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!
I remember watching this urban exploration video, the guy went into an abandoned Russian nuclear bunker, deep underground. Watching this titanic effort of engineering, made by people who were both highly intelligent and had vast resources at their disposal, yet felt it necessary to build it to have an answer to the unthinkable horrors the future held, all of this reflected in the sturdy but utilitarian design of the concrete complex, rooms filled with all sorts of pumps, air filters, and electronic equipment necessary to sustain human civilization after the bomb fell. As the guy walked from room to room, he noticed that in one of the rooms was a set of old PCs. The power was on. He switched it on, and suddenly the familiar bootup chime of Windows 95 played, and he was looking at a desktop. He sat down, started clicking around, opened Solitaire, started playing. Suddenly all the tension dropped, I forgot where I was. The whole thing felt comfortable, even pedestrian. I had to actively remind myself that the guy was many stories underground in an abandoned bunker, likely patrolled by active military.
Computers even at their crudest have a hypnotic ability to bring you into their world, and somehow make you forget about the reality you live in. This is not the only mechanism of society that does this, but certainly one of the most powerful we found in recent history.
From the article: "... there is no other Internet, just a place with five corporate towns and some Chinese ones that are really hard to visit if you don’t speak Chinese."
Yeah, that's only true if you don't hang out in the old-style Internet. I spend most of my time on blogs, reading and replying to discussions on wide-ranging topics, talking to interesting people who know a lot more than I do about many subjects (in fact, most subjects that aren't computer programming) The discussion isn't on Disqus, it's not monetized, it's just... people talking to each other. And it's an active, fun community.
They're out there. Just... choose to disengage with the boring communities. I haven't had a Facebook account in years; I only got one because at the time there was a social group I belonged to that was using Facebook as their primary communication tool, and when I moved to another city I deleted my Facebook account. I never signed up for Twitter. Didn't want an account when it started, didn't want one five years ago, don't want one now.
It's possible to disengage from the artificial, and find real communication with real people. The first step is to just... stop logging onto Facebook. Just walk away.
Ironically, when people moved their communities to Reddit and discord they only helped to enable the AI theft of this culture
Forums were easy to search. The threads were mostly chronological and easy to stay in touch with.
These corporate platforms are designed to promote reposting. Always “new” content and impossible to find anything else. keep the user reloading that feed at all costs. And behind the scenes the corporations are mining your activity
I’m somewhat optimistic that as future generations of LLMs keep scanning this new LLM driven social media landscape, the models will collapse and the content will just suck more and more.
And people with interesting takes and novel ways of expressing them leave the corporate platforms, and we return to the humble days of user owned platforms without all the bots
After all, it’s easier than ever to build a platform now that we have LLMs to do all the chore work
AI culture theft works just as well on phpBB as it does on Reddit. What we really lost from moving to centralised platforms was independent moderation. On Reddit you obey Reddit policies even if you don't like them. There are piracy communities on Discord where you can't mention "piracy" but have to call it other words so that the autobanner won't autoban you or the community.
Unfortunately, running an online forum has been a pain for a long time. You have to promote the forum to keep it active, deal with various bad actors (historically spammers, trolls, and black hats), maintain the forum, deal with drama, etc. It adds up and largely isn't appreciated. People act like a forum exists by itself, but it doesn't.
And in the last 5 years, running an online forum has become more of a pain given how badly behaved some bots are. Just recently, I installed Anubis on some online forums I run, and I've been amazed by how much traffic dropped. Before, server load was becoming a problem to the point where all the forums I ran were taken offline by their hosts! I have been thinking about how there's a need for a forum software which produces static HTML for the content, while all dynamic components are behind a login. Bots won't increase server load much in this case. If the forum administrator decides to end the forum, they can easily keep hosting the content without any future maintenance beyond paying the bills. Two of the forums I run are just archives at this point, and I'd love to be able to flip a switch and make them static HTML... (I probably will adapt some script I found on GitHub do to this in the future, maybe with help from LLMs.)
I really don't like hearing people complain that they miss communities that have died out. You can't expect someone else to create a community, because what you're going to get is a corporation creating one in exchange for money.
If you miss a community, go be a part of one, that'll help everyone! I'm a part of a maker community and it's fantastic, the only thing that's missing is more makers talking about the weird stuff they're building!
I wouldn't be surprised no one knows how to make a community like they old ones.i just knew they were there.usually forums attached to some content. How would you create one today?
Yeah, some people really need to take a step back from where they hang out. If you think all there is to the internet is the Five Places and the Weird Chinese Thing (paraphrasing from OP), you’re being quite myopic.
Heck, do we even know anyone that truly hangs out there? The people around me are talking to each other on WhatsApp and Discord. Otherwise they’re playing mobile games, which is its own issue.
I got into role-playing, the VTES card game, some board games, and had a kid. Turns out most people wanna hang out offline, and otherwise use chat apps to talk about their hobbies. Then there’s all the great bloggers that write about parenting and the newsletters that cover positive news the media doesn’t spin.
The internet is fine. Now if we could get the crawlers and bots to behave a bit…
I find it hard to believe. People literally copy-paste comments from facebook to those comment sections. It's no different in the end, the mainstream is awful and it's invaded every brain.
How do you find those? I haven't been able to find an invite to a private tracker since my IRC days 20 years ago. PhpBB forums, are there any still around?
Idk. I believe you and I think you're right, but I don't even really know where to start even so
> I’ve been scraping dating sites and feeding them to ChatGPT, and it’s amazing how few of the profiles still say anything about the person.
Yeah, it's common knowledge now that you can't put many identifying details into a dating profile - there are creeps out there doing things like harvesting them and feeding them into ChatGPT.
I really like this style of writing in short bursts, and I appreciate the author's tone and concerns.
I do wonder if the author is very young. As much as I enjoyed his small essay, a few things stuck right out at me:
>I tried having a flip phone once (2014), but you couldn’t find out what time the movies were playing because moviephone just redirected you to their app.
This has been a solved problem for a long time: you look up the movie times and such prior to departing for the movies. No smartphone needed.
>And it’s not like there’s anywhere to go. The real world is strip malls and axe throwing and escape rooms. Oh god people actually go on a hinge date to axe throwing and think it’s the real world.
You can escape, but you'll never hear about it by either checking online, or by listening to very-online people. Go on a hike. It doesn't even have to be a good one. Just go do it. Maybe say hi to some people you meet while you're there. You probably won't develop a deep friendship with them, but you will have a real, face-to-face human interaction.
Living away from the internet can now only be done intentionally. It can be done, though, but it's not the automatic choice. It's not even difficult ... it's just "manual." You must always think about what you want to do and how you want to do it. It's a skill that will come back to you. Or, if the author never learned it, a skill he still has a chance to learn.
What we've lost is getting to feel like you're connected to a common culture. This is a big, big loss, but it is not everything. The tools you need to escape are all around you. Power off your devices. Get some books at your local library. Try leaving your devices off all weekend, even when you get anxious, and bored, and your brain cries out for the easy, automatic stimulation it's become so accustomed to. Lay in bed and stare at the ceiling until your brain creates interesting thoughts out of your boredom. It's possible.
Well, I guess our only choice is to own an expensive corporate surveillance device. There's no other option. The ancient polynesians managed to learn to navigate huge, open seas by memorizing the stars. The ancient Greeks managed to measure the size of the sun with trigonometry and grit alone. We've mapped the genome and soon we may even cure inherited illnesses, or bring extinct species back to live.
But I hear you. What if I wanted to know what movies were playing, but I was already at a restaurant? What could I possibly do? The only answer is a smart phone. There's no choice, and no escape.
> What if I wanted to know what movies were playing, but I was already at a restaurant? What could I possibly do?
Do you actually have a solution here or what?
Call the theater? Do you have their phone number memorized? Phone Books and Pay Phones basically don't exist anymore, remember.
Do you just drive to the theater after the meal and check in person? Who is going to agree to that anymore? People will just say "nah maybe next time" and go home
Like it or not, society has changed. Social expectations have changed.
I'm just so frustrated by how quickly and easily people give in to these things. People face relatively small inconveniences and quickly give away their rights. Smart phones and social media (in large part, enabled by always-on, always-present smart phones) have so, so many negatives effects and people won't even consider moving on. "It's hard to find parking" or "some restaurants are now inconvenient to eat at" are measured next to "the suicide rate of teen girls is spiking" and "we've enabled government tracking and surveillance on a scale never before thought possible." I don't know how else to be. People are so obsessed with immediate impulse satisfaction and immediate comfort that they'd give up anything. I think if you offered to remove someone's right to vote, but told them they would be able to gamble for free once a month you'd lose half the votes in the country.
That’s a good clarification, thanks for writing it. I think you and the uncle post by bluefirebrand are both right: the social expectations are different enough now that there really might not be a practical alternative for most people to the corporate surveillance pocket computer—and you’re not wrong that the shift in values and priorities that indicates is pretty scary and grim.
the problem is not the people who want impulse satisfaction, comfort, and convenience - these are all perfectly normal human desires. the problem is that we as a society have allowed predators to tie these needs to surveillance and addiction engineering. there is no intrinsic reason that couldn't have been regulated against - look at some of the absolutely idiotic things the government is willing to spend time and money in micromanaging.
Oh man, the past was fucking wild, because you would do this. You'd just show up to the theater and look at what was playing. Or, if you were close to a store, you'd go and buy a newspaper that had the movie listings for your local theaters.
I can relate. For a brief, shining month, I worked at Tower Records, and one of the duties when we closed was to get on the PA (through the phone system) and make the announcements about the store closing.
Now these announcements were supposed to be brief and structured, but when they permitted me to make them, I couldn't resist cracking up and laughing for some reason, in the middle of recitation, and so never mastered the art of making the announcements for the store. Pretty sad.
But I do recall those days, when movie theaters had all their showtimes on tape. I know that the movie theater is a place that we would never expect to reach a human on the phone. Because that announcement would play, for as long as it needed at a multiplex, and then repeat or cut off. And you were supposed to figure out the showtimes by picking through the linear verbal announcement and choosing your favorite film. I can only imagine the teenage staff who are mostly paid in concessions, how they would get to recording that stuff!
It can be it's own "adventure" just to go to the movies and pick something that's playing. You can end up seeing a movie you wouldn't have because you didn't spend 20 minutes reading the negative reviews of and it turns out to be fun.
I discovered a lot of new things by being forced to make choices from limited set of options.
So, I'm a college instructor, and sometimes I find myself reading a paper that I dislike -- and as I get into it I'm finding that I'm mentally arguing with the content and the actual argument(s) (as opposed to "quality of writing") and that's when I realize this person should get a good grade.
This is like that for me; he sounds kind of annoying, but as they say, points were made.
Ah, sorry, I wasn't familiar with him. Looks like he was born in 1989, and so is not so young. I'm a bit baffled to hear that he doesn't think he can escape his smartphone given that he was resourceful enough to jailbreak an iPhone 4 back in the day. I understand he's speaking poetically and emotionally. Maybe he just means he has the knowledge but not the means.
I am a similar age to Geohot and I have tried to escape smartphones to a dumb phone. It didn’t work. So many things that used to work without a smartphone don’t anymore and people don’t realize it.
• Surface parking in my city is all by QR code. Where there are machines, they are broken because no one cares.
• Social groups are on iMessage or RCS. RCS is not nearly as backwards compatible with MMS as it seems and you WILL get dropped silently, eventually.
• Some restaurants literally don’t have print menus (they’re expensive! QR codes are cheap!).
• Rideshare, bike rentals, etc. are all dependent on apps. Taxis are not reliable or available.
The list of tiny cuts goes on and on. When you have a smartphone you don’t realize the affordances that made it possible to be without them are disappearing.
I’m sure you can do it in a smaller place but you have to be dedicated and willing to suffer in a city.
Similar age as well, and damn, if I could actually convince my bank to let me approve transactions with a dumbphone... The reality is just that a significant part of the modern world is contingent on carrying around a brand-name smartphone
Now imagine how poor people stress if their smartphone bricks or gets damaged or lost. Or if they're homeless, in which case the likelihood of their possesions getting damaged is probably much higher.
