Naivety is a very good thing at times.

I've seen average people achieve incredible things, and not because what they did was incredible... but just because they started work on things that no-one else thought they could complete. Some way into it, when enough progress has been made, people have rushed to give support because "halfway there but badly done" is a hell of a lot better than "not even started yet".

But also now that I am in my 30s, and they are as well, we frequently look back at that time and laugh about being that young. "Man, you were fun to work with, but also what were we thinking"

So I definitely wish Hotz all the luck. If nothing else, the more smart people working on the problem of self driving cars, the better.

My comment mostly stemmed from amusement of his quotes.

Part of this was hubris. The thought of someone I considered less capable than myself accomplishing something I felt I could not damaged my ego. This was humbling.

Part of this was experience. The experience to know that attempting the hard or impossible is sometimes worth the effort, whether you succeed or not. This was educational.

Part of this was ambition. Ambition to do something new, to ignore the naysayers and noways when needed, and forge your own path, which I've always felt short on, but have steadily worked on over time. This is ongoing.

I do remember being about 19 and thinking I was the best programmer in the world. By about 22 I had rewritten as much of my old code as I possibly could because it was so horrible. Somewhere between there and now I've gotten a cynical bit of humility to tamper my ego. I think the cynical part is that my ambition has not lessened, just my belief that I can succeed.

One Steve Jobs philosophy is focus and say no. I'm guessing I could do better if I said no to all but a single project.

"There's nothing like succeeding at something you weren't even qualified to attempt."

Thanks for sharing.

People building untested self driving cars is an entirely legitimate concern.

"Nationally, 963,000 teen drivers were involved in police-reported motor vehicle crashes in 2013, which resulted in 383,000 injuries and 2,865 deaths"

I'd worry about that more than the odd geek with a laptop.

“I live by morals, I don’t live by laws,” Hotz declared in the story. “Laws are something made by assholes.”

Thats what I think 'foolish' means in "Stay hungry, stay foolish."

He might not be naive.

In my opinion, we must never underestimate people.

>>but just because they started work on things that no-one else thought they could complete.

Nothing fails like smartness. The reason why a few people achieve the impossible while far more intelligent and smart people don't is because of the curse of intelligence makes them believe certain things are impossible.

The fool didn't know it was impossible, so he did it.

I also realize this kid probably won't end up making a huge dent in the universe.... but.... statistically speaking, there should be several "Leonardo da Vinci"- level humans alive right now. Why not this kid?

Impressive as they are, his chops still don't support his claim to "know everything there is to know". The Dunning-Kruger effect is in full swing.

I kind of took that to be like how Musk talks about needing to know first principles. In the article you can see that he was humble about what he thought he knew, took jobs here and there and eventually confirmed that he was at the cutting edge, that he knew 'everything there is to know' about this special area.

That's when he realized that he was qualified to try this. IMO, anyway ;)

I sold my first company and the investors did very well, but I made tons of stupid mistakes in the process. Not least of which was holding on to dotcom stock that I thought would go to the moon but which mostly went down the drain.

(I'm very familiar with this literature - see my username)

I assume you're talking about using backpropagation with gradient descent. Backpropagation itself isn't all that interesting. The interesting part is that it works for practical problems and doesn't get stuck in shallow local minima.

Someone who has digested enough of the AI literature to think about the methods in aggregate is very likely to be in a position to see any particular method as a "simple" implementation of some more general set of principles.

But the particular quote is referring to learning rates in autonomous robotics, especially visual classification in complex real-world scenes.

I have worked and published in ML since the early 1990s, was a program chair for the learning track at NIPS one year, participated in the same DARPA learning-to-drive program that Yann LeCun did, and don't consider the math behind "state-of-the-art papers" to be simple.

Just taking deep learning: there are a lot of tricks and recipes (e.g., rectified-linear activations, number of layers, staged training) that are not mathematically understood. It's exciting, but mathematically still a jungle. Just because a neophyte can code and optimize a network does not mean that the math that explains why it actually works is simple. As engineers, we need to understand why it works before using it in a safety-critical situation.

Now, to understand WHY the algorithms work, and gives you the result it claims to calculate, is quite hard, but that understanding is not required to implement those algorithms.

If only he knew about the Dunning Kruger effect...

(probably one of the more Buddhist-ish gems from Western philosophy)

> A person in their 20's knows nothing, but thinks they've outsmarted the world...

Is a dangerous and gross generalization. I totally agree with the changing of perspectives point, but feel that this community has a very clear bias from the older gen (30s and up) against the younger gen (teens and twenties). That's all I'm saying. It's divisive. Instead of saying they "know nothing", it should be phrased, "still have a lot to learn."

> This whole: "Twenty year olds don't know shit but 30 year olds are so enlightened" sentiment

I think the point you are making is generally valid... But he is a savant. I don't think it is wise to apply generalities to him.

Yes, age will change some of his sharper edges, but he is already pretty unusual.

I don't think this has anything to do with saying he knows everything he needs to know in the world.

Anyways, wouldn't you agree that it is better to be empathetic rather than thinking you're an idiot?

To be honest, I recommend faking to yourself that you're in your 20s still :) Much healthier attitude.