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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't spend a single dollar on George.

The guy could wake up tomorrow and decide he didn't feel like developing this stuff any more and you're going to be stuck with a dead project. In fact, he already did that once when he found a bug in the driver.

People RIP on Google for killing projects all the time and now you want to bet your business on a guy who livestreams in front of a pirate flag? Come on.

Never mind that even in my own personal dealings with him, he's been a total dick and I'm far from the only person who says that.

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what are you talking about. George has been working on comma.ai for years. It's shipping actual products and has revenue.

We need more people who "think different" and push back against the status quo instead of carrying out ad hominem attacks on public forums.

It is certainly possible to "think different" and not be a wannabe steve jobs.

They're talking about the meltdown he had on stream [1] (in front of the mentioned pirate flag), that ended with him saying he'd stop using AMD hardware [2]. He recanted this two weeks after talking with AMD [3].

Maybe he'll succeed, but this definitely doesn't scream stability to me. I'd be wary of investing money into his ventures (but then I'm not a VC, so what do I know).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0rWJhv9jU

[2] https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...

[3] https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/166980346408248934...

If his grievances actually got through to the AMD CEO, I'd say he's already had a bigger impact than most.

It is good press at a time when AMD is very visibly looking like they lost out on the first round of AI. His project is open source, AMD likes that and can benefit from the free developer feedback. I'd say this is less about George and more about Lisa being the insanely smart and talented business person that she is.

Lisa is smart but this only got to her because George got publicly upset.

He emailed her after he had his meltdown. It wasn't like she saw the meltdown and wrote to him. He is nowhere on her radar.

By the way, I also got a bug in the AMD drivers fixed too [0]. That bug fix enabled me to fully automate the performance tuning of 150,000 AMD gpus that I was managing. This is something nobody else had done before, it was impossible to do without this bug fix. We were doing this by hand before! The only bummer was that I had to upgrade the kernel on 12k+ systems... that took a while.

I went through the proper channels and they fixed it in a week, no need for a public meltdown or email to Lisa crying for help.

[0] https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/470297/?series=99134...

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