Has 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
I’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.
Yeah, that’s fair, although FSD also goes for $12k right now and you can get the Comma 3 + required car harness for like $2400, so if it’s providing me at least 20% the value of FSD then I’m happy. I’d say it probably gives ~70% of the value of FSD, and without phantom braking. Not hating on the progress Tesla is making with FSD, but I think it is overpriced for now.
Also, openpilot has gotten much better over the past year, you might be surprised if you get the chance to try it again. They’re not even using the whole field of view of the new wide angle camera in the model currently, although it’s coming in openpilot 0.8.14. Their rate of improvement now that they’re developing for the Comma 3 is really impressive.
Tesla gets criticized because they claim that their "AutoPilot" can someday be safer than a human driver. I don't think an open project would make such overblown claims so easily.
Yes, used extensively. It gave back control very often in tight turns, and the version I had blacked out the screen when changing lanes.
It was a product I was happy to fiddle with, but definitely wouldn't sit my wife and kids to drive down from SF to LA with.
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.
> If you have time, listen to one of Lex’s conversations with Hotz while you are getting exercise, gardening, etc.
That’s a good way to do it. I really wanted to like Lex’s podcast based on the hype and his impressive guest list, but I walk away from every episode feeling like it was full of good vibes but empty calories. It seems his trademark is softball questions delivered in the gentlest possible format, which I suppose is disappointing given his positioning as a hard-hitting intellectual.
The Hotz episode was great for getting a sense of his energy and ambition, which are both impressive and hard to match. However, it’s lacking if you’re expecting more serious discussion, as is typical for Lex’s podcasts. Go in with the right expectations and it’s still enjoyable, though.
Lex Fridma's podcasts are as good as his guests. If you want "hard-hitting" listent to his interviews with Vladimir Vapnik (two of them), Yoshua Bengio, Peter Norvig, Judea Pearl, Juergen Schmidhuber, Francois Chollet, Rodney Brooks, Michael I. Jordan, Stuart Russel - people who are in a position to speak and think critically and whose salaries and reputation do not depend on saying what everyone wants to hear. And who know a thing or two, of course.
Most of the rest is unfortunately a bit like guest show TV. Fridman is a likeable guy but he's as hard hitting as a fluffy kitten. Also, he takes forever to ask a question sometimes.
I did enjoy Lex's episode with Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown [1], in which Lex attempted to ask softball questions, such as "isn't e^(pi*i)+1=0" the most beautiful equation in math?", to which Grant responded along the lines, "No, it's only considered beautiful because of our poor notation". Overall, I enjoyed Grant's answers to his questions.
I’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.
You 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.
Tech enabling injustice and authoritarianism is a problem as old as tools themself. Get yourself a bunch of spears and your group can terrorize the neighboring tribe.
With ever increasing globalization, the entire planet might one day become unified under a dictatorship. So with this fear in mind, we could categorically reject any sort of tech and social progress. But will that prevent it from happening? How are isolation and traditionalism going for the uncontacted indigenous peoples of the Amazon?
The way I see it, but please correct me if wrong, we need to have the biggest spear, we need to have all the latest tech including self-driving, while simultaneously making sure we have political checks and balances in place and debate the risks as a society. The people have to be aware of what can happen when they aren't vigilant. Free societies are constantly threatened not just by outsiders but also from within. More often than not from within. Currently I'm rather pessimistic about the state of consciousness in supposed liberal democracies, the populace isn't paying attention and isn't involved enough and that's very dangerous. Don't need autonomous vehicles to establish a fascist rule, it would just be an added bonus.
> 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
I 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.
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
To 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.
Comma 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.
I'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.
I 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.
Okay, if you're advocating Tesla as some paragon of safety we're in a different universe. Telsa is known as the company as notoriously the least safety concious. Other car companies have comparable technology to Tesla marketed under ADAS. Why? Because they don't want to burn their reputations to the ground for having similar attitudes towards safety as Tesla. The entire approach of Comma is "Maybe we can train a computer to be slightly worse than a human driver"
The "mediocre humans" you cite are the everyday folks who drive cars, most of whom do not get into accidents. That makes them quite a useful model to learn from.
Reading 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.
He'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.
120 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.
Your 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
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.
Interesting 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.
Just a note that this comment, and the thread below it (hopefully excluding the one you're reading), produced zero value to the readers of the thread. Writing these comments must've taken a lot of care and energy for the authors of the comments. But because the whole thread was essentially just a quarrel, and speaking over each other, all that effort was wasted.
Restraint: I believe this is the HN way. Hold back your comments, think about how many people are going to read it. Now think if your comment will add value to the lives or knowledge of those readers. If the answer is "No", then please exercise restraint, and try to overcome your desire to say something smart (or, intentionally, dumb) just because you have the opportunity and the time to respond.
Disclaimer: I have no relationship with HN, apart from being just another user. So my claims of "the HN way", should not be taken to mean that I know anything about HN, or the community.
If you spent half as much time obsessing over the technical details rather than the people you too could be an amazing programmer. What is it that makes you read that and come away thinking "wow, I want to know more about him" and not "wow, I want to be able to do that too"?
Except, from what I’ve heard, RMS is full of shit about that and was actually caught copy-and-pasting Symbolics code. Kind of like how he originally based GNU emacs on gosmacs and early versions had to be removed from distribution as a result.
Nowhere 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.
Your 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.
That’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?
> What specific part of my comment gave you the impression that he’s replaceable?
I think but obviously can't confirm it might have been this bit:
> ... 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.*
To me this might be construed as Stallman could be replaced by anyone, since he had little personal power and only crafted ideas; anyone could craft ideas.
I might be wrong though but that would be my guess
I 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.
Sounds 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?”
>> 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.
