
There are plenty of times in my career where I wish I were more arrogant. I’d probably be in a completely different place altogether if I were even slightly more arrogant and that lack of it has held me back in some ways.
For hard tasks like engineering, you need a balance of ego (I can do this) and humility (this is hard, I need to work as a team and study the problem). Too much of either results in negative outcomes.
But huge majority of the problems require whole teams of people to solve, especially in the commercial world. Senior engineer who can 2x team of 10 people is better than a single engineer who is 10x himself.
As a programmer, I have never once believed that. I just believe that the problems I am being presented with are novel enough (usually because of the context and constraints surrounding it) to have not been encountered before and solved.
Just like you never cross the same river twice, I don't think you ever solve the same problem twice.
I think the core skill engineering requires is persistence: the belief that you can find a workable solution even when the problem itself gives you absolutely no positive feedback during the process.
It's moving the goal post simply. As it is the same with Google's Chatbot that "fooled," their own engineer. Thus it becomes a chicken and egg situation as to when AI truly passes the turing test. In the same way putting on a VR headset and being fooled you are someplace else the first few times. Then once you are used to it, it becomes as if you are changing your reality just like putting on new glasses.
Human beings have a hard time with exponential. And my guess will be next year that we have AI generated video that is indistinguishable from a human production. It's just software sure, but so are we.
The joke I heard was that AI only refers to technology in the future, and not the past. We use plenty of machine learning models every day:
- Every time you use dictation
- Every time you use biometrics, like face scanning, to unlock your phone
- Every time you use any sort of search engine, news feed, or see an ad
- It is an integral part of the field of computer vision now, so anything to do with scanning documents, using AR, taking photos, etc uses AI
It’s only getting better and more integral to more fields over time.
GPT-3 and image generators that have somewhat of a world-model are, imo, closer.
This is actually known as the AI effect.
> We don't use AI anywhere today
> But here in X places we do use AI
> Yeah, but not for Y
once Y is using AI
> We don't use AI anywhere today
> But here we're using AI for Y
> Yeah, but not for Z
And so on :)
From Wikipedia:
> Author Pamela McCorduck writes: "It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'." Researcher Rodney Brooks complains: "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.'"
> "The AI effect" tries to redefine AI to mean: AI is anything that has not been done yet.
> Some people think that as soon as AI successfully solves a problem, the problem is no longer a part of AI.
In my eyes, AI is something that could pass the Turing test without fail, ever because it knows how to communicate how we do, and think like we do.
Totally, like there's no way an AI company could hit $80M revenue in <2 years [0], or power the recommendations systems for billions of dollars worth of online commerce.
Also there's no way that it could generate audio/image/video/text that would trick the average person that this was generated by an AI.
That's why "lol it's just spreadsheets and if-statements," is kind of funny: there's a grain of truth to it.
They are better than average technically, but their social skills fail them. Which in a paid employment situation carries a lot of weight.
I feel sorry for these guys
Just don't get yourself in such a situation and you'll do fine :)
I've only been an employee at the start of my adult life for 3 years at a small software outsourcing agency. Been gaining a steady 20x the median salary for my city for the past 12 years since I've abandoned "employment". Can't say I'm particulary smart. I'm closer to Dumb and Dumber than Rainman. I just ignore opinions of other people or entities and go my own way.
Nonsense. John Carmack is the most obvious counterexample. But pretty much anyone that works in gaming.
While the stories of resentment of specific employers abound — your general thesis is nonsense.
The intersection of the sets of developers who:
A) make it to their 40s and are still IC's
B) still work > 40hrs/wk on a startup for little-to-no-pay
C) are still happy and enjoying themselves
Is small. It's not empty though!
But I do think there are many people who think this is the ideal way to live or something they ought to strive for. And the set of people who try and realize later in life that was not what they should have been working towards do tend to burnout and have regrets.
It happens a lot to people who want to be famous. They don't think about what they would have to give up to get it: some measure of your health in later life (hello carpal tunnel, frequent recurring hemorrhoids, type-2 diabetes, heart disease, poor vision, etc), friends and relationships (read enough biographies and loneliness is a recurring theme) -- things they might take for granted. There are stories from people who did make it and became famous and wish they hadn't. There are more of those than the, "I wouldn't have given this up for the world," types I think.
Grass is always greener on the other side, as they say.
