First to hack iPhone, tech prodigy joins Musk’s Twitter to fix search feature
The game recognizes the game, and Elon Musk is bringing talent to Twitter after a series of layoffs at the social media company that followed his takeover. George Hotz, who made a name for himself as one of the first people to jailbreak or hack into an iPhone, has joined a “12-week internship”.
The move came after Hotz shared a photo of Musk’s post to his employees and hailed the world’s richest man’s attitude as the right way to achieve success. There were critics commenting on the thread, with one person saying, “Workers should be willing to serve as contract ICs forever sprinting while taking as little capital as possible from those they enrich. This is hardcore. This is how we change world.”
Hotz decided to put his money where his mouth is and offered to work a 12-week internship at Musk’s company on the cost of living in San Francisco. “It’s not about accumulating capital in a dead world, it’s about making the world alive,” Hotz said.
Musk replied: “Sure, let’s talk”.
Sure, let’s talk.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 16 November 2022
Since then, more about Hotz’s work has emerged on Twitter. He is working on improving the site’s search function. Hotz has one month left.
that’s what Elon told me my job was, and I’m going to try my best to do it. I have 12 weeks
also trying to get rid of the non-repudiable login that pops up after scrolling a bit, these things are ruining the internet https://t.co/vZbSfEqlfW
— George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) 22 November 2022
While working to fix the issue, Hotz shared more thoughts on Twitter’s advanced search feature and how it works.
He shared some takeaways, including “Searching ‘liked’ and ‘viewed’ tweets with a modifier should be table effort, the fact that modifiers and advanced search should be displayed much better, and the need to move away from exact text search and towards embedding”.
Ok, summarizing:
‣ Searching “liked” and “viewed” tweets with a modifier should be table stakes.
‣ The modifiers and advanced search should be displayed much better. Discord does this well.
‣ Move away from exact text search and towards embeddings.— George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) 22 November 2022
The newest addition has many excited, but there are some whose views of Musk and his handling of Twitter have influenced their opinions of Hotz. His tweet asking for suggestions got some nasty responses, with Hotz saying, “I’m an intern trying to improve search, whatever your feelings are about Twitter and Elon it’s not about me.”
The range of responses varies from:
– I don’t want to work for free either
– It is impossible to do without
– Hey bro, check out this codeI’m pretty sure who will go the longest in life.
— George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) 23 November 2022
Musk wrote in the same thread: “Welcome to Twitter!”
Hotz may have recently arrived to work for Musk, but the innovator had his eye on the tech prodigy for some time. Hotz – who also developed comma.ai – was approached by Musk to help Tesla’s self-driving technology. But at the time, Hotz felt that Musk kept changing the deal and is known to have replied to him “I’m not looking for a job. I’ll ping you when I crush Mobileye.” Mobileye provides Tesla with most of its self-driving technology.
Musk’s latest hire is a man who claims to live by morality. “I live by morals, I don’t live by laws. Laws are something made of holes”, he said during one One from New York profile. They had done a story on Hotz when he was 22 and had just hacked the PlayStation 3 and released the software for others to use.
He studied briefly at the Rochester Institute of Technology and then enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University. Hotz had also briefly worked at SpaceX — another of Musk’s ventures — for four months.
Musk’s drive for excellence finds reflection in Hotz, according to his LinkedIn bio who cheekily riffs on the Pokémon theme song to say “I want to be the very best, like no one ever was”.
As “Boss Twit” hires people who have annoyed him somewhat in the past, it now remains to be seen whether the guy tracks Musk’s private jet get a job at Twitter too.
