> Scientists yearn to stumble upon something [that] definitely rules out some of the more fringe theories
The existing measurements at CERN ruled out a lot of the "more natural" variants of string theory. Until now this insight has not lead to a big scientific breakthrough.
> Let’s take a bunch of the smartest people alive, train them for decades, give them a month of Google money
Unpopular opinion: Google makes an insane amount of money, so they can afford this salary. The CERN (or whatever your favourite research institute is), on the other hand, is no money-printing machine.
Every step towards understanding subatomic physics is a step towards cold fusion. The second we're able to understand and capture this energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy, which would also abolish money from a fundamental market value perspective. I'll continually preach that we need to plan for this economically as a species because none of our current government or economic systems will survive the death of scarcity.
> Every step towards understanding subatomic physics is a step towards cold fusion.
Is it?
You are assuming cold fusion is possible. We don't know that. It might be one more step before we finally prove it is never possible.
You are also assuming that cold fusion is something this path of research will lead us to. However this might be a misstep that isn't helpful at all because it doesn't prove anything useful about the as yet unknown physical process that cold fusion needs.
We just don't know, and cannot know at this point.
My point is that you shouldn't believe in marketing claims that are obviously too good to be true, like
> The second we're able to understand and capture this [cold fusion] energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy, which would also abolish money from a fundamental market value perspective.
I mean obviously this statement is false as we live in a finite section of the visible universe.
This said beyond the marketing there is a reality that if cold fusion did show up that there is a singularity event that occurs that making predictions past that point will almost always fail as the world would change very rapidly.
>
Im gonna go against the grain and say he is an elite expert on some dimensions, but when you take all the characteristics into account (including an understanding of people etc) I conclude that on the whole he is not as intelligent as you think.
Intelligence (which psychologists define as the g factor [1]; this concept is very well-researched) does not make you an expert on any given topic. It just, for example, typically enables you to learn new topics faster, and lets you see connections between topics.
If Karpathy did not spend a serious effort of learning to get a good understanding of people, it's likely that he is not an expert on this topic (which I guess basically nobody would expect).
Also, while being a rationalist very likely requires you to be rather intelligent, only a (I guess rather small) fraction of highly intelligent people are rationalists.
I know it was just an example, but there's research suggesting otherwise. There are things you can do to increase/decrease empathy in yourself and others. If you're curious, it might be worth looking into the subject.
There is the autistic spectrum, and there is understanding of people and psychology. Autistic people might have a hard time understanding people, but it's not like everyone else is magically super knowledgable about human psychology and other people's thought patterns. If that were the case, then any non-autistic person could be a psychologist, no fancy study or degrees required!
Unless your point is to claim that Karpathy is autistic. I don't know whether that's really relevant though, the original issue was whether/how he failed to recognize the alleged hype.
I would tend to disagree. The tech types have a strong intellectual center, but weaker emotional and movement centers. I think a realignment is possible with practice. It takes time, and as one grows older, the centers begin to integrate better.
You are what you do. If you want to develop your empathy, spend time/energy consciously trying to put yourself in the shoes of others. Eventually, you will not have to apply so much deliberate effort. Same way most things work.
Being empathic is different from "understanding people".
Psychopaths and narcissists often have a good understanding of many people, which they use to manipulate them, but psychopaths and narcissists are not what most people would call "empathic".
They dont understand people. They understand how to control people, which is completely different from the context of building products that people want - which requires an understanding of peoples tastes and preferences.
> which is completely different from the context of building products that people want - which requires an understanding of peoples tastes and preferences.
Rather: it requires an understanding how to manipulate people into loving/wanting your product.
> AI can build the thing but it needs to be told exactly what to build by someone who knows how software works.
If AI was following my instructions instead of ignoring them, and after complaining telling me it is sorry, and returns some other implementation which also fails to follow my instructions ... :-(
> Have you never run a team of software engineers as a lead?
I expect juniors to improve fast to get really good. AI is incapable of applying the teaching that I expcect juniors to internalize to any future code that it writes.
Google Maps is still insanely bad for hiking and cycling, so I combine the old-fashioned map method with an outdoor GPS onto which I load a precomputed GPX track for the route that I want to take.
I am very certain that these don't describe me well, or I am classified wrong in some categories (without using any tracking/privacy protection! But I won't actively correct this misclassification).
My experience is rather that some people have very niche interests (among hacker-minded people, the proportion of these people is in my experience much higher than in the general population), and are hard to target using ads, so advertising networks and companies don't make the effort to target these users.
Also, when I google about prices for some product category, I often have other reasons than a buying wish. For example I recently googled about the prices of products in some category because some work colleague claimed that someone else bought a product of a specific vendor for a specific price, but I really felt that the claimed price was off; to substantiate my claims, I did some googling.
Or I google about products in a specific category because I am exactly not satisfied with what some established players that love to advertise have to offer.
> For whatever reason, distro maintainers working for free seem a lot more competent with security than billion dollar hardware vendors
I don't believe that these billion dollar hardware vendors are really incompetent with security. It's rather that the distro maintainers do care quite a bit about security, while for these hardware vendors consider these security concerns to be of much smaller importance; for their business it is likely much more important to bring the next hardware generation to the market as fast as possible.
In other words: distro maintainers and hardware vendors are simply interested in very different things and thus prioritize things very differently.