It's weird that people are sleepwalking into this single point-of-failure dystopia instead of regulating it out existence and only realize it when their phone gets damaged or lost or is glitching in some deal-breaking way.
Here's a tip, if you want people to help you out don't start with, "I don't have an smartphone..."
Instead, say a variation of "Hey, my camera's broken/the app keeps crashing on my phone. Can you help me out?" People tend to be a lot more sympathetic.
I've never had issues with the restaurant QR thing.
me:"Hey, my camera doesn't work can you help me out?"
waiter: "Sure you can take a look on my phone/use this tablet."
Like, I have to fix my phone's camera before I can park in your city? are you kidding me?
For a long time, but not anymore, Consumer Cellular had this fantastic “Lyft Concierge” service, where you could call a human who could 100% arrange a Lyft ride for you, even with a feature phone.
Of course it was designed for the elderly and disabled, but I loved it. There may still be third parties offering this type of service.
>So many things that used to work without a smartphone don’t anymore and people don’t realize it.
Have you considered using a GNU/Linux phone (Librem 5 or Pinephone)? There is no dependence on a megacorp and QR codes work fine. Some services might redirect you to a web app if you show them such phone.
I've previously tried living out of a PinePhone Pro, and if those web apps require much JS at all they're going to be in for a bad time. By benchmarks and your previous accounts, it sounds like the Librem 5 is only going to be worse from there.
But you nod towards a useful point there at the end. I've found I don't need to present ancient hardware to get some entities to provide web apps or other means, I just say something handwavy about my phone being locked down by my employer's IT policy, neglecting to mention that I'm my employer. Bigger orgs aren't worth bothering with, though. You could show an airline an employee a flip phone and they aren't going to have any flexibility on the matter.
Yes, JS-heavy websites are a nightmare for most non-recent hardware. Nobody promised you that you won't have to make any compromises to fight for your freedom though.
> my phone being locked down by my employer's IT policy
This is basically lying, whereas I truly own a legitimate smartphone which they do not support - and they have to respond somehow.
My example was that specific user, if you didn't notice.
I send and receive iMessages perfectly fine on my non-iOS devices. It's doable, much more so than running ancient hardware is, but there are reasons I don't bring it up with people who haven't asked.
The PinePhone Pro wasn't a compromise, it was unusable. Maybe that's improved since then, but it was a horrendous experience.
I set the IT policy for my devices. I sleep fine saying I can't install crapware on it. It's my primary business device and that comes with sensible restrictions.
Neither of those are dumbphones and neither resolve 90% of the problems I mentioned. I wasn't trying to get away from walled gardens or chase additional privacy, I was trying to get away from the most distracting devices ever created and to intentionally not have 24/7 access to a web browser.
My path was iOS -> LightPhone 3 -> GrapheneOS -> iOS.
The LightPhone was the right level of capability for the distraction free goal I had but it wasn't capable enough to resolve all of the things I mentioned.
The phone with GrapheneOS was an attempt at compromise. The idea was something I had enough control over that I could (in code) limit my usage on. In reality it didn't limit my usage and had issues with things like banking apps and RCS, so I was basically using a more irritating iPhone again. I went back to iOS.
What's your opinion on the Commodore phone? It runs a smartphone OS but web browsers (and social media apps) are intentionally banned for distraction reasons.
No RCS and iMessage via bridge (which effectively means no iMessage via phone number and a number of privacy concerns) makes the communication part an issue, but the rest looks nice. Preordered to see how it goes.
This really does - I don't mean it in a disparaging way - read like a mid-life crisis writing. Having to come to terms with the fact that the "old world" is not the current world anymore, which is too bad, because you like the old one, and you don't quite fit in the new one either.
This feeling has existed across generations and most of us have to go through it eventually.
The world, however, is not any less real than it has always been and is not collapsing.
> This really does - I don't mean it in a disparaging way - read like a mid-life crisis writing.
OP is living in a world of hyperreality of his own making. dude has always been doing software and never been able to break out of that.
it's not like he's been bartending though college and then slide into CS/dev work and is struggling with how startups are it's own weird universe. it's all hes ever known and is now convinced that the hinge dates and axe throwing are the weird, not-real thing.
homie has been in his weird autism-tech-bubble and never had a reason to get out of it
> But the difference is that you didn’t do anything. And in so much as there is a you, it isn’t steering. Now I realize that the non steering you is everywhere.
Jesse: I was thinking about that thing you said about the universe. Going where the universe takes you? Right on. It's a cool philosophy.
Jane: I was being metaphorical, it's a terrible philosophy. I've gone where the universe takes me my whole life. It's better to make those decisions for yourself.
El Camino, 2019
i think there's a balance, where you know where you want to get to and strive to course-correct towards it over time, but allow your present circumstances to choose which one of the infinite ways is going there today
This reads more like geohot finally hit the point where he can't stand comments more so than it has to do with what is in the text. Idiots and trolls in the audience put real mental toll on streamers - facing and tackling mean comments straight on don't make them mental Hulks. If anything that wears them down and mentally weaken them.
But: what exactly is the problem if AI was going to exceed us humans in intelligence? We keep pets around and enjoy watching them move about, despite them being clearly less intelligent than ourselves. We enjoy arts, sometimes conceived by literally clinically low-IQ or insane people. Proof of above-average exceptional intelligence != source of dignity nor justification for your existence as an sentient being.
I guess the idea that AI going past meat human is scary, because there is an implication that it could lead to general deprecation and deliberate extinction of meat humans with no concrete proof of their own continuities or the guaranteed ultimate free choice as the carrier of the human civilization for us to make. But IMO, that kind of an moment-of-truth situation is not guaranteed, and there are plenty chances that it leads to situations similar to Data from Star Trek, or Doraemon by Fujiko Fujio, or Yukikaze by Chohei Kambayashi, or Rocky from Hail Mary for that matter - bunch of friendly next-door 400-IQ sentient autonomous superhuman aliens that just happen to be non-traditionally-biological.
> This reads more like geohot finally hit the point where he can't stand comments more so than it has to do with what is in the text. Idiots and trolls in the audience put real mental toll on streamers - facing and tackling mean comments straight on don't make them mental Hulks. If anything that wears them down and mentally weaken them.
geohot is living in a world where he is reacting to their discussions, instead of harvesting them. of course he burns out.
the game streamers just go LOL and the onlyfans types go "oh honey" and blow it off -- and watch their wallet fill with $$$
but george is making this interactive and isn't harvesting $$$, he feels a need to engage. knowledge workers see all criticism as a challenge, part of the "engineer's disease thing" and can't disconnect, and doesn't have the satisfaction of walking out with 300k a year from the stream.
> Oh god people actually go on a hinge date to axe throwing and think it’s the real world.
Hinge dates and axe throwing are not my world. I also didn't go to pop band concerts and meat market bars in the olden times. I don't judge the people who did, at least now I don't.
> Oh god people actually go on a hinge date to axe throwing and think it’s the real world.
My experience with dating apps was mostly awful, but then I met my wife on one. Now we’re happily married with 3 kids.
Axe throwing is just a business fad like so many before it. This started long before the internet.
Pinball arcades, video game arcades, tanning salons, self storage, frozen yogurt. The list goes on and on.
Not sure what my point is, I guess it’s mostly this has nothing to do with the internet or with now. If the author were writing this in the 80s he’d be complaining about people hanging out in malls.
If it were written in the 50s he’d be complaining about drive-in movies and restaurants, and tract houses. Go back earlier and he’d probably be complaining about electrification.
To be fair I think we should be more intentional about our adoption of technology, but nostalgia is a hell of a drug that is best avoided.
He's got "tech brain" where he thinks everything either serves tech or is tech. But you are correct in pointing out that he's just complaining about inconsequential cultural trends, probably because he's somewhat self isolating or something.
Every trend has a period where it’s new, and you can either enjoy it or ignore it. And a peak where it’s hard to ignore it, but you can opt out and it’s not too annoying. And then there’s the post-peak when it’s no longer new and shiny, the limitations are obvious, and it’s kind of annoying/cringe to be asked to participate in it (as if it’s something new and exciting) because it’s clearly passé.
This goes for dances, food trends, activities, apps, etc.
Some of these cycles are generational, some of them last only weeks or months. It’s just how we are.
These days there’s the added factor that the world has been culturally “flattened” and it’s hard to escape sameness with distance. It’s tough times for the easily bored, you really have to branch out into unusual niches to find anything of interest.
I didn't fully understand the author there. Was their point that the activity of "axe throwing" is silly or that it is silly to do that on a first date?
Personally I've never done axe throwing but I think it probably doesn't matter at all what activity is being done on a first date, as long as it helps break the ice. Also... it is the real world. Those people are probably subjectively speaking much closer to experiencing the real world than George Hotz, it's just not a world he necessarily wants to accept.
While I agree with you, that disagreement with the author (and not in a my side vs. your side talking point kinda way) is one of the things I liked.
I don't think anyone other than geohot himself would agree with the full thing, but that's his point.
>I’ve been scraping dating sites and feeding them to ChatGPT, and it’s amazing how few of the profiles still say anything about the person. There are no rough edges, it’s basically marketing copy. Reflected back and forth in their heads with this “society” mirror so many times that there’s no identity or coherence left, just a mush of diffuse monochrome light.
The only thing I will now remember this guy for is when he volunteered to work for Twitter/X after Elon took over. He failed to get twitter code building locally for about 4 weeks when attempting to change some placeholder text in the twitter search bar. He ultimately couldn't figure it out and then immediately quit lol. He even ran a poll on his twitter asking if he should quit, most people voted "NO" then he quit anyway.
It’s just an example of the fact that programming is far more than code. It is also managing dependencies, build systems, making architectural decisions, developer support, etc.
It is very possible to be good at slinging code and bad at everything that is required to support deployed code.
Based on geohotz history, I wouldn’t be surprised if he falls in that bucket - hacking and algorithm skills are great but don’t lend themselves at all to building twitter. That’s why it is foolish to pretend like one guy is great or even good at everything.
I think the more likely explanation is that he's just not as familiar with frontend web development and react, so he underestimated the difficulty. He was asking for help on Twitter for how to make pills inside of a text field. His failure was caused by a knowledge check rather than a skill check.
If I remember correctly, he wanted to fix the web search UI to match the features offered by Discord. He even crowdsourced some free work from his followers by asking them for help in implementing visual pills in text fields or something like that.
The basic feature set he wanted to implement wouldn't have been very difficult for someone who is experienced with react, but I'm imagining there's lots of minor quirks with the "last mile" of details related to internationalization / localization and accessibility.
geohot is lucky to have grown up in proper hacker culture, doing CTFs, poking at hardware. I've only touched the surface of this from the outside. One time I got root on my network switch, but that was about it. And now I feel like I've wasted my life. Geohot made a pretty big difference to the world with his hardware hacking.
Separate thought: This new information world can be fought, but it's the war against capital and power, and that cannot be won, only resisted until the side with the capital and power becomes so incompetent and detached from reality that it collapses by itself (this is happening now, slowly; it happened already in the Soviet Union), and then we can shape what comes afterwards. But there probably won't be as much computer technology post-collapse.
The key, as I’ve been saying lately, is to begin building more local networks (meshes, IP over radio, sneakernets) that are totally disconnected from the normal internet. Put up a BBS that your friends can only get to by connecting over radio, or set up a private Reticulum chat with a functional non-Internet access path. Maybe set up a neighborhood wifi captive portal message board on an ESP32, hidden in a solar light.
If there are Bad Times ahead, it will be good to have this as a tested option. If not, you get a cozy private space to talk with people you know, outside of the surveillance grid.
But they're objectively inferior to the real internet and nobody uses them. People only use Meshtastic to say "hello, I'm using Meshtastic!"
A cool idea would be to build out an ISP to a small set of hub locations using leased lines or illegally placed fiber something, but that will get expensive.
I heard someone have an idea to use a drone to lay illegal fiber across city rooftops.
