[p0wn]

One of my favorite tech articles of all time involved this guy. He was showing off the self driving capabilities of his framework and took a reporter out on a drive. Everything went well and while they were wrapping up the interview the reporter said "Well I bet you're just driving around all the time hands free, it must be amazing" and Hotz says "Oh well I just got it working this morning".

Classic. I love it. My kind of engineer.

[mayankkaizen]

It is funny to read top comment and then your comment. The thing you are admiring about him is the same thing top commentor is criticizing.

[PragmaticPulp]

Comma was always riding the tailwinds of the underdog effect.

When Tesla ships an autopilot on mass market cars that fails in edge cases, commenters are up in arms that it wasn’t tested to perfection in every scenario. Big companies are punished if they don’t deliver perfection.

When an underdog company hacks together an autopilot proof of concept and takes a reporter for a ride with it, they’re heroes for pulling off a technical feat like that. Underdog stories will always draw applause.

The challenge with a company like Comma is that they can’t maintain underdog status forever. The product is very impressive in the context of an underdog hacker success story, but outside of a few early magazine shootout wins it just can’t hang with the efforts of the big companies throwing huge budgets at their own solutions. This puts them in a difficult spot because the underdog-hacker story can’t scale forever.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

That kind of attitude is great for editor or compiler or game development.

It is absolutely the wrong attitude for self-driving cars or anything that is safety critical.

[1980phipsi]

To be fair, he was recently in the news saying self-driving cars are a scam. https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/09/george-hotz-autonomous-...

[breck]

Please read the details of Howard Hughes's test flights (also Winston Churchill) and realize that perhaps it's people like that who are required to make anything work.

If planes were designed by safety committees we would have never figured out how to make them light enough to fly.

[terafo]

That's what he is talking about. There are different standards for safety for experimental planes and commercial jets. And he is much better in building former than latter.

[generalizations]

> It is absolutely the wrong attitude for self-driving cars or anything that is safety critical.

With your attitude, we would never have allowed cars in the first place.

[turminal]

Compiler development is (often indirectly) safety critical too.

[wiseowise]

You do understand that this is joke, right?