The dude is superhuman. An absolute machine in terms of programming output. Very engaged with the community. And extremely patient with people who have wrong opinions :)
For sure. He is pretty reasonable guy. Just over a decade ago I have CS friends who make fun of him for his appearances. Now at least I think what he talked regarding Free/ Or at the very least Open Source software is prophetic for that time.
And not just physical output of code, but he also seems extremely friendly & helpful and interested in fostering productive communities. Which is IMO just as important to the long-term health of open-source projects.
More importantly, he’s a GOFAI engineer who understands modern ML. Folks like him are rare (especially those of his generation who are still actively coding).
It’s a big deal because he’s extremely charismatic and well connected and that matters much, much more for a tech company’s success than some programmers like to think.
My interaction with him is limited, but he's really sharp and a very nice guy in my experience. He's responsible, at least in some part if not mainly, for Twitter's adoption of Scala.
Quite agree. And he seems like such an agreeable person too. Listening to Richard Hipp and his thought process felt familiar in the sense that he is the traditional old school programmer, and I know a few of those.
He built the best http library for Python and it’s free to use. That’s gotta alleviate some of peoples’ negative feelings towards him. That is huge value created for the world.
He has the skill to assemble and lead/manage a group of quality engineers & designers. He connects people. People who want to program it, who want to invest in it and users who want to use it. His ideas might not be that great (or better put, fitting) these days but that doesn't make him less useful. He's also a thought leader and someone people look up to. He's a great asset to any company really.
When did he even start working at OpenAI? I subscribed to him when he was doing the GTA-AI stuff and thought he was interesting for releasing NNfS, but I never noticed that he had begun working at OpenAI.
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