It seems like they've been assuming Twitter is the way it is because it was staffed by technically incompetent leftists, and if only they could apply their own get-things-done attitude and "neutral" politics, then the problem would be trivially fixable.
Where does this fallacy come from? Is it because of the illusory simplicity of the tweet format? Something like: "We just need to come up with the right algorithm and do an embarrassingly parallel run over these tiny 280-character chunks of text. How hard can that be. In my own Very Serious Day Job, I deal with oompabytes of very complex data. This tweet processing stuff should be child's play in comparison."
I've seen enough engineers presume they can easily become experts in law; I haven't seen many lawyers presume they can easily become experts in engineering.
Why?
Dunning-Kruger is, approximately "I'm good at the thing I do" (by someone who is actually incompetent).
What I'm talking about is "That thing that other people are doing is really easy; I'd be good at it" (the thing is not easy, and they would not be good at it).
If the person in the latter case actually ends up doing the allegedly easy thing, they may realise that actually they are not good at it, in which case it's not Dunning-Kruger. This is pretty common, I think; person barges in, saying "this will be easy, because I've decided the thing I'm good at is more difficult than it", admits it's not easy, and either leaves or learns. Alternatively of course they may retreat into full Dunning-Kruger; see the Musk Twitter debacle, which is _both_, say.
Very complicated algorithms and mathematical proofs can still be understood by a single person, and be explored by a small number of people who all know each other. Brain surgery is done by a small team of people. These are typical "smart people" occupations.
Something as simple as Twitter still needs machinery that spans across technical skills, needs 24 hour monitoring, and needs lawyer and accountant support, so nobody can actually to it.
People think they can do it, because it's easy to spin up a demo that sends messages to a few thousand people and then shut it down again. They don't think about how to scan for CSAM, or how to respond to foreign government censorship requests.
WhatsApp was 55 people big when they got acquired, and to me that sounds about right.
Twitter employed 7,500 people. 7,500!!!! So please tell me where the complexity lies? Surely not in the front-end code I can tell you that.
Let's compare it to something WAY-WAY-WAY more complex, like a game with multiplayer, awesome mod tools, etc.: ROBLOX: 2,200 employees. Do I need to mention they wrote their own physics simulation engine and keeping realtime multiplayer going?
So please, explain this to me: how is Twitter more than 3 times more complex than Roblox???
Maybe I'm wrong, that's very possible, I've been wrong in the past. But just explain this 1 thing then: Twitter needs more than 3 times the manpower than Roblox?
Then nothing happened. At least, nothing that I personally observed as a casual Twitter reader. The goalposts were moved to "it will go down with the New Year's Eve spike", and once again nothing happened. Then the narrative became "the cracks will only be noticeable in a few months", and here we are and yet again, nothing.
So Musk and Geohot came out as the saner voices of that whole debacle. Of course Geohot said exaggerated things like "you only need 40 engineers to run Twitter", but if it turns out it takes 300 engineers, then I would consider this as Geohot being proven mostly right.
I don’t think that qualifies as “nothing happened” when features used in high-profile events fail, with the CEO and a potential future president left on the line. Any other platform wouldn’t have struggled with a stream of this size.
I guess you might say that’s just one thing, and other than the CEO’s live streams not working, everything is fine. But there are numerous other examples of accumulating paper cuts and failures at Twitter. I think this is close to what most of those doomsayers expected would happen.
https://mashable.com/article/google-ai-maps-search-event-bin...
> the AI falsely said the James Webb Space Telescope took the first ever picture of an exoplanet
> During the announcement about a new Lens feature, the demo phone was misplaced and the presenter wasn't able to show the demo
> Google seemed to say, "let's pretend this never happened," and immediately made the livestream recording private after the event
Are you sure ? Others say 6.5 M listened to the livestream that was delayed 20 mins
There was a lot of "ooh, it will catastrophically fail within weeks", which was fundamentally an assumption that the previous team was entirely incompetent. (Any halfway decent team tries their hardest to build resilient systems, not things that need hand-holding all the time.)
The current trajectory is exactly on the expected failure path predicted by anybody who does actually work on large systems - a steady increase of smaller failures, punctuated by the occasional large failure. (Cf. DeSantis announcement)
In essence, a reduction in staff will result in worse SLO results. It will result in less coverage of edge cases (technical and UX). Smaller teams are more constrained to travel on "the happy path". And the fact that marginal utility of additional engineers decreases means you can usually reduce teams a lot before impacting that path.