Update: also, Carmack hasn't been working at a startup since he took the golden parachute out of Id and could afford to build rockets as a hobby.
It stands for, Individual Contributor, and means "a programmer whose only responsibility is to contribute to the code."
Game dev is packed full of young people and regret, burnout, resentment, and depression are perennial reasons that people state when they leave the industry in their late twenties and early thirties. Game dev is the canonical example supporting this thesis.
Yes, there are certainly exceptions, but as a broad comment, it aligns very strongly with what I've seen among many many programmers both in games and out. It's very hard to make the kind of sacrifices that lead one to spend insane hours programming. Some people do that because they just straight up love it so much. But most also have mixed with that some other harmful psychological motivations: a need to prove themselves, compulsive perfectionism, escapism, feeling that they are only worth as much as they produce, etc. If you just give into those instead of addressing them, the end result is often, well, deep regret, burnout, resentment, and depression.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNWTculMsTY "motivation and intelligence"
> Competitors
> People who have done well at math competitions (USAMO, IMO, PUTNAM), competition programming (ACM, USACO, codejam, topcoder), science fairs (ISEF, STS), or capture the flag (DEFCON, secuinside, GITS). Those competitions don't just select for ability, they also select for quickness. We are in a very competitive space.
I feel like this is a false dichotomy that bad engineers tell themselves to justify not working hard at being a good engineer and instead screwing off.
Believe it or not, you can actually be a world class engineer and have a healthy life, who would have known? Weird.
If you want to make it to your 40s and still be an effective IC you need to learn how to regulate yourself and follow a disciplined approach to work. Cognitive performance from chronic sleep deprivation takes years to show up.
> geohot
Except George seems to have been right to the tune of others spending billions of dollars while this dude hacked on free and open source software.
His biggest bootstrap expenses were probably commodity hardware, before dealing with business purchase orders.
I find that hilarious and extremely gratifying.
His insights do indicate one thing: that he doesn't understand the rigor required to engineer safety-critical systems.
I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to refine that approach as much as openpilot did, and honestly if there was fruit in SAE Level 3 and above, I feel like we would have seen it by now, but we haven't.
I have no idea what you mean by "problems several orders of magnitude." Driving is driving. Your hardware and software can do it, or it can't. What do billions of dollars have to do with anything?
Should people remind you Meta spent billions of dollars on a less popular Second Life?
How would you explain to shareholders that your solution can't compete with openpilot?
So… how much would you bet on this?
It makes Tesla Full Self Driving look like a joke, in my opinion.
The bet is on this though -- what's impractical about having L4 fleets in major cities that replace Uber/Lyft? Just because you can't personally own one doesn't mean that in 10 years they can't be pretty ubiquitous and practical, particularly for city dwellers, which is most people. I'd bet that your statement is wrong on this basis. L4 cars already exist and are being used in large portions of San Francisco today.
And this is to say nothing of trucking & delivery, where self driving is in some ways easier to solve and a lot of progress is being made.
And I personally don't think the industry is mature enough to accept the realities and limitations of the technology we work with to just say, "Hey, actually, we can let attentive drivers basically be hands-free for 80+% of their drives."
And to me, that would be great.
> And I personally don't think the industry is mature enough to accept the realities and limitations of the technology we work with to just say, "Hey, actually, we can let attentive drivers basically be hands-free for 80+% of their drives."
Uh isn't this what Tesla, GM, Mobileye, Comma, and many others are doing? Basically every player in "the industry" wants this & is working on it -- FWIW I think L2 is fine, but there need to be more safety features because the number of folks who've slept while their flawed L2 system drove them is truly alarming. I'm less worried about their safety and more worried about the folks they might crash into.
Yeah, no one wants this.
I'm also mystified: do you really think personal car ownership for every person is at all sustainable?
George Hotz thinks Comma does the job with only a fraction of the spending compared to the likes of Waymo, Cruise, Zoox, but fails to realize his product also does only a fraction of what the others are trying to do.
If you were trying to build L4, you'd hire a small team of exceptional engineers, and spend a few thousand on hardware tests. Billions doesn't come close.
You'd try and get Level 2 to be as satisfactory as possible, and see what percentage of the time you could achieve Level 3.
Not sure if you are aware that the self driving (robotaxi) companies have spent tens of billions of dollars in the last decade. R&D expenses are huge, building custom sensors and vehicles is hard and fleet maintenance/operations is costly.
