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
Many research labs in scientific fields other than CS need a lot of compute power and have an insufficient budget.
In the PS3 era, the PS3 had the highest compute power (FLOPS) to cost ratio of any commercially-available computer, due to a combination of its parallel architecture and the fact that Sony's business model was to sell the console at a loss and make up the money by taking shares of game revenue (and by charging $6 a month to allow the console to connect to the Internet)
But it turned out that it was possible to jailbreak the PS3 to run software other than certified PS3 games (this was officially allowed at first, but Sony quickly pulled the plug). And as a result, the best bang for your buck for "highly parallel we just need FLOPS" supercomputer workloads was to build a rack of PlayStation 3s.
> Sony actually allowed "OtherOS" until Geohot screwed it up for everybody and they locked it down.
I recall exploits allowing some level of access to the RSX and other components Sony had locked away from OtherOS as far back as 2007, and Sony had already removed OtherOS from the PS3 Slim with no warning or explanation in August of 2009.
Geohot didn't even start on the PS3 until December of 2009. At that point Sony had already made it clear that they no longer saw value in OtherOS and wanted to get rid of it. Geohot's exploit (which was janky, required external hardware, and didn't even enable homebrew much less piracy) gave them a convenient excuse but there's no reason to believe they wouldn't have jumped on any other excuse.
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I do love how Sony immediately learned the hard way that there are a lot of very skilled people out there who are more than happy to play in a sandbox and not make a mess in the rest of the yard as long as it gives them enough room to do something interesting, but if you take the sandbox away they're going to play everywhere else.
PS3'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.
I 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.
I know but updating your system is a choice, it was perfectly fine to keep your clusters at an older firmware version. I know for a fact that a university in my home town managed such a ps3 clusters after 2010
Okay so circa 2011 it was powering some labs. Don't think there are many/any frontier labs in 2026 running ps3's, or at least no one has provided any evidence of that still..
Much later, I got to deploy 20,000 PS5 chips to mine ethereum. When PoS happened, we shut it all down. Now those boards (BC-250) are being sold on ebay for $200 and people are running AI on them.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
So you want to employ unreformed murderers, psychopaths, rapists etc. Or do you have a line somewhere?
Better question, are you fine with not hiring assholes who aren’t brilliant?
> So you want to employ unreformed murderers, psychopaths, rapists etc. Or do you have a line somewhere?
Key phrase in the quote was 'until they fix themselves', reformation by other means, particularly therapy (prisons are not therapy, and incredibly inefficient, which is why they have such a high recidivism rate). So, sure, we should employ *reformed* murderers, psychopaths, etc. As long as they have had adequate therapy and confirmed reformation. Of course, on a tight leash, but nonetheless, yes.
Plus, just being an asshole doesn't mean someone can't be reasoned with, sometimes you need an asshole or two on the team to get shit done. The ability to stand your ground with a considerable weapon of knowledge on your back is not asshole behavior, that's just knowing your shit.
I wouldn't hire anyone if they weren't brilliant. I would and do hire knowledgeable assholes, because they tend to know their shit so well that its all they know. That's why I hire them.
> Key phrase in the quote was 'until they fix themselves', reformation by other means, particularly therapy.
So you’d be fine with don’t hire assholes until someone else
fixes them.
> Plus, just being an asshole doesn't mean someone can't be reasoned with, sometimes you need an asshole or two on the team to get shit done. The ability to stand your ground with a considerable weapon of knowledge on your back is not asshole behavior, that's just knowing your shit.
I agree with your 2nd sentence, but that also means that you don’t actually need to hire assholes.
> I wouldn't hire anyone if they weren't brilliant. I would and do hire knowledgeable assholes, because they tend to know their shit so well that its all they know. That's why I hire them.
I think the issue here is that you might be confusing people who can stand up for themselves, don’t bullshit, and don’t like to put up with bullshit with assholes.
> I think the issue here is that you might be confusing people who can stand up for themselves, don’t bullshit, and don’t like to put up with bullshit with assholes.
You are correct - looks like we had two alternative definitions, we agree with each other here! I categorize your definition of assholes as 'dicks', that makes sense.
He is good, yes. There are are a lot of really good programmers, his fanboyschere make him sound like super genius mr.robot its so tacky and cringe. What did he really accomplish
My 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!
"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