The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)

You've got it all wrong. I pay three AI subscriptions and I use LLMs every day, for various tasks.

I know models are here to stay (not just LLM ones). At least 12 computers at home (well counting the Pis and NUCs as computers) and at all times at least half of those turned on. And more VMs than that (and agents running into those VMs).

I'm all but a luddite but this doesn't mean I don't find itprofoundly lame when such a venerable institution as Phrack can't even bother to write one page of text without using a LLM.

Also they use a monospaced font and there's ONE fucking non-ASCII character in the entire prose that appears several times: the em-dash from LLMish.

Now I wrote (and typeset) books: I can tell you about various types of dashes and spacing characters (in both english and french). I'm not saying we shouldn't be using em-dashes. But when you use a monospace font to look old-school cool using ASCII art, then maybe you could have removed that one LLMish artefact and use, I dunno, two minus signs like in the good old days?

They didn't even bother to replaced these em-dashes.

Here's what Gemini (on purpose) has to say about the text:

There is exactly 1 unique non-ASCII character in the provided text (see what I'm doing here? I'm using a LLM):

The Em Dash (—): Used throughout the text (e.g., "2025 — 40 years", "Dead—Long Live", "criminals." — The").

All other characters—including the quotes (", '), ellipsis (...), and formatting symbols (|, =, -)—are standard ASCII characters."

Why, just why? Why are ellipsis ASCII ... ? Did they replace the Unicode ellipsis codepoint with three ASCII dots? They forgot to replace the em-dash?

What happens when that well dries up?

Plus the relative freedom available to said hackers in the past, that is now being choked by the very same tools they've built.

We like to think of ourselves as capable systems designers, coming up with complex reliable/durable/highly-available/distributed systems to be proud of. But we can't stop and think about the only system that really matters in the end.

* Not saying it was 100% the case, nothing ever is, but you can't deny that a large part of historic and modern hacker culture grew from well off places who could afford it. Sure, sure "necessity is the mother of all invention" and all that, but that breeds a different kind of innovation.

You downvoters really cannot see what's wrong with a Phrack article written in an insufferable LLMish tone that reads just like a 2026 LinkedIn feed?

You are lost.