That is not a pivot I would have expected. Aviation turbines are not good utility turbines. If you just need to beef up your turbine engineering, drone turbines are probably the place to go. Less competition from GE etc.
I don't think they expected it either, but it's building expertise in that general area, the question is if that expertise will transfer back over to supersonic jet engines, or if they're different enough that they can't.
Hierarchy and plurality are essential properties of any functioning information space.
- People with expertise / exceptional qualities are by definition out-numbered by the rest, so there must be privileged seats if you want quality to become represented.
- Social coherence requires turning lots of conversations into a few, again requiring fewer privileged seats to represent views efficiently and have conversations between well-informed people trusted by those they represent.
- Preventing runaway power feedback loops from reinforcing one single set of views requires that independent hierarchies can exist, which is pluralism.
Positron | Bootstrapping Startup | South Korea | Co-founder
Equity-only co-founders. If you must take a salary position, send us a resume with "Salary only" and we'll check back later.
We're developing an efficient social-decision model so that communities can organize social-finance campaigns and effectively administrate funds without being beholden to one creator. Keeping funds in the hands of backers creates accountability and is one key to taking social finance to the next level.
We say that our social tech "makes the money smarter." It will do this by making communities smarter. How we do social will change how every future social platform gets built and will upset every social product on the market. Society will benefit tremendously from the more coherent discourse.
To bootstrap our platform, we are developing an music visualizer called MuTate. It will soon be powered by our in-house machine learning tricks, which do not rely on back-propagation in order to enable radical forward architectures that are smaller and easier to develop and train. This work directly impacts our mission and aligns us both with consumer enthusiasm for small & local AI to run outside the cloud and with people working on hard problems that need AI tool-kits they can embed their own world models within.
We are using PrizeForge as a better kind of Patreon while we finish our crowd cognition implementation and start to integrate social decisions with our existing social finance.
Our entire tech stack is Rust where possible. We use Leptos, Axum, Postgres with SQLx. It's like a full-stack typescript setup, but with Rust and WASM. MuTate uses Rust, the Vulkan API, and Slang.
Anyone who materially accelerates the trajectory of the company will participate proportionately in the rewards. Our work on MuTate will put us default-viable. Our work on crowd cognition and community-organized campaigns will likewise make use default-viable.
Korean language skill is optional but anticipate learning business Korean and translating a lot. Same timezone is as far as will be considered remote unless you're physically stuck in Ukraine etc and begin by contributing on MuTate.
Not just relative to other billionaires, relative to the average American, he never went after get rich quick schemes, has a reputation less dirty, values life-long relationships more, and fell to not one of so many traps and dynamics that see many successful people trash their own legacy.
The internet citizen is so often convinced that everyone with a high net worth is crooked, cheated to get where they are at, and would be even more morally corrupt if only they weren't so undeserving as to be incompetent of the ways to do so.
So often the ambitious can believe that to succeed one must perform ultra sexy acts of innovation multiplied by inhuman hours of naive young team members. This pressure can drive us to be impatient, reckless, and unscrupulous.
When we look at most startup CEOs who make it big, we say "don't try to emulate them" because we know they took huge risks and rolled at least a few good numbers. A person can emulate Warren Buffet. It's just patient and prudent, avoiding self-deception for decades. Yet it is excruciating. If not for Warren Buffet, so many would say, "It's not worth it" or "It will never work because you'll slip up."
Being at least an anecdote that being honest and right can work out in the long run is a herculean counterweight against the vast traps of cynicism that can lead many to defeat themselves before they even try. It's tough to keep going or commit to that path, especially as your options keep going up. Few else tried because it takes an entire lifetime. Making it work saved a lot of people from a lot of imprudent choices and will continue to save more. That is heroic.
At some point the biggest enemy is the inner cynicism that would tear down perfection manifest to avoid seeing even the bare idea of an aspiration and the consequent actions it would motivate.
1984 was published in 1949. GNU and the FSF are contemporary with Neuromancer. The BSD license predates the GPL and the idea of copyleft by several years. It takes a village to raise a child.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses the 4-clause (GPL incompatible) BSD license was 1988, 3-clause (the one everyone uses now) was 1990. It got rid of the advertising clause at RMS's behest. RMS spent a long time wrangling for that change.
GPL1 was 1989. I'm not sure if RMS was involved with BSD3. The MIT license as used in MIT Athena and X windows was somewhat earlier, like 1986, and is similar to BSD3.
GNU Emacs as released around 1984 had its own license similar to GPL1, called the Emacs General Public License (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft). The term "copyleft" per that article originated in 1984 or 1985.
I semi-remember that GPL1 was mostly ported from the Emacs GPL, basically substituting "The Program" for "Emacs". I don't remember if the Emacs GPL used the term "Copyleft".
