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This lament about the superficiality of publicly oriented endeavors is interesting cause this guy's life is inseparable from meta commentary. "George Francis H
by firasd 3mo ago
This lament about the superficiality of publicly oriented endeavors is interesting cause this guy's life is inseparable from meta commentary.
"George Francis Hotz (born October 2, 1989), known online by geohot, is an American security hacker, entrepreneur,[1] and software engineer. He is known for developing iOS jailbreaks,[2][3] reverse engineering the PlayStation 3, and for the subsequent lawsuit brought against him by Sony. From September 2015 until November 2025, he worked on his vehicle automation machine learning company comma.ai.[4] Since November 2022, Hotz has been working on tinygrad, a deep learning framework."
From the early legal controversy to today, if there's one thing we can expect from geohot, it's that he's gonna think he's god's gift to programming and everyone whose work he disagrees with are losers. But the bluster often doesn't result in much eg his plan to 'fix twitter search' didn't amount to anything (and today in June 2026 twitter search is way less reliable than it was pre-Elon/Hotz/etc in Oct 2022-- but I guess we can't say it's Hotz's fault cause like I said he did approximately nothing)
Punk is actually a good metaphor because the the angst in the music became the blockbuster 'brand' of the music. Being jaded and cynical doesn't make you inherently more interesting it just leaves you--'here', wherever this post is. The programmer equivalent of sporting a studded leather jacket and green mohawk
- tangenter 3mo ago[flagged]
- khalic 3mo agolol, are you the author by any chance?
- myrmidon 3mo agoUnlikely. This is him, at least according to that account: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=georgehotz https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=georgehotz
- khalic 3mo agoOh well, guess that settles it /s
- tangenter 3mo agoPeople flexing on HN not knowing who geohot is. Sad.
- bena 3mo agoI think you're being accused of being a sockpuppet.
- khalic 3mo agoBingo
- red-iron-pine 3mo ago51% of the internet is now bots. entirely possible it's not a person. but we're talking about geohot here, entirely possible he built an agent to handle all criticism
- georgehotz 3mo agoMy legend precedes me. I love when one of my blog posts reaches HN and I get to read a nice critique of my personality. I will make sure to incorporate all of your feedback so I can be the best person I can be!
- tough 3mo agoThanks for sharing your thoughts with us
- cluckindan 3mo agoOk clanker
- sarchertech 3mo ago> think he's god's gift to programming and everyone whose work he disagrees with are losers If he thinks like that (I don’t know him), he needs to limit the scope of what he works on to projects he can accomplish completely on his own.
- drannex 3mo agoThe thing is though is that he is a ridiculously good programmer, and accomplishes more on his own than most programmers do with a team, he is insanely good. Does this mean everything he does or says is right? absolutely not, sometimes its myopic and tunnel-vision induced with a smidgen of good points hidden within. Does he come across as 'off' to some people? a slight god-complex? is he likely hardcore autistic and miss practically all social niceties? absolutely, obviously unverifiable, true. He should have gone into Academia (not that he would have excelled at the 'school' side of it), and he still could, because I am sure in the future he will be an excellent eccentric and transformative professor or researcher, if he wasn't so caught up in the rat-race libertarian capitalistic technology scene. With all that said, even though we align on many things here, I don't think he or myself could stand being in a room with each other for anything more than a few minutes.
- sarchertech 3mo ago> The thing is though is that he is a ridiculously good programmer, and accomplishes more on his own than most programmers do with a team, he is insanely good. I don’t know the guy, but if what the person replied to is correct about how he views himself and people who disagree with him, it doesn’t matter how good he is. You don’t want to be on a team with that. You don’t want to hire that guy. It’s not worth it. Let him make something on his own and sell it to you. Or let him grow up a bit.
- serf 3mo ago>You don’t want to hire that guy. It’s not worth it. how many times in history does this need to be disproven? some of the most insufferable assholes in human history were absolutely brilliant once-in-an-era types. it's a chicken-or-egg question to ask whether or not the brilliance comes from the confidence or the other way around, but opinionated assholes that can't operate in traditional team settings have a proven track record of effectiveness in the world. the trick isn't to ignore the brilliance, the trick is to find a handler or method that works to smooth the burden so that your organization can take advantage of the brilliance without self-destructing. in fact, here's a rule of thumb. if any opinion anyone ever concludes with "Let's disconnect this human from society until they fix themselves" , well , I humbly disagree.
- solid_fuel 3mo agoHero worship is just so… tacky. Gross, maybe. It certainly has no place in 2026.
- nicman23 3mo agolol he is right. his work both on the ps3 and now with the hacked p2p drivers is powering many a lab
- ryan_n 3mo agohow does the ps3 hack "power many a lab"?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- khalic 3mo agoMaybe North Korean labs
- nicman23 3mo agowhat the ps3 or the tinygrad?
- zdragnar 3mo agoPS3's, prior to the otheros block, were turned into supercomputers in quite a few labs. The US Air Force had the 33rd fastest 'supercomputer' by building a networked cluster of them at one point. Doing this was substantially cheaper than actually purchasing a similarly powerful actual supercomputer. The hack allowed users to continue using them as such, though to what extent that persisted I don't actually know.
- cbdumas 3mo agoI worked as a undergrad assistant in a research lab in 2011-ish, and the lab had a shelf full of PS3s working as a cluster. Regretfully my project didn't get to use it.
- dgellow 3mo agoWasn’t that a cluster based on Sony’s official OtherOS feature? Multiple universities had such clusters
- m3047 3mo agoI'll leave this here, although it 404s now: http://www.bsc.es/projects/deepcomputing/linuxoncell/ http://www.bsc.es/projects/deepcomputing/linuxoncell/
- crtasm 3mo agoarchive: https://web.archive.org/web/20101021072500/http://www.bsc.es/projects/deepcomputing/linuxoncell/ https://web.archive.org/web/20101021072500/http://www.bsc.es...