"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

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.

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.

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 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 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.

  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

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 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

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.

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.

That’s so rich from someone known for his public stunts against Sony & co

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Why...

> 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.

end of history doesn't mean nothing will ever happen again

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

Uh, movies are definitely not more "real" than YouTube videos and they're just as passive.

I think I'd rather read slop than edgelord.

While the ersatz realms of AI regress to the mean, religious traditions chug on, bringing joy to adherents.

Find your community of faith.

some kernels of truth but it feels like he doesn't need AI or tattoos, he needs a therapist

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.

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.