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George Hotz against the institutions
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sbinthree 5y agoGreat article.
- MaxMoney 5y ago
- 29athrowaway 5y agoGeorge Hotz is an interesting person. He has a YouTube channel with coding sessions and a Twitch channel that's worth watching. The guy sometimes goes on 10+ hour long livecoding marathons.
- redthrow 5y agoHe also has a blog which is very entertaining to read https://geohot.github.io/blog/ https://geohot.github.io/blog/
- RealityVoid 5y agoAfaik, he did not do one of those live coding sessions in a while. i agree, it is _highly_ entertaining.
- moab 5y ago"During our conversation, I was continually struck by the degree to which Hotz and his company are anti-mimetic. Like many founders of tech startups—thanks to the influence of Peter Thiel – Hotz has a passing familiarity with René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. The theory, now supported by a trove of empirical evidence, posits that our desires do not originate in us but are always learned from models." Perhaps not so relevant, but here is a nice read about Girard: https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/deceit-desire-and-literature-professor-why-girardians-exist https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/deceit-desire-and-literatur...
- mach1ne 5y agoCertainly not all desires are learned from models, some are a combination of biological mechanisms combined with exposure. Food is an obvious example from the far end.
- LudwigNagasena 5y agoIt’s one of those vague motte-and-bailey things that can either mean something true but unremarkable or something fascinating but utterly wrong.
- octoberfranklin 5y agoFor those who've never heard of Girard's theories, this is a better (and more concise) starting point: http://www.imitatio.org/brief-intro http://www.imitatio.org/brief-intro Then you can read the link above, which assumes you're familiar with this stuff and pokes fun at it in the in the most verbose way possible.
- Kina 5y ago> Back more than 50 years ago, René Girard started teaching French literature because he needed a job. He hadn't even read many of the books he was assigned to teach. Then, as he studied the classic novels of Stendhal and Proust with a fresh mind, staying one step ahead of his students, he was struck by a series of similarities from novel to novel. Unbound by any narrow research agenda, Girard discovered a simple but powerful pattern that had eluded sophisticated critics before him: imitation is the fundamental mechanism of human behavior. This could be a hagiography or a joke, it works either way.
- leobg 5y agoBuffett said something Girardian, too: “It’s not greed that moves the world, but envy.”
- fuzzfactor 5y agoI always liked it where he said: “I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” and of course: “If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.”
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
- shimonabi 5y ago
- trompetenaccoun 5y agoBecause you found a few buzzwords? It's curious dreamers are often mocked by others. Even more so in this case as many cars already drive around with his garage-built autonomous software. Openpilot is a really cool project, why the hate?
- shimonabi 5y agoHe is a tech influencer with half-baked ideas. Girls post bikini photos on Instagram, he posts coding sessions on Youtube. It won't be long before he starts pulling Techlead-like scams. The article is already pointing to it.
- icelancer 5y agoWhat? geohot broke the SIM lock on the iPhone, first to do it. Broke the PS3. Broke Android. Developed qira. Say what you want about the other stuff, but Hotz's resume is impressive.
- CamperBob2 5y agoSo, for that matter, is Kanye's, even if you don't care for his music or his personal issues. The GP was a pretty unenlightened comment(er).
- icelancer 5y agoThe Kayne comparison, while ridiculous, is not the contention I have with the post. "He is a tech influencer with half-baked ideas..." Is patently false.
- elif 5y agoi think the commenter was referring to the absurd breadth of DEEP challenges he has picked. It reveals a level of naivety imo. The kind of naivety that usually gets sorted out after a few years in university.
- marcan_42 5y agoReminder that geohot wasn't the first person to jailbreak an iPhone; that's an oft repeated myth. He was the first person to publicly carrier unlock an iPhone, which he did using information and methods he mostly learned from others.