Hams do stuff like this all the time, as a hobby. But yes, most people won’t be that interested. The experience isn’t the same as regular internet (and that’s ok).
If you have line of sight, or can borrow a tower that does, you could always use point-to-point wireless or laser links to build a high bandwidth backbone. This would let you play LAN games if that makes it more interesting.
I concede that most people aren’t going to be interested in this. It is what it is.
I know there are some long-range licensed fixed radio links run by hackers here, and others that are using equipment that doesn't require a license (ISM band WiFi). A local hackerspace recently for some reason got a redundant internet connection via long range WiFi to a not so local data center, increasing total uplink from 1Gbps to 2.5Gbps. I'm not sure why they did that but it sounded cool.
I think his usage of spectacle here is the "spectate" kind, not the hullabaloo kind. Spectacles are created to be consumed from the sidelines as a spectator, rather than directly participated in. Being involved, not a spectator, is the root of punk ethos. Bad music and outlandish hair was always just the window dressing.
Say what you like about geohot's public behavior and his long string of half-finished projects, but he's always been very DIY and I respect that about him.
If you were following the scene at the time, geohot was absolutely non stop trolling publicly. He was by far the best at pushing big corporations buttons. The obvious example is the Sony distrack, but that’s only the top of the iceberg. He was pretty much the definition of a rockstar in the hacker world, leaking to the mainstream. His persona and following was already well established when he started looking at the ps3. Wild times
Oh god, George is getting old. Sounding like an old guy.
What does that say about me? I used to find him childish.
Jokes aside I also didn’t like him. Until I heard him on that podcast with the Russian-American dude whose name I can’t remember and can’t be bothered to search right now. I was surprised to start find that I would like George, because he said he was religious and I generally dislike people who capitalize god, etc.
I think he was one of the coolest hackers of the millennial generation.
While the connectedness of our world allows for great ideas to be spread and shared, there’s a huge reduction in actual variety. I don’t know what the solution is.
Not really that related. Refinement culture is concerned with evolving aesthetics and marketing which is partly a response to globalization and the rising middle classes of asia, partly related to digitization, and partly just a normal evolution of style.
What George is talking about here is much more related to the ideas of Nick Land, technocapital, Marshall McLuhan, and man's relationship to industrialization.
> Isolation is basically impossible because the Internet follows you everywhere. And it’s perfectly uniform, there is no other Internet, just a place with five corporate towns and some Chinese ones that are really hard to visit if you don’t speak Chinese.
This is McLuhan's "global village".
> I don’t think I’m properly capturing the scope of the machine. First you build the fence to keep the animals out then you build the fence to keep the animals in. It’s a Fullmetal Alchemist homunculus maybe it has already eaten your soul.
I think 99% of the commenters in this thread seem totally tone deaf to the article and the phenomenon being attacked by geohot. Granted, he doesn't articulate it well, but as you say, these aren't new concepts and much better introduced by Nick Land, Mark Fisher, Byung-chul Han etc.
ChatGPT does not know more than you. The fallacy is always that you compare AI to a human without literature references and a database.
This is most egregious in chess engines that literally have endgame databases for example. Would Carlsen have won game six against Nepo if Nepo had had a tablebase? No, it was a draw many times.
Hacker culture has slowly been subverted since the mediocre developers of open source projects sold out to corporations and became managers of the A developers. Literally like pg wrote: C students manage the A students. Except that in open source this was a novelty and the A students were too timid or conflict averse to fork.
Maybe in the area of your expertise, but ChatGPT probably knows most of the Habsburg dynasty. (just as one example) The breadth of knowledge, even when the depth is quirky and limited, is genuinely a big deal.
> ChatGPT does not know more than you. The fallacy is always that you compare AI to a human without literature references and a database.
If the human needs a literature references and a database to answer a question, can they be said to "know" the answer?
ChatGPT doesn't have an endgame database for chess. Despite having "read" all the literature about chess, it will hallucinate the board state if you try to play chess with it directly. But it "knows" how to write a chess engine that would beat me… and more than that, one which would beat a competent player.
It is a very weird and spiky form of intelligence, but it's also definitely not just a database.
> If a CPU needs RAM and disk access to give answers, does it "know" the material?
If you need to have a prefrontal cortex (RAM) and hippocampus (disk access), same question. (The answer is "yes, obviously that's fine, why would you even ask").
> in chess engines that literally have endgame databases for example
You / Carlsen / anyone will not beat a top chess engine even without the endgame databases. In the vast majority of cases you / anyone won't even reach that part (7piece / 8piece for some positions).
> ChatGPT does not know more than you
Yes, yes it does. Your fallacy is that you confuse knowledge with "knowing what to do when you don't have that knowledge". But in pure raw knowledge (definitions, trivia, bits of history, etc) chatbots are oom over any human being. Just try any of the "benchmarks" gamified by people.
LLms are a cleverly encoded database. It is a lookup.
A very fast librarian with a select material of reference books and adept at speed reading could give the same answers as LLMs. A bit slower of course. Most of the time an encyclopedia would suffice and be more accurate than the hallucinating ghosts in the machine.
EDIT: The insane downvoters can go back to their AI girlfriends. The comment was meant for thinking people.
A very fast librarian with a select material of reference books and adept at speed reading could give the same answers as LLMs.
This is called the "Chinese Room" argument, postulating that a human equipped with a Borgesian library of reference books in a language he doesn't understand and a symbolic lookup table for that language can emulate a thinking human mind without actually thinking.
It was controversial for decades, and is now known not to hold up at all. (Or to hold up perfectly, if unlike Searle your goal is to show that human minds are nothing all that special.) To the extent that the room's occupant succeeds at a task that requires thinking, he is thinking... end of story. Simulated intelligence is now known, thanks to LLMs, to be indistinguishable from real intelligence.
Ask the operator of a Chinese room, who doesn't know Chinese or math, for a novel proof of an unsolved conjecture. The LLM can give you one, but your hypothetical reference librarian won't even know what to look up at first. By the time they learn, the core premise of the argument will no longer hold true.
> The fact that you don't know whether you're talking to an LLM or a human right now is good enough for me.
Uh huh. So you have no evidence, and can't prove shit. That's what I figured.
LLMs are nothing but a shallow mirror of human thought, they don't hold up to any serious examination and the only people who think they do are typically narcissists who can't form deep connections with real people. The superficiality of LLMs is not apparent to these fans, because they have never managed to connect with the depth and inner world of another human.
You hate to see it. It's like watching somebody about to be hit by a bus. You scream, you wave your arms, but they either don't see you, or they think you're some kind of nut and ignore you.
Then, the next thing that goes through their mind -- the last thing -- is a chrome hood ornament shaped like a greyhound.
Oh so you do get it! All these idiots running around acting like a calculator can think. The bus is really going to hurt when they hit 40 and realize they outsourced all their humanity to a machine. Art, writing, even reading - these dorks hand it all over to chatGPT. Then they go online and act like they’re more productive than ever, when all they can produce is a dribbling stream of liquid shit.
I like to think of LLMs as a compressed knowledge base that you explore, navigate via prompts. Unfortunately the heavy post training from ai labs obfuscate that way too much IMHO
FWIW it’s considered bad form on HN to comment on downvotes. Better to just take the loss and move on, it’s not like the karma matters (see the guideline page)
This makes me glad that I got into tech later in life after being in the trades.
I don’t know how to explain it quite yet but I feel like Geo is experiencing something I’ve seen with a lot of my counterparts who were computer nerds from their childhood into adult life. It’s like they haven’t considered much outside of that realm and can’t figure out how to.
Don’t get me wrong, I find my field fascinating and work on it all the time. But it’s still just a field and I can’t apply myself just as well to anything else.
> I’ve been scraping dating sites and feeding them to ChatGPT, and it’s amazing how few of the profiles still say anything about the person.
I’ve long described dating apps as “distilling an entire person into a few curated photos and a snippet of text”. In all dating app profile advice I’ve ever seen, creativity, personality, and anything against the grain is highly discouraged. No wonder they barely work.
i'd argue against that point to a degree. going against the grain does work, if you know who you're looking for and can send the right signals accordingly
it's that okcupid data about how the highly tattoo'd people tended to get the most negative responses, but also very strong responses from other seriously tat'd people
That only worked in first-gen dating sites where you browsed profiles. I think this strategy was called "spearfishing" where you make your profile as polarizing and authentic as possible, because it would cut out all the people you don't want to meet and appeal strongly to the person you do want to meet.
In today's Elo-score face swiping apps, your profile just tanks because all those people you didn't appeal to left-swiped you, and the one person who would have liked your tattoos never sees you. The only strategy for these apps is to 1) be attractive 2) don't be unattractive.
Reads like a man who put off searching for a real relationship for too long, but also didn’t develop that part of himself to maintain one. Then a bunch of existentialism blaming anything but himself. Could be compounded by his location, for example, it’s hard to find a wife in Miami ;)
The loneliness could take him to dark places. I’ve been there. I hope he finds someone.
The bit about stream viewers is interesting. What is the typical viewer experience?
I assumed watching streams is similar to watching vs participating in sports. I played a few as a teen, got quite good at one. As much as I like watching highly talented people apply their skill it does nothing to scratch the participatory itch.
Think it depends a lot on the type of stream. The vibes are all over the place. Say gaming stream, live walking stream vs a talking stream vs a podcast stream.
Size of the stream also matters. If you're regularly in the comments of a 50 person stream commentators recognise each other and there is interaction not entirely unlike old school forums that have regulars. In a 1000+ stream nope.
So I don't think there is such a thing as a typical experience.
The main one I follow is a talking stream of someone I've been following for years. So has a bit of old friend vibe in that you know a lot about this person & it's a comforting presence. But of course its all parasocial and one direction only (mostly) so old friend parallel is kinda fake.
This post feels like how my own notes are done before they're polished into a proper "article/blog post" or whatever, and I genuinely appreciate what seems like a stream of consciousness from the author made public (not sure I'd dare to), even though I don't personally agree with it all.
> The new war demands your inner reality. The new war will be weird in all sorts of new ways we can’t even imagine yet.
I've been orienting myself towards this already being true as well, and think we still haven't even started to see this taken to its (logical) extreme. If nothing else, it'll at least be interesting to see all the effects and methods around this, and all the cool mind reading toys.
Is it wrong to feel the truly privileged doom pilled are a true manifestation of irrelevant inconsequential thought processeses, sick loops created by our own Dr. Frankensteins? Isn't PKD meeting Sallinger just pile on?
> Maybe the new tattoos are just like being racist or something, but that’s hard to do when your heart isn’t in it and they will eventually find some way to absorb that.
overall, too much of this makes sense. The only part I have any objection to is the part about when you're using an AI to make something, you are not steering.
I think you only give up the steering on the how, but the "what" and the "why", which were always the more important parts, in my opinion, are still in your hands.
There has always been tension on that specific point, and it's what made being a programmer in a company you don't own so painful.
When I read stuff like this, I think the people involved need to go outside and touch grass.
I don’t mean that in a mean or reductive way. But something about this kind of assumption that things will get more elaborate and more abstract forever (when he’s talking about the future war for your inner reality) as if there are infinite resources, just strikes me as disconnected from physical reality in a way that feels particularly weird
There's something strong to be said about it, and not in a mean way
When I was laid off a couple months ago, the first thing I did was go out and mow my lawn. One hour of simple, clean labor, with clear progress, goals, and solitude. It helped me stay out of a bad mental frame, and when I finished I went inside and sent out a few hundred applications
Over the next several weeks, I spent a lot of time that wasn't spent on finding a new job working on my yard. Fixing sprinklers, cleaning up the edges of the grass, turning, peating, and mulching garden beds, and more
While this job search period took longer than any of my past ones, and ostensibly should have been more stressful, it wasn't. Is that because I spent most of the downtime working outdoors? Probably, who knows? It was certainly a better use of my time than sitting indoors moping
Although I’ve not been laid off (sorry to hear that), had a similar experience tending to my garden recently. Working to keep some fussy plants alive in my garden has been surprisingly therapeutic and put a lot of other stuff in perspective
I have similar feelings but also think this is mostly an effect of more people participating.
