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Comment by mmmmmbop | Hacker News Reader

George Hotz is a great hacker and problem solver, but I greatly doubt he has the patience to actually build a product.

This is a fantastic skill set to solo-hack a complicated piece of software and produce a proof-of-concept, but not for building a tool that people actually use. See his track record of never building any successful product after his PS3 & iOS jailbreaks, his latest resignation memo from Comma.ai, and his resignation from Twitter after just 4 weeks.

So I think it's kind of hilarious that you're citing him and his newest tinygrad project in one sentence with the assertion that PyTorch & friends will soon be considered ancient and clunky tools. While I don't necessarily dispute the latter, I'm certain that tinygrad won't be the one replacing them.

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George Hotz is exactly the kind of cowboy programmer that drives me up a wall. I encounter them in my company all the time. Due to some early success ( or even not ) a Self-absorbed, know-it-all who can produce gobs of code in the mold of a so-called ‘10x programmer’ and then move onto something else, leaving an unsupportable mess in their wake. It’s usually someone who likes to be seen programming rather than actually taking the time to build something for the long term. This is an attitude we should be actively trying to discourage.

That’s a lot of meanness just to refute a detail that was never asserted.

It's not mean, it's just a statement of a fairly obvious pattern in his career, which should influence how much weight we give to one of his predictions.

Why do we have so many of these overhyped personalities in the programming community? Guessing it's because half of the community have less than 5 years experience and younger people are more online but these personality cults are very offputting.

Largely, because we're human. Nothing I've seen from other fields makes me think they're immune to it, or that devs are more susceptible to it.

Some fields are literally defined/created by personality cults.

I think because so many of us are invisible that when you have someone like George Hotz who received a ton of media exposure, you sort of are impressed that they did it or something?

Streaming. A handful of software engineers are now entertainers. This does a few things. It vastly increases their mindshare - they become one of the ten or so programmers known by the most people. It also encourages exaggeration. Streamers live off eyeballs. You want big loud over the top personalities with hot takes and extreme reactions.

If there was a gossip rag at the grocery check stand that dished on drama between George and Elon, I’d buy it.

His rap about getting sued by sony is a classic.

comma.ai is quite successful. it does what it advertises and profitable. it is a viable product and used and loved by many. it is amazing how much they achieved given the little funding they raised compared to the money raised in this space. it is a great achievement to get it all this way

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