Geohot says the darndest things

I found out yesterday that George Hotz, the hacker most known for unlocking the original iPhone and hacking the PS3, is now studying at my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University. CMU has a bash.org clone for saving ridiculous quotes in IRC and around the computer science campus, and geohot already has some great ones in there.

amwatson: George, you have to start working on the assignment! If you don't, you won't have time to run on the supercomputer!
geohot: Don't worry. I have my own supercomputer!
amwatson: ...You have your own 256-core machine?
geohot: Yeah! Well, I have a botnet...

<geohot> I'm permitted to own Sony products. I'm just not permitted to touch them inappropriately.

< Tony0> I like geohot's method of forcing himself to suck less with vim
< Tony0> apparently he rebound the arrow keys to backspace.
< gwillen> I,I vim is properly appreciated in the original Klingon

Oh, geohot! More great quotes at cmubash.org. Thanks, Dannel!

• [SamSam]

  Not enough of a Vim geek to get that last one. Is the idea that if the (back?) arrow key is bound to delete, then you’d better write things correctly the first time, because going back to fix it will make life even worse for you? Or if you bind all arrow keys to delete, you train yourself never to touch arrow keys at all?

  • [ayleph]

    I think your second guess is correct. Plain old vi (if I remember correctly) doesn’t use arrow keys to navigate; you have to use HJKL. I often run into this on Solaris boxes or embedded systems that don’t have vim installed. I’ll try to navigate with arrow keys and accidentally insert newlines with B or D in the file.

  • [Dean Putney]

    Vim has powerful navigation short cuts for moving not only in single steps between characters, but also between words and lines. The arrow keys are a crutch for navigation and would prevent you from learning these other tools, so the backspace remap is punishment for using them by deleting your work.