I was always fascinated by George Hotz's hacking abilities. Inspired me a lot for my personal projects.
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 resilientl…
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.