- xiphias2 5y agoThat may be true, but during the coding videos on YouTube he's extremely smart. My favorite saying of him is that they don't have a cone guy because a self driving system shouldn't contain the knowledge of a cone explicitly. Guess what happened in the last Tesla update: the car went into a cone because it wasn't the usual color.
- ehsankia 5y agoI think he's a bit out of his depth with the self-driving startup and bigger projects he's undertaken, but when it comes to CTFs and hacking competition, he's pretty damn good. Idk if he still does, but for a while he competed until tomcr00se and he'd always be at the top of the leaderboards for nearly every competition. I don't think that's just luck or plagiarism. You can see him in top10 of US [0] during 2013-2015 when he was most active, that's not a trivial feat. [0] https://ctftime.org/stats/2014/US https://ctftime.org/stats/2014/US
- mythrwy 5y agoHe's usually on leaderboard (top 100) in Advent of Code. I don't know if he was this past year.
- WaffleIronMaker 5y agoHe placed on the leaderboards on a few days, but did not make top 100 overall. And, of course, solving programming questions quickly is not a direct qualification for everything he says he is. For example (not exhaustive): https://adventofcode.com/2021/leaderboard/day/4 https://adventofcode.com/2021/leaderboard/day/4 https://adventofcode.com/2021/leaderboard/day/5 https://adventofcode.com/2021/leaderboard/day/5 https://adventofcode.com/2021/leaderboard/day/6 https://adventofcode.com/2021/leaderboard/day/6
- CyberRabbi 5y agoInteresting discussion of AI and the decline of civilization. His allergies to power are a bit naive though not completely unfounded, at least Stallman comes to mind as an example of someone who was able to change the course of history without much personal power, instead he crafted ideas that had power. Some ideas are powerful enough to compel enough people to act in line with them. Ultimately accomplishing anything at a large scale requires large scale cooperation. Whether the reason is money, submission to authority, or ideological conviction.
- thowaway673y 5y agoRMS is no normal human, he can match with 5 or 6 100x programmers from symbolic company which they have admitted.
- CyberRabbi 5y agoNowhere in my comment is there a suggestion that RMS is a “normal human.” If your intention is not to refute my comment but to add unrelated info, then thank you for that info.
- thowaway673y 5y agoYour comments gives the impression anyone could have substituted RMS place in history. I want to point out that this is not the case. RMS is unique in at least 2 ways. One his intellect stands out even among the 100x programmers. Second willing to sacrifice his personal life for a cause he believes in. Its very rare both intersect. You can see either Einstein level geniuses or Activists who sacrifice their personal life. RMS is an intersection of both. The only other person I can think of is Aaron Swartz.
- CyberRabbi 5y agoThat’s interesting that you came away with the impression that Stallman is replaceable from my comment given my comment states in literal terms that Stallman crafted an idea that changed the world. What specific part of my comment gave you the impression that he’s replaceable?
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- liquid153 5y ago
- octoberfranklin 5y ago> Perhaps a week after our conversation [event that happened in November 2021] The interviewer just kinda sat on this for four months before writing the article?
- vmception 5y agoedit: alright alright
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dang 5y agoThis is the sort of comment we all make in smaller conversations and it perhaps has more of a function there, but on the internet it just accrues into a big trash ball. That's why the site guidelines say things like this: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 5y agoSmall but interesting previous thread: Ride or Die: George Hotz against the institutions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30607829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30607829 - March 2022 (3 comments)
- rank0 5y agoI generally like this dude and his antics…but becoming dependent on opiates as an “experiment” is the stupidest shit I’ve ever read. It sounds like he wanted some adversity to overcome and couldn’t find any so he manufactured his own. Hopefully George understands that premeditated physical opioid dependence is not the same kind of struggle which addicts face. The homeless dudes shooting smack under a bridge have terrible lives. George is a software genius with loads of money and opportunity at his disposal.
- vasco 5y agoHe stopped himself and said this wasn't applicable to others.