In complex systems, reductions also mean you're more vulnerable to a black swan event being irrecoverable, but that still requires a black swan first.
I don't think anyone argued Twitter was run by technically incompetent people. Where was this, if so? By leftists, yes, and by far too many people, yes. Both were argued repeatedly. But those things are now proven objectively true. The Twitter files showed just how systematic their enforcement of left wing orthodoxy was, and Musk fired most of the staff yet the site kept trucking and even launching new changes which is more or less the definition of having been over-staffed.
That's definitely more outrageous than saying that frontend is trivial. Whatever, I never took him seriously anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_paradox_of_the_Gra...
Maybe something that pretends to be the real numbers, like a matrioshka doll of infinite containers inside containers.
Related: the Schröder–Bernstein theorem [4], "if there exist injective functions f : A → B and g : B → A between the sets A and B, then there exists a bijective function h : A → B.".
Not related, but great: Max Cooper (sound) and Martin Krzywinski (visuals) did a splendid job visualising "ℵ_2" [5].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality_of_the_continuum
[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E2%84%B6
[3] "Cardinalities and Bijections - Showing the Natural Numbers and the Integers are the same size", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuJwmvW96Zs
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6der%E2%80%93Bernstei...
[5] "Max Cooper - Aleph 2 (Official Video by Martin Krzywinski)", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNYfqklRehM
As for the set of real numbers, we have the subset of irrational numbers which are uncountably infinite (see cantors diagonalization argument) thus making the whole set of real numbers, a set whose cardinality is ℵ_1.
The annotated turing book goes into this pretty well in the first couple pages.
It turns out the 'continuum hypothesis' can be true or it can be false. Neither contradicts standard ZFC set theory: the hypothesis is 'independent'.
[1] Using the concept of polycomputing from There’s Plenty of Room Right Here: Biological Systems as Evolved, Overloaded, Multi-Scale Machines: "Form and function are tightly entwined in nature, and in some cases, in robotics as well. Thus, efforts to re-shape living systems for biomedical or bioengineering purposes require prediction and control of their function at multiple scales. This is challenging for many reasons, one of which is that living systems perform multiple functions in the same place at the same time. We refer to this as 'polycomputing'—the ability of the same substrate to simultaneously compute different things, and make those computational results available to different observers.", https://www.mdpi.com/2313-7673/8/1/110
On the relative fringes, there are serious studies on alternative interpretations. See for example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...
(You can skip to the part that discusses Cantor's arguments, but I suspect that if you haven't heard about related concepts you probably want to understand what it is first.)
If I had a dollar for every job that I didnt get where I estimated the correct degree of difficulty, and they laughed, went with the person who said it would be easy and they could bang it out in a day of sleeping - I would be rich.
The loud optimist wins the 5.1 mil every time.
As soon as there is a dead serious one, I've noticed everyone get serious and starts ignoring the rainbows and unicorns people. If it's a slap on the write the rainbows still win.
It's likely there was some humor and bravado, as is the culture of his east coast origins.
The truth of his engagement with Twitter was, Just based on my watching him and his live streams during that time, that he was looking for a thing to do while he ceded control over comma AI, to a new executive leadership group.
Of course, he should know better than to throw claims like that.
I'm glad that the company exists. I'm glad that smaller car manufacturers were exploring integrating the self-driving software, too.
And, from a celebrity media perspective, I think your engagement at Twitter was underreported especially in gossip mongering pseudo serious technology fan sites like this one.
It was an interesting shift for you, as you mature out of your first big startup into kind of a journeyman phase, in my view. (Tasting different experiences.) Something that is relatable to large numbers of us.
It's not like he decided to hop from self-driving cars to 'AI' because fads changed.
1. https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/10/29/the-...
AI is not going anywhere. This is not a fad like some of the others mentioned but more likely than not where the next decade of innovation is built on.
The reason the company might fail is because their main thesis, being that car manufacturers would just license the self driving tech to somebody else (like Comma), never came about. Car manufacturers are just too conservative. It was a perfectly reasonable bet to make though. Unfortunately they ended up in the business of selling hardware and giving away software for free when they wanted to be in the business of selling software.
I'm Comma user in one of my cars as well, and I do like it. But, when was last time you tried built-in driving assist in a Tesla-priced car?
Tesla's driver assist is nothing special nowadays.
