Geohot/Tinycorp gives up on AMD | Hacker News Reader

Geohot/Tinycorp gives up on AMD

github.com

76 pointslyu0728246 comments

Geohot is a smart guy full of hot air. He keeps claiming that problems have simple solutions and vow to fix it as a proof of how easy it is.

Then he meets reality and silently gives up within a few weeks. Every. Single. Time.

See comma that still hasn't produced anything.

See his stint at twitter where he claimed he'd turn everything around within weeks but gave up after 2 days.

See the absolute bullshit that went on with his shitcoin, cheapETH.

Now see this.

> See comma that still hasn't produced anything.

What are you talking about? They actually shipped a product that has over 90 million miles driven, blowing past all competitors apart from Tesla. You can buy the product today, hook it up to your care and get a better lane assist than pretty much every other car company ships. Plus they're profitable. Compare that to dozens of self-driving startups that are basically vaporware or outright frauds.

You can dislike the guy but you're delusional if you brush off comma.ai as not having produced anything.

Yeah, Op is so off base here. I do think that George still gets astroturfed by Muskateers though. Possibly even Musk's paid for army, but I think they are still cool with each other. But people who wanna cuddle an Elon will just jump in and crap on George or Comma quick. He was for sure more than a bit manic when he debut Comma, but their tools work and they have been in quite a bit of use for a while and their new robot platform is pretty cool. I don't think self driving cars can really be solved in the US but whatever, I hear the Mercedes stuff is surprisingly good. I'm not a twitch guy buy I joined a stream he was doing one day where he was live coding SLAM. I've done a lot of work with slam and not only is he a very good programmer but while doing the work to an audience he was able to have a brief but compelling conversation with me about his strategy. If my girl knocks on the door to bring me coffee while I'm coding I lose my place.

He's not involved with Comma much anymore and he's 100% right that Nvidia hasn't won the race yet.

I worked at Nvidia on RAPIDS. From what I understand, they've gotten better but it's still a very traditional MS style company. CUDA is amazing and is something akin to x86 with it's ubiquity. It's the fastest and best to work with but is an albatross and it's being used to accelerate the development of it's replacements. I feel his pain with this AMD stuff. I bailed on them in 2018. They do not have the ability to ship real compute tooling.

Also the myriad of ways we can now bridge to the browser with WebGPU and WebASM and Vulkan.... and FPGAs and next year photonic computing is going to start trickling in and then it's going to become. a flood. I think there are two fabs in the US. I plan to ship some test designs to SkyWater in August. With the end of globalization, photonics are going to be where we move quick.

I like Geohot. I really enjoyed his punk ass spirit as a young guy and I think he's grown up to being a decent example of how to be a tech public figure. His soundcloud is dope. Not only does it have some good songs but a few of them are about valley inside baseball that has not ever been reported anywhere but his music.

https://soundcloud.com/tomcr00se/

I was curious and looked that up because your post sounds strikingly similar to corporate marketing material. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but it seems Comma couldn't find a buyer and just open-sourced the product. And Geohot seemed to have stepped down from the company completely.

His Twitter shit was ridiculous, imagine ever having beaen a software engineer and thinking you alone can universally out-compute MILLIONS of man hours of human brain compute into a project.

Fucking audacity beyond words.

If you were a composer, you’d be Salieri.

Salieri was a master of his craft in his era, the artistic father of Schubert and Beethoven. He had nothing to envy Mozart for, and for most of their lives Salieri was preferred for a lot of gigs for the emperor. Salieri's portrait in media is crazy because historical documents tell a very different story (the Mozart family was very much convinced of the existence of an Italian cabal putting down composers and directors who weren't Italian) until Salieri's senile delirium of stating that he poisoned Mozart, so you should call him Mozart, but I sense he doesn't fit neither of them.

Not much of a put down, nobody fits "neither of them".

Computing is a very broad matter, sooooo maaaaaybeeeeee if you were Karpathy you could be compared?

you're taking your history from a pop-culture movie based on a book, both of which were of dubious historic value and designed to attract eyeballs.

Thanks!

> silently gives up

He gave up loudly on his twitter in public space.

> gave up after 2 days.

More like several weeks.

> See comma that still hasn't produced anything.