The people that create slop garbage profiles or cookie-cutter profiles didn't have very quirky profiles before. The probably didn't even participate before.
The quirky stuff is still there and maybe there is even more of it but it takes effort to find it instead of being able to go online and everything being novel.
> AI is making this all so much worse. When you are prompting you feel like you are steering, but are you really? Would you know if you weren’t?
This one hits hard. I feel more and more that AI-assisted creation is really just consumption. And it’s worse because it gives a false sense of creativity. Are we really expressing ourselves and challenging ourselves by pressing a button and generating the same slop as a million other people?
Spend some time on HN reading people's comments about how AI frees them and liberates their minds and lets them be creative in ways that were never possible before and how anyone who thinks otherwise is just a Luddite. You'll realize how not obvious it is to many people.
You (collective you, not you personally) are just consuming a product. The LLM is a product. The model is a product.
You're reheating spam from the can in the microwave and acting like you're Gordon Ramsey. But you don't know how to cook, all you know how to do is push buttons. And worst of all, you probably think anyone who bothers to learn how to prepare food with their hands is a rube.
> Spend some time on HN reading people's comments about how AI frees them and liberates their minds and lets them be creative in ways that were never possible before
The creativity: literally just rewriting an existing product in a new programming language or a shitty SaaS app that will never be used.
Honestly seems like status-quo to me, at least going off Show HN
Honestly, picking up some shifts at a local coffee shop might help. Or doing some fine arts night classes.
Or if he's lucky enough not to need to worry about money for a while, then spend half a year doing Peace Corps or some sort of voluntourism project. Walk the Camino de Santiago or the Appalachian Trail. Spend a week in the second-largest city of every country in Africa, in reverse alphabetical order. Whatever.
His current situation isn't making him happy. So try something very different for a while, get some perspective, then reassess.
I sympathize with the author. I started with HyperCard in the late 1980s when fax machines were an up-and-coming business. Then learned C, C++ and assembly language before I knew what a spreadsheet was. I got educated on a very strange mix of simplicity and complexity that is diametrically opposed to this "modern" world we live in, where web and app development have become so complex that an individual developer effectively can't compete in the market without using AI, while the business logic our software performs is often smaller than what non-programmers used to cobble together for their office workflows without a manual.
I keep asking myself what went wrong. How has so little progress happened in the way we write software since the Dot Bomb in 2000? How did languages like Rust rise in prominence, while others like AppleScript devolve into something unrecognizable?
The answer is gross, but it's misaligned incentives. Why would Meta make React better, when its very complexity forms a moat that prevents outside competition? Why would Google rewrite Android's spaghetti code, when the last thing it wants is competing smartphones? Why would Apple improve its web browser to run at 1000x current speed and negate the need for archaic native apps written in Swift/Objective-C and lose its gatekeeper status?
This vacuum of innovation, this cultural wealth inequality, has become so ingrained into our lives that we can't even see it anymore. It's a just a state of being now, a perpetual scarcity mindset. It limits not just what we imagine, but what we can imagine. Not for formal reasons, but logistical ones. Financial survival trumps mental/physical/spiritual health.
Influencers, streaming, the gig economy, even AI paper over this rot at the core of our reality. Instead of fixing underemployment, undertaxed capital gains, money in politics, trade deficits stemming from colonization, a national debt obfuscating public to private wealth transfer, etc etc etc, we tell our young people that they'd be happier alone. That if they just gave up their blue hair and avocado toast and stopped being lazy, they could someday reach the 20th century American Dream.
It's all baloney. On the one hand, I'm jealous of young people today - scraping dating sites to actually meet girls would have been the golden ticket when I was young in the late 1900s. But on the other hand, I feel a strange mix of concern and pity for them - technology is a pale imitation of the party plane that my generation spent eons escaping reality to.
If I didn't know better, I'd say this year is 1996 (2.0). Now that the Internet Age has ended, AI gives all of us unprecedented access to not just free information - but free motivation. For the first time in human history, we have digital slaves to fill the artificial scarcity component of capitalism. We're so close to being free for the first time, just like we were before the powers that be pulled the plug at the end of the 90s by denying access to capital to the masses.
The squares, the sellouts, they don't even know they're a joke, at least not consciously. The rich and powerful talk at us so hard, shamelessly, losing the intellectual debate by refusing to participate in it.
The most punk thing we can do is share. Time, money and resources - not content. Pay it forward. Bring someone up with us. Help.
Otherwise the wrong people will win the AI lottery too.
Eh not really. It's more like it starts explaining to the user that they are very special, and they discovered this unique intellectual thing in the AI slop that no one ever has, then starts convincing them it's mystical or similar. Just feeding the user magical narcissism basically.
I honestly believe that certain cultures are measurably worse than others, and skin colour is unfortunately a great proxy for that. I am strongly against celebrating cultures that provably have more negative influence on wider society than others - and I don't see a problem with cultural erasure if it eventually leads to better life standards for everyone. Racial profiling by the police is unfair, but it's necessary.
My views have changed 180° once I moved into a ghetto. Within two years I witnessed three shootings, and had my belongings stolen twice. There's trash everywhere, and kids are revving engines at 2AM and nobody cares. I don't buy the excuse "the problem is poverty and lack of chances" because it just doesn't hold up when you compare people across countries. You cannot tell me that a Moroccan kid growing up in Paris somehow has fewer chances in life than a white kid growing up in Rădoiești-Deal. Besides, I don't understand how poverty explains the inability to bring your trash to the trash can.
Being gay is literally illegal in almost all Muslim countries, many of them have death punishment for being gay. I don't see a reason why I'd be morally obliged to respect that as a valid way to construct a society. If they want me dead, I want them dead too, tit for tat.
I see countries like Japan or Korea heavily opposing immigration despite demographic crisis. I don't think they're making the wrong decision.
We've got used to 'reasonable' society and politics in the last few centuries, but check out politics in developing nations or dictatorships, or woke, or Trump or places like pageantry. All fake news and gossip and performance, and AI just makes this potentially much much worse.
It already has a name in academia I think, post-truth, or post-reality or whatever, I think it all started with the French post-modernism thing, then critical theory, etc.
But I'm not sure it's a post- 'advance' at all, but more like a rejection of the enlightenment and a return to the tribal village.
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
I'll leave this here, although it 404s now: http://www.bsc.es/projects/deepcomputing/linuxoncell/
archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20101021072500/http://www.bsc.es...
lol he is right. his work both on the ps3 and now with the hacked p2p drivers is powering many a lab
how does the ps3 hack "power many a lab"?
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.
But that only worked as long as the hack worked.
Sony actually allowed "OtherOS" until Geohot screwed it up for everybody and they locked it down.
> 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.
---
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.
My best guess: Putting Linux on subsidized hardware makes for affordable compute for large labs.
Example [here](https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomput...).
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.
You could get yellow dog Linux running on a ps3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Dog_Linux
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.
Wasn’t that a cluster based on Sony’s official OtherOS feature? Multiple universities had such clusters
The feature was removed by firmware update in 2010.
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.
Maybe North Korean labs
what the ps3 or the tinygrad?
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> 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.
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.
This logic would have prevented the Enigma machine from existing
Really? I wasn’t aware that Arthur Scherbius was known to be an asshole.
I was referring to Alan Turing
Turning didn’t cause the Enigma Machine to exist. He assisted with making it practical to decipher messages encrypted with the Enigma Machine. But
1. He was just one person working on it. It probably would have happened without him.
2. Despite what you might have seen in some dramatizations, there’s no mention of him being a jerk while working at Bletchley Park.
It might have happened without him eventually, which wasn't really an option at the time.
I visited Bletchley Park Museum a few months ago, it doesn't really mention much of what happened with him at all. Which account are you referring to?
In any case, history is littered with difficult geniuses without talking about just one. Isaac Newton for example.
>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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz
Hero worship is just so… tacky. Gross, maybe. It certainly has no place in 2026.
lol, are you the author by any chance?
Unlikely.
This is him, at least according to that account:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=georgehotz
People flexing on HN not knowing who geohot is. Sad.
I think you're being accused of being a sockpuppet.
51% 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
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!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us
Ok clanker
Bingo
Oh well, guess that settles it /s
I remember watching this urban exploration video, the guy went into an abandoned Russian nuclear bunker, deep underground. Watching this titanic effort of engineering, made by people who were both highly intelligent and had vast resources at their disposal, yet felt it necessary to build it to have an answer to the unthinkable horrors the future held, all of this reflected in the sturdy but utilitarian design of the concrete complex, rooms filled with all sorts of pumps, air filters, and electronic equipment necessary to sustain human civilization after the bomb fell. As the guy walked from room to room, he noticed that in one of the rooms was a set of old PCs. The power was on. He switched it on, and suddenly the familiar bootup chime of Windows 95 played, and he was looking at a desktop. He sat down, started clicking around, opened Solitaire, started playing. Suddenly all the tension dropped, I forgot where I was. The whole thing felt comfortable, even pedestrian. I had to actively remind myself that the guy was many stories underground in an abandoned bunker, likely patrolled by active military.
Computers even at their crudest have a hypnotic ability to bring you into their world, and somehow make you forget about the reality you live in. This is not the only mechanism of society that does this, but certainly one of the most powerful we found in recent history.
You better find that video for us. Sounds juicy af.
I feel like this comment is validating the post's point.
Not this one but it's got similar vibes.
https://youtu.be/ob9YJlGb4oM
This is my all-time favorite bunker video, and it will be yours, too
https://youtu.be/NPpeSYytxMQ?t=296&is=tvKwOwthNBU5lzKd
From the article: "... there is no other Internet, just a place with five corporate towns and some Chinese ones that are really hard to visit if you don’t speak Chinese."
Yeah, that's only true if you don't hang out in the old-style Internet. I spend most of my time on blogs, reading and replying to discussions on wide-ranging topics, talking to interesting people who know a lot more than I do about many subjects (in fact, most subjects that aren't computer programming) The discussion isn't on Disqus, it's not monetized, it's just... people talking to each other. And it's an active, fun community.
They're out there. Just... choose to disengage with the boring communities. I haven't had a Facebook account in years; I only got one because at the time there was a social group I belonged to that was using Facebook as their primary communication tool, and when I moved to another city I deleted my Facebook account. I never signed up for Twitter. Didn't want an account when it started, didn't want one five years ago, don't want one now.
It's possible to disengage from the artificial, and find real communication with real people. The first step is to just... stop logging onto Facebook. Just walk away.
I miss all the old forums that have died out. Still some gems out there, but not nearly as active anymore as far as my hobbies and interest go.
Ironically, when people moved their communities to Reddit and discord they only helped to enable the AI theft of this culture
Forums were easy to search. The threads were mostly chronological and easy to stay in touch with.
These corporate platforms are designed to promote reposting. Always “new” content and impossible to find anything else. keep the user reloading that feed at all costs. And behind the scenes the corporations are mining your activity
I’m somewhat optimistic that as future generations of LLMs keep scanning this new LLM driven social media landscape, the models will collapse and the content will just suck more and more.
And people with interesting takes and novel ways of expressing them leave the corporate platforms, and we return to the humble days of user owned platforms without all the bots
After all, it’s easier than ever to build a platform now that we have LLMs to do all the chore work
AI culture theft works just as well on phpBB as it does on Reddit. What we really lost from moving to centralised platforms was independent moderation. On Reddit you obey Reddit policies even if you don't like them. There are piracy communities on Discord where you can't mention "piracy" but have to call it other words so that the autobanner won't autoban you or the community.
Unfortunately, running an online forum has been a pain for a long time. You have to promote the forum to keep it active, deal with various bad actors (historically spammers, trolls, and black hats), maintain the forum, deal with drama, etc. It adds up and largely isn't appreciated. People act like a forum exists by itself, but it doesn't.
