Looking at the comments for that product I suspect it'll find a home in your junk drawer rather quickly.
I've ordered gizmos from Lilygo in the past and found their support/documentation/updates to be very poor. Once a product is out the door they seem to do little further with it.
Churning out new products seems to be their forte.
I've been using ZFS for about a decade on several systems and can't say enough good things about it: rock solid, feature rich and easy to use are the top benefits.
And it's been used by many commercial networking and storage appliances too. Juniper using various devices (routers, firewalls, switches, etc), Citrix Netscreen load balancers, Dell storage Isilon just to name few. Knowing FreeBSD pays dividends if you work enterprise gear. Makes your life so much easier even there is vendor specific UI's and shell, but you know your way around so much better when you encounter any issues which requires using shell and it helps you debugging things you would otherwise not being able to accomplish.
Knowing you way around *BSD how check things, mount a USD drive, collect data & or evidence when need arises is well worth having beyond just surviving bare Linux skills. BSD's are alive and kicking on commercial appliances and devices.
Generally, when a "good" developer has a huge public presence and reputation, that's quite valuable to a company when they're competing in a tough space. Many a time, more so than the (very high) technical skill of the developer in question.
I've seen large funded companies gather good popular developers like pokemon cards and just have them go around give talks and write blog posts. It creates an aura around them which makes things like hiring, fund raising etc. much easier.
So, it's not really a statement about Karpathy himself. It's more about the company hiring him.
Yea, I say this as a marketing agency owner, not a developer or AI researcher, that besides Sam Altman, Dario, Demis and Elon, that Karpathy is one of the most influential I follow.
There’s a lot of value for the business world in learning AI from someone who has been at the top of their game but now is doing a general service by being a great educator and translator between the fields.
His recent Wiki approach may be simple to devs but is certainly an aha moment for the rest of the peanut gallery paying attention!
His LLM-wiki framework has been very useful for me for some personal research and knowledge-building projects I've been working on recently. When I get an idea for a new project, I first give it to Claude together with LLM-wiki.md and have it spend a few sessions compiling knowledge in the wiki before beginning work on the project itself. I schedule further wiki-maintenance sessions for later, too. Over time, the wikis become especially valuable when planning major changes or additions to the projects, as they help to ground both me and Claude with knowledge specific to the project.
Here's an example wiki in a public repository for a dictionary I have been having Claude build for the past few months:
> That implies Karpathy is either dumb or desperate
This kind of thing happens to big names in software all the time. Carmack going to Facebook is a prime example - he joined with the idea of using all those resources to build world-changing tech, and instead he ended up headlining conferences, and fighting a losing battle against the corporate types who were put in charge of Oculus.
Hasn't Carmack solved a few serious engineering problems, making Oculus more or less the most advanced VR device? (The fact that an advanced VR device does not seem to be needed by the mass market is not an engineering problem.)
Yes - but - ironically - he did that _before_ joining them. IIRC he literally started collaborating and helping them while being at a different company.
That seems surprisingly common to me. Visionary engineer has solution to problem, gets hired, solves the broad strokes in the first year, then spends N more years in meetings with exec stakeholders and worrying about schedules/hiring/financials instead of _doing the vision work_.
yeah, and its kind of just misaligned incentives. Visionary engineer wants to solve hard tech problems, corporation wants a product with mass-market appeal. To hit mass-market appeal, corporation cost-cuts until the hard tech problems are outside the solution space...
No it doesn’t? It matches his skills to the lab’s needs. Karpathy is a media personality, manager, and educator far more than he is a hands-on researcher.
It’s kind of useless to argue through metaphors here. There are a hundred researchers with more significant contributions to theory and practice than Karpathy. If you disagree, I’d love to see what papers or implementations you think he’s offered that pushed SOTA.
Andrej is a smart guy. You don't get into Stanford for grad school without that.
But he has always been known for his communication rather than his research. He got famous by putting out a (very well made) course on machine learning that was available to the public. Since graduating he hasn't exactly delivered on revolutionary new stuff at the businesses that employed him but he has continued to be extremely good at communicating thoughts about the current and future state of AI. Businesses want that and he knows that he can deliver that.
I don’t think it does. I think it’s better phrased that he is marketing rather than a marketer. He can do whatever he wants to do, in return Anthropic gets to say “hey, this guy works with us!”
He already stated his motivation a few months ago in an interview with Dwarkesh - basically saying that he might join one of the big labs, for a while, to keep in touch with frontier research.
Andrej seems like a great guy, but him joining Anthropic feels a bit like a transactional relationship (rich old guy marries hot young chick). Anthropic get a "glorified marketer", and he gets a front row seat at SOTA LLM dev 2026. I don't think they hired him expecting he's going to change the direction/pace of their research.
