He has all the right intuitions about capitalism but draws the wrong conclusions.
All the right observations and intuitions abotu why academia is ass, why “crazy people took over”, about the AI revolution, etc. pp
But he seems unable to think about solutions outside the constraints of capitalism / private property & free markets.“Making sure (the) democratic system stays in control” is meaningless, it’s not in control right now.
Right, so your suggestion is give the people democratic control, right? Right?
I’m surprised how little people in the US view themselves as part of a society. Like you can say this is due to some Russian agitprop or something, but that really doesn’t explain it. Maybe I just see it now living in Hong Kong, there’s something about here that constantly reminds you. And it really works for the benefit of all.
Link to originalHe defaults to thinking the alienation comes from russian agitprop, and not as a natural consequence of capitalist society (worker as an appendage to the machine etc.).
And he goes on:
Circular transclusion detected: library/the-reckoning/the-reckoning
Well, case in fucking point: This is literally what happens if you’re so brainwashed by capitalist propaganda to not allow you to think about solutions outside the constraints of capitalism… if you’re stupid, your solutions lead to contradictions (UBI, …). If you’re smart (George, Peter Thiel) → barbarism, (techno-)pessimism 1
Synthesis of techno-optimism and techno-pessimism: revolutionary optimism
Some good blogposts:
- clip-show (meta-summary of his blog)
- a-person-of-compute
- the-importance-of-diversity
- closed-source-ai-neofeudalism
- the rest, basically
Notes from streams, talks, interviews, …
The most useful thing to know when trying to solve problems, especially related to programming, is to stop thinking about shortcuts and abstractions early. Do the simplest thing that solves the problem
Notes from stream 24.12.23
secrecy in startup almost always means what they have is not good
Inefficiency of the free-market:
Artificially reducing supply increases the total market cap of a sector. The pie is bigger if you reduce the supply. Examples: Cigarettes, Oil, Housing, Potatoes, …
Our energy usage has been leveling off since the 70s. Fundamental sciences too (physics, bio, ..) The 747 came out in 1969…
Notes from stream 22.1.24
Science stopped progressing in the 1970s really.
Like what new fundamental science has there been since then? Maybe the human genome project. And sure, we built the LHC, but did it find any new science? No. Same with the argument abt. 747 still being used 50 years later. Crazy.
There are two theories to this:
- Either we are at a limit were science doesn’t progress anymore as quickly because of some fundamental thing.
- There’s sth wrong with society.
(Software)Systems don’t have to be complex. It’s some disfunction of governance that leads ( software)systems to be complex.
The question people ask about software complexity is: How can we get more people to productively cooperate on? Instead of: How can we reduce complexity. (← due to human labor only value src?)
Instead of dozens of VCs trying to do the same thing (fundamental research) in private, that research should be government funded! 2
Prime example: AI startups (OpenAI, Anthropic, Magic, 1million others)
Hardware startups: Tensortorrent, Extropic, Etched, …
George is bearish on startups that require fundamental research to be done. Spot on. Tax funded innovations, corporate profits.
Notes from stream 27.1.24
What is a fundamental growth-limiting factor of companies / organizations?
→ Working together to get superlinear effects
(best example is me working on EZ with Lukas. I’m not 2x as fast. Without him I wouldn’t have even come close to finishing. And that even though now I’m doing like quite a bit more than 50% of the work on the project)
Funny stream 24.3.24 (amd open src register discover)
Geohot: And ppl think LLMs are smart. Like LLMs are soo dumb.
Alex: Woah woah woah. They know very specific things and you have to use them in a very specific way… It’s kind of like your parents.
stream 1.4.24, George Hotz | Researching | documenting the AMD 7900XTX so we can understand why it crashes | RDNA 3
george being pro-union “they need us we dont them”
My comments on the stream:
What we need is democracy in our economy. Workers elect their representatives, “managers & bosses”. Workers decide what we need to produce, what to focus on.
They need us, we dont need them. The parasitic class is the capital owning class. Those who do not work, but make money off of other people’s work.
Fiat money is necessary for the state to save the capitalist system from collapsing and bail corps out.
Speculation in the market is so high because there are little productive investments to be made due to overproduction (ppl cant afford the shit they produce, natural tendency for capital to produce way too much when a sector is profitable).
The reward function is not the manipulation of people, but money! It should not be a cheap proxy, we should rationally plan to produce what we want! That’s why society is fucked, because profit as a proxy for what we want can be cheated, e.g. as you say by manipulation instead of value creation.
No one you can manipulate to get gold? ^^ You can manipulate people to go to war for you for gold even if it’s not in their interest. If you possess enough gold / means of production, you make the state keep people obediently working for you, so you can get more gold without working, while they get the scraps they need to survive.
2:13:00
the solution to white supremacy is not black supremacy but no white sopremacy king / female kign → no king
idpol being pushed by ppl desperately trying to stay in power
The people who suceed in companies are not the one’s who care. It’s just a sad fact about the world. - geohot
I like being right, but not at the expense of being wrong. - geohto
Reply to “but isn’t it the opposit? don’t ppl get more opportunity to be competitive when resources are scarce?”