And in the last 5 years, running an online forum has become more of a pain given how badly behaved some bots are. Just recently, I installed Anubis on some online forums I run, and I've been amazed by how much traffic dropped. Before, server load was becoming a problem to the point where all the forums I ran were taken offline by their hosts! I have been thinking about how there's a need for a forum software which produces static HTML for the content, while all dynamic components are behind a login. Bots won't increase server load much in this case. If the forum administrator decides to end the forum, they can easily keep hosting the content without any future maintenance beyond paying the bills. Two of the forums I run are just archives at this point, and I'd love to be able to flip a switch and make them static HTML... (I probably will adapt some script I found on GitHub do to this in the future, maybe with help from LLMs.)
I really don't like hearing people complain that they miss communities that have died out. You can't expect someone else to create a community, because what you're going to get is a corporation creating one in exchange for money.
If you miss a community, go be a part of one, that'll help everyone! I'm a part of a maker community and it's fantastic, the only thing that's missing is more makers talking about the weird stuff they're building!
I wouldn't be surprised no one knows how to make a community like they old ones.i just knew they were there.usually forums attached to some content. How would you create one today?
Yeah, some people really need to take a step back from where they hang out. If you think all there is to the internet is the Five Places and the Weird Chinese Thing (paraphrasing from OP), you’re being quite myopic.
Heck, do we even know anyone that truly hangs out there? The people around me are talking to each other on WhatsApp and Discord. Otherwise they’re playing mobile games, which is its own issue.
I got into role-playing, the VTES card game, some board games, and had a kid. Turns out most people wanna hang out offline, and otherwise use chat apps to talk about their hobbies. Then there’s all the great bloggers that write about parenting and the newsletters that cover positive news the media doesn’t spin.
The internet is fine. Now if we could get the crawlers and bots to behave a bit…
Yeah, boredom is back and some of us are more used to dealing with that than others.
I find it hard to believe. People literally copy-paste comments from facebook to those comment sections. It's no different in the end, the mainstream is awful and it's invaded every brain.
How do you find the non walled garden places?
From other such places. phpBB forums, imageboards, private trackers, webrings are good gateways.
How do you find those? I haven't been able to find an invite to a private tracker since my IRC days 20 years ago. PhpBB forums, are there any still around?
Idk. I believe you and I think you're right, but I don't even really know where to start even so
https://wiby.me
have interests. pull on threads. follow weird leads.
in some cases, build your own.
> I’ve been scraping dating sites and feeding them to ChatGPT, and it’s amazing how few of the profiles still say anything about the person.
Yeah, it's common knowledge now that you can't put many identifying details into a dating profile - there are creeps out there doing things like harvesting them and feeding them into ChatGPT.
[dead]
I really like this style of writing in short bursts, and I appreciate the author's tone and concerns.
I do wonder if the author is very young. As much as I enjoyed his small essay, a few things stuck right out at me:
>I tried having a flip phone once (2014), but you couldn’t find out what time the movies were playing because moviephone just redirected you to their app.
This has been a solved problem for a long time: you look up the movie times and such prior to departing for the movies. No smartphone needed.
>And it’s not like there’s anywhere to go. The real world is strip malls and axe throwing and escape rooms. Oh god people actually go on a hinge date to axe throwing and think it’s the real world.
You can escape, but you'll never hear about it by either checking online, or by listening to very-online people. Go on a hike. It doesn't even have to be a good one. Just go do it. Maybe say hi to some people you meet while you're there. You probably won't develop a deep friendship with them, but you will have a real, face-to-face human interaction.
Living away from the internet can now only be done intentionally. It can be done, though, but it's not the automatic choice. It's not even difficult ... it's just "manual." You must always think about what you want to do and how you want to do it. It's a skill that will come back to you. Or, if the author never learned it, a skill he still has a chance to learn.
What we've lost is getting to feel like you're connected to a common culture. This is a big, big loss, but it is not everything. The tools you need to escape are all around you. Power off your devices. Get some books at your local library. Try leaving your devices off all weekend, even when you get anxious, and bored, and your brain cries out for the easy, automatic stimulation it's become so accustomed to. Lay in bed and stare at the ceiling until your brain creates interesting thoughts out of your boredom. It's possible.
>This has been a solved problem for a long time: you look up the movie times and such prior to departing for the movies. No smartphone needed.
Strangely, not everyone is at home when they decide to go to the movies.
Well, I guess our only choice is to own an expensive corporate surveillance device. There's no other option. The ancient polynesians managed to learn to navigate huge, open seas by memorizing the stars. The ancient Greeks managed to measure the size of the sun with trigonometry and grit alone. We've mapped the genome and soon we may even cure inherited illnesses, or bring extinct species back to live.
But I hear you. What if I wanted to know what movies were playing, but I was already at a restaurant? What could I possibly do? The only answer is a smart phone. There's no choice, and no escape.
> What if I wanted to know what movies were playing, but I was already at a restaurant? What could I possibly do?
Do you actually have a solution here or what?
Call the theater? Do you have their phone number memorized? Phone Books and Pay Phones basically don't exist anymore, remember.
Do you just drive to the theater after the meal and check in person? Who is going to agree to that anymore? People will just say "nah maybe next time" and go home
Like it or not, society has changed. Social expectations have changed.
You're kind of being a dick now.
I'm just so frustrated by how quickly and easily people give in to these things. People face relatively small inconveniences and quickly give away their rights. Smart phones and social media (in large part, enabled by always-on, always-present smart phones) have so, so many negatives effects and people won't even consider moving on. "It's hard to find parking" or "some restaurants are now inconvenient to eat at" are measured next to "the suicide rate of teen girls is spiking" and "we've enabled government tracking and surveillance on a scale never before thought possible." I don't know how else to be. People are so obsessed with immediate impulse satisfaction and immediate comfort that they'd give up anything. I think if you offered to remove someone's right to vote, but told them they would be able to gamble for free once a month you'd lose half the votes in the country.
That’s a good clarification, thanks for writing it. I think you and the uncle post by bluefirebrand are both right: the social expectations are different enough now that there really might not be a practical alternative for most people to the corporate surveillance pocket computer—and you’re not wrong that the shift in values and priorities that indicates is pretty scary and grim.
the problem is not the people who want impulse satisfaction, comfort, and convenience - these are all perfectly normal human desires. the problem is that we as a society have allowed predators to tie these needs to surveillance and addiction engineering. there is no intrinsic reason that couldn't have been regulated against - look at some of the absolutely idiotic things the government is willing to spend time and money in micromanaging.
> these are all perfectly normal human desires
They're animal desires, being human means having the discipline to control them.
Oh man, the past was fucking wild, because you would do this. You'd just show up to the theater and look at what was playing. Or, if you were close to a store, you'd go and buy a newspaper that had the movie listings for your local theaters.
Or just call the theater. You can still call stores and ask them if they have something, rather than looking it up on Amazon.
Remember MovieFone? That guy with the Mr. Moviefone voice?! Oh, man!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moviefone
We used to record the showings listings manually at the cinemas and it was incredibly hard to do while zooted on weed
Theater usher was quite possibly the best job I’ve ever had
I can relate. For a brief, shining month, I worked at Tower Records, and one of the duties when we closed was to get on the PA (through the phone system) and make the announcements about the store closing.
Now these announcements were supposed to be brief and structured, but when they permitted me to make them, I couldn't resist cracking up and laughing for some reason, in the middle of recitation, and so never mastered the art of making the announcements for the store. Pretty sad.
But I do recall those days, when movie theaters had all their showtimes on tape. I know that the movie theater is a place that we would never expect to reach a human on the phone. Because that announcement would play, for as long as it needed at a multiplex, and then repeat or cut off. And you were supposed to figure out the showtimes by picking through the linear verbal announcement and choosing your favorite film. I can only imagine the teenage staff who are mostly paid in concessions, how they would get to recording that stuff!
Ok, assume you don't have a cell phone. Call the theater with what? Pay phones don't exist anymore
With your dumbphone?
Come on man, read and understand the post before replying. It's three* sentences.
I didn't say "you don't have a smartphone" I said "you don't have a cell phone"
It can be it's own "adventure" just to go to the movies and pick something that's playing. You can end up seeing a movie you wouldn't have because you didn't spend 20 minutes reading the negative reviews of and it turns out to be fun.
I discovered a lot of new things by being forced to make choices from limited set of options.
So, I'm a college instructor, and sometimes I find myself reading a paper that I dislike -- and as I get into it I'm finding that I'm mentally arguing with the content and the actual argument(s) (as opposed to "quality of writing") and that's when I realize this person should get a good grade.
This is like that for me; he sounds kind of annoying, but as they say, points were made.
Well idk if the author is actually geohot but if it is then look him up. Famous hacker from cmu ppp, I think he was first to jailbreak iPhone 4
Ah, sorry, I wasn't familiar with him. Looks like he was born in 1989, and so is not so young. I'm a bit baffled to hear that he doesn't think he can escape his smartphone given that he was resourceful enough to jailbreak an iPhone 4 back in the day. I understand he's speaking poetically and emotionally. Maybe he just means he has the knowledge but not the means.
I am a similar age to Geohot and I have tried to escape smartphones to a dumb phone. It didn’t work. So many things that used to work without a smartphone don’t anymore and people don’t realize it.
• Surface parking in my city is all by QR code. Where there are machines, they are broken because no one cares.
• Social groups are on iMessage or RCS. RCS is not nearly as backwards compatible with MMS as it seems and you WILL get dropped silently, eventually.
• Some restaurants literally don’t have print menus (they’re expensive! QR codes are cheap!).
• Rideshare, bike rentals, etc. are all dependent on apps. Taxis are not reliable or available.
The list of tiny cuts goes on and on. When you have a smartphone you don’t realize the affordances that made it possible to be without them are disappearing.
I’m sure you can do it in a smaller place but you have to be dedicated and willing to suffer in a city.
Similar age as well, and damn, if I could actually convince my bank to let me approve transactions with a dumbphone... The reality is just that a significant part of the modern world is contingent on carrying around a brand-name smartphone
Now imagine how poor people stress if their smartphone bricks or gets damaged or lost. Or if they're homeless, in which case the likelihood of their possesions getting damaged is probably much higher.
It's weird that people are sleepwalking into this single point-of-failure dystopia instead of regulating it out existence and only realize it when their phone gets damaged or lost or is glitching in some deal-breaking way.
Here's a tip, if you want people to help you out don't start with, "I don't have an smartphone..."
Instead, say a variation of "Hey, my camera's broken/the app keeps crashing on my phone. Can you help me out?" People tend to be a lot more sympathetic.
I've never had issues with the restaurant QR thing.
me:"Hey, my camera doesn't work can you help me out?"
waiter: "Sure you can take a look on my phone/use this tablet."
Like, I have to fix my phone's camera before I can park in your city? are you kidding me?
Go to your bank in person, say you're not going to have a smartphone, see what they say.
If opening a new account, pretend not to have a phone.
For a long time, but not anymore, Consumer Cellular had this fantastic “Lyft Concierge” service, where you could call a human who could 100% arrange a Lyft ride for you, even with a feature phone.
Of course it was designed for the elderly and disabled, but I loved it. There may still be third parties offering this type of service.
>So many things that used to work without a smartphone don’t anymore and people don’t realize it.
Have you considered using a GNU/Linux phone (Librem 5 or Pinephone)? There is no dependence on a megacorp and QR codes work fine. Some services might redirect you to a web app if you show them such phone.
A committed Windows user who just noted they depend on iMessages probably isn't a great prospect for your proselytizing, anyway: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38855086
I've previously tried living out of a PinePhone Pro, and if those web apps require much JS at all they're going to be in for a bad time. By benchmarks and your previous accounts, it sounds like the Librem 5 is only going to be worse from there.
But you nod towards a useful point there at the end. I've found I don't need to present ancient hardware to get some entities to provide web apps or other means, I just say something handwavy about my phone being locked down by my employer's IT policy, neglecting to mention that I'm my employer. Bigger orgs aren't worth bothering with, though. You could show an airline an employee a flip phone and they aren't going to have any flexibility on the matter.
