I agree. It is fascinating. When you observe his development process (btw, it is worth noting his generosity in sharing it like he does) he gets frequently stuck on random shallow problems which a perhaps more knowledgable engineer would find less difficult. It is frequent to see him writing really bad code, or even wrong code. The whole twitter chapter is a good example.
Yet, himself, alone just iterating resiliently, just as frequently creates remarkable improvements. A good example to learn from. Thank you geohot.
This matches my own take. I've tuned into a few of his streams and watched VODs on YouTube. I am consistently underwhelmed by his actual engineering abilities. He is that particular kind of engineer that constantly shits on other peoples code or on the general state of programming yet his actual code is often horrendous. He will literally call someone out for some code in Tinygrad that he has trouble with and then he will go on a tangent to attempt to rewrite it. He will use the most blatant and terrible hacks only to find himself out of his depth and reverting back to the original version.
But his streams last 4 hours or more. And he just keeps grinding and grinding and grinding. What the man lacks in raw intellectual power he makes up for (and more) in persistence and resilience. As long as he is making even the tiniest progress he just doesn't give up until he forces the computer to do whatever it is he wants it to do. He also has no boundaries on where his investigations take him. Driver code, OS code, platform code, framework code, etc.
I definitely couldn't work with him (or work for him) since I cannot stand people who degrade the work of others while themselves turning in sub-par work as if their own shit didn't stink. But I begrudgingly admire his tenacity, his single minded focus, and the results that his belligerent approach help him to obtain.
There are developers who have breadth and developers who have depth. He is very much on the breadth end of the spectrum. It isn't lack of intelligence but lack of deep knowledge of esoteric fields you will use once a decade.
That said I find it a bit astonishing how little Ai he uses on his streams. I convert all the documentation I need into a rag system that I query stupid questions against.
I know what I said about lacking raw intellectual power probably feels like a personal attack rather than a description. However, that comment is in comparison to guys like Peter Norvig or Donald Knuth, not random Hacker News mid-wits like myself.
I had a younger cousin who wanted to start a career in software engineering. He asked me, assuming my years of experience had some merit, what programming languages to learn, what code editor to use, what platforms and frameworks to study. I told him the most important thing he could do is to be persistent. The computer will constantly humble you. Your coworkers will constantly try to rail-road you into solutions that are sub-optimal. You have to be resilient and keep going no matter what, you can't ever give up.
I think it is fair to say that George excels at what I consider to be the most important aspect of programming. And if he could manage to stop disparaging others in his streams, suggesting that everyone else is stupid and that the code they write is rotten, I could very easily look over the fact that he is frequently careless and hasty.