Years of working in embedded computing have left me with the impression that most hardware companies are just bad at software. I think part of it is that the long cycle times of making hardware push them towards a culture of waterfall development. But years of working with the microcontroller libraries for ethernet PHYs, the bash scripts to build the kernels for SoCs, etc make me perfectly willing to believe they are incompetent with security.
Everyone's gonna give you shit for this answer and there's a hundred things I could tell you about their software that pisses me off, but the bar is so low for software these days, their stuff is still in the high end of quality (they need to do a lot to get back to where they were 10 years ago though)
Only other software I regularly use that I think is overall high quality and I enjoy using are the JetBrains IDEs, and the Telegram mobile app (though the Premium upselling has gotten kinda gross the past few years)
It's a cost vs benefit. As long as the cost of such blatant violation of security principles doesn't outweight the benefit of focusing on something else, nothing is done.
I don't buy it. It makes sense for a small company where the cost of fixing it might be noticed. But AMD generates some ~$30bn in annual revenues. How much of a developer's time does it take to change the code to use HTTPS? $1000? $5000? Let's be extreme and call it $10,000. That's 0.00003% of AMD's annual revenue. It's barely even a rounding error on their accounts.
Because that's not how corporate maths works. The comparison is not "what is the cost of this vs our current revenue?" The calculation is "what could that engineer be doing instead and what is that worth vs fixing this issue?"
Will fixing this issue bring in more revenue than ignoring it and building a new feature? Or fixing a different issue? If the answer is "no" then the answer is that it doesn't get fixed.
> The calculation is "what could that engineer be doing instead and what is that worth vs fixing this issue?"
I don't agree with this, because it pre-supposes that there's a limited number of engineers available. The question isn't "shall I pull engineer X off project Y so that he can fix security bugs?", it's "shall I hire an additional engineer to fix security bugs?". The comment above mine suggests the answer to that question is "no, because it's too expensive to do that compared to just paying to clean up security breaches after they happen", which is what I was questioning in my first comment.
It doesn't matter: the equation is exactly the same. Why would you hire someone to work on a bug fix or security fix when you could hire that same person and have them work on something even more valuable again?
Now there's a related problem in the premise: it pre-supposes that the company has an unlimited amount of valuable work to be done. If that were the case, all companies would simply expand their workforce as much as possible all the time, only constrained by money running out (which itself would be an exponential increase since "valuable" work presumably leads to more money in future). In reality, companies do not prioritise expansion above all else. In fact any time a company pays a dividend to its shareholders, or otherwise refrains from spending cash reserves on new hires, it's recognising that it cannot invest profits in an effective way into its labour force.
When framed correctly (there's effectively an unlimited labour supply for most companies, and effectively a limited demand for staff) then the question becomes "shall we hire an engineer to fix security bugs when we don't need an engineer for anything else?".
> it pre-supposes that the company has an unlimited amount of valuable work to be done.
In effect, there is, yes. At the very least, there’s more high value work that most companies can do than there are engineers to do said work. There’s a reason literally every leadership course teaches you how to say “no” over and over again.
First they have to hire a developer with knowledge of how to do this right, as they might not even have one. Which could easily eat 10k+ of dev time as hiring good people takes a lot of time.
You could probably take any user at random from this discussion alone and they'd have the knowledge needed to make the switch from http to https. I'm certain that AMD has all the knowledge they need right now, but even more certain that it wouldn't be hard to hire someone new who does as well
Ok, but this ultimately just comes down to a debate over the amount of the cost. The principle is the same. Even if we double or triple the cost, it's a drop in the ocean for a company like AMD.
I didn't say I don't believe it happens. I'm saying I don't believe it's a based on a cost benefit analysis. I.e. that in a multi-billion dollar company someone consciously ran the numbers and decided "it's cheaper for us to pay to clean up the mess if there's a security breach than it is to hire someone to fix security bugs". The cost of the latter is too low for this kind of logic to make any sense.
I think it's more realistic that in any sufficiently large company the bureaucracy is so unwieldy that sensible decisions become difficult to make and implement.
This comes down to intentions versus results. Viewed through the lens of results the comment you're replying to is still correct: The result is incompetence. I'd argue that's the only lens that matters when you're on the receiving end of such work.
> I'm always puzzled by such a claim. One can look at Facebook to see the comments people put up tied to their real name and find no shortage of utterly abhorrent comments. Not sure why there's such a pervasive memory-holing of this when people talk of wanting to tie the ability to comment publicly to peoples' identities.
This should give insanely obvious evidence that clear-name policy does not lead to a more civilised discussion. I mean, everybody who went to a public school [in the American sense of the word] already knows this well: "everybody" knew the names of the schoolyard bullies.
The political wishes of clear-name policies are rather for surveillance and to silence critics of the political system.
It does change people's behavior. Perhaps the average person will use more polite language? But it's not uncommon for me to see dehumanization, threats, and calls for literal mass-murder-of-entire-demographics genocide promoted with polite language. Sometimes used by journalists. Sometimes by academics. Sometimes by podcast hosts. Sometimes by their fans. Sometimes by politicians. All using their real names.
I frequently encounter people using their real name saying my family deserves to die. Who would, in a heartbeat, threaten my employer by dint of a relative's place of birth.
Not having my real identity behind my posts is my only means of keeping myself safe from extremely sick people online who have a culture of intimidating into silence those that express views or belong to a demographic they detest.
The existing measurements at CERN ruled out a lot of the "more natural" variants of string theory. Until now this insight has not lead to a big scientific breakthrough.
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