Things that Comma handles seamlessly that the built-in cruise in both cars will not:
- Full stop and go
- Sharp turns on the highway that require slowing down (both built-in adaptive cruise modes will gladly just drive you off a cliff at 65 mph)
- Situations where the lane lines are hard to see or are implied
- Non-highway driving
- Not requiring me to touch the steering wheel every 20 seconds
Maybe those things work in higher end cars (though I'd say the Ioniq is a fairly high-end car), but then again with Comma you get it for ~$2k in a ton of cars instead of having to buy a luxury car.
It is true that if you are on a highway, with clear lane lines, the steering assist in both cars is certainly a lot better than nothing, but it's just not nearly matching the reliability and versatility of Comma in any sort of imperfect situation.
In many countries doing this will void your insurance.
> - Sharp turns on the highway that require slowing down (both built-in adaptive cruise modes will gladly just drive you off a cliff at 65 mph)
While it's probably given that this will happen, it's also an infrastructural failure. Just place a limited speed limit sign way before the sharp turn, or fix the road so it doesn't make a sharp turn.
https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2023/company/porsche-mobiley...
It takes guts to put out such bold bets in writing. We've seen many (senior!) tech people sneer at George's at times naive optimism. I actually find the "how hard could be" attitude refreshing against "no no it is complicated you can't do that" gatekeeping. Because otherwise we will end up using big-tech for lack of alternative. It is not the critic who counts and all that..
Cruse and Waymo have invested billions, they need 10’s of billions in annual sales or their project is a failure.
Is that it? SF only? After billions invested? There is a laundry list of those that tried and failed especially with burning an insurmountable amount of VC money even with billions of their own money.
Lyft: Scrapped and sold their self-driving project. [0]
Uber: Scrapped their robot-taxi project and sold it off. [1]
Zoox: Once valued at $3BN, acquired by Amazon for $1BN after nearly going bankrupt and is still using specialised cars for self driving only in SF. [2]
Cruise: Acquired by GM and still using specialised cars for self driving in SF [3]
Drive.ai: Ran out of money and almost bankrupt and acquired by Apple. [4] No where to be found on the roads.
Waymo: Same situation as Cruise, but Google keeping them alive.
Comma has lasted longer than these over-valued companies and is already in lots of consumer grade vehicles beyond SF today and not in specialised cars and taxis unlike Cruise and Waymo who are still stuck in SF [5].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/04/26/business/stock-marke...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/944337751/uber-sells-its-auto...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/26/amazon-buys-self-driving-tec...
[3] https://fortune.com/2016/03/11/gm-buying-self-driving-tech-s...
[4] https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/25/self-driving-startup-drive...
[5] https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/18/cruise-waymo-near-approval...
which is the critical element everyone is in denial about, even to the point of saying Tesla has a long way to catch up.
1. They are living in a sf USA big city centric bubble. 2. They are very easily influenced by marketing. 3. They are just trolling.
Comma is a product you can buy all code is opensource. All others is just a service, where people could theoretically just be diving remote and they sell it as self driving.
Whereas comma is taking the right approach of a nimble team, iterate fast and ship a working product (even if not L4-5), get cash flow, next milestone.
George is courageous, inspiring, and highly intelligent. He stands for what he believes in. He stands up for himself and his beliefs, and talks back to powerful people.
How many tries did it take to invent scalable electricity, or the light bulb?
George Hotz is frikkin awesome
1. Soliciting others to do his work - and offering internships to others that can help, in a kind of internship MLM (He was an intern at the time).
2. Complaining about how Twitter doesn't run on his laptop
I know it seems like ages ago at the current pace, but ya gotta remember that GPT-3 was released in mid-2020.
What kind of comment is this on a site that used to be called Startup News? Even if that doesn’t resonate with you, isn’t what he’s talking about pure hacker ethos anyway?
This project fits the pattern of his previous projects: he gets excited about the currently hot thing in tech, makes his own knockoff version, generates a ton of buzz in the tech press for it, and then it fizzles out because he doesn't have the resources or attention span to actually make something at that scale.
In 2016, Tesla and self-driving cars led to his comma one project ("I could build a better vision system than Tesla autopilot in 3 months"). In 2020, Ethereum got hot and so he created "cheapETH". In 2022 it was Elon's Twitter, which led him to "fixing Twitter search". And in 2023 it's NVIDIA.
I'd love to see an alternative to CUDA / NVIDIA so I hope this one breaks the pattern, but I'd be very, very careful before giving him a deposit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz