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.
I think 99% of the commenters in this thread seem totally tone deaf to the article and the phenomenon being attacked by geohot. Granted, he doesn't articulate it well, but as you say, these aren't new concepts and much better introduced by Nick Land, Mark Fisher, Byung-chul Han etc.
> 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
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.
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 those very quirky profiles 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.
Eh not really. It's more like it starts explaining to the user that they are very special, and they discovered this unique intellectual thing in the AI slop that no one ever has, then starts convincing them it's mystical or similar. Just feeding the user magical narcissism basically.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
He's got "tech brain" where he thinks everything either serves tech or is tech. But you are correct in pointing out that he's just complaining about inconsequential cultural trends, probably because he's somewhat self isolating or something.
I didn't fully understand the author there. Was their point that the activity of "axe throwing" is silly or that it is silly to do that on a first date?
Personally I've never done axe throwing but I think it probably doesn't matter at all what activity is being done on a first date, as long as it helps break the ice. Also... it is the real world. Those people are probably subjectively speaking much closer to experiencing the real world than George Hotz, it's just not a world he necessarily wants to accept.
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 know there are some long-range licensed fixed radio links run by hackers here, and others that are using equipment that doesn't require a license (ISM band WiFi). A local hackerspace recently for some reason got a redundant internet connection via long range WiFi to a not so local data center, increasing total uplink from 1Gbps to 2.5Gbps. I'm not sure why they did that but it sounded cool.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> What if I wanted to know what movies were playing, but I was already at a restaurant? What could I possibly do?
Do you actually have a solution here or what?
Call the theater? Do you have their phone number memorized? Phone Books and Pay Phones basically don't exist anymore, remember.
Do you just drive to the theater after the meal and check in person? Who is going to agree to that anymore? People will just say "nah maybe next time" and go home
Like it or not, society has changed. Social expectations have changed.
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.
Oh man, the past was fucking wild, because you would do this. You'd just show up to the theater and look at what was playing. Or, if you were close to a store, you'd go and buy a newspaper that had the movie listings for your local theaters.
I can relate. For a brief, shining month, I worked at Tower Records, and one of the duties when we closed was to get on the PA (through the phone system) and make the announcements about the store closing.
Now these announcements were supposed to be brief and structured, but when they permitted me to make them, I couldn't resist cracking up and laughing for some reason, in the middle of recitation, and so never mastered the art of making the announcements for the store. Pretty sad.
But I do recall those days, when movie theaters had all their showtimes on tape. I know that the movie theater is a place that we would never expect to reach a human on the phone. Because that announcement would play, for as long as it needed at a multiplex, and then repeat or cut off. And you were supposed to figure out the showtimes by picking through the linear verbal announcement and choosing your favorite film. I can only imagine the teenage staff who are mostly paid in concessions, how they would get to recording that stuff!
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.
Think it depends a lot on the type of stream. The vibes are all over the place. Say gaming stream, live walking stream vs a talking stream vs a podcast stream.
Size of the stream also matters. If you're regularly in the comments of a 50 person stream commentators recognise each other and there is interaction not entirely unlike old school forums that have regulars. In a 1000+ stream nope.
So I don't think there is such a thing as a typical experience.
The main one I follow is a talking stream of someone I've been following for years. So has a bit of old friend vibe in that you know a lot about this person & it's a comforting presence. But of course its all parasocial and one direction only (mostly) so old friend parallel is kinda fake.
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
If you were following the scene at the time, geohot was absolutely non stop trolling publicly. He was by far the best at pushing big corporations buttons. The obvious example is the Sony distrack, but that’s only the top of the iceberg. He was pretty much the definition of a rockstar in the hacker world, leaking to the mainstream. His persona and following was already well established when he started looking at the ps3. Wild times
I think his usage of spectacle here is the "spectate" kind, not the hullabaloo kind. Spectacles are created to be consumed from the sidelines as a spectator, rather than directly participated in. Being involved, not a spectator, is the root of punk ethos. Bad music and outlandish hair was always just the window dressing.
Say what you like about geohot's public behavior and his long string of half-finished projects, but he's always been very DIY and I respect that about him.
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
AI culture theft works just as well on phpBB as it does on Reddit. What we really lost from moving to centralised platforms was independent moderation. On Reddit you obey Reddit policies even if you don't like them. There are piracy communities on Discord where you can't mention "piracy" but have to call it other words so that the autobanner won't autoban you or the community.
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 wouldn't be surprised no one knows how to make a community like they old ones.i just knew they were there.usually forums attached to some content. How would you create one today?
