I went to high school with George Hotz. He was nothing if not an iconoclast even back then, someone who refused to do anything he didn't really feel had any value. I remember one year we had a combined English and History class assignment that was meant to introduce us to the kind of research papers that academics in the humanities and social scientists write in higher ed. We were meant to read widely and conduct research over the course of many months and turn in a well cited paper between ten and fifteen pages in length. Instead, George decided to loudly dictate his entire paper in the engineering class we had the period before the assignment was due, basically just riffing on Harry Potter and LOTR, to the amusement of everyone in the computer lab. He then converted the entire Word doc into Zapf Dingbats and submitted it with a printed out decoder mapping the symbols to their English letter equivalent, like some puzzle on the back of a cereal box. Dunno what he received as a grade, though I do know the assignment counted for a considerable piece of our overall grade for both those subjects that semester.

I'm in two minds about Hotz. Can't work out whether he is genuinely operating on a higher plane of perspective i.e. genuine smarts, or if he's just an incredibly obnoxious, full of his own self importance, type of person.

In either case, I think his product is actually pretty good.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time thinking about this with curiosity. After listening to enough of his ranting and deep dives on Twitch/YouTube, I’m amazed at the level of depth (and width for that matter) that his mind is capable of.