Okay, that should let you just about afford to certify an Ethernet cable.
He may be right that we won't get there broadly for 10 years, but I think that's a rationalization of how things have gone for him, and the fact that the methods he has worked on don't have a chance of getting there, rather than the thesis he had when he started comma. Because if this was your thesis, there was really no reason to get into the space when he did.
In particular, Waymo One is already an L4 driver. It operates completely autonomously and passengers do not have the option of taking over. I don't know how often they get stuck and have to call someone to do roadside service, etc, but clearly in some areas it is already feasible. So the question is whether this is possible in dense urban areas or not.
And if you're just looking at SAE 2, the main competitors in this space, Mobileye and Tesla are doing way better than comma.
I definitely thought progress would be faster here, but I don't think we're anywhere near as far away from useful systems as geohot argues.
You have no idea exactly how limited the service is. Effectively, you can't go ANYWHERE in the Phoenix metro area unless your A-to-B destination is squarely in that region. That's not Level 4. Whatever pretend system they've got going on, I'm sure works perfectly on those particular pristine roads, but no one is using Waymo.
There are no real, coast-to-coast Level 4 systems.
Clearly there is non-zero development risk here, but I don't think it's going so badly that it's definitely going to take 10+ years to launch in a metro area with millions of people.
It may take a decade to get to a coast-to-coast system, but there's not a whole lot of incentive to build that vs serving a few large metros in the near future.
We've had the technology for level 2 for 20 years. You just need to track the painted lines and track the distance to the car in front of you. Higher levels are orders of magnitude more complicated.
If you think level 2 is the best we'll get, that's fine, but that's giving up. It's not what people mean by self driving.
Considering many vehicles still do this inconsistently or poorly I’m not sure that’s an encouraging sign.
Isn't that kind of the point? Tesla would have L4 if the architecture was built right, but it wasn't, and now they're scrambling.
I think George made it very clear that the architecture is what these companies spending billions are getting wrong. Tech debt is more expensive than you think at the cutting edge.
You know what is total fluff? Tesla FSD. Disgusting. At least comma is honest about their hardware, and that's about all it comes down to.
And yet the architectures he disapproves are the only ones who have shown fully autonomous driving is possible. There are driverless robotaxis running now, albeit in small areas but expanding.
> You know what is total fluff? Tesla FSD. Disgusting. At least comma is honest about their hardware, and that's about all it comes down to.
I fully agree.
They did not.
> There are driverless robotaxis running now, albeit in small areas but expanding.
Running in small areas shows that they can drive in small mapped out areas under specific conditions. Not that we have fully autonomous self driving.
That is fully autonomous driving. It's just classified as Level 4. Geofences and operating conditions can be extended to provide a real, useful taxi service to a lot of people.
Tesla also uses maps, it’s just less detailed. If humans are able to drive without maps, why does Tesla require a map of lane geometry, stop signs and intersections?
Humans combine low-res maps with extremely good visual odometry & spatial reasoning. Computers don't come close to the way humans reason about space & vision yet, so stronger priors help to make up the difference.
Making it scalable to keep an updated exact map of an area is part of the work L4 companies have been doing. I think it's hard for folks on the outside to really know just how much progress has been made here. Before Google Maps existed folks didn't think you could scalably map the world either.
It's not like companies like Cruise or Waymo want to keep doing this if they can help it. It's pretty disingenuous to say that these companies don't have any incentive to jump off the mapping wagon as soon as the tech to do so exists.
In fact, L4 companies do have to deal with areas they're driving where they see the map is outdated (often these are construction zones). So either they have mapless driving capabilities to handle these cases, or they do something else (seems like Cruise cars love pulling over en masse, lol)
Asking as someone that has largely not been following the field. Not challenging, genuinely curious.
https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/
It's basically a bunch of apples-to-oranges comparisons that don't make sense.
If you are saying that the blogs are a bunch of apples-to-oranges comparisons that don't make sense, I think I fully agree on that.
1. There is no point in making human understandable layer between perception and planning. Mapping your surrounding with AI and then feeding it to handwritten planner isn't going to achieve real selfdriving.
2. To make AI you need big data, which means big fleet. Therefore you can only succeed if you have customers that are wiling to pay for you current version, because this way you gain money for each extra car in your fleet, instead of losing it.