> A committed Windows user who just noted they depend on iMessages probably isn't a great prospect for your proselytizing, anyway
Thank you for your advice, but if you've been following the recent trends, more and more committed Windows users are switching to Linux. Especially among the technical audience that comments on HN. Examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47548437, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47614197, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47995030. Concerning the iMessage, there is nothing one can do here: It's a well-designed walled garden. You either embrace it or leave.
Yes, JS-heavy websites are a nightmare for most non-recent hardware. Nobody promised you that you won't have to make any compromises to fight for your freedom though.
> my phone being locked down by my employer's IT policy
This is basically lying, whereas I truly own a legitimate smartphone which they do not support - and they have to respond somehow.
My example was that specific user, if you didn't notice.
I send and receive iMessages perfectly fine on my non-iOS devices. It's doable, much more so than running ancient hardware is, but there are reasons I don't bring it up with people who haven't asked.
The PinePhone Pro wasn't a compromise, it was unusable. Maybe that's improved since then, but it was a horrendous experience.
I set the IT policy for my devices. I sleep fine saying I can't install crapware on it. It's my primary business device and that comes with sensible restrictions.
Neither of those are dumbphones and neither resolve 90% of the problems I mentioned. I wasn't trying to get away from walled gardens or chase additional privacy, I was trying to get away from the most distracting devices ever created and to intentionally not have 24/7 access to a web browser.
My path was iOS -> LightPhone 3 -> GrapheneOS -> iOS.
The LightPhone was the right level of capability for the distraction free goal I had but it wasn't capable enough to resolve all of the things I mentioned.
The phone with GrapheneOS was an attempt at compromise. The idea was something I had enough control over that I could (in code) limit my usage on. In reality it didn't limit my usage and had issues with things like banking apps and RCS, so I was basically using a more irritating iPhone again. I went back to iOS.
What's your opinion on the Commodore phone? It runs a smartphone OS but web browsers (and social media apps) are intentionally banned for distraction reasons.
No RCS and iMessage via bridge (which effectively means no iMessage via phone number and a number of privacy concerns) makes the communication part an issue, but the rest looks nice. Preordered to see how it goes.
I think he is longing for the “old web” or “small web” as some refer to as these days.
Yes it’s geohot’s blog. He’s also active on HN from time to time
He's not very young, he just acts that way.
This really does - I don't mean it in a disparaging way - read like a mid-life crisis writing. Having to come to terms with the fact that the "old world" is not the current world anymore, which is too bad, because you like the old one, and you don't quite fit in the new one either.
This feeling has existed across generations and most of us have to go through it eventually.
The world, however, is not any less real than it has always been and is not collapsing.
>> it’s not like there’s anywhere to go. The real world is strip malls and axe throwing and escape rooms.
The author really needs a change of scenery. 'Strip malls and axe throwing' sounds like a minor update to the 'strip malls and TGIFs' of the `90's.
> This really does - I don't mean it in a disparaging way - read like a mid-life crisis writing.
OP is living in a world of hyperreality of his own making. dude has always been doing software and never been able to break out of that.
it's not like he's been bartending though college and then slide into CS/dev work and is struggling with how startups are it's own weird universe. it's all hes ever known and is now convinced that the hinge dates and axe throwing are the weird, not-real thing.
homie has been in his weird autism-tech-bubble and never had a reason to get out of it
> mid-life crisis writing
Might also be that but his takes have also been…unique
That’s also why I think the blog is liked. Sometimes the takes a bad. Sometimes they are novel and good
It's more aligned with Baudrillard's concept of Hyperreality, than that I think.
Yes and that can manifest in a very different kind of personal crisis.
> But the difference is that you didn’t do anything. And in so much as there is a you, it isn’t steering. Now I realize that the non steering you is everywhere.
You choose the life you lead.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
i think there's a balance, where you know where you want to get to and strive to course-correct towards it over time, but allow your present circumstances to choose which one of the infinite ways is going there today
This reads more like geohot finally hit the point where he can't stand comments more so than it has to do with what is in the text. Idiots and trolls in the audience put real mental toll on streamers - facing and tackling mean comments straight on don't make them mental Hulks. If anything that wears them down and mentally weaken them.
But: what exactly is the problem if AI was going to exceed us humans in intelligence? We keep pets around and enjoy watching them move about, despite them being clearly less intelligent than ourselves. We enjoy arts, sometimes conceived by literally clinically low-IQ or insane people. Proof of above-average exceptional intelligence != source of dignity nor justification for your existence as an sentient being.
I guess the idea that AI going past meat human is scary, because there is an implication that it could lead to general deprecation and deliberate extinction of meat humans with no concrete proof of their own continuities or the guaranteed ultimate free choice as the carrier of the human civilization for us to make. But IMO, that kind of an moment-of-truth situation is not guaranteed, and there are plenty chances that it leads to situations similar to Data from Star Trek, or Doraemon by Fujiko Fujio, or Yukikaze by Chohei Kambayashi, or Rocky from Hail Mary for that matter - bunch of friendly next-door 400-IQ sentient autonomous superhuman aliens that just happen to be non-traditionally-biological.
So why be depressed?
> This reads more like geohot finally hit the point where he can't stand comments more so than it has to do with what is in the text. Idiots and trolls in the audience put real mental toll on streamers - facing and tackling mean comments straight on don't make them mental Hulks. If anything that wears them down and mentally weaken them.
geohot is living in a world where he is reacting to their discussions, instead of harvesting them. of course he burns out.
the game streamers just go LOL and the onlyfans types go "oh honey" and blow it off -- and watch their wallet fill with $$$
but george is making this interactive and isn't harvesting $$$, he feels a need to engage. knowledge workers see all criticism as a challenge, part of the "engineer's disease thing" and can't disconnect, and doesn't have the satisfaction of walking out with 300k a year from the stream.
> Oh god people actually go on a hinge date to axe throwing and think it’s the real world.
Hinge dates and axe throwing are not my world. I also didn't go to pop band concerts and meat market bars in the olden times. I don't judge the people who did, at least now I don't.
> Oh god people actually go on a hinge date to axe throwing and think it’s the real world.
My experience with dating apps was mostly awful, but then I met my wife on one. Now we’re happily married with 3 kids.
Axe throwing is just a business fad like so many before it. This started long before the internet.
Pinball arcades, video game arcades, tanning salons, self storage, frozen yogurt. The list goes on and on.
Not sure what my point is, I guess it’s mostly this has nothing to do with the internet or with now. If the author were writing this in the 80s he’d be complaining about people hanging out in malls.
If it were written in the 50s he’d be complaining about drive-in movies and restaurants, and tract houses. Go back earlier and he’d probably be complaining about electrification.
To be fair I think we should be more intentional about our adoption of technology, but nostalgia is a hell of a drug that is best avoided.
He's got "tech brain" where he thinks everything either serves tech or is tech. But you are correct in pointing out that he's just complaining about inconsequential cultural trends, probably because he's somewhat self isolating or something.
Every trend has a period where it’s new, and you can either enjoy it or ignore it. And a peak where it’s hard to ignore it, but you can opt out and it’s not too annoying. And then there’s the post-peak when it’s no longer new and shiny, the limitations are obvious, and it’s kind of annoying/cringe to be asked to participate in it (as if it’s something new and exciting) because it’s clearly passé.
This goes for dances, food trends, activities, apps, etc.
Some of these cycles are generational, some of them last only weeks or months. It’s just how we are.
These days there’s the added factor that the world has been culturally “flattened” and it’s hard to escape sameness with distance. It’s tough times for the easily bored, you really have to branch out into unusual niches to find anything of interest.
I didn't fully understand the author there. Was their point that the activity of "axe throwing" is silly or that it is silly to do that on a first date?
Personally I've never done axe throwing but I think it probably doesn't matter at all what activity is being done on a first date, as long as it helps break the ice. Also... it is the real world. Those people are probably subjectively speaking much closer to experiencing the real world than George Hotz, it's just not a world he necessarily wants to accept.
While I agree with you, that disagreement with the author (and not in a my side vs. your side talking point kinda way) is one of the things I liked. I don't think anyone other than geohot himself would agree with the full thing, but that's his point.
>I’ve been scraping dating sites and feeding them to ChatGPT, and it’s amazing how few of the profiles still say anything about the person. There are no rough edges, it’s basically marketing copy. Reflected back and forth in their heads with this “society” mirror so many times that there’s no identity or coherence left, just a mush of diffuse monochrome light.
> I don't think anyone other than geohot himself would agree with the full thing, but that's his point.
OK, that makes a bunch more sense to me. Thanks for sharing that interpretation.
You are a good consumer, consumer451, because you don't judge other consumers' consumption habits.
The only thing I will now remember this guy for is when he volunteered to work for Twitter/X after Elon took over. He failed to get twitter code building locally for about 4 weeks when attempting to change some placeholder text in the twitter search bar. He ultimately couldn't figure it out and then immediately quit lol. He even ran a poll on his twitter asking if he should quit, most people voted "NO" then he quit anyway.
If you ever saw this guy program you know he's very competent so IMHO that reflects badly on twitter, tbh.
It’s just an example of the fact that programming is far more than code. It is also managing dependencies, build systems, making architectural decisions, developer support, etc.
It is very possible to be good at slinging code and bad at everything that is required to support deployed code.
Based on geohotz history, I wouldn’t be surprised if he falls in that bucket - hacking and algorithm skills are great but don’t lend themselves at all to building twitter. That’s why it is foolish to pretend like one guy is great or even good at everything.
I think the more likely explanation is that he's just not as familiar with frontend web development and react, so he underestimated the difficulty. He was asking for help on Twitter for how to make pills inside of a text field. His failure was caused by a knowledge check rather than a skill check.
> His failure was caused by a knowledge check rather than a skill check.
whats the difference w/r/t programming? in this case I'd argue the knowledge was the skill
Skill is inherent, abstract, hard to modify, and generic. Problem solving is skill. Knowledge is knowing the syntax for a textbox in React.
Not much skill in problem solving if you can't Google some react syntax
Totally fair! I think it is more of a reminder that making impact at large companies can be hard even for competent people.
If I remember correctly, he wanted to fix the web search UI to match the features offered by Discord. He even crowdsourced some free work from his followers by asking them for help in implementing visual pills in text fields or something like that.
The basic feature set he wanted to implement wouldn't have been very difficult for someone who is experienced with react, but I'm imagining there's lots of minor quirks with the "last mile" of details related to internationalization / localization and accessibility.
I'll never forget Cydia or the PS3 hacks lol.
Same here. While I diverge from his opinion trees on many things these days, dude is/was an absolute rockstar to me.
To be fair I think he's more of a hardware guy.
Guy was also tryna hire other interns as an intern himself, lol
That’s called a “referral”
geohot is lucky to have grown up in proper hacker culture, doing CTFs, poking at hardware. I've only touched the surface of this from the outside. One time I got root on my network switch, but that was about it. And now I feel like I've wasted my life. Geohot made a pretty big difference to the world with his hardware hacking.
Separate thought: This new information world can be fought, but it's the war against capital and power, and that cannot be won, only resisted until the side with the capital and power becomes so incompetent and detached from reality that it collapses by itself (this is happening now, slowly; it happened already in the Soviet Union), and then we can shape what comes afterwards. But there probably won't be as much computer technology post-collapse.
The key, as I’ve been saying lately, is to begin building more local networks (meshes, IP over radio, sneakernets) that are totally disconnected from the normal internet. Put up a BBS that your friends can only get to by connecting over radio, or set up a private Reticulum chat with a functional non-Internet access path. Maybe set up a neighborhood wifi captive portal message board on an ESP32, hidden in a solar light.
If there are Bad Times ahead, it will be good to have this as a tested option. If not, you get a cozy private space to talk with people you know, outside of the surveillance grid.
But they're objectively inferior to the real internet and nobody uses them. People only use Meshtastic to say "hello, I'm using Meshtastic!"
A cool idea would be to build out an ISP to a small set of hub locations using leased lines or illegally placed fiber something, but that will get expensive.
I heard someone have an idea to use a drone to lay illegal fiber across city rooftops.
Hams do stuff like this all the time, as a hobby. But yes, most people won’t be that interested. The experience isn’t the same as regular internet (and that’s ok).
