4 ms·
Hard to take seriously from a guy who has Facebook, Google, and Twitter on his CV.
by d1sxeyes 9mo ago
Hard to take seriously from a guy who has Facebook, Google, and Twitter on his CV.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- flanked-evergl 9mo agoAll inequality is inequity and other hot takes from people of privilege.
- fnoef 9mo agoI noticed an interesting pattern. People who “made it” usually by working high paying jobs for the neofeudal lords, suddenly gain moral compass and tell the rest of us to not work for said neofeudal lords, because “money is not important”, and apparently you can buy a place to live or food to feed your family simply by having principles.
- dizlexic 9mo agoIt’s remarkably easy to tell others not to do what you did.
- breppp 9mo agoit's simply the principle of fuck you money that's why they are also more egocentric, racist, etc. When people do not feel the threat of society it is easier to have opinions that verge out of the norm or could restrict further employment (and also opinions that are wrongfully or rightfully policed in society)
- GardenLetter27 9mo agoMoney is less important once you've already paid off your mansion.
- oefrha 9mo agoI also chuckled when an ex-Facebook employee whose blog is popular on HN lectured us on "web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you here".
- weinzierl 9mo agoI agree with your point, and superficially OP is a prime example. Not to excuse the guy, but I think that, looking deeper, the situation with geohot is more involved. He grew up in a lower-middle-class household and was lucky to be a smart kid in a time when being a nerd could be a ticket out. I guess not unlike many of us here on HN. Unlike many of us, his explorations in the corporate world were all short stints. If I’ve kept tabs correctly, he never stayed longer than a year. Sometimes only for weeks. Apart from that, I often take the pattern you noticed more as confession, penance, and a "tell your children not to walk my way" kind of message. Maybe I read this stuff too generously.
- fnoef 9mo agoSure, self awareness is important. When you tell your kids not to walk your way, you take accountability. You say that what you did was bad, and you are accountable for it. You also acknowledge that what you did brought you to where you are, but given the chance you would take a different way. It’s not bad to have moral principles after you’ve done what you fight against, as long as you do it with accountability and self awareness. OPs post had neither.
- d1sxeyes 9mo agoThen he should know better the line he’s selling. “Opt out of capitalism” doesn’t work when you’re trying to feed your family. He offers no alternative, speaks from a place of safety with no acknowledgment that the people he’s addressing don’t have the same safety net as he does.[0] He’s not wrong. We are all fucked. But if it were as simple as “not participating” (whatever that means), then we wouldn’t be. [0]: to be fair he does address others at tech companies, maybe he assumes that everyone working in big tech has a safety net, which is perhaps not as unreasonable as I first thought.
- mlrtime 9mo agoProbably not a popular opinion but this is why capitalism works. We all work to compete for what is best for US and our Family, not what someone tells us to work on because they think they know whats better, they don't.
- esotericwarfare 9mo agoRead this one: http://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2021/06/23/pieces-of-shit.html http://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2021/06/23/pieces... >Capitalism is so rigged it isn’t fun anymore.
- kaliqt 9mo agoI fail to see your point. He's very well traveled is all.
- MattGaiser 9mo agoIn case he is wrong about money, he has already hedged himself.
- shomp 9mo agotraveling more would inspire one to think positively of capitalism, rather than the reverse. to quote andrew carnegie roughly, the status quo has always been misery for everyone, and just recently have we begun to extricate ourselves from it. not to mention that it is sheer derangement of luxury to have plenty of funding for one's own family, and yet vocally dissuade others from taking the same steps, for some "end game theoretical" that certainly won't arrive in single digit generations
- heeen2 9mo agoI'm guessing his soapbox has a nice cushion from his previous jobs.
- petesergeant 9mo agoSo?
- d1sxeyes 9mo agoMy point is after you’ve worked at Facebook, Google, and Twitter, telling us you had a nightmare that you worked at Amazon is hard to swallow. Ranting about how everyone else should opt-out after he’s filled his cup at the bosom of these behemoths is hard to swallow. In his defence, he does say that he’s targeting folks who already work in big tech.
- myst 9mo agoThat is exactly why I’d take it seriously.
- ares623 9mo agoWill you take it seriously from someone who _hasn't_ worked at those companies? It's a realistic take. I personally wouldn't absolve him of his contribution though.
- raphman 9mo agoa) On such a topic I would trust someone who has worked there even more than someone who only experienced how these companies work from the outside. b) I'd argue that decentralization of power and knowledge has always been a main driver for George Hotz¹²³ and possibly a reason why he is no longer at Facebook, Google, Twitter. ¹) https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/10/06/always-been-at-war.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/10/06/alway... ²) https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/11/04/disrupt-the-government.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/11/04/disru... ³) https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2021/06/10/a-circulation-of-the-elites.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2021/06/10/a-cir...
- ben_w 9mo agoHe worked for Facebook for less than a year back when Zuck had just been Time Person of the Year, Google before it dropped the "Don't be evil" motto and code of conduct, that really only leaves his time as Twitter as a "what were you thinking?" because it was after Musk bought it… compensated for somewhat by him leaving it quickly. Even with the poor judgement to join Musk's twitter at all, he left a few weeks after joining, soon after ChatGPT was released. Before ChatGPT, the idea that the singularity was anywhere near was utterly fringe: tech version of all the new-age stuff, I think Charlie Stross described it as "Rapture for atheists" or something like that. It's now… well, a lot of people with a lot of power are trying to *make it* be the singularity. I still don't think this is "it", despite how useful I find what we do have, but of the top 10 valued companies by market cap in Q4 last year, 9 are chasing it, the money is definitely interested, in a way it just wasn't when he worked at those places.