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.
Good 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.
> something that's missing from the "I want a robot girlfriend" / George Hotz style takes
Wow. Nice projection/takedown.
> intelligence is a collective effort.
You're not totally wrong, but you might want to be careful with all that Collective Body stuff. I know it codes as "left" for legacy/historical reasons, but, like, superorganisms may not align with your political sympathies. Pretty soon you need a "head" and "arms" and "feet". Pretty soon you need an immune system to root out "contagion". Pretty soon the T-cells are smashing windows and looking for Anne Frank.
If 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
This 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.
Reminder 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.
That 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.
Let's just say I've talked with people who have worked with him on comma.ai and... I heard his cars would be driving into everything if it were just his code running them without all the safety features the folks around him added.
geohot isn't dumb, but he's also extremely good at making himself look like a lone genius, all the while he heavily relies on those around him. This has been a pattern his entire career. He started out pretty clueless and relying on others; these days he's pretty good but still relies on others, and at no point did he learn to humble himself a bit and credit everyone else.
I personally experienced this when we gave a presentation on Sony's PS3 ECDSA screwup, and a week later he posted the root keys obtained using our method. I had to email him to ask him to give us credit since he literally just implemented what we described in our talk, and made no mention of it. Then Sony sued us all (my name was on the lawsuit next to his, even though I had nothing to do with his idea of posting the keys outright).
The reality is "lone geniuses" don't exist. I'm pretty good at what I do (and I also have 15-hour coding marathon live streams on YouTube, FWIW), but to accomplish something great you have to work with others, whether you give them credit or not. The major projects I've worked on aren't "my" projects (even those which I lead/led); they've all been a team effort.
Thank you for this. Reminder that comma.ai famously cancelled their first product[1] after getting a very reasonable[2] letter with questions from a governmental safety agency. It generated quite a discussion at the time[3] but seems to have largely been forgotten since then. Given their history of playing fast and lose I’d rather not have any cars driven by their code anywhere near me on the road.
I'm probably one of the people you've talked to. For all his flaws, and there are many, I would give a lot for any team I've been part of since to have someone even half as good as him.
It is very evident in his videos that he is trying to show off. There is a lot of code snippets that he copies and lots of pasting code which is kind of boring to watch. In fact I really like to watch your videos as it deals with a lot of low level stuff.
Yes. I have a watched a lot of his videos which I usually keep in the background. He dabbles into a lot of stuff from FPGAs in embedded to COQ (Formal language theorem prover) but there is not much depth in his videos. In a few weeks he would jump to something different again.
Kudos for those safety features, smart people don’t hire people dumber than them.
And it’s great that you found out that PS3 uses XKCD’s random generator for nonces (or maybe XKCD stole the random generator function from Sony, Sony should sue them).
Elon likes to take his teams ideas as well and present it as his: the gigacasting was a documented example where the Italian company had the idea years before Elon started talking about it, and they met Tesla at an auto show. Elon presented as he was looking at his Tesla matchbox and thought that it would be the best to scale it up.
Probably this similarity between Elon and George was the reason why they couldn’t work together.
I still love the idea that he (and his team) wants self driving cars to drive as an average human driver as possible, just with non-stop focus, while if you look at Tesla, they care about accident rates. The problem with Tesla’s approach is that on the videos nobody knows if the human driver should take it over or not, and I think that’s what’s really dangerous, and not the optimal way to get to full self driving. At the same time Tesla has orders of magnitudes more money.
I 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.
That’s not a problem with Tesla’s “cone AI”, it’s a problem with their self driving stack’s lack of a “do not drive into solid objects” feature.
It doesn’t matter what a static object is, you don’t drive into it unless you’re dang sure it fits in the class of “things that are safe to collide with.”
In comma.ai the solution is to just not run into things / go around things how a human would do and learn to peioritize what things to go around and where to be extra careful.
The important part of the thinking is at that point knowing whether a thing is a cone or not is just a technical debt in the code base, as it shouldn't be acted upon. At the same time those cones are perfect test to see if the software can learn to go around things or not, so that extra code hinders development of the final software.
At 16, you are highly unlikely to know the law or even be able to working out the ramifications of your actions and most 16yr old have next to nothing to lose.
Same thing that happened to e.g. Shkreli, or RMS. Social media's demand for reality to play out like a crafted narrative with plot beats and protagonists/antagonists is distorting everything.
My name was on the Sony lawsuit next to his, for what it's worth. I don't know him personally, but I did have to ask him to give us credit for just implementing our method when he posted the PS3 metldr keys without explanation, a week after we'd given a talk on it.
I 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.
One 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.
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.
I 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.
That'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).
Yo, 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.
The 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.
Their 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.
I 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.
I 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.
> “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?
It'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.
"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."
Certainly 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.
> 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.
I 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.
I 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.
i think this is rationalization on his part, he probably got addicted for whatever reason, stress, anxiety, ability to work longer hours and not get bored (yes opiates can do this in low doses). you even see he pairs quitting opiates with accepting he doesn't need infinite income
> This documentary by Leo Regan follows the life of his friend, photographer Lanre Fehintola, as he becomes part of the hard drug scene through researching it for his book
Like 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
You 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.
Hotz 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.
Hotz 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
Someone 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?
Can 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.
I feel you. The attempt from the article author to frame Hotz' comments as something deeply intellectual made me laugh. I don't dislike Hotz, it's okay to have opinions and to be passionate about what you do. But to put him on such a pedestal as if he was some kind of paradigm-shifting genius is ridiculous.
He's a nerd, he likes engineering, AI and crypto, dislikes universities, sees himself as a genius and thinks the unabomber manifesto is deep philosophy. Wow. How original.
So 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.
This 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."
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?
i 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.