If you have line of sight, or can borrow a tower that does, you could always use point-to-point wireless or laser links to build a high bandwidth backbone. This would let you play LAN games if that makes it more interesting.
I concede that most people aren’t going to be interested in this. It is what it is.
I know there are some long-range licensed fixed radio links run by hackers here, and others that are using equipment that doesn't require a license (ISM band WiFi). A local hackerspace recently for some reason got a redundant internet connection via long range WiFi to a not so local data center, increasing total uplink from 1Gbps to 2.5Gbps. I'm not sure why they did that but it sounded cool.
I love the idea of this, but I don't think I could convince my friends to use it over mainstream platforms.
For anybody misled by the title and still a bit confused by the article he's not referring to music.
This is clever-clogs George Hotz of hacking, comma.ai and tinygrad etc fame.
He used (?) to live stream hacker stuff like long running coding sessions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz
Unofficial video archive:
https://youtube.com/@geohotarchive/videos
From the title, I thought it was video. From the post, I thought it was gaming.
> What killed the hacker culture I grew up in was spectacle.
That’s so rich from someone known for his public stunts against Sony & co
I think his usage of spectacle here is the "spectate" kind, not the hullabaloo kind. Spectacles are created to be consumed from the sidelines as a spectator, rather than directly participated in. Being involved, not a spectator, is the root of punk ethos. Bad music and outlandish hair was always just the window dressing.
Say what you like about geohot's public behavior and his long string of half-finished projects, but he's always been very DIY and I respect that about him.
What public stunts? He jailbroke a console, it's not like he went on a talk show.
If you were following the scene at the time, geohot was absolutely non stop trolling publicly. He was by far the best at pushing big corporations buttons. The obvious example is the Sony distrack, but that’s only the top of the iceberg. He was pretty much the definition of a rockstar in the hacker world, leaking to the mainstream. His persona and following was already well established when he started looking at the ps3. Wild times
Google his Sony Court case dis Track and you’ll see
dude was cracking iphones for the glory and lulz as much as for practical access reasons
lots of folks be working on exploits and jailbreaks who, as a rule, STFU 100% OpSec 100% of the time
"the real, scary hitmen aren't the ones bragging about it"
Unlike murder, finding an exploit isn't illegal.
tell that to sony, who definitely sued his ass
Depending on the jurisdiction it is, reverse engineering has pretty strict restrictions
Oh god, George is getting old. Sounding like an old guy.
What does that say about me? I used to find him childish.
Jokes aside I also didn’t like him. Until I heard him on that podcast with the Russian-American dude whose name I can’t remember and can’t be bothered to search right now. I was surprised to start find that I would like George, because he said he was religious and I generally dislike people who capitalize god, etc.
I think he was one of the coolest hackers of the millennial generation.
Feels very related to the idea of refinement culture: https://lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/refinement-culture
While the connectedness of our world allows for great ideas to be spread and shared, there’s a huge reduction in actual variety. I don’t know what the solution is.
> I don’t know what the solution is.
Interstellar diaspora. Interplanetary diaspora isn't far enough apart.
Not really that related. Refinement culture is concerned with evolving aesthetics and marketing which is partly a response to globalization and the rising middle classes of asia, partly related to digitization, and partly just a normal evolution of style.
What George is talking about here is much more related to the ideas of Nick Land, technocapital, Marshall McLuhan, and man's relationship to industrialization.
> Isolation is basically impossible because the Internet follows you everywhere. And it’s perfectly uniform, there is no other Internet, just a place with five corporate towns and some Chinese ones that are really hard to visit if you don’t speak Chinese.
This is McLuhan's "global village".
> I don’t think I’m properly capturing the scope of the machine. First you build the fence to keep the animals out then you build the fence to keep the animals in. It’s a Fullmetal Alchemist homunculus maybe it has already eaten your soul.
This is Nick Land.
I think 99% of the commenters in this thread seem totally tone deaf to the article and the phenomenon being attacked by geohot. Granted, he doesn't articulate it well, but as you say, these aren't new concepts and much better introduced by Nick Land, Mark Fisher, Byung-chul Han etc.
ChatGPT does not know more than you. The fallacy is always that you compare AI to a human without literature references and a database.
This is most egregious in chess engines that literally have endgame databases for example. Would Carlsen have won game six against Nepo if Nepo had had a tablebase? No, it was a draw many times.
Hacker culture has slowly been subverted since the mediocre developers of open source projects sold out to corporations and became managers of the A developers. Literally like pg wrote: C students manage the A students. Except that in open source this was a novelty and the A students were too timid or conflict averse to fork.
>ChatGPT does not know more than you.
Maybe in the area of your expertise, but ChatGPT probably knows most of the Habsburg dynasty. (just as one example) The breadth of knowledge, even when the depth is quirky and limited, is genuinely a big deal.
> ChatGPT does not know more than you. The fallacy is always that you compare AI to a human without literature references and a database.
If the human needs a literature references and a database to answer a question, can they be said to "know" the answer?
ChatGPT doesn't have an endgame database for chess. Despite having "read" all the literature about chess, it will hallucinate the board state if you try to play chess with it directly. But it "knows" how to write a chess engine that would beat me… and more than that, one which would beat a competent player.
It is a very weird and spiky form of intelligence, but it's also definitely not just a database.
If Stockfish uses a table base to play endgames, does it play chess?
If a CPU needs RAM and disk access to give answers, does it "know" the material?
> If Stockfish uses a table base to play endgames, does it play chess?
It would be very impressive to watch this, but irrelevant:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22table+base%22&t=osx&ia=images&i...
> If a CPU needs RAM and disk access to give answers, does it "know" the material?
If you need to have a prefrontal cortex (RAM) and hippocampus (disk access), same question. (The answer is "yes, obviously that's fine, why would you even ask").
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> in chess engines that literally have endgame databases for example
You / Carlsen / anyone will not beat a top chess engine even without the endgame databases. In the vast majority of cases you / anyone won't even reach that part (7piece / 8piece for some positions).
> ChatGPT does not know more than you
Yes, yes it does. Your fallacy is that you confuse knowledge with "knowing what to do when you don't have that knowledge". But in pure raw knowledge (definitions, trivia, bits of history, etc) chatbots are oom over any human being. Just try any of the "benchmarks" gamified by people.
LLms are a cleverly encoded database. It is a lookup.
A very fast librarian with a select material of reference books and adept at speed reading could give the same answers as LLMs. A bit slower of course. Most of the time an encyclopedia would suffice and be more accurate than the hallucinating ghosts in the machine.
EDIT: The insane downvoters can go back to their AI girlfriends. The comment was meant for thinking people.
A very fast librarian with a select material of reference books and adept at speed reading could give the same answers as LLMs.
This is called the "Chinese Room" argument, postulating that a human equipped with a Borgesian library of reference books in a language he doesn't understand and a symbolic lookup table for that language can emulate a thinking human mind without actually thinking.
It was controversial for decades, and is now known not to hold up at all. (Or to hold up perfectly, if unlike Searle your goal is to show that human minds are nothing all that special.) To the extent that the room's occupant succeeds at a task that requires thinking, he is thinking... end of story. Simulated intelligence is now known, thanks to LLMs, to be indistinguishable from real intelligence.
Ask the operator of a Chinese room, who doesn't know Chinese or math, for a novel proof of an unsolved conjecture. The LLM can give you one, but your hypothetical reference librarian won't even know what to look up at first. By the time they learn, the core premise of the argument will no longer hold true.
> Simulated intelligence is now known, thanks to LLMs, to be indistinguishable from real intelligence.
Oooff, that's quite the claim. Why don't you try to back it up? Cite some research.
Last time I checked it was still very possible to distinguish "reasoning" LLMs from Real People.
The fact that you don't know whether you're talking to an LLM or a human right now is good enough for me.
The "last time you checked" was evidently 2023 or so. I suggest checking again.
> The fact that you don't know whether you're talking to an LLM or a human right now is good enough for me.
Uh huh. So you have no evidence, and can't prove shit. That's what I figured.
LLMs are nothing but a shallow mirror of human thought, they don't hold up to any serious examination and the only people who think they do are typically narcissists who can't form deep connections with real people. The superficiality of LLMs is not apparent to these fans, because they have never managed to connect with the depth and inner world of another human.
You hate to see it. It's like watching somebody about to be hit by a bus. You scream, you wave your arms, but they either don't see you, or they think you're some kind of nut and ignore you.
Then, the next thing that goes through their mind -- the last thing -- is a chrome hood ornament shaped like a greyhound.
Oh so you do get it! All these idiots running around acting like a calculator can think. The bus is really going to hurt when they hit 40 and realize they outsourced all their humanity to a machine. Art, writing, even reading - these dorks hand it all over to chatGPT. Then they go online and act like they’re more productive than ever, when all they can produce is a dribbling stream of liquid shit.
As it happens, https://www.imo2026.com/ is coming up next week in Shanghai. Grab your best calculator, let's see how you do without thinking.
> let's see how you do without thinking
That’s your domain buddy, not mine.
I like to think of LLMs as a compressed knowledge base that you explore, navigate via prompts. Unfortunately the heavy post training from ai labs obfuscate that way too much IMHO
I don't make much distinction between "knows" and "has the knowledge" when it comes to LLMs.
FWIW it’s considered bad form on HN to comment on downvotes. Better to just take the loss and move on, it’s not like the karma matters (see the guideline page)
ChatGPT does not know more than you.
You'd have to be deluded or deranged to believe that. Even if it does nothing else, it "knows" more than any human alive.
This makes me glad that I got into tech later in life after being in the trades.
I don’t know how to explain it quite yet but I feel like Geo is experiencing something I’ve seen with a lot of my counterparts who were computer nerds from their childhood into adult life. It’s like they haven’t considered much outside of that realm and can’t figure out how to.
Don’t get me wrong, I find my field fascinating and work on it all the time. But it’s still just a field and I can’t apply myself just as well to anything else.
> I’ve been scraping dating sites and feeding them to ChatGPT, and it’s amazing how few of the profiles still say anything about the person.
I’ve long described dating apps as “distilling an entire person into a few curated photos and a snippet of text”. In all dating app profile advice I’ve ever seen, creativity, personality, and anything against the grain is highly discouraged. No wonder they barely work.
So he fed millions of profiles into a summarization machine and was surprised to find no sharp edges? Crazy work.
i'd argue against that point to a degree. going against the grain does work, if you know who you're looking for and can send the right signals accordingly
it's that okcupid data about how the highly tattoo'd people tended to get the most negative responses, but also very strong responses from other seriously tat'd people
fly a flag, signal theory, etc.
That only worked in first-gen dating sites where you browsed profiles. I think this strategy was called "spearfishing" where you make your profile as polarizing and authentic as possible, because it would cut out all the people you don't want to meet and appeal strongly to the person you do want to meet.
In today's Elo-score face swiping apps, your profile just tanks because all those people you didn't appeal to left-swiped you, and the one person who would have liked your tattoos never sees you. The only strategy for these apps is to 1) be attractive 2) don't be unattractive.
What an unpleasant read
Reads like a man who put off searching for a real relationship for too long, but also didn’t develop that part of himself to maintain one. Then a bunch of existentialism blaming anything but himself. Could be compounded by his location, for example, it’s hard to find a wife in Miami ;)
The loneliness could take him to dark places. I’ve been there. I hope he finds someone.
Are romantic relationships really the only thing that people find meaning in in later life? If so, I'm fucked.
He had a girlfriend in livestream and was also on SeekingArrangement. He's rich from tech so what happened?
He was looking for a sugar baby?
It's an unpleasant world. Hard to write about pleasantly.
I don't think you're ascribing enough agency to the writer here.
> I’ve been scraping dating sites and feeding them to ChatGPT
Why...
Because it’s a numbers game and nothing wrong with playing to win.
Should we also talk to dates using chatgpt? is a numbers game, play to win!
lets abstract the human interaction process even futher
and homeboy is a rich tech bro, he doesn't have to play the numbers game
The bit about stream viewers is interesting. What is the typical viewer experience?
