10 comments

  • paxys1 hour ago
    Lots of words and weird analogies to say basically nothing.<p>What is the status of the project? What can it do? What has it achieved in 5 years?<p>But no, let&#x27;s highlight how we follow the &quot;Elon process&quot;.<p>As a side note, whenever someone incessantly focuses on lines of code as a metric (in either direction), I immediately start to take them less seriously.
    • dewey49 minutes ago
      Using lines of code as a metric for productivity is bad. Using it to show how simple something is, or how a refactor removed x lines of code that doesn’t need to be maintained any more isn’t such a bad thing I’d say.
      • alphazard36 minutes ago
        Yeah this is exactly right, if you can trust the contributors to not code-golf or otherwise Goodhart the LOC metric, then it&#x27;s a reasonable measure of complexity.<p>It doesn&#x27;t work as well when you start mixing languages, or generating code.
      • whilenot-dev43 minutes ago
        TFA includes a time measurement though, and 5 years for 18&#x27;935 SLOC doesn&#x27;t scream quite &quot;how simple something is&quot;.
      • selkin21 minutes ago
        Less LOC also doesn&#x27;t imply simplicity: just look at the demoscene, which often has the former but not the latter.
    • jszymborski1 hour ago
      From [0]:<p>&quot;When we can reproduce a common set of papers on 1 NVIDIA GPU 2x faster than PyTorch. We also want the speed to be good on the M1. ETA, Q2 next year.&quot;<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinygrad.org&#x2F;#tinybox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinygrad.org&#x2F;#tinybox</a>
    • piskov22 minutes ago
      He was able to run nvidia gpu on mac via thunderbolt with tinygrad.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;pc-components&#x2F;gpus&#x2F;tiny-corp-successfully-runs-an-nvidia-gpu-on-arm-macbook-through-usb4-using-an-external-gpu-docking-station" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;pc-components&#x2F;gpus&#x2F;tiny-corp-su...</a><p>—<p>Check tinygrad’s twitter account for specifics if you want to catch up on progress
  • still-learning1 hour ago
    &gt;People get hired by contributing to the repo. It’s a very self directed job, with one meeting a week and a goal of making tinygrad better<p>I find this organizational structure compelling, probably the closest to reaching 100% productivity in a week as you can get.
    • ttul1 hour ago
      I wonder what happened to George’s old policy of requiring everyone to move to San Diego?
      • georgehotz51 minutes ago
        That&#x27;s comma.ai&#x27;s policy since they make hardware and solve physical problems. The tiny corp has been hybrid (remote-first) since day 1 because it primarily writes open source software, and there&#x27;s a long track record of success with remote for this kind of task.<p>We have a few whole-team meetups in Hong Kong each year for 2-4 weeks, and there&#x27;s a San Diego or Hong Kong office that anyone can work from as they choose. We also have a wide array of fancy multi GPU boxes that everyone on the team gets full access to (known external contributors can get some access also).<p>I think many companies that were quick to embrace remote have walked it back, not everyone is capable of working productively remotely, nor are all types of work amenable to remote.
  • alphazard32 minutes ago
    &gt; To fund the operation, we have a computer sales division that makes about $2M revenue a year.<p>What&#x27;s the margin on that? Do 5 software engineers really subsist on the spread from moving $2M&#x2F;yr in hardware?
    • piskov24 minutes ago
      George raised $5.1M in 2023 for Tinygrad
  • pa7ch2 hours ago
    Very weird to market this as subscribing to &quot;Elon process for software&quot;<p>I remember when defcon ctf would play Geohot&#x27;s PlayStation rap video every year on the wall.
    • spiderfarmer1 hour ago
      I hate it when ‘inspirational’ quotes are attributed to the person with the largest audience and not the people who came up with it, like in this case, the engineers at Lockheed’s Skunk Works.
      • piskov1 minute ago
        You would be amazed<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;TRIZ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;TRIZ</a>
  • measurablefunc1 hour ago
    Is it really &quot;Complex&quot;? Or did we just make it &quot;Complicated&quot;? - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY</a>
    • alphazard30 minutes ago
      Programming a GPU in 2025 is complex, that might be because it has been made complicated, but regardless, it is not complexity that this project can control.<p>The fact that it competes with PyTorch in so few lines speaks to the incredibly low incidental complexity imposed by Tinygrad.
  • mika69962 hours ago
    What would tinygrad replace if they continue to proceed like this?
  • piskov27 minutes ago
    &gt; tinygrad is following the Elon process for software. Make the requirements less dumb. The best part is no part.<p>That’s not Elon. See Russian TRIZ<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;TRIZ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;TRIZ</a>
  • deburo2 hours ago
    So this is all python? I bet Chris Lattner probably approached them.
    • zephen1 hour ago
      Lattner is a smart guy, but I think Mojo might be the wrong direction.<p>Time will tell.<p>History has not so far been kind to projects which attempt to supplant cPython, whether they are other Python variants such as PyPy, or other languages such as julia.<p>Python has a lot of detractors, but (despite some huge missteps with the 2-3 transition) the core team keeps churning out stuff that people want to use.<p>Mojo is being positioned &quot;as a member of the Python family&quot; but, like Pyrex&#x2F;Cython, it has special syntax, and even worse, the calling convention is both different than Python, and depends on the type of variable being passed. And the introspection is completely missing.
  • timzaman1 hour ago
    Fell bad for geohotz. Such a lovely guy, i hope he strikes it right soon
    • still-learning1 hour ago
      Seems like he&#x27;s doing fine, why do you feel bad for him?
  • vileain2 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • dang1 hour ago
      &quot;<i>Please don&#x27;t pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.</i>&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>
      • vileain47 minutes ago
        &quot;<i>Please don&#x27;t post shallow dismissals, especially of other people&#x27;s work. A good critical comment teaches us something.</i>&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>
    • mycodendral1 hour ago
      the value is the directness, not implied origination<p>not everyone cares about playing voldemort
      • vileain32 minutes ago
        What is so aggrandizingly &#x27;direct&#x27; about calling the system you are attempting to improve &#x27;dumb&#x27;?
    • spiderfarmer1 hour ago
      There are lots of bubbles where Elon is still king. Those bubbles are often void of deodorant.
      • vileain1 hour ago
        Based on the response it appears HN is one such bubble.
        • spiderfarmer58 minutes ago
          Elon spent billions to buy a platform and promote his tweets. He spent billions more to create a tweaked AI model that praised him like a mad king.<p>He only has to spend a couple thousand a month to influence comment ranking on HN.