- DantesKite 5y agoI have a suspicion that was just a rationalization for his curiosity. There are many people who become addicted because they wanted to experiment and don’t understand what they’re getting into.
- floodyberry- 5y agoLike most? all? of the names dropped in the article, he appears to be interminably up his own ass. Not sure why he was notable enough for a long form interview
- ryloric 5y ago
- fragmede 5y agoHis Wikipedia article does a bit better.of a job explaining his technical accomplishments vs the passing mentions in the article. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz
- dgellow 5y agoYou never heard of geohot before? He’s a very well known figure in the broader hacker and open source world since he’s a teenager. He will always be remembered for his work on iOS and the PS3 jailbreak, and his public stance against Sony (and his infamous rap songs). He has a really impressive public track record of technical achievements and reaching goals he boasted publicly about. And more than demonstrated his technical abilities and moral stance over the years.
- jackblemming 5y agoSomeone reverse engineered comma.ai’s architecture a few years back and it was a pretty basic CNN pipeline. Why are we pretending people like this and other tech bros like Elon Musk are glorified Tony Starks?
- ecef9-8c0f-4374 5y agoI have an idea for a new religion. Imagine living your live and dying. Then realizing the world is a simulation (duh). The world is a training place for AIs. You exist to learn to think like a human. Now the time is come. You will get tested. Will you do the task? Will you do it well? No? Well then you get deleted/nirvana. But if you find satisfaction in the moment and in simple tasks, then you will get reborn .... as an AI supported fruit juicer, toaster or if you are really lucky as an AI for a self-driving car.
- dharma1 5y agoComma con from last year https://youtu.be/qTaPD0l_8PM https://youtu.be/qTaPD0l_8PM I think Tesla could do with higher dynamic range cameras, in adverse lighting conditions you end up with a lot of blown out details otherwise. The AR0231’s comma use are like $300-400, not that much I’ve changed my opinion about Hotz over the last few years, like the guy. He came across a bit of a Randroid on Fridman but he’s entertaining and smart
- nonrandomstring 5y agoThis one just got more and more interesting as it went, and toward the end gets into some full-on existential philosophy. A very good read. This chap Hotz sounds like someone who gets it. Give and you shall receive. Start by giving it all away and realising you're already dead and alone, then build an 'earned' world you understand, that can't be taken from you. But it must be tempered with compassion and humanism, or one has a tendency to be reckless and not just fall after pride, but hurt others too.
- nullptr_deref 5y ago> “Modern Silicon Valleyism is a grotesque ideology formed by psychopaths. Fuck you, I’m not a fucking piece of data. I will not be optimized, integrated, or transformed.” That is one hell of a powerful line! I have been looking into hacker culture and silicon valley of the past. What used to be great paradise of hack culture and innovation, now seems like a huge ponzi scheme of invest, make, sell and repeat. There are so many companies out there, selling things to another company. Is it really good for the society to be reformed around some vision of tech bros who never know what lies beyond the hills of the valley?
- CipherThrowaway 5y agoIt's not clear to me that early tech culture is at odds with modern tech culture. To me it feels like the values of that early culture provided quite fertile ground for the situation we have now.
- CipherThrowaway 5y agoCan we please stop lionizing the "maverick genius." It should be clear to everyone at this point that the Nth brilliant asshole with an untamed superiority complex who hates institutions and fixates on sci-fi tail risks is not going to be making the world a better place. We are facing unprecedented global challenges this century that will benefit from humble and cooperative thinking at institutional scales. Not more myopic nerds motivated by ressentiment and delivering disruption with zero consideration of social impact. >“To truly understand what I am. If you want to understand what a radio is,” he said, “build it from scratch. If you want to understand what a microprocessor is, build it from scratch. If you want to understand what a human is, build it.” This sounds like a joke about the things men will do instead of just going to therapy. It's a level of grandiosity that is indistinguishable from satire.
- yeetard 5y ago
- CipherThrowaway 5y agoCritique isn't jealousy. Expect to grow out of that PoV in 5-10 years.