It has produced something as other comments pointed out.

It seems to me you are the one who is full of hot air.

There's a reason he earned the name 'egohot' many, many years ago, and he hasn't changed since.

"Feel free to close my issues", I'm too cool for this shit.

He just uncommented the forced login to twitter when you wanted to search for something - he then left saying "mission accomplished" then it became worse - they bought the forced login back and and now give a crappy rightwing leaning meme timeline featuring Elon's wisdom

> See comma that still hasn't produced anything.

What do you mean by this?

Comma.ai was his self driving car startup.

Yes, but it has produced something -- in fact, it has produced the top rated ADAS system as rated by Consumer Reports: https://data.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/...

Comma and openpilot are doing fine and don't need George anymore. Don't think they will "win self driving cars" though.

> Don't think they will "win self driving cars" though.

The boldest and bravest prediction.

Comma.ai wont win self-driving against Google and Tesla.

Ten days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36065175

I thought he was going to write his own driver because he already knew AMD drivers are garbage but I guess that wasn't the plan. In the video he said that he assumed AMD's userspace was broken but the kernel driver worked and he later discovered that it's much worse.

I thought the same too. He seems very suspicious and volatile.Just like the Java keyword.

explain

To be fair, amdgpu can be a dumpster fire at times...

I've also seen cases where I get that sdma ring buffer timeout, and rather than resetting the GPU, it spews garbage continuously in dmesg before I have to power cycle it.

On the other hand, that 2950x system is cursed. Half the time I boot it up, it downclocks the memory to 2400, won't detect USB devices... or part way through booting the kernel decides that it doesn't want anything to do with the pcie bus and panics.

I thought his whole pitch was that AMD drivers suck and he was gonna write new ones?

Now he's giving up because AMD drivers suck?

He has a point. If you have been following AMD for years you'll see there's something inexplicable about the quality of their drivers. <shrug> I guess it's the culture. I don't know but something seems wrong.

It has been going on for 23 years. My rage128 card, which I bought as a youngster, in 2000, had the worst drivers that 80% of the time did not work.

I don't know if that's a fair comparison... AMD might have bought ATI, but they're not exactly the same company anymore...

Plus back then the concept of needing drivers for hardware was rather new... prior to SVGA, DOS games talked to the hardware directly or just dumped data into a chunk of memory for the video card to display.

I don't agree. The Windows 2000 drivers were critical to get the card to work. However almost all the time the card would not work, it would not give you dvd mpeg-2 playback as the product and ATI promised.

More context: https://youtu.be/Mr0rWJhv9jU

Thats quite a freewheeling video...

It's on brand I suppose, relevant part starts at 2:06: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0rWJhv9jU&t=126s

> "It's on brand I suppose"

is this really how he rolls? any normal person would delete this video

EDIT: I got to 22:55 when he fired up the meditation youtube video with the calm narration after his unhinged rant lmao it was like a bad character development scene from a movie. if tinybox takes off and geohot completes his hero journey and someone makes the next 'social network' type movie about these new titans of industry, i demand this scene goes into the film

Any normal person wouldn't become a famous/infamous edgelord.

i don't doubt it lol, it's just the first time i saw him in action

> any normal person would delete this video

Without the drama, what's left? I thought that's the whole point...

People take geohot seriously, should there be a disclaimer on everything he puts out that they should not?

> "... aww shit they have alignment, ok well, we don't want any alignment. our AIs are unaligned"

lmao

https://youtu.be/Mr0rWJhv9jU?t=2750

    05:31:00 need to merge speedups for realtime
    05:31:40 thank you for watching
    05:32:00 prison hierarchy

Well, that didn’t last very long, did it.

Whoops, 5M down the drain.

Easier said than done, I guess.

It looks like he's pivoting to Intel (but for how long).

If I were him I'd pivot to ARM, like, really.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's more PFLOPS in all ARM devices combined than any other arch.

But I reached out a few days ago and the guy is a dick so good riddance.

Orin is overpriced and Altra is weak sauce compared to GPUs.

It was generally assumed the point was to sell to AMD, I guess that wasn't the goal.

intel's challenges are doing more to sell AMD than anything.

geohot is there to sell himself

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