Interview
Programming Meme Review with George Hotz
- George Hotz reviews programming memes primarily sourced from r/programming, rating them on a binary pass/fail scale or a 1-10 score.
- He rates a meme about spending six minutes doing something by hand versus six hours failing to automate it as a "win," citing it as the core spirit of programming.
- Hotz critiques a meme stating doctors possess divine wisdom, arguing instead that programmers are more trustworthy because they verify information via papers and search engines rather than relying on institutional authority.
- He recounts an incident where a doctor incorrectly identified Adderall as a "schedule B" drug, highlighting a lack of specific knowledge in medical professionals regarding DEA scheduling.
- Regarding automation and outsourcing knowledge, Hotz states he would look up complex mathematical integrals on Wolfram Alpha or Stack Overflow rather than memorizing them.
- He notes that regression testing at his company, Comma, has significantly improved, providing confidence that code passing tests will function correctly in autonomous driving scenarios.
- The team utilizes a tool called "process replay" to ensure that refactored code produces exact same outputs over 60 minutes of driving data.
- Hotz declines to use IDEs, describing them as "Clippy on steroids" and preferring Emacs for its simplicity.
- He expresses hope for machine learning approaches to improve IDEs, citing Gmail's auto-suggestion features as a successful example of basic GPT-3 applications.
- He criticizes news sites for broken revenue models and user interfaces that rely on aggressive pop-ups, login traps, and "gym membership" subscription tactics.
- Hotz recommends using Chrome extensions to hide like and retweet counts on Twitter to prevent social proof manipulation and improve the quality of content judgment.
- He argues that trending topics often contain political agitprop designed to outrage rather than inform, and that he prefers learning of major global events (e.g., nuclear war) through personal contacts rather than feeds.
- He finds Stack Overflow interactions "rough" and notes that the quality of answers depends heavily on how the question is phrased, a principle he emphasizes in hiring interviews.
- Comma's hiring strategy includes a paid "micro-internship" to distinguish candidates with genuine motivation from those merely seeking employment.
- Hotz considers the best candidates to be those who have read the open-source OpenPilot codebase beforehand and can ask specific questions about it.
- Regarding hardware constraints, Comma is addressing overheating issues in the Comma 2 by lowering CPU frequencies, noting that the code has been optimized sufficiently to compensate for reduced performance.
- Hotz admits to frequently resolving bugs by restarting systems without understanding the underlying cause, acknowledging this behavior defies logic but is effective.
- He reflects on his performance in a Twitch Slam coding competition, noting he spent six months studying the game prior to the event, which explains his rapid success.
- Hotz remains bullish on neural networks, defining them as matrix multiplications interspersed with nonlinearities that are differentiable and quasi-convex.
- He posits that the limits of current AI capabilities are due to the lack of an optimal loss function, speculating that future advancements may rely on concepts related to compression or "surprise."