- yeetard 5y agoSee my comment below.
- CipherThrowaway 5y agoSo you feel the tone is too harsh. I'll grant that it is harsh. But I chose it because it's proportional to how misguided the celebration of anti-social tech geniuses really is. The era of uncritically celebrating these personalities is well and truly over for most of us.
- yeetard 5y ago
- jeffreygoesto 5y agoHe's a brilliant kid, but also boasting about things he has no clue about. We built 120db cameras into series production cars since 2005. Took one guy being brilliant in FPGAs and me implementing HDR tonemapping it down for processing on those small CPUs we had back then.
- yeetard 5y agohe's like 32
- jeffreygoesto 5y agoBiologically.
- CamperBob2 5y ago120 dB of dynamic range -- meaning one pixel is ~20 bits hotter than the one next to it -- sounds pretty amazing. I had no idea modern image sensors were capable of anything close to that. Is that the correct interpretation of "dynamic range" in this context, or is there a more specialized definition that leave some room for handwaving? The last time I messed around with digitizing video, you got 8 bits of each R/G/B component and you were happy about it.
- jeffreygoesto 5y agoYour interpretation is correct. You need multiple exposures or so called "partial resets" for high dynamic imagers. Having an ADC with more than 8 bit should be accompanied with proper gain and offset compensation, minimum for the columns. If you search for those keywords, you can find articles like https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4621212 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4621212 The trick is that you get some log like sensitivity curve and not a linear one. This is ok for almost all applications, since you don't need the super fine greyvalue resolution in bright areas.
- gurumeditations 5y agoThis guy sounds like he’s gone off the deep end.
- gameswithgo 5y agobeen off it for a while
- SixDouble5321 5y agoMad bros with nothing to show.
- HellDunkel 5y agoOne of the great promises in 2016 was that end to end machine learning would solve „self-driving“. It is pretty clear now that this approach failed and will not work for the foreseeable future. As smart as George Hotz may be, he did not deliver and probably never will.
- wffurr 5y agoConsumer Reports was quite complimentary of Comma2 in their review of ADAS systems: https://data.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/consumer-reports-active-driving-assistance-systems-november-16-2020.pdf https://data.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/... ADAS isn't self driving, and as you say it may never get there, but they did in fact deliver a working quality ADAS product. After reading that review, I was somewhat tempted to retrofit one into my 2017 Chevy Bolt, but was dissuaded by the thought of changing the accelerator wiring.
- tylergetsay 5y agoI did it in a similar vehicle and there's no modification of the pedal, you just need to bypass the stock LKAS
- zozbot234 5y ago> ADAS isn't self driving Except that all current so-called "self-driving" systems are just glorified ADAS that are nowhere near the advanced SAE levels.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ttttttttttttttp 5y agoHotz seems to be falling into the familiar pattern of those who gain fame at a younger age for doing something impressive to a wide audience - as they get ever older, they feel the need to recapture that feeling, and jump from trend to trend, trying to stay relevant. He's clearly an intelligent man, but he should try to understand that he no longer needs to prove himself, or outdo his previous famous achievements. It will be a crack to the ego, but a healthy one, in the long run.
- yieldgap 5y agoI'm not really sure he is jumping from trend to trend though. He's been working on comma.ai since 2015.
- Invictus0 5y agoTalk about armchair psychology
- warkanlock 5y agoHotz jumping from trend to trend? Have you noticed what this guy was doing all these years? Twitch is free and watching archives of him coding is publicly available. He's been on this thread since 2015
- TimPC 5y agoI feel sorry for him. Spending your life trying to make it into a good story is sad. Most good stories have characters who are intentionally flawed in order to create conflict and plot. The best lives are fairly boring as far as narrative plot goes. It’s even a curse to live in interesting times.
