Reminder that geohot wasn't the first person to jailbreak an iPhone; that's an oft repeated myth. He was the first person to publicly carrier unlock an iPhone, which he did using information and methods he mostly learned from others.
My favorite saying of him is that they don't have a cone guy because a self driving system shouldn't contain the knowledge of a cone explicitly. Guess what happened in the last Tesla update: the car went into a cone because it wasn't the usual color.
geohot isn't dumb, but he's also extremely good at making himself look like a lone genius, all the while he heavily relies on those around him. This has been a pattern his entire career. He started out pretty clueless and relying on others; these days he's pretty good but still relies on others, and at no point did he learn to humble himself a bit and credit everyone else.
I personally experienced this when we gave a presentation on Sony's PS3 ECDSA screwup, and a week later he posted the root keys obtained using our method. I had to email him to ask him to give us credit since he literally just implemented what we described in our talk, and made no mention of it. Then Sony sued us all (my name was on the lawsuit next to his, even though I had nothing to do with his idea of posting the keys outright).
The reality is "lone geniuses" don't exist. I'm pretty good at what I do (and I also have 15-hour coding marathon live streams on YouTube, FWIW), but to accomplish something great you have to work with others, whether you give them credit or not. The major projects I've worked on aren't "my" projects (even those which I lead/led); they've all been a team effort.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/28/comma-ai-cancels-the-comma...
And it’s great that you found out that PS3 uses XKCD’s random generator for nonces (or maybe XKCD stole the random generator function from Sony, Sony should sue them).
Elon likes to take his teams ideas as well and present it as his: the gigacasting was a documented example where the Italian company had the idea years before Elon started talking about it, and they met Tesla at an auto show. Elon presented as he was looking at his Tesla matchbox and thought that it would be the best to scale it up.
Probably this similarity between Elon and George was the reason why they couldn’t work together.
I still love the idea that he (and his team) wants self driving cars to drive as an average human driver as possible, just with non-stop focus, while if you look at Tesla, they care about accident rates. The problem with Tesla’s approach is that on the videos nobody knows if the human driver should take it over or not, and I think that’s what’s really dangerous, and not the optimal way to get to full self driving. At the same time Tesla has orders of magnitudes more money.
You can see him in top10 of US [0] during 2013-2015 when he was most active, that's not a trivial feat.
And, of course, solving programming questions quickly is not a direct qualification for everything he says he is.
For example (not exhaustive):
https://adventofcode.com/2021/leaderboard/day/4
It doesn’t matter what a static object is, you don’t drive into it unless you’re dang sure it fits in the class of “things that are safe to collide with.”
The important part of the thinking is at that point knowing whether a thing is a cone or not is just a technical debt in the code base, as it shouldn't be acted upon. At the same time those cones are perfect test to see if the software can learn to go around things or not, so that extra code hinders development of the final software.
Weird way to show you have a vendetta against someone you likely don't even know.
You are replying to marcan from fail0verflow; he likely does. Many people from the early PS3 hacking days did.