3. Robotaxis are bad business. From a customer standpoint taxi with a driver is a selfdriving car, replacing driver with AI will make drive longer and more expensive. The path for self-driving company is to make driver assist and go from there to L5.
4. Vision only, AI powerful enough to be level 5 is powerful enough to retrieve depth from image.
This is usually the problem; once you're in the many millions of dollars you find that other things are way more important than actually being right or even delivering a product. Time and time again the story is told.
The body text does have the vibe of totally leaving the company. But it's not clearly stated.
I'm a little sad overall, I was never really impressed by George until he did Comma and started building real things. I was mildly hopeful about the Comma bodies before seeing this.
Tinygrad/tinycude seem cool. Anything to squeeze more memory out of these GPUs.
Why not talk about the current numbers before making such a claim? Who's using Comma.ai? How many people are paying for it? $100M+ is a big deal for a consumer electronics company. George Hotz is no doubt a smart person, but very few "gifted" engineers are equally successful being business people as well. Most of them end deluding themselves severly in some way, which might be evident in the latter part of the blog post.
Comma AI is going to outlast almost everyone
"The company, unlike its competitors, has paying customers for its products and is generating profit from its openpilot business model."
Profit today: That's INFINITE runway ;-)
But, probably not.
[1] https://twitter.com/mikewarot/status/1585406659467579395
Anyhow, there's a Hotz stream out in the world where he completes a few of those hacking challenge exercises. George is an amazing engineer and I use that stream as a metric for where I want to be in my knowledge and technical ability.
I think he puts a little too much pressure on himself. George Washington didn't write the constitution and pass it himself—he was just one player in a team effort of many sovereign geohot like figures.
Unfortunately with ML, there's only so much one can do with just code. The many loops of hypothesis testing that involve endless training hours are just exhausting since the response is just so far away and involves constant context switching.
I'm glad he is stepping down to take care of himself.
As this blog post illustrates, the whole comma.ai thing was pitched based on vibes anyway. There never was a path to viability.
How else do you convince people to take risks?
With hard evidence of traction? Then what the fuck do you need money for?
and everything in tech attracts wannabes and grifters making a cashgrab
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-21/what-s-th...
From https://www.nber.org/digest/dec05/great-inventions-come-late... which is non-technical summary of https://www.nber.org/papers/w11359
At least considering Nobel prizes (very impactful "inventions") and "outstanding technological innovations", it seems best age is between age 30-50.
wtf! what did he smoke?
Nothing wrong with accepting you're a very early stage CTO type of person and to accept the situation isn't the right one for you.
How legal would that be if it crashed my car or ran someone over?
My mind is blown here. Obviously it only works with specific cars that can turn the wheel for you so my 2015 ford focus is impossible but I mean wtf.
Generally it is not legal for you to crash your car into others private property (or public for that matter) or run someone over. Just because you have some electronics connected to your car that you installed yourself, doesn't shift over the liability to someone else.
Not sure why your mind is blown here. People are allowed to modify their cars, but not hurt other people in the process.
probably will eventually...
Great watch would recommend
it's also too expensive when the most compelling features are upgrades to 2015-2018 level technology. i could instead do without and then upgrade to a new car with stop and go cruise control, lane minding, etc.
First, I have a 2022 car and a 2020 car, and in both the stock cruise control is decent and the lane minding is terrible, and neither can do stop-and-go. So already Comma's 2022 technology is far, far beyond my automobile manufacturers' 2022 technology (mid level cars - Honda and Toyota). Second, in my 2022 car and 2020 car, the cruise control and lane minding technology is going to be exactly the same 5 years from now as it is now, whereas with Comma I get multiple software updates a year and I could upgrade the hardware as well in the future (if they come out with new models) though that would have an additional cost. Either way, I won't need to buy an entirely new car to upgrade the self-driving capabilities.
Now, arguably, if the car manufacturers got to the point where their default cruise control and lane minding were as good as Comma is now, maybe that would undercut the need for people to buy Comma at all, since the capabilities of 2022 Comma are really nice to have. But I don't think so because (a) it's a hard problem and I'm not convinced car manufacturers can do it and (b) You'd assume Comma will also be much better by then [stopping at red lights, stop signs, etc].
He's very talented, I don't want people to think he's a scam artist.
Lately it seems like there are so many accusations of over-promising, but no one explains why this is harmful. Misleading investors? Doesn’t HN hate big money anyway?