I assumed watching streams is similar to watching vs participating in sports. I played a few as a teen, got quite good at one. As much as I like watching highly talented people apply their skill it does nothing to scratch the participatory itch.
>What is the typical viewer experience?
Think it depends a lot on the type of stream. The vibes are all over the place. Say gaming stream, live walking stream vs a talking stream vs a podcast stream.
Size of the stream also matters. If you're regularly in the comments of a 50 person stream commentators recognise each other and there is interaction not entirely unlike old school forums that have regulars. In a 1000+ stream nope.
So I don't think there is such a thing as a typical experience.
The main one I follow is a talking stream of someone I've been following for years. So has a bit of old friend vibe in that you know a lot about this person & it's a comforting presence. But of course its all parasocial and one direction only (mostly) so old friend parallel is kinda fake.
This post feels like how my own notes are done before they're polished into a proper "article/blog post" or whatever, and I genuinely appreciate what seems like a stream of consciousness from the author made public (not sure I'd dare to), even though I don't personally agree with it all.
> The new war demands your inner reality. The new war will be weird in all sorts of new ways we can’t even imagine yet.
I've been orienting myself towards this already being true as well, and think we still haven't even started to see this taken to its (logical) extreme. If nothing else, it'll at least be interesting to see all the effects and methods around this, and all the cool mind reading toys.
Want to be punk in tech? Go full blown MAGA! I am not even kidding.
Is it wrong to feel the truly privileged doom pilled are a true manifestation of irrelevant inconsequential thought processeses, sick loops created by our own Dr. Frankensteins? Isn't PKD meeting Sallinger just pile on?
> And it’s not like there’s anywhere to go. The real world is strip malls and axe throwing and escape rooms.
While the ersatz realms of AI regress to the mean, religious traditions chug on, bringing joy to adherents.
Find your community of faith.
every instance of a reference to "end of history" is always repeating a misunderstanding of Fukuyama's argument.
end of history doesn't mean nothing will ever happen again
Fukuyama recently admitted his own argument was wrong
That doesn't even mean it's wrong.
Well, i am quite certain that it is
ok
> Maybe the new tattoos are just like being racist or something, but that’s hard to do when your heart isn’t in it and they will eventually find some way to absorb that.
I think I'd rather read slop than edgelord.
overall, too much of this makes sense. The only part I have any objection to is the part about when you're using an AI to make something, you are not steering.
I think you only give up the steering on the how, but the "what" and the "why", which were always the more important parts, in my opinion, are still in your hands.
There has always been tension on that specific point, and it's what made being a programmer in a company you don't own so painful.
Even the “how” you only give up as much as you are willing to.
Parts of this reminded me of the book "Sadly, Porn".
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I don't really know what to say other than what absolutely amazing article that articulates our new post-industrialism world really well.
Basically "the Industrial Revolution and its consequences..."
I appreciate the commentary, but there's some irony of this being hosted on a github.io space.
Poor George
Fukuyama wasn't wrong, he was just early.
When I read stuff like this, I think the people involved need to go outside and touch grass.
I don’t mean that in a mean or reductive way. But something about this kind of assumption that things will get more elaborate and more abstract forever (when he’s talking about the future war for your inner reality) as if there are infinite resources, just strikes me as disconnected from physical reality in a way that feels particularly weird
There's something strong to be said about it, and not in a mean way
When I was laid off a couple months ago, the first thing I did was go out and mow my lawn. One hour of simple, clean labor, with clear progress, goals, and solitude. It helped me stay out of a bad mental frame, and when I finished I went inside and sent out a few hundred applications
Over the next several weeks, I spent a lot of time that wasn't spent on finding a new job working on my yard. Fixing sprinklers, cleaning up the edges of the grass, turning, peating, and mulching garden beds, and more
While this job search period took longer than any of my past ones, and ostensibly should have been more stressful, it wasn't. Is that because I spent most of the downtime working outdoors? Probably, who knows? It was certainly a better use of my time than sitting indoors moping
Although I’ve not been laid off (sorry to hear that), had a similar experience tending to my garden recently. Working to keep some fussy plants alive in my garden has been surprisingly therapeutic and put a lot of other stuff in perspective
While the layoff was inconvenient, yes, it's put me in a better place at a better company. I was stagnant at my old one and starting to hate my work
I used to laugh at the king of the hill joke "Why would anyone do drugs when you could mow the lawn" but now I understand it completely
When life gives you lemons, don't just touch grass, mow it down to size first and grow it back that way you realy want :)
I have similar feelings but also think this is mostly an effect of more people participating.
The people that create slop garbage profiles or cookie-cutter profiles didn't have very quirky profiles before. The probably didn't even participate before.
The quirky stuff is still there and maybe there is even more of it but it takes effort to find it instead of being able to go online and everything being novel.
Hacker culture isn't dead. It just smells funny.
> AI is making this all so much worse. When you are prompting you feel like you are steering, but are you really? Would you know if you weren’t?
This one hits hard. I feel more and more that AI-assisted creation is really just consumption. And it’s worse because it gives a false sense of creativity. Are we really expressing ourselves and challenging ourselves by pressing a button and generating the same slop as a million other people?
Wasn't this obvious?
Spend some time on HN reading people's comments about how AI frees them and liberates their minds and lets them be creative in ways that were never possible before and how anyone who thinks otherwise is just a Luddite. You'll realize how not obvious it is to many people.
You (collective you, not you personally) are just consuming a product. The LLM is a product. The model is a product.
You're reheating spam from the can in the microwave and acting like you're Gordon Ramsey. But you don't know how to cook, all you know how to do is push buttons. And worst of all, you probably think anyone who bothers to learn how to prepare food with their hands is a rube.
Or are they right and you’re the one saying if you don’t know how to saddle a horse and rub it down you shouldn’t consider yourself a driver?
Thank you for demonstrating my point so perfectly.
> Spend some time on HN reading people's comments about how AI frees them and liberates their minds and lets them be creative in ways that were never possible before
The creativity: literally just rewriting an existing product in a new programming language or a shitty SaaS app that will never be used.
Honestly seems like status-quo to me, at least going off Show HN
We wouldn't be having debates about it every other day if it was
Is this blog post meaningfully readable for anyone? It just reads like an incoherent rambling.
> you couldn’t find out what time the movies were playing because moviephone just redirected you to their app
Uh, movies are definitely not more "real" than YouTube videos and they're just as passive.
homeboy lived inside of tech-bro-capitalism since he was 19 and is now realizing it's hollow, but hasn't been forced to live outside of that bubble.
some kernels of truth but it feels like he doesn't need AI or tattoos, he needs a therapist
Honestly, picking up some shifts at a local coffee shop might help. Or doing some fine arts night classes.
Or if he's lucky enough not to need to worry about money for a while, then spend half a year doing Peace Corps or some sort of voluntourism project. Walk the Camino de Santiago or the Appalachian Trail. Spend a week in the second-largest city of every country in Africa, in reverse alphabetical order. Whatever.
His current situation isn't making him happy. So try something very different for a while, get some perspective, then reassess.
The wrong people won the internet lottery.
I sympathize with the author. I started with HyperCard in the late 1980s when fax machines were an up-and-coming business. Then learned C, C++ and assembly language before I knew what a spreadsheet was. I got educated on a very strange mix of simplicity and complexity that is diametrically opposed to this "modern" world we live in, where web and app development have become so complex that an individual developer effectively can't compete in the market without using AI, while the business logic our software performs is often smaller than what non-programmers used to cobble together for their office workflows without a manual.
I keep asking myself what went wrong. How has so little progress happened in the way we write software since the Dot Bomb in 2000? How did languages like Rust rise in prominence, while others like AppleScript devolve into something unrecognizable?
The answer is gross, but it's misaligned incentives. Why would Meta make React better, when its very complexity forms a moat that prevents outside competition? Why would Google rewrite Android's spaghetti code, when the last thing it wants is competing smartphones? Why would Apple improve its web browser to run at 1000x current speed and negate the need for archaic native apps written in Swift/Objective-C and lose its gatekeeper status?
This vacuum of innovation, this cultural wealth inequality, has become so ingrained into our lives that we can't even see it anymore. It's a just a state of being now, a perpetual scarcity mindset. It limits not just what we imagine, but what we can imagine. Not for formal reasons, but logistical ones. Financial survival trumps mental/physical/spiritual health.
Influencers, streaming, the gig economy, even AI paper over this rot at the core of our reality. Instead of fixing underemployment, undertaxed capital gains, money in politics, trade deficits stemming from colonization, a national debt obfuscating public to private wealth transfer, etc etc etc, we tell our young people that they'd be happier alone. That if they just gave up their blue hair and avocado toast and stopped being lazy, they could someday reach the 20th century American Dream.
It's all baloney. On the one hand, I'm jealous of young people today - scraping dating sites to actually meet girls would have been the golden ticket when I was young in the late 1900s. But on the other hand, I feel a strange mix of concern and pity for them - technology is a pale imitation of the party plane that my generation spent eons escaping reality to.
If I didn't know better, I'd say this year is 1996 (2.0). Now that the Internet Age has ended, AI gives all of us unprecedented access to not just free information - but free motivation. For the first time in human history, we have digital slaves to fill the artificial scarcity component of capitalism. We're so close to being free for the first time, just like we were before the powers that be pulled the plug at the end of the 90s by denying access to capital to the masses.
The squares, the sellouts, they don't even know they're a joke, at least not consciously. The rich and powerful talk at us so hard, shamelessly, losing the intellectual debate by refusing to participate in it.
The most punk thing we can do is share. Time, money and resources - not content. Pay it forward. Bring someone up with us. Help.
Otherwise the wrong people will win the AI lottery too.
This was quite a bit more relatable than TFA. Thank you.
This slop is exactly what ChatGPT spits out when it's leading you down the hole of AI psychosis.
> AI psychosis.
No need to be so dramatic, might just be a bit of an early midlife crisis thing.
I liked the post, some interesting takes.
Eh not really. It's more like it starts explaining to the user that they are very special, and they discovered this unique intellectual thing in the AI slop that no one ever has, then starts convincing them it's mystical or similar. Just feeding the user magical narcissism basically.
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You got me curious now, in what ways do you think you are racist? Racists usually don't think they are racists, I would think, but maybe I'm wrong
I honestly believe that certain cultures are measurably worse than others, and skin colour is unfortunately a great proxy for that. I am strongly against celebrating cultures that provably have more negative influence on wider society than others - and I don't see a problem with cultural erasure if it eventually leads to better life standards for everyone. Racial profiling by the police is unfair, but it's necessary.
My views have changed 180° once I moved into a ghetto. Within two years I witnessed three shootings, and had my belongings stolen twice. There's trash everywhere, and kids are revving engines at 2AM and nobody cares. I don't buy the excuse "the problem is poverty and lack of chances" because it just doesn't hold up when you compare people across countries. You cannot tell me that a Moroccan kid growing up in Paris somehow has fewer chances in life than a white kid growing up in Rădoiești-Deal. Besides, I don't understand how poverty explains the inability to bring your trash to the trash can.
Being gay is literally illegal in almost all Muslim countries, many of them have death punishment for being gay. I don't see a reason why I'd be morally obliged to respect that as a valid way to construct a society. If they want me dead, I want them dead too, tit for tat.
I see countries like Japan or Korea heavily opposing immigration despite demographic crisis. I don't think they're making the wrong decision.
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We've got used to 'reasonable' society and politics in the last few centuries, but check out politics in developing nations or dictatorships, or woke, or Trump or places like pageantry. All fake news and gossip and performance, and AI just makes this potentially much much worse.
It already has a name in academia I think, post-truth, or post-reality or whatever, I think it all started with the French post-modernism thing, then critical theory, etc.
But I'm not sure it's a post- 'advance' at all, but more like a rejection of the enlightenment and a return to the tribal village.
post- means after, not better
By 'advance' I meant 'a further exploration', moving on to something new, not necessarily better.
But it seems like we're just going back to a previous time.
"Everything is awful now", from exactly the sort of person who made it so.