Maybe poor choice of words on my part - what I meant was that this doesn't appear to be a case of AI research co. hires AI researcher to do AI research.
A regular marriage is transactional to some extent too right, but not quite the same as Anna Nicole Smith marrying a 90yr old.
As an aside, an Indian guy I used to work with once explained to me how traditional Indian arranged marriages, like his own, work, and they are HIGHLY transactional. It's not just a matter of same caste, same social status etc, but an explicit trade off. In my co-worker's case he cheerfully told me how his wife was very dark skinned, therefore considered not that attractive/desirable (to other Indians!), but her family had money and social status so it was considered a fair trade for a nice looking boy like himself!
I don't know anything about this person, but want to point out that renown and validation is something that most (all?) humans crave. That doesn't make them dumb or desperate, it makes them normal.
Yes, that's probably his dumbest public idea to date. Given that this GPT repos and parts of autoresearch are brilliant I'm sympathetic. I think he's earned the right to exhibit mild expressions of AI psychosis at this point.
And, my objection was that he clearly had no understanding of the supply-chain risk he was worsening by advocating widespread use of Obsidian for agentic engineering tasks.
Since his announcement, Obsidian has taken proactive steps to mitigate the risks, or at least study threat model. Hopefully, they will implement proper RBAC or something before someone else with his visibility announces an even more irresponsible half-baked idea.
oh my, i see what youre saying. at this point youd hope everyone has realized that the best way to keep models more reliable is to force them to stay honest via very very string static typing as a feedback loop. bags of text with hyperlinks certainly fail that measure
There are things that you can only explore and learn in those places, for obvious reasons.
I don't know his personal life goals but he's a great communicator and educator, if this decision makes him more up to date, and allows him to create even more relevant content then is something everyone will benefit. I understand the risks of being bias toward one company and not the other, but if you look at the content he created so far, he always talk principle first and specific tool later.
I think people here should give him the benefit of the doubt.
Alright, is just that your previous comments and some others sounded to me a bit too judgy, I had to re read these with a new interpretation:
> i wouldn't be surprised if he just becomes a glorified marketer for anthro.
> im also going to guess that whatever research he does ...
At first sounded like unnecessarily prejudging a person and his future efforts.
But if you say you meant everything out of respect for him, then I have to re read what you said , more as skepticism towards Anthropic than picking up on him at a personal level.
I guess what's behind is the sentiment that big companies are going to (or have already) cross ethical lines when it comes to survive and making revenue, and I can share the same concern easily. I think in this forum the majority would do.
I would just make that more explicit and separate the person from his choice, and his future work from how the company could use it, that would be a more respectful way in my view.
But is just my opinion! and I'm aware I'm might be picking on nuances that don't matter or being overly polite :D
he's not dumb or desperate compared to the average person, but it's very possible to be dumb and desperate compared to the delusional promises and outsized amounts of money in the industry. Manages to make smart people look extremely stupid every day.
I wonder if anyone remembers the long running computer club that met at the Forest Hill Collegiate on Eglinton Ave in Toronto?
And there was another one in the basement of the old Toronto School Board building (where the new TDSB building now stands) beside Mel Lastman Sq. in Willowdale.
> When performing his work as an undercover agent, Arctor goes by the name "Fred" and wears a "scramble suit" that conceals his identity from other officers. Then he is able to sit in a police facility and observe his housemates through "holo-scanners", audio-visual surveillance devices that are placed throughout the house.
When will we need to start wearing "scramble suits"
This may be a more accurate analogy... "The Porsche you rented at $200/mo now only allows you a maximum of 100km of travel. You will be automatically charged extra when you go over that."
I hit my limit on the project I've been working on (after I let "MAX" run out and moved to "PRO") after about only 2 hours!
TIP (YMMV): I've found that moving the current code base into a new 'project' after a dozen or so turns helps as I suspect the regurgitation of the old conversations chews up tokens.
It seems that anthropic has added something similar to their browser UI because just in the last few days chat has become almost unusable in firefox. %@$#%
Your tool's method of returning element references is clever and should greatly improve llm handling of the page components (and greatly reduce token cost).
It inspires me to tackle a project I've been holding off on for many years: OCR my grandmother/great-grandmother's cookbook. It's about 100 pages of collected and annotated recipes from the 1930-1980s.
OCR and AI have become sufficiently capable (as you've demonstrated) to properly scan, index, and classify the recipes into something I can share with relatives online or as an ebook.
I've ordered gizmos from Lilygo in the past and found their support/documentation/updates to be very poor. Once a product is out the door they seem to do little further with it.
Churning out new products seems to be their forte.
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