Unfortunately, running an online forum has been a pain for a long time. You have to promote the forum to keep it active, deal with various bad actors (historically spammers, trolls, and black hats), maintain the forum, deal with drama, etc. It adds up and largely isn't appreciated. People act like a forum exists by itself, but it doesn't.
And in the last 5 years, running an online forum has become more of a pain given how badly behaved some bots are. Just recently, I installed Anubis on some online forums I run, and I've been amazed by how much traffic dropped. I have been thinking about how there's a need for a forum software which produces static HTML for the content, while all dynamic components are behind a login. Bots won't increase server load much in this case. If the forum administrator decides to end the forum, they can easily keep hosting the content without any future maintenance beyond paying the bills. Two of the forums I run are just archives at this point, and I'd love to be able to flip a switch and make them static HTML... (I probably will adapt some script I found on GitHub do to this in the future, maybe with help from LLMs.)
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.
How do you find those? I haven't been able to find an invite to a private tracker since my IRC days 20 years ago. PhpBB forums, are there any still around?
Idk. I believe you and I think you're right, but I don't even really know where to start even so
Yeah, some people really need to take a step back from where they hang out. If you think all there is to the internet is the Five Places and the Weird Chinese Thing (paraphrasing from OP), you’re being quite myopic.
Heck, do we even know anyone that truly hangs out there? The people around me are talking to each other on WhatsApp and Discord. Otherwise they’re playing mobile games, which is its own issue.
I got into role-playing, the VTES card game, some board games, and had a kid. Turns out most people wanna hang out offline, and otherwise use chat apps to talk about their hobbies. Then there’s all the great bloggers that write about parenting and the newsletters that cover positive news the media doesn’t spin.
The internet is fine. Now if we could get the crawlers and bots to behave a bit…
Reads like a man who put off searching for a real relationship for too long, but also didn’t develop that part of himself to maintain one. Then a bunch of existentialism blaming anything but himself. Could be compounded by his location, for example, it’s hard to find a wife in Miami ;)
The loneliness could take him to dark places. I’ve been there. I hope he finds someone.
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 and 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 postmodernism thing, then critical theory, etc.
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.
I think the more likely explanation is that he's just not as familiar with frontend web development and react, so he underestimated the difficulty. He was asking for help on Twitter for how to make pills inside of a text field. His failure was caused by a knowledge check rather than a skill check.
It’s just an example of the fact that programming is far more than code. It is also managing dependencies, build systems, making architectural decisions, developer support, etc.
It is very possible to be good at slinging code and bad at everything that is required to support deployed code.
Based on geohotz history, I wouldn’t be surprised if he falls in that bucket - hacking and algorithm skills are great but don’t lend themselves at all to building twitter. That’s why it is foolish to pretend like one guy is great or even good at everything.
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.
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
There's something strong to be said about it, and not in a mean way
When I was laid off a couple months ago, the first thing I did was go out and mow my lawn. One hour of simple, clean labor, with clear progress, goals, and solitude. It helped me stay out of a bad mental frame, and when I finished I went inside and sent out a few hundred applications
Over the next several weeks, I spent a lot of time that wasn't spent on finding a new job working on my yard. Fixing sprinklers, cleaning up the edges of the grass, turning, peating, and mulching garden beds, and more
While this job search period took longer than any of my past ones, and ostensibly should have been more stressful, it wasn't. Is that because I spent most of the downtime working outdoors? Probably, who knows? It was certainly a better use of my time than sitting indoors moping
Although I’ve not been laid off (sorry to hear that), had a similar experience tending to my garden recently. Working to keep some fussy plants alive in my garden has been surprisingly therapeutic and put a lot of other stuff in perspective
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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 68.7 ms ] threadWhile 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.
Interstellar diaspora. Interplanetary diaspora isn't far enough apart.
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.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
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.
The people that create slop garbage profiles or cookie-cutter profiles didn't have those very quirky profiles 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.
No need to be so dramatic, might just be a bit of an early midlife crisis thing.
I liked the post, some interesting takes.
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.
>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.
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.
Personally I've never done axe throwing but I think it probably doesn't matter at all what activity is being done on a first date, as long as it helps break the ice. Also... it is the real world. Those people are probably subjectively speaking much closer to experiencing the real world than George Hotz, it's just not a world he necessarily wants to accept.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Why...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
This is like that for me; he sounds kind of annoying, but as they say, points were made.
Strangely, not everyone is at home when they decide to go to the movies.
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.
Do you actually have a solution here or what?
Call the theater? Do you have their phone number memorized? Phone Books and Pay Phones basically don't exist anymore, remember.
