| ▲ | firasd 5 hours ago |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | m3047 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I'll leave this here, although it 404s now: http://www.bsc.es/projects/deepcomputing/linuxoncell/ |
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| ▲ | nicman23 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| lol he is right. his work both on the ps3 and now with the hacked p2p drivers is powering many a lab |
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| ▲ | ryan_n 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | how does the ps3 hack "power many a lab"? | | |
| ▲ | Bratmon 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | zdragnar 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | thatsJustBadUX 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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...). | |
| ▲ | cbdumas 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | ryan_n an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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.. | |
| ▲ | dgellow 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Wasn’t that a cluster based on Sony’s official OtherOS feature? Multiple universities had such clusters | | |
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| ▲ | khalic 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Maybe North Korean labs | |
| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | tangenter 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | sarchertech 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | drannex 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | sarchertech an hour ago | parent [-] | | > 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. |
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| ▲ | khalic 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | lol, are you the author by any chance? | | |
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