100%

Sad.

Who is in charge of this shit now?

I work with tech and the phase of my current development doesn’t leverage AI.

Once I know exactly my needs I will likely start to adopt AI to fill in the details of my plan.

And I read 2600 and also occasionally submitted, but it certainly wasn’t treated as gospel. Also of course there was clout chasing — most of the scene was teenagers trying to impress each other!

The word you're looking for is phreaking. I must admit, since the title of TFA's website is only two letters away, it's funny you forgot it.

You won’t get my point so I have to lay it bare: That doesn’t matter. Content counts and not the methods to create it.

Yeah that's it.

for example, i would describe this article as grandiose, overdramatic and excessively ornate. ironically those styles show a lack of humanity.

it has vanishingly little substance. take "a poetic snapshot of a subculture forming in the shadows". this is meaningless!

it's generic, everything about the article is stating the mean belief. where is the controversy, where is the drama that would justify these massive sentences?

you can also notice that everything about an llm text has this repulsive corporate optimism, a desperation to deliver a redeeming conclusion.

so this article says, the hero meets the challenge in the journey, "We used opcode charts like musicians used sheet music. We owned the stack." oh no. we reached the bottom. but! watch out! because, we will be redeemed, "That spark is hard to find now, but it still lives in the rarest of places". how about this: no it fucking doesn't, the spark is dead, bled out and buried in a block of concrete. end of article.

i studied humanities but i hope that readers of any subject would react the same way.

The hacker culture in the West is more related to creating a thing, and doing everything yourself from scratch on bare metal components - often for the fun and challenge, rather than necessity.

Honestly I don't understand how anyone can defend this LLMish garbage.

Back then, if you were a phreaker, you basically got a few free phone calls. And learned a lot about the telephone system. I think for all intents and purposes you were a rounding error and really weren't doing any major harm (i.e. lowering slightly the profit of huge hulking corporations that were quite well). If you were a classic MIT hacker, you never even entertained criminal activities in the first place. I guess the 2600 culture and the Hacker manifesto is more descendant of phreakers and early internet hackers in the "break into computers" sense. But even then, as it says, "their crime was curiosity", and the purpose still was never to steal stuff. That's what criminals do. If you break things as you learn, you have the responsibility for your breakage. If you harm people that can be real harm. There's a difference between unsanitized (and harmless) and plainly an asshole. You gotta learn the difference.

Honestly I think this point is really important to drive today, because if we had script kiddies a few decades ago, today we can have Uber-Script-Kiddies, probably you can get a hold of some jailbroken LLM model and break serious things without technical knowledge or good intentions. Don't do it, kids.

But overall I don't see how it's worthwhile to actually do this kind of hacking today, specially the more attacking kind. I think there is today so many more resources for learning things non-destructively (although I'm sure there always were some).

The hacker mythos in my opinion is due to the mythos that are always built around power. There were the mythos of warriors, of sorcerers, etc., there was the shadowy ninja, and so many others -- they usually wielded some special skill, power or ability. In the case of hackers, they wielded special control and knowledge of computers to do their bidding. I think this kind of myth would happen regardless of intentions -- to break or to defend. It draws our attention and imagination I guess. Kind of like being a magician in an era dominated by communicating machines.

Naturally, the distinction between wielding those powers for good reasons and bad ones would emerge. That's the black hat and grey/white hats. Side note I think the black=bad, white=good association is just a kind of bad one, and nonetheless extremely overused at this point, but I digress. The thing is, what you do have consequences. If the only consequence is you learning stuff, maybe some minor nuisance to a megacorp (like downloading a e-book you don't plan on buying for <legitimate reasons>), then I think that's the good ole' hacker spirit.

I think the observation and a little bit of daredevil spirit is useful because almost every experiment we do IRL tends to carry at least a little bit of risk. We need to manage this risk wisely. For example, if you're messing with electronics you can run the risk of electrocuting yourself or destroying your device. The right spirit is not don't do it, but learn to do it safely enough, and at an acceptable risk to your device. If you wanted to play with radio transmissions, you run the risk of disrupting communications from emergency services and medical devices. Again, it's not "don't do it", but "know what you're doing". If you're playing with computers, (and you were skilled enough; which most of us (thankfully?) aren't) you can basically unleash a minor disaster. The answer is as always not "don't do it", but "know what you're doing and what you're playing with". Also of course for entrepreneurship as well, it's not "don't do it, never make anything". Everything carries risks. The important thing is to study well enough the risks of what you're doing until you can be reasonably sure (in proportion to the risk) the benefits outweigh the risks. Have integrity. Else yea, don't do it. Don't shove a gazillion ads into my eyeballs until I almost lose my mind, thank you very much.

Hackers are all part of society. That's what Hacking the Planet means in spirit. Use the magic sand to save the world. Wield the beauty of the baud... the mastery of the switch. Or Just learn and have some harmless fun, make someone smile, that might be better than any software or widget you could ever make.

Skin color of the creator is not important. Even if their ethnic background is visible through the use of one specific word a lot and slang or dialect, it doesn’t matter. Similarly it doesn’t matter whether it was made with an LLM.

Argue with the content, not the methods or risk being boring and uninteresting and generally easy to dismiss

in general though, i think it does get tiresome when people attack a piece solely based on the use of LLM editing instead of its merits (or lack thereof). That is ultimately an ad hominem. The reason to dislike LLM writing is because typically its vapid, not due to the LLM in and of itself.

So clearly not all sources are equal, and that applies to LLM too.

If you spend 4h of your time writing an article on something you care about it’s likely to be interesting. If the extent of the effort you are willing to put in the topic is 10 seconds of your time to ask ChatGPT to « write an article about phrack », then just don’t bother. We can all ask our own GPTs to do it for us whenever we want.

In theory someone could iterate for 4h with ChatGPT to get to the exact words they wanted to say without having written a line of it, but unfortunately for those folks, 99% of the content generated in that way will be nice sounding emptiness, and people don’t want to read 100 pieces of BS just to find 1 good one. There is too much content online and not enough time to read it all, we gotta filter somehow, and LLM sounding prose is one of the best filter available today.

I am. It sounds like it was written by an LLM. That's synonymous with uninteresting and derivative.

BTW, likening not wanting to read LLM output to racism is possibly one of the funniest things I've ever seen on this website. Thank you.