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Comment by johngossman | Hacker News Reader

Like self-driving taxis where the business model is to stop paying drivers so we can pay more to big tech companies. Viva la revolution!

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I wonder how many people noticed that geohot is George Hotz, who authored the article on his GitHub page.

George Hotz runs Comma AI, a self driving car company.

https://comma.ai

funny. people are probably more likely to know him as geohot here. and afaik he is ex-comma. a more likely motivation (if you wanted to suppose one) is that he sells local compute. https://tinygrad.org/#tinybox

People used to call him "egohot" back in the day when he was cracking playstation games, because he was already incredibly arrogant even at a young age.

Yeah. This has strong self-selection bias. Egohot thinks about this stuff a lot so obviously everyone does!

Most people only care about money as they have no choice. Absent a cash-first system money has become a social construct. The valuation of a dollar is entirely ephemeral now.

I see that social reality becoming more realized and the existing social system around money collapsing due to generational churns attenuation of the social significance.

Tech bros are little more than disciples of a dogma being missionaries for their dogma. There are other dogmas.

Fuck Geohot for lending his hand to Musk during the Twitter takeover. He is obviously "sorted" and successful. But his recent blog posts suggests to me that he has started to realize, despite all his success, that if/when the system collapses, he'll be queuing up in the breadlines just like the rest of us.

The sooner the other techbros get the same realization the better.

It was actively good that Elon Musk took over Twitter. Twitter itself is exactly as free a social media platform under Musk as it was under Parag Agrawal (which is to say, it was a privately-owned platform that made arbitrary moderation decisions and engaged in de-facto user lock-in both before and after the acquisition); and the political distaste that a lot of the most active users of Twitter had for Musk actually got them to move off of Twitter and onto to alternate social media platforms, typically Mastodon in the ActivityPub ecosystem or BlueSky in the ATProto ecosystem. Both of these protocols have issues with not being decentralized enough to really mitigate censorship from the system operators, but the status quo now is certainly better than it was before the Musk acquisition.

I didn't know that Geohot had anything to do with the acquisition, but insofar as he did, I'm glad it happened. There's a bunch of different and mutually-incompatible ways "the system" might collapse in a way leading to breadlines, and I have no reason to think your theory that it will be a result of Musk buying Twitter is any better than any other random person's theory about why the world is going to decline in terms of material prosperity in the near-future.

How is paper money any less of a social construct? How is a gold coin that you can't actually use in any other way than trading it to another hairless monkey?

The value of paper money was the social construct

The existence of money is now a social construct

In a free market it would be stop paying drivers so everyone can pay less for taxis.

But the market is so unbelievably messed up that this is not what happens in practise.

Disagree.

The work on self-driving cars would not be done if there were not a way to profit from it. If it isn’t expected to earn more than it costs, it wouldn’t be done.

Now maybe it’s all being done because of expectations of a monopoly (this is a free market consequence, right?), but …

I think you made the assumption that gp is disagreeing with, that reducing costs necessarily reduces prices. (hence the bit about messed up markets)

Research has a large asymmetry to it. Once someone shows something can be done. Others can follow quite easily.

And more substantial is that when someone shows something can be done, its orders of mangnitude easier for $ENGINEER at $CORP to get $CSUITEs attention to get a budget / justify the risk.

Your self driving car example is the best example of this. Since waymo and tesla got popular NVIDIA really started pushing their self driving cars for everyone tech.

https://youtu.be/EzAVW1VgzcI?si=gfnOJoaO9hfIFXX1

And NVIDIA isn't the only one.

> The work on self-driving cars would not be done if there were not a way to profit from it. If it isn’t expected to earn more than it costs, it wouldn’t be done.

I disagree. "Expected" is hiding a lot of the work there, and the reasons for that expectation could be rational or completely irrational.

Hypothetically "work on self-driving cars" would be done if some crazy psychic-trusting billionaire's psychic told him they would be profitable, even if all rational analysis said they'd be a bad business. A lot of major investments, especially in tech, and done based on hope or as a bet, not due to any real foresight.

Stopping progress because you put people out of work is a great way to stall all development.

By that same logic we’d stop doctors from using antibiotics because now barbers will lose their job of bloodletting.

The safety improvements seem pretty substantial, though.

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