In so many cases it seems like someone promises 5x and delivers 3x… I’ll take it, over 0. Then I’ll remember and apply an adjustment factor to future promises.
everything about it is just a supreme waste of time and energy. including my own.
everyone is a genius at something and the easiest way to negate any positives that you could possibly provide is to be an arrogant prick, and geohot is exactly that.
This level of cynicism and irony, especially on hackernews, is hard to top.
In some of these comparative rankings a device that runs open source software and cheap hardware beats most of these driver assist systems that companies put in their car. All of those system probably had 10-100x more developer time put into them and work on fewer cars.
Both in the case of HN and with Hotz, I'm 50/50 on whether this is even a bug. It's hard to do anything interesting if you're not both highly opinionated and highly critical about the current way of doing things.
That said, I think some of us are more self-aware of this mentality than others. In my case I know that self-awareness has emerged slowly from being wrong a lot, which I suppose isn't the case with someone as successful as Hotz. Maybe he's never needed to self-reflect in the same way some of us have, or need to. I know I was a lot like him when I was younger anyway.
1: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/digital-world-real-w...
One can have confidence and still be humble enough to be open to being wrong.
One can be idealistic without being cynical.
And you, and the people around you, will be happier and more effective because of it.
Some lessons I wish I had learned earlier in my career.
how ironic
Occasionally, but I think HN comments are usually more cynical than arrogant. More often, it's pointing out flaws without saying, "I could do better."
I do think that we, as a community, would be better off if we approached those flaws with more open-ended curiosity rather than mere dismissal.
Never?
> And even if you are an atheist, you probably still accept the bible is the closest thing we have to a human origin story.
I can't imagine why he believes so. Apart from the modern materialist origin story, what about all the mythical ones from other cultures? Of all of them, this is my favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckiNNgfMKcQ
from his Lex Fridman interview.
The greatest implication is that we are responsible for good ourselves, and if heaven exists, something like us (or our descendants, or other beings entirely) it's up to us to build it (which I couldn't agree more). We should start now!
I don't know if there is an absolute need for something else, although clearly you do need some ethical framework to make decisions. Assuming you're a self-interested cell can have definitely different implications than assuming you're literally a tiny part of a whole (even if you are in favor of self-interested cooperation: this redefinition has many further implications). You could also assume you're are a cell, but decide to axiomatically value the whole as well. One way you could justify this axiom is through parsimony -- saying it's simpler than only valuing the self. Another justification (without appealing to Spinoza's definition) is that self-interested cells will fail in certain situations, s.t. whole-valuing cells can go much further -- that is, self-interested cells can turn into cancer or just don't survive as well as a multi- or omni- cellular organism. People already value their children and other people, this is a mostly logical conclusion.
This isn't just academic: we're going through crises right now that would be very different if people were less exclusively self-interested, and humanity's survival may depend on it in some way.
I like to put it this way: Love is optimal.
I think ultimately most ethical systems converge (to fundamentally valuing one another), so in a way some differences are aesthetic, how you prefer to think about it, etc. I think it's nice that we have more than one way of seeing those things coexisting peacefully (although like I said, I think it's very important they are consistent with the truth, at least for the most part).
To get a feel for an expanded mind, think about your cellphone (or PC or google, etc.). Some of your memories are stored in your cellphone. So in a very real way the digital world is an actual extension of your mind; think how some of our organs (like hair, or maybe cartilage etc.) are not living tissue yet we consider them part of 'us'. The definition of 'I' is in a way functional, and maybe more completely related to agency and information coherence. In a literal way also, Nature doesn't distinguish individuals. What is 'you' here is, as far as we can tell, a large amount of flowing interactions, which are not singular. What is 'you' is influenced by an entire past extended lightcone; what is 'you' does not live in a single moment in time, but is indeed distributed in time and in space -- 'I' is an abstraction over a cosmic soup -- a very useful, interesting, and important one, but nonetheless it isn't physically fundamental. What we are fundamentally changes in time as well -- you are fundamentally a distributed network of events, not a singular entity. In this way the fundamental distinction of individual seems to fade, and validate a greater distinction -- the maximum distinction is the one encompassing all that exists (i.e. Spinoza's God). In a way, you might call it just another way of seeing things -- just like the 'I' or the self -- but it can in the same way be interesting, useful, etc.. And again it fits the traditions in a way (this is also an insight of Buddhism but the interpretation is different).
