[meowface]

I watch and very much enjoy his Twitch streams, and he's definitely and obviously very intelligent, but I'd say not necessarily more than a top ~70th percentile HN commenter who works in software engineering. I don't think he's necessarily a genius, but just super curious and motivated and confident in his ability to learn anything if he dedicates enough time and practice.

You can see his learning and motivation process in his streams, when he dives into something he's totally unfamiliar with. It's very inspiring and fun to follow along with (partly because he clearly is having fun). He really enjoys learning things and has the kind of ego (not in a bad way) that just doesn't let anything stop him from trying to catch up on any concept in any field, even if he's totally "veering outside his lane" and going in blind (like his COVID-19 bioscience streams). He has a deep, almost hypomanic hunger for knowledge, and keeps Googling things until he understands everything he's reading. I think a lot of it's psychological and not purely IQ/cognitive speed, though of course it helps.

If anyone's curious, you can find an archive of his streams here: https://www.youtube.com/c/commaaiarchive

[KentLane]

Hotz won CSAW singlehanded, a one-man team against multi-person teams. And he won by an enormous margin. He is clearly way above the 70th percentile.

[meowface]

You're right, I shouldn't downplay his abilities, and he's definitely well over 99th percentile when it comes to results and accomplishments at the very least. I've competed in CSAW and some other CTFs and winning as a one-person team is definitely a massive achievement.

Just to counter a tiny bit, he didn't necessarily win by an enormous margin. CMU's PPP has overwhelmingly dominated every collegiate CTF since forever, and he was a CMU student and I wouldn't be surprised if he trained closely with PPP members. He got 5100 to PPP's 4800, which, to play Devil's advocate, depending on the particular point weights of the solved challenges, could potentially mean he solved one additional challenge over PPP (though possibly more; I didn't dig to find the exact breakdowns). I believe he also deeply specialized in low-level RE from a young age (as demonstrated by the iPhone and PS3 exploits), and from my perception that was less common among collegiate CTF competitors and gives you a huge leg up. But of course mastering something that difficult so young and being at CMU are itself huge achievements, as is outmatching PPP on anything at all entirely by yourself.

Obviously insanely impressive, and exponentially better than I could've done (and did do) at that age or could do today. Be it intelligence or endless drive and work ethic or all of the above, he's clearly an extremely skilled polymath. I guess I just didn't want people feeling too demotivated over genetic factors, which play a big but not a full role. He may very well be a genius, though.

[lightbendover]

With every halfway decent engineer you personally know, go compete in a major competition he won by himself in his early 20s and then repeat your statement. The archives are all online, take your time.

[meowface]

I'm probably biased because I competed in those competitions in college and do know some people who did very well (though of course not as well as him). He's definitely a > 99th percentile RE and hacker, to be sure. I was just talking about raw cognitive ability, but he absolutely may very well be > 99th percentile there as well.

[anonyxyz]

Back in the early days of csaw it was easy as hell. There wasnt a lot of competition.