George Hotz is best known for jailbreak iPhone carrier lock and hacking PlayStation 3. Now Elon Musk has given him his most momentous technical challenge: fix Twitter in three months. OK, not everything. He was hired to fix the currently broken Twitter search function.
Musk had previously tried hiring the hacker for Tesla, but they had one stand out about the conditions of employment. Hotz later founded Comma AI, a company that a competing software against Tesla’s Autopilot AI. Musk then feasted with him in 2015 about whether a single person or a small company (like Comma AI) “lacking extensive technical validation skills” would be able to develop autonomous driving software that can be used in real cars. At the time, he clearly didn’t believe an upstart like Hotz could oust a major industry behemoth like Tesla, but it seems Musk has made a significant change of heart since then. He’s now hired Hotz to fix something that should probably take a whole engineering team to complete. Character Growth: We love to see it.
It all started when Hotz praised Musk for letting go of everyone who didn’t want to work at a “hardcore” twitter. A Twitter user pointed out that he advocated indentured servitude, and Hotz responded with offers to sign himself for nothing but the cost of living in San Francisco. musk expressed interest in what is probably the cheapest tech help he could ever get, and the rest is history. my city reached out to Hotz to ask why he hadn’t asked for a full-time position but hadn’t received a response at the time of publication.
Hotz has big plans for his 12 weeks on Twitter. He wants to get rid of them Login popup that indicates when you’ve scrolled too long. He wants to improve it relevance of search results. Whether he succeeds or not, Hotz has already proven one thing: he’s the biggest jerk in the tech world.
It is already becoming apparent that Hotz may not be able to replace an entire team after all. Hotz is currently a major figure on tech twitter for trying Ask engineers for free help. As some have noted, asking for volunteer work, especially after Musk, doesn’t bode well for one of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies fired
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At the very least, Hotz is following the Silicon Valley tradition of fixing things that the average user doesn’t care. “If I just get rid of the popup I still consider my internship a win,” Hotz tweeted. “I have a Chrome extension on my laptop to block it.”