Do you just drive to the theater after the meal and check in person? Who is going to agree to that anymore? People will just say "nah maybe next time" and go home
Like it or not, society has changed. Social expectations have changed.
I discovered a lot of new things by being forced to make choices from limited set of options.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moviefone
Theater usher was quite possibly the best job I’ve ever had
Now these announcements were supposed to be brief and structured, but when they permitted me to make them, I couldn't resist cracking up and laughing for some reason, in the middle of recitation, and so never mastered the art of making the announcements for the store. Pretty sad.
But I do recall those days, when movie theaters had all their showtimes on tape. I know that the movie theater is a place that we would never expect to reach a human on the phone. Because that announcement would play, for as long as it needed at a multiplex, and then repeat or cut off. And you were supposed to figure out the showtimes by picking through the linear verbal announcement and choosing your favorite film. I can only imagine the teenage staff who are mostly paid in concessions, how they would get to recording that stuff!
I didn't say "you don't have a smartphone" I said "you don't have a cell phone"
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.
Think it depends a lot on the type of stream. The vibes are all over the place. Say gaming stream, live walking stream vs a talking stream vs a podcast stream.
Size of the stream also matters. If you're regularly in the comments of a 50 person stream commentators recognise each other and there is interaction not entirely unlike old school forums that have regulars. In a 1000+ stream nope.
So I don't think there is such a thing as a typical experience.
The main one I follow is a talking stream of someone I've been following for years. So has a bit of old friend vibe in that you know a lot about this person & it's a comforting presence. But of course its all parasocial and one direction only (mostly) so old friend parallel is kinda fake.
"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
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
That’s so rich from someone known for his public stunts against Sony & co
lots of folks be working on exploits and jailbreaks who, as a rule, STFU 100% OpSec 100% of the time
"the real, scary hitmen aren't the ones bragging about it"
Say what you like about geohot's public behavior and his long string of half-finished projects, but he's always been very DIY and I respect that about him.
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.
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
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!
And in the last 5 years, running an online forum has become more of a pain given how badly behaved some bots are. Just recently, I installed Anubis on some online forums I run, and I've been amazed by how much traffic dropped. I have been thinking about how there's a need for a forum software which produces static HTML for the content, while all dynamic components are behind a login. Bots won't increase server load much in this case. If the forum administrator decides to end the forum, they can easily keep hosting the content without any future maintenance beyond paying the bills. Two of the forums I run are just archives at this point, and I'd love to be able to flip a switch and make them static HTML... (I probably will adapt some script I found on GitHub do to this in the future, maybe with help from LLMs.)
in some cases, build your own.
Idk. I believe you and I think you're right, but I don't even really know where to start even so
Heck, do we even know anyone that truly hangs out there? The people around me are talking to each other on WhatsApp and Discord. Otherwise they’re playing mobile games, which is its own issue.
I got into role-playing, the VTES card game, some board games, and had a kid. Turns out most people wanna hang out offline, and otherwise use chat apps to talk about their hobbies. Then there’s all the great bloggers that write about parenting and the newsletters that cover positive news the media doesn’t spin.
The internet is fine. Now if we could get the crawlers and bots to behave a bit…
The loneliness could take him to dark places. I’ve been there. I hope he finds someone.
It already has a name in academia I think, post-truth, or post-reality or whatever, I think it all started with the French postmodernism thing, then critical theory, etc.
But it seems like we're just going back to a previous time.
whats the difference w/r/t programming? in this case I'd argue the knowledge was the skill
It is very possible to be good at slinging code and bad at everything that is required to support deployed code.
Based on geohotz history, I wouldn’t be surprised if he falls in that bucket - hacking and algorithm skills are great but don’t lend themselves at all to building twitter. That’s why it is foolish to pretend like one guy is great or even good at everything.
Twitter built locally? Nice.
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.
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
When I was laid off a couple months ago, the first thing I did was go out and mow my lawn. One hour of simple, clean labor, with clear progress, goals, and solitude. It helped me stay out of a bad mental frame, and when I finished I went inside and sent out a few hundred applications
Over the next several weeks, I spent a lot of time that wasn't spent on finding a new job working on my yard. Fixing sprinklers, cleaning up the edges of the grass, turning, peating, and mulching garden beds, and more
While this job search period took longer than any of my past ones, and ostensibly should have been more stressful, it wasn't. Is that because I spent most of the downtime working outdoors? Probably, who knows? It was certainly a better use of my time than sitting indoors moping
I used to laugh at the king of the hill joke "Why would anyone do drugs when you could mow the lawn" but now I understand it completely
> 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.