Nvidia CEO: One of the most 'profound learnings in my life' came from a gardener | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia CEO: One of the most 'profound learnings in my life' came from a gardener

cnbc.com

17 pointsrntn16 comments

The article is a waste of time and doesn't deserve to be on the front page of HN. Every mega-rich has their own "profound learnings" - morning yoga routines, cold showers, intermittent fasting, reading a book a week, you name it. It's all the same recycled advice that doesn't resonate with the average person dealing with real-life challenges. Replicating their routines won't achieve anything. We should focus on practical solutions and insights that can genuinely help people improve their lives.

Huang isn’t saying any of those one-simple-trick things.

His advice is actually incredibly difficult to put into practice: define your purpose, dedicate your life to it, and prioritize working on it.

I don't think Huang was even trying to give any advice. The author 'assembled' the article from random Huang's quotes and presented it as advice.

He’s at his Facebook moment where people give away data to Zuck and he doesn’t know why. They’re box shifting GPUs so will milk that until something else comes along. That’s what the NVDA CEO is steering.

This time it’s "learning from poor people, they are so humble and live a simple life without useless luxury." It is very ridiculous indeed.

>It's all the same recycled advice that doesn't resonate with the average person dealing with real-life challenges.

"average" person does not exist

Jean-Luc Picard would agree.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Boothby

Jokes aside star trek tng is full of positive messages and role models.

Boothby strikes again!

Not sure I understand what the message is here. Anyone want to take a stab?

People often hold the impression that I'm "very busy" working on "important things" and hesitate to reach out when they should. I understand this, but it goes against my most important role: helping others to be healthy and productive (which are largely synonymous in my opinion). I understand Jensen's anecdote to mean that he is both thinking carefully about what he chooses to do, and doing what is important first -- even when the work is slow and tedious (like picking dead moss with tweezers).

My interpretation is that you just do what you do, regardless of whether the conditions are comfortable, and regardless of whether people will notice

There's definitely something Chinese to it (me being Chinese-American too) -- you have a duty to do your job, and you don't ask why. You just do it, period.

(Now picking your job is something that's left out here, and that's a fair confusion/criticism. But once you pick it, do a good job.)

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I do think there is something to this -- I have noticed that many aspects of life have become more "optimized" and "incentivized" lately.

Ted Gioia has some good thoughts on music and movies, and the drastic ways those have changed in ~20 years due to business practices. But it's happened with the food industry and the tech industry too.

Everything is driven by incentives -- i.e. capitalism as "paper clip maximizer" -- you don't need AI for that (and yes this is ironic, given the subject)

And it lowers quality, to the point that I'd argue it's poisoned our bodies (Ozempic being evidence of this) and brains (e.g. people think social media has caused mood disorders in millions of young people; I tend to think there's something to that).

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It's basically the opposite of asking "Is this going to be easy for me, and am I going to get a lot out of it?"

I do think rejecting that philosophy opens doors that you couldn't have seen beforehand. That is, Jensen's work definitely compounded in unique ways over 30 years. It's literally impossible otherwise

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In some ways this is similar to the Steve Jobs meme of "why do you make the circuit board look nice if nobody is going to see it?"

Although it's funny that this page sort of pours cold water on that - https://folklore.org/PC_Board_Esthetics.html

Steve responded strongly. "I'm gonna see it! I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it's inside the box. A great carpenter isn't going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody's going to see it."

I can explain. Jensen Huang is considered the #1 CEO these days. Ashton Jackson, the author of the article, understands this quite well — whatever nonsense you write will be picked up by Nvidia followers. Some of them will trash the article, but a small percentage of people will read it to the very end, including this part:

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