- p2detar 5y agoSounds a bit unfair and I'm not really sure how you arrived at that conclusion. Here's an excerpt from the article: In the same way, he can’t define what a good story is, but he knows it’s a story he wants to read. “If you give a version of myself frozen in time the story of the rest of my life, and that version of me would rather read a different book… what am I doing wrong?”
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- elif 5y agoThe comma business model is built upon a car interface created by manufacturers for their own purposes. Those manufacturers are working on their own autonomous driving programs in various stages. None of those manufacturers want crash statistics for their vehicles being driven autonomously. Comma is clearly the unwanted guest in the room... the only positive outcome for them is acquihire when one of the manufacturers realizes how hard FSD is. Their business model standing alone is built of kerosene and straw.
- md2020 5y agoTheir business model, which has resulted in a profitable business with actual customers who love their product, is built of kerosene and straw?? As opposed to every other self-driving company, of which none are profitable or have customers and all rely on crazy amounts of VC funding.
- stavros 5y agoI feel simultaneously amused and dismayed at your "their business model is doomed" analysis that somehow fails to account for the business model of "sell people something they want at a profitable price". I want to say "peak HN" but that would be doing the HN community a disservice, so I'll say "peak 'peak HN'" instead.
- tenuousemphasis 5y agoI think the point is that their business model is in conflict with that of the auto manufacturers, and that their business model depends on the auto manufacturers continuing to allow theirs to exist.
- mark_l_watson 5y agoGeorge Hotz has been on Lex Fridman’s podcast a few times https://lexfridman.com/george-hotz/ https://lexfridman.com/george-hotz/ Hotz has an interesting take on life and tech. If you have time, listen to one of Lex’s conversations with Hotz while you are getting exercise, gardening, etc. I like Hotz’s idea of generic equipment that works on multiple types of cars. Off topic a little, but the Honda Pilot we bought a year ago has some driver assist technology, and we love it. I like driving myself, but having safety backups like monitoring blind spots, lane changes, staying inside lanes, etc. That said, I am willing to wait for full autonomous driving until they really get it right.
- flatiron 5y agoI’m more excited for self driving cars when I’m not physically in the car. Why park at the train station when I can ge dropped off. Kids on a play date? Sure I can drop off and pick up it’s a couple taps on my phone. Having small kids and a public transit commute is certainly a demographic for this.
- javiramos 5y agoThe experience you are talking about sounds like Lyft and Uber.
- flatiron 5y agoI don’t believe Lyft and Uber would drive a 3 year old to a play date. That and I don’t trust people.
- 14 5y agoYou and I both don't trust people. The second I read your comment I questioned if I would trust my kids alone in a car without me. We know some people are evil. What if you can take over a car and it's destination by hacking the car, something we have seen many times over, and then kidnap a child without going near the house. Or maybe it isn't kids but maybe one day a dictatorship decides all of it's political opposition will be redirected to the detention center. I wonder how long it will be before we see hostile take over of a cars destination and how we can prevent that from happening.
- Traster 5y agoTo be honest, it's just a little sad that reading this article it seems that Hotz hasn't grown up much, and that attitude isn't great to see from a person working on a safety critical application. If you want to put your hands in the life of George Hotz fine, but keep the hell away from the public roads.
- md2020 5y agoComma has really good safety code. ISO26262 compliant, and they use MISRA C guidelines. Hotz talks about safety in the comma.ai discord server all the time, and frequently berates people for requesting unsafe features or making unsafe forks of openpilot. Afaik, comma auto-bans devices from using their servers if they detect that you’re running a fork that’s removed safety restrictions. It’s safe.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Traster 5y agoI've worked with ISO26262 before, it's not some utopia, it's a very basic set of requirements, and these requirements are bourne of hard-learned lessons, lessons Hotz seems to publicly dismiss constantly. It doesn't matter if he points out the safety cocerns he has, it's about having a system in place to address safety concerns you don't have. It's the things that aren't obvious that are going to go wrong, and even if they go wrong in 1/10000 cases that's still once per person per year. To be clear, these standard are literally about not assuming the designer is a genius, which absolutely seems to be a premise that Hotz doesn't want to accept.