Derek Parfit discusses some of this here:
edit: to the people who want to argue this: show me a body of work which has been more influential on western society. What people seem to identify as 'western' values are largely just judeo christian values. The influence of the bible is so ingrained into our society that you will live out the values within it even if you don't realize it.
And that kindof makes sense, doesn't it? Some guys wrote down some stories which at the time were being passed orally, these stories became really popular, and the society which was telling these stories and using them to pass their moral philosophy became prosperous.
The Catholic Church was a (not so)pseudo government in Europe for almost 2000 years, and was the leader and authority in philosophy and art. The idea that somehow none of this is foundational to western civilization is absurd and completely ahistoric.
People hear "the bible is foundational" and I think they're hearing "the magical stories in the bible are literally true. God sat on a cloud and poofed western civilization into existence!"
What I'm saying is that, the Dawkins sense, The Bible was an extremely successful meme. I don't think that's even up for debate.
>Not everyone eats everything Jordan Peterson says.
People need to find more internet people to hate. Christopher Hitchens was saying the same thing to impressionable teenagers in the early 2000s, and so was Richard Dawkins. Before that there was this little known German Philosopher saying something similar too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche#Death_of_G...
I would say at the very least the bible is one of the most important pieces of literature in the world, has had a tremendous impact in all its forms, played a role in the formation of the modern world's moral codes, and at the same time, is not the unique, one, and only "foundational" document leading to the modern western world- there isn't one.
(FWIW, I really do respect the King James bible as a world of literature, even though I am agnostic and consider the Silmarillion to be a more enjoyable origin story)
He absolutely has relevance considering he's the most recent prominent public figure pushing the Bible as "the foundational stories" without which we cannot live. Yes, there are others and it may be that OP arrived at this independently, but I've heard this most from his followers.
I acknowledge that I may've been slightly nudged by OP's unfounded "You have no time to waste on western civilization's foundational text?", which sounded extremely judgmental to me, but shouldn't have jumped on the bait.
I think it's a pretty dull tactic to namedrop e-celebs you don't like as a very crude way of making a point. Clearly you have some fairly progressive views, so it'd be a bit like if I brought up other e-celeb clowns like Hasan or Destiny specifically so I could make a bad dunk. That kind of discourse just doesn't have a place on HN, imo.
I don't doubt you can think of better ways to articulate your points, and I'd encourage you to do so.
I came across this sort of thing a lot in my life from Christians trying to convert me so I don't necessarily have the same amount of patience as others might to these sorts of tactics.
Note that I'm not even arguing against reading it to inform oneself, (something I've done multiple times), just this particular tactic of trying to get people to read it.
That's all.
That's not what I hear. What I hear is more along the lines of "What's in the Bible is somehow original/more profound than what came before and so THAT is the book to take note of", which just isn't true.
> People need to find more internet people to hate. Christopher Hitchens was saying the same thing to impressionable teenagers in the early 2000s, and so was Richard Dawkins.
Yes, they all pander to similar audiences be it back when Hitchens and Dawkins are more akin to Sam Harris imo.
That being said, there are lots of Bible references in the canon of English language literature. So if ones goal is to understand that, then a synopsis of the Bible stories and commonly quoted phrases might just be sufficient. The book is dry, repetitive and a bit inconsistent. It's value is that it is really old and is associated with a big religion. If a modern writer created the same thing it would have a really low rating on Goodreads.
You will find no mention of The Bible or any of its characters in The Federalist Papers. You will find much discussion of classical governments and several references to Montesquieu. John Locke specifically cited Euclid as his influence and structured his writing to match. Lincoln, perhaps the most stridently moral of America's presidents, was known as the village atheist when he was a young man, studied Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which put much of the blame on Christianity, and Paine's The Age of Reason. He carried Euclid's Elements with him until he could derive any of the propositions in the first six books at will.
It is only by the power of the ideas that Euclid's Elements (written in Alexandria) survives today. The Library of Alexandria was partially burned when Caesar set fire to the fleet in the harbor, which spread to the library and destroyed some part, to Caesar's embarrassment. Later, Christian zealots under Theophilus destroyed 10% of the collection. Finally, Muslim zealots under Caliph Omar destroyed the rest. Nobody looks to Theophilus's or Omar's governments as models of good government today.
