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 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.
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.
> From the early legal controversy to now if there's one thing we can expect from geohot is that he's gonna think he's god's gift to programming and everyone whose work he disagrees with are losers.
As one of many who has seen him doing his thing alongside others, yeah he’d think that. And he’d be right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
> 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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
> 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 with a Borgesian library of reference books can emulate a thinking human mind without actually thinking. It was controversial for decades, and is now known not to hold up at all.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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
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"?
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
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.
Maybe North Korean labs
> From the early legal controversy to now if there's one thing we can expect from geohot is that he's gonna think he's god's gift to programming and everyone whose work he disagrees with are losers.
As one of many who has seen him doing his thing alongside others, yeah he’d think that. And he’d be right.
> 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.
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.
Oh well, guess that settles it /s
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 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.
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
>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.
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.
He's not very young, he just acts that way.
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.
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.
How do you find the non walled garden places?
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
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 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.
Yeah, boredom is back and some of us are more used to dealing with that than others.
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.
> 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 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.
It's more aligned with Baudrillard's concept of Hyperreality, than that I think.
> 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.
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 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.
If you ever saw this guy program you know he's very competent so IMHO that reflects badly on twitter, tbh.
Totally fair! I think it is more of a reminder that making impact at large companies can be hard even for competent people.
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”
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
What public stunts? He jailbroke a console, it's not like he went on a talk show.
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 love the idea of this, but I don't think I could convince my friends to use it over mainstream platforms.
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.
What an unpleasant read
It's an unpleasant world. Hard to write about pleasantly.
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?
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.
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’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!
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. 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.
>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.
> 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 with a Borgesian library of reference books can emulate a thinking human mind without actually thinking. It was controversial for decades, and is now known not to hold up at all.
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.
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.
> 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.
Hacker culture isn't dead. It just smells funny.
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
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
I appreciate the commentary, but there's some irony of this being hosted on a github.io space.
> 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.
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.
Parts of this reminded me of the book "Sadly, Porn".
Poor George
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.
"Everything is awful now", from exactly the sort of person who made it so.
> 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?
We wouldn't be having debates about it every other day if it was
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
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.
I don't really know what to say other than what absolutely amazing article that articulates our new post-industrialism world really well.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Is this blog post meaningfully readable for anyone? It just reads like an incoherent rambling.