- carlosdp 5y agoI think you are extrapolating something that doesn't exist in the article... Comma implemented driver attention monitoring into their device before Tesla did, and George had been advocating Tesla do it for a long time before they finally did. He talks about this in the most recent podcast with Lex Friedman. That doesn't sound like someone who is too immature to work on a safety critical application to me.
- md2020 5y agoHas anyone in this thread who is commenting to hate on Hotz/Comma tried the product or even watched a video of it? I have their device in my car, and I love it. Lots of people in here saying this is doomed to fail and that e2e won’t work seem to not realize that Comma has pretty much already succeeded. Their e2e lateral policy is fantastic, and e2e longitudinal is shipping this year probably. They livestream demos on YouTube and it looks like e2e longitudinal is coming along nicely, here’s a stream from 3 months ago: https://youtu.be/wHoLW9WXOy8 https://youtu.be/wHoLW9WXOy8
- majkinetor 5y agoI guess he has 0 fucks to give, judged from this interview. Respect!
- ricardobayes 5y agoExactly the attitude I want from someone whose software can kill.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoI’ve experienced it, although it was a while ago and only briefly in someone else’s car. It felt simultaneously very impressive for a grassroots effort, but it felt like the underdog status was doing all the heavy lifting in the owner’s perception of how great it was. When something like Tesla’s autopilot makes a mistake, everyone harshly criticizes them. When Comma makes a mistake, if feels like their fan base is quick to forgive and wants to point out that it’s an impressive effort from a small company.
- trdtaylor1 5y agoIf I were president, I would give Hotz a mid-tier medal, as its people like him that empower America, lead to our world dominance, and create the billion dollar industries we profit from. I'm waiting till their product gets a bit better but I'll be a buyer once that occurs. It's damn close for the comma three
- andersonmvd 5y agoReading hint: if you prefer to listen instead of reading when the article is big, at least on iphone I use safari -> reader mode -> scroll 2 fingers from top to bottom and it starts the dictation (I think I had to enable in accessibility). There may be something for android.
- motohagiography 5y agoI know that people who do this seriously for a living hate armchair speculations about trolley problems and other dumb and misleading narratives that in effect sabotage valuable research. However, I'd wonder if progress on the beneficial use case has to come from solving first for malign one, where the only way to get to "kill no humans," is to start with "kill all humans." Sort of like throwing yourself at the ground, but missing. Even to the point of where cars learn to set traps for humans, where we think it's parked, and then it pounces and runs them down, misdirects them into thinking they're turning one way, and then swerving to take them out. Maybe the infotainment system has access to social media data that implies someone will be in a place at a given time, and like Appointment in Samara, there is no avoiding your fate, determined at birth, of meeting your maker via being run down by an autonomous car. They could even co-ordinate, where one can signal to the other that a cyclist is coming, flash its lights and honk, while the other opens its door into the cyclists path. They could hunt in packs, where data about pedestrians they didn't hit gets passed to oncoming vehicles who might still have the opportunity. The presence of a school in the area would enable cars to reduce human populations by both preventing them reaching maturity, but also imposing catastrophic costs on humans who had already invested in making new ones. They could linger around known bus routes at peak times and co-ordinate to select routes based on their lifecycle whether to sacrifice one of their own against many humans on a bus. These are obviously horrific, but the counter-cases for them yield features and that pop out of serial 1:1 sensor array development, and into a general strategy for "self driving," that is not a replication of human abilities at all, but an entirely new logic of transportation that optimizes for risk reduction, based on the contra strategies for the hunter/killer use case. I'd wonder if to make anything remotely human or resembling a living being at all, you need to equip it with the capabilities of a successful predator in its environment, and then have it choose to not exercise them for some higher order incentive.