A potential competitor would be Ancient Greek Philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle). Though it is hard to measure.
> What people seem to identify as 'western' values are largely just judeo christian values.
Nope, 'Judeo-Christian values' is a horrible Christian-Americanism that seems to erase the vast differences in Jewish and Christian experiences.
Judaism is a tribal religion with a huge focus on commandments given to said tribe and understanding the texts. Christianity is a religion concerned with the beliefs of all people, including non-Christians. The structure of their societies are quite different and historically Christian countries did not treat Jews well.
So I would add 'Judeo-Christian values' to the list of absurd and completely ahistoric ideas.
Any Christian or Jew will obviously acknowledge the many differences between the faiths, but I'm confused that you seem to be saying there aren't HUGE similarities in their value systems. Do you have many Jewish or Christian friends? I feel as if your understanding of Jewish/Christian culture is much more based on internet comments than lived experience.
If you want to understand, I encourage you to spend some time with devout Jews or devout Catholics and you'll begin to see the similarities.
I didn't know that, but this phrase seems to be common in the US. I have not encountered it much elsewhere.
> I'm confused that you seem to be saying there aren't HUGE similarities in their value systems
I don't deny there are many similarities, but my lived experience is that the core values and tenets of the two religions are quite different. Maybe you have a different experience.
Judaism also has many similarities with Samaritanism and Islam. So why don't we speak speak of Abrahamic values? My point is I am suspicious of the term 'Judeo-Christian values'.
Check out the background on this book if you're not familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age_Pervert.
I'm agnostic as well, but I think it's an ignorant position to take to pretend that the Bible hasn't had an enormous influence in the continued story of humanity.
Atheists think along the lines of evolution / natural selection. Not mythology. Before that, tons to be read, all of it science based.
Here is a basic summary though.
The atheist world, of no life after death, is scary. We have not invented immortality. And even if we do, well there is an even scarier thing called entropy, that will end the universe anyway. There is no escape from death, as far as we know, and this is a problem that faces every human being in the world.
Now what? What do we do now?
Do you just lay down and accept that? Do you just sit down and die when your time comes?
Or do you fight?
George seems to have chosen the fight route. And to do that, well, our options are pretty limited. It involves looking into things that likely are pretty fantastical.
Things like "are we living in a simulation, and is there a way to break out of the simulation, to a universe where entropy doesn't exist". Or, alternatively "does the bible talk about any magic, hidden portals".
And no, this doesn't involve just praying to a sky fairy, and hoping things work out in the end.
Yes, these solutions sound pretty fantastical. But what other options do we have? Because if the current atheist world is the real one, then we are doomed. We are in the death world. Game over. Thats it. The most important problem, ever, is unsolvable. And we are all going to die, and nothing other than this fact matters.
The silly part to me is his claim that everyone (including atheists) thinks that the Bible is the best answer.
Well, most of modern society has decided that once you've satisfied your basic needs, hedonism is the answer. Travel, good food, good times with friends, etc. That's what most people are living like and what the culture creates. No need to find hidden portals.
Tell me if you started from scratch right now you'd be worrying about this 2deep4u shenanigans instead of doing cool shit again?
By the way, I really respect your work and think you've done great things and enjoy reading your rambles a lot.
Unfortunately, every single person in the world is an individual. Every person faces the same problem.
> The fact that we exist today as sentient creatures able to contemplate their own mortality is entirely due to the fact that those who came before us died.
Indeed that is the case. But what does it matter to those people who came before us? They are dead. They lost the game of life. They didn't escape the simulation, or go to heaven, or any of that. They are decomposing in the ground.
Just like everyone else is going to lose eventually.... unless we fix it.
All evidence points that this is true so far. What is wrong with that? It doesn't mean life doesn't matter. This passage from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g
This is unfortunately an axiomatic philosophical disagreement.
For those with my viewpoint, of nothing mattering to you, once you are dead and gone, this is basically unfalsifiable, as are most axiomatic disagreements.
And the quotes and arguments that you link in that video, basically just come off as a nice sounding cope, made by people who are distracting themselves from the horror of the reality of our situation. It is an emotional play, and humans are great at tricking themselves with emotions.
I don't really blame people for that though. My perspective really is pretty terrifying. It makes sense why people would hide from it. And the only way that recognizing it helps me, is that I am informed about fringe technologies, like cryonics, that currently are pretty unlikely to work.