Good point! I left out the most important bit: For primitive classless societies (hunter gatherers) this was the case as you described. With the development of classes, i.e. those that work and those that just own and profit off of other’s work, this changed. We progressed in certain aspects, but this didn’t change the fact that competition dominates. Through this progress, we now have the means to move back to cooperation “from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom”, if we abolish classes, i.e. private property of mean if production, which allows us to plan the economy rationally (as opposed to the irrational planning that is happening now, with (unhealthy) competition between companies and nation states (wars, patents, unfree software, pollution, misleading or poisoning/addicting customers, …) or lack thereof (monopolies)). I see this analogous to Michael Levin’s work… like cells coming together, developing higher goals than any individual could, improving the overall prosperity. Under capitalism, this is weak. Cancers dominate. We need to scale the lightcone of humanity. I don’t have time to go into details here, but for the historical background, I can recommend reading “the origins of family, private property and the state” by engels.
stream 6.4.24 George Hotz | Researching | same thing we do every weekend, documenting the AMD 7900XTX | Part 1
Intellectual property is using the state monopoly on violence to make a non-scarce good artificially scarce. 00:34:00
stream 14.10.25 George Hotz | Just Chatting | how to actually win? | tinygrad.org
If you want to understand the destiny of humanity, you gotta understand economics
Some ideas from the stream:
Rent seeking is bad. Limiting access to access controls to a service. Of course rules and hierarchy are needed … BUT:
Anyone with e.g. ethereum can read any contract, understand exactly what the rent-seeking is and fork. And just the threat of the fork prevents rent seeking or makes it less bad due to fairer competition.
Use carrots and not sticks to get me to log in.
tldr of the stream: https://github.com/tinygrad/toonygrad/blob/master/PLAN.md
We are in one of three worlds.
- We’re dead no matter what.
- We’re dead or alive based on the decisions we make.
- We’re alive no matter what.
Must act as if in world 2.
My comments / disagreements:
The best we can hope for is a democratically planned economy… What the marked does with our societal resources we can clearly see… What we need is true democracy. All compute divided by all humans. Allocate it to your will.
communism == maximum agency for the individual. Giving people control over their own lives, workplaces, society. Capitalism is a democracy for the owners of the means of production. It’s agency for the wealthy. But “If we ask the right questions, it is much more likely to find the meaning of human existence. As a heuristic in the search space, we should try to increase the diversity of people (or conscious beings) asking such questions”. We don’t want to optimize the proxy profit. It is irrational if our goal is to maximize progress and prosperity.
Planning doesn’t need to be central… scale-free structures, small wordlness. Aka democratic centralism. Works for the brain, will work for the economy.
“AI infra must be taken granted for free like Linux” … so should music, games, pictures, patents, … so should all of this stuff that is basically free when we divide the costs of production by the amount of consumers forever after. What’s holding it back is the private property to these things, upkept by the state.
Btw, if you follow this to its logical conclusion, of course infra like food, water, housing, internet and healthcare should be granted for free as well. We have the means to do so. It’s an organizational problem of society, we’ve long passed the technological hurdle.
There is no diverse competition under late-stage capitalism.
In a society of super-abundance, cooperation beats competition. Life wouldn’t exist without cooperation. The degree of cooperation is a sign for the development of a society.
saved tweeties
AI and robotics bubble and misinvestments
Geo: It’s like investors learned no lessons from the graveyard of self driving car companies, and now we have to speed run it again for humanoid robots. The same scammers will profit, and the same public will lose.
Soumith: Self-driving cars are an all-or-nothing capability. Robots applied to home or light industrial (like security) have a lot of incrementality — i.e. they can be useful before they are perfect. Comparing these two isn’t useful. I think robotic penetration into the home has real potential this time around; I think the bottleneck is in the electrical, mechanical and energy storage side of things though (I don’t think AI is the harder bottleneck.)
Geo: Self driving cars are certainly not all or nothing, we’re shipping an intermediary that brings value to many people. It’s not that home robotics is bad, I love my Roborock Q8 and Nest Cam. It’s the hype and the inflated valuations I can’t stomach.
Soumith: yea, the inflated valuations are funny money — some of the public demos for what are billion dollar robotics companies weren’t very impressive to me. I think a lot of the VC investment into “AI research for robotics” IMO is misguided too (instead of investing in companies that can compete with hardware interation cycles of Tesla) — but I think that’s how high-risk VC investments go, there’ll be a few disproportionate winners and most of them will lose all their money because they chased bad deals or got unfavorable terms as an investor to bag the deal. The AI valuation multipliers in general are going to pop at some point; and the robotics one will follow.
Geo: What’s sad about that to me is they will hoover up talent that will be squandered on writing code that never ships. Once you’ve raised too much money and promised the moon, you can’t ship something reasonable. And this is why we all lose.
But still, give $130M back, drop the hype narrative, and ship an incrementally useful product.
Nobody wants the hype world with fake technology you can possibly rent. It’s an SF bubble thinking circle jerk and a complete cultural dead end. - X
Thinks we are in a simulation and God is real… “Think god is fake? Who created the world?”
update: Couldn’t tell at the time… but I’m pretty sure he was trolling.
References
Footnotes
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This essay is the most over the top “here is a witty analysis of some obvious issues with technology in a captialist society, but literally only the dumbest takes imaginable on it” I can’t like I can’t explain to myself how someone can criticise certain aspects so clearly, yet be so utterly confused, that my only logical conclusion was that it’s peak ragebait — until I checked the author (the guy means it, and so does geo, in his own way). This is like culture war but for SF-techies lmfao. The solution is like out of the box bro, have you thought about that? Like literally everything he concludes i disagree with… duty calls: “same technology, different outcomes” but why…? But why are you being fed metric tons of corn syrup? You think because of technologia? Ur name Ted? Decline of “order”, but why…? “While pushing forward the frontiers of human power over nature is indeed exhilarating, this experience is by nature itself limited to a few—unless that magic elixir that turns us all into Einsteins is invented.” … as if frontier research — and esp the act of utilizing it to dominate nature — isn’t the most collective act. As if capitalism isn’t the alienating people precisely this, which makes us human: the conscious, creative, collective transformation of nature. As if it wasn’t true that intelligence is collective. “There are no jobs for chimpanzees” … distribute productivity gains and everyone just works less. And what do people do with the time, material security, and the freedom to act on it? Exactly what trotsky described . ↩