- blacksmith_tb 5y agoThat's taking TDD to a new level! But I think the obvious problem is that would produce cars that were very good at not killing people (yay!) but potentially not especially good at driving from point A to point B in an environment full of all kinds of things (not limited to people).
- mindentropy 5y ago> “I live by morals, I don’t live by laws,” Hotz told The New Yorker in 2012. “Laws are something made by assholes.” Reminds me more of Hindu Dharma. I like his take.
- jokethrowaway 5y agoYo, my name is GeoHot and for those who don't know... I'm getting sued by God Hotz is definitely iconic and I agree a lot with him. Talking about business: I think the fastest way to human level artificial intelligence is through biology. If we synthesised a human brain (or maybe just partially developed a human embryo, if we care more about science than a human life) and tried to connect it to digital signals maybe we could train it and eventually come up with automatic ways of doing so.
- bko 5y ago> Apart from a criminal streak, Hotz shares with Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s antihero, a predilection for instrumental reason and an urge to test his own mettle, to know himself by knowing his limits. As a young adult Hotz allowed himself to become addicted to prescription opiates almost as an experience in self-mastery. “I did it, I was addicted, and I quit,” he told me. “I think I had to have that experience. I don’t think I ever could have been the type who never tried it. Because in some ways I feel that if I’m not strong enough to defeat that and overcome it…” He paused for several beats before assuring me he’d never want anyone to follow his example. “In order to quit,” he continued, “it required me to rethink what I wanted out of life. After that, one of the biggest things that changed is I stopped caring about money.” This tells you the kind of personality Hotz is. I wouldn't want to compete against this guy. He might self-destruct, but there is something to say about his extreme personality that's beneficial to solving hard problems
- chews 5y agoI do try and compete at this level of difficulty. When it comes to depth of skill he feels like an anchor who will drown those not as heavy as him.
- k1ll3r 5y agowhat
- selimthegrim 5y agoI have to salute him. A lot of purely money based (even when they don't appear to be) incentive structures will just ride on autopilot (generalize his remarks about NGOs) and not even accomplish their stated charity tasks.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago>> Once he achieves his goal of building a fully autonomous driving system, one sophisticated enough that the human “driver” can take a nap as the car navigates to its destination, Hotz says his ultimate ambition, which he settled on at age fifteen, is to “solve AI” That is, to “build something that can do everything a human can do.” This has been the ambition of many people in AI research for a long time but I really have to wonder: isn't this ambition a little too ambitious? More than sixty years after Dartmouth, we still can't build "something" (a machine) that can do everything a _cockroach_ can do. We can't even build something that can do _anything_ a cockroach can do. Aren't we putting the cart before the horses then? Surely, someone who can create autonomous vehicles and machines that "can do everything a human can do" should be able to create a machine with the autonomy and intelligence of a cockroach, or some other insect (not a eusocial one! Oh gods, no). So let's see anyone with the same great ambitions as George Hotz do that first. Then we can talk about autonomous vehicles and artificial humans.
- Barrin92 5y ago>not a eusocial one! Oh gods, no That might actually be a very good starting point because eusocial species show something that's missing from the "I want a robot girlfriend" / George Hotz style takes, which is that intelligence is a collective effort. Less anthropomorphizing and thinking of intelligence more of trying to bring individual actors together and building tools for this seems much more realistic. Sort of an updated, actually working Cybersyn.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y agoGood point, clearly eusocial insects are intersting in a way that non-eusocial ones are not. But I'm thinking primarily of feasibility. Individual eusocial insects can still act autonomously, so there's two levels of intelligent behaviour there, that of the individual and that of the society. Figuring out how to create the former is hard enough without having to think about the latter also. So an insect like a cockroach which (for the most part) goes around on its own is probably easier to begin with. There may also be increased costs in creating many "artificial insects" compared to having just one. I don't know enough about robotics to be sure about this one. Edit: Cybersyn - wow. I had no idea!