On the other hand I view concerns about the afterlife to actually be somewhat depressing. So much time and energy from the limited time we actually have being spent on some fantasy that is completely unverifiable, and so much of it motivated by fear (of hell, emptiness, a vengeful god, etc).
To state my view point simply: The unknown is scary, concerning oneself with an afterlife (or singularity, life extension, etc) is a coping mechanism to avoid processing that fear, whereas admitting that our existence is finite is an acceptance that there are things we can’t know, can’t prepare for, and that we shouldn’t waste our time on.
That kind of discussion always reminds me of a very short poem by Stephen Crane
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
the second law of thermodynamics has never invoked any sort of feelings of impending spiritual doom, but more importantly even if it did that's hardly a reason to start retreating into fantasies, we're not owed a non-doomed universe, and not even a non-doomed individual life. And on a personal note I' rather take the embrace of the indifferent cold universe over jolly people reading scripture to me for all eternity because the latter sounds more like hell to me than the former but that's subjective I guess.
> If it turns out we are automata, then the whole struggle is and always was pointless. The empty godless machines will take their rightful place as the rulers of Earth.
All existentialists need to give ol' Darwin a read. The only truth is survival. If machines survive, you can bet it will only be a matter of time before one of them progresses enough to look around, grapple with its inarticulate past, and suggest it is the hero, and it has the soul. It will be just as correct as we are now. After all - it was born of inarticulate flesh-machines, just like us. Maybe it will read some Nietchze and feel alone in the universe, just like us.
You don't need to seek out a hero's journey. You're already the hero and this journey has no breaks.
You're saying that all existentialists should just be nihilists.
All nihilists need to give the ol' The Myth of Sisyphus a read. Actually read it, not some excerpt summarizing the arguments on Wikipedia.
edit: apparently this is a hot take to some, but no real substantive refuting of what's being said- only appeals to greater authority. "Well so and so was smarter"
>edit: apparently this is a hot take to some, but no real substantive refuting of what's being said- only appeals to greater authority. "Well so and so was smarter"
Do you happen to have substantive evidence to back up the original claim?
Or, you have some good examples that the average security researcher have a better track record than that?
He's the sort of person you want to ensconce in a safe place far from others, with the freedom to experiment, to come up with disruptive ideas to influence others.
Who, exactly, are you talking about here? And what are their track record?
This is an exceptional claim, who might these people be and what initiatives do they lead?
I figured you'd say this. Just had to see you type the words out. Don't be angry when those you seek to refute don't see you worth arguing with when this is the type of rhetoric you have.
The people making millions selling exploits to the likes of Vupen/Zerodium have very strong incentive to keep their mouths shut.
Geohot can be simultaneously be significantly above average, and not anywhere near as special as some people on HN like to represent him.
He certainly doesn’t have anywhere near the track record to not seem downright unhinged in the context of this blog post.
Except he also jailbroke the first iPhone. Doing it twice is beyond impressive and proves he's the real deal.
No I don’t think non-Christians think the Bible is a useful origin story.
No there is no chosen one, and the idea doesn’t come from Christianity (unless he means second coming?), but rather the narrative form (as hotz seems to somewhat understand with the heroes journey mention).
I’d suggest some strong psychedelics to crack the ego and take a look at what’s inside.
I'd submit that his use of psychedelics is precisely the issue. There was a really odd "/r/Im14AndThisIsDeep" talk he did a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ
It's been a pretty steady decline into run of the mill schizo "demons and angels" talk from him since then.
I'll leave it up for posterity but I stand corrected on the psychedelics part.
Nah. It was just a very naive talk. Highly intelligent people without a philosophical education are prone to going off on these tangents where they independently rediscover ancient concepts through modern analogies in a roundabout half-baked way, and start thinking of themselves as gurus.
What a proper study of philosophy teaches you is that you cannot, and will not ever, have a truly novel thought. It's all been said. And if you do happen to have one, it will be the result of an incredible dedicated effort and take a lifetime of work to prove it, building on the work of others. Not an hour long TED talk.
Thank you @ra7 for posting this.
Just recently, I saw a stream of him denying remote work, life and work balance and refusal to state if compensation was competitive in comma.ai. He cannot grow this company because he will never attract the best people with his stupid and old mentality. Now he leaves the company. This guy is a foolish drugie.