> It reminds me of George Hotz’s legendary single week at Twitter in 2022, where he joined just to fix a login popup that was bothering users, then bounced.

The author remembers this, uh, event differently than I remember it... George Hotz boldly claimed that he could "fix Twitter search" faster than those lazy Twitter devs, only to bail almost immediately. Hubris!

On the way out, he removed that login popup as a sort of consolation prize.

Well, that's a bit of my time gone (re)looking into GeoHot, patent trolls, and now comma.ai.

Comma.AI by George Hotz sounds very interesting, it's basically a $999 "comma 3x" smartphone with an OBD-II connector and a $99 wiring harness that can add an equivalent of a Tesla Autopilot to many cars manufactured in the last 10 years (even Tesla's own cars, too), for a total cost of $1098, whilst being OSS and available on GitHub, and — get this — even having ssh access to your car! Optional cloud subscription plans are $10/mo for your own SIM, or $24/mo with bundled cellular data.

Sadly, it does NOT have an equivalent of Tesla Sentry Mode yet, https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/issues/29912, which is kind of unfortunate, because Tesla's own implementation of Sentry Mode is using 250W of power — depleting the entire 80kWh battery from 80% to 30% in like 7 days (".5*80kWh over 7 days" = 238W) — openpilot would have been a nice alternative at what'd presumably be around 5W or less ("40kWh / 5W" is 333 days).

Yeah, what? He seemingly joined Twitter, did fuck-all and quietly bounced. Embarrassing and completely self-inflicted.

Updated the post to tell that story more accurately. Simultaneously took down the damn blog because Github pages has some freak bug, but oh well.

And then he was trying to pitch rewriting it from scratch to elon