The informal distribution terms for PDP-10 Emacs in the 1970's were an antecedent of copyleft that RMS called the "Emacs Commune". Distribute freely but you were (informally) required to send in changes and improvements. See: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_as_in_Freedom_(2002)/Cha... The GPL's were somewhat a codification of the Emacs Commune.
It wasn't like the MIT and BSD stuff happened with with RMS in a state of ignorance either. He obviously wasn't in control of anything outside the GNU project, but he was involved in lots of discussions with MIT and Berkeley about licensing and other issues.
That was sort of complicated and I'm not sure whether the BSD4 license development was related. It's possible (I don't know) that BSD4 was developed for some other reason like the VLSI tools Berkeley was releasing at the time.
Regarding BSD itself, there was a lawsuit between AT&T (or some successor) and UC, that was settled by UC having to delete some files from the BSD distro but then being off the hook with regard to the rest. That made it possible to freely distribute the BSD distro. The BSD distro existed long before the lawsuit, but you originally had to be a Unix licensee to get it. Then I think Berkeley tried to get rid of the AT&T files and release the rest under BSD4 but there was still some FUD. They got sued and in the settlement they agreed to delete a few more files, which removed any remaining legal clouds.
Fwiw the legal doubts about BSD during that period (pre-settlement) are basically why the Linux kernel became popular despite being far less mature than the BSD kernel at the time. People were afraid to run BSD because of the potential for AT&T lawsuits. The basic Unix userspace utilities were presumably long gone since they were full of AT&T code, but the GNU counterparts mostly existed by then.
I don't think the specifics matter much by now, but I didn't like the misstated history that I responded to.
In the broad strokes, the inaccuracy is to suggest that nobody besides the FSF and RMS were converging to many of the same conclusions at the same time. The FSF did a good job of tying their ideas to a ratchet (GPL and copyright assignment) that would continue to pull in influence. That influence and recognition did not bring any benefit to open source (one of their childish "can't words"). Instead, it merely brought donations into the FSF and starved oxygen from a generation of others.
Hundreds of thousands of developers with access to a global communication network were not stopped by AMD. Why act like dependents or wait for some bright star of consensus unless the intent is really about getting the work for free?
We don't have to wait for singular companies or foundations to fix ecosystem problems. Only the means of coordination are needed. https://prizeforge.com isn't there yet, but it is already capable of bootstrapping its own development. Matching funds, joining the team, or contributing on MuTate will all make the ball pick up speed faster.
>We don't have to wait for singular companies or foundations to fix ecosystem problems.
Geohot has been working on this for about a year, and every roadblock he's encountered he has had to damn near pester Lisa Su about getting drivers fixed. If you want the CUDA replacement that would work on AMD, you need to wait on AMD. If there is a bug in the AMD microcode, you are effectively "stopped by AMD".
We have to platform and organize people, not rely on lone individuals. If there is a deep well of aligned interest, that interest needs a way to represent itself so that AMD has something to talk to, on a similar footing as a B2B relationship. When you work with other companies with hundreds and thousands of employees, it's natural that emails from individuals get drowned out or misunderstood as circulated around.
You can see in his table he calls out his AMD system as having "Good" GPU support, vs. "Great" for nvidia. So, yes, I would argue he is doing the work to platform and organize people, on a professional level to sell AMD systems in a sustainable manner - everything you claim that needs to be done and he is still bottlenecked by AMD.
A single early-stage company is not ecosystem-scale organization. It is instead the legacy benchmark to beat. This is what we do today because the best tools in our toolbox are a corporation or a foundation.
Whether AMD stands to benefit from doing more or less, we are likely in agreement that Tinygrad is a small fraction of the exposed interest and that if AMD were in conversation with a more organized, larger fraction of that interest, that AMD would do more.
I'm not defending AMD doing less. I am insisting that ecosystems can do more and that the only reason they don't is because we didn't properly analyze the problems or develop the tools.
The natural can create the formal. An extremely intuitive proof is that human walked to Greece and created new formalisms from pre-historic cultures that did not have them.
Gödel's incompleteness theorems are a formal argument that only the natural can create the formal (because no formal system can create all others).
Tarski's undefinability theorem gives us the idea that we need different languages for formalization and the formalisms themselves.
The Howard Curry correspondence concludes that the formalisms that pop out are indistinguishable from programs.
Altogether we can basically synthesize a proof that AGI means automatic formalization, which absolutely requires strong natural systems employed to create new formal systems.
I ended up staying with some family who were watching The Voice. XG performed Glam, and now that I have spit many other truths, may you discover the truth that motivates my work on swapchain resizing. I wish the world would not waste my time and their own, but bootstrapping is about using the merely sufficient to make the good.
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