"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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
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.
> “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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
173 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadThe guy sometimes goes on 10+ hour long livecoding marathons.
https://geohot.github.io/blog/
Perhaps not so relevant, but here is a nice read about Girard: https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/deceit-desire-and-literatur...
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.
This could be a hagiography or a joke, it works either way.
“It’s not greed that moves the world, but envy.”
“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.”
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?
It won't be long before he starts pulling Techlead-like scams. The article is already pointing to it.
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.
"He is a tech influencer with half-baked ideas..."
Is patently false.
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.
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
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/5
https://adventofcode.com/2021/leaderboard/day/6
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.”
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.
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.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/28/comma-ai-cancels-the-comma...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12872399
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12815948
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.
Weird way to show you have a vendetta against someone you likely don't even know.
You are replying to marcan from fail0verflow; he likely does. Many people from the early PS3 hacking days did.
+ https://media.ccc.de/v/27c3-4087-en-console_hacking_2010
+ https://www.pcworld.com/article/500115/sony_sues_ps3_hackers...
as for the history of the iphone, https://forums.modmy.com/iphone-news-legacy-hidden-f4/731914...
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
> instead he crafted ideas that had power
The emphasis is on the idea rather than the individual.
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.
The interviewer just kinda sat on this for four months before writing the article?
"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
Ride or Die: George Hotz against the institutions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30607829 - March 2022 (3 comments)
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz
> 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
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0876261/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_9
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PFRIGx69bw (scenes of drug taking)
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
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?
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.
No. My objection is that your comment is spiteful and hysterical.
This isn't about anyone's personality. Can't you see that?
>stop lionizing the maverick genius
>nth brilliant asshole
>untamed superiority complex
>myopic nerd
>motivated by ressentiment
----------------------------------
>"We have big problems and mediocre self-driving cars won't solve them" is insecurity now?
Nobody even meant to imply that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Except that all current so-called "self-driving" systems are just glorified ADAS that are nowhere near the advanced SAE levels.