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Is true hacking dead? What we lost

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Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#51

Post by 80386 »

scoutt wrote: post #32
peteforde wrote: post #16

There was a time when I used to fret that the era of tinkering was coming to an end. Crypto was going to be illegal, they were going to put DRM on speakers, and our computers are designed to be completely locked down to the degree that you can't even add more RAM to a MacBook Pro. However, I think that the rise of Linux, Raspberry Pi and Arduino, OSS and Github and massive package repos for every language, Adafruit,…

Hacking is just interesting only if you are not following any "tutorial". Today you can run an embedded linux under 10 minutes with less that 20 bucks with a RPI by reading some tutorial or watching a youtube video. What's the fun about that? I remember too hacking my commodore and the only help I had was just a book in a strange language (english in my case) and my dad (he was into 8086 at that time) when I was a ki…

Linux is... a little alienating, isn't it? How many people can hold the whole thing in their head? Not many - and I don't think it's seamless enough to work as another layer of magic, either. People accept OS X because it's another layer of magic.

TempleOS was written by one guy, so I assume it can fit inside one head. Linux has been written by a lot of people over several decades.

Maybe I'm completely wrong about this, I don't know. But I'm getting old and lazy, so these days I'm on Windows.

I'm a little surprised there aren't more weird OSes going around these days, now that everything runs in the browser except text editors and fancy video games.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#54

Post by gitgud »

tus88 wrote: post #8

> The sad and inspiring story of TempleOS, a.k.a. what the Raspberry Pi should have been. Eh?

Well it was hacked together from scratch which is inspiring...

But I mainly see it as a cautionary tale on mental health and how arrogance can destroy your reputation...

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#55

Post by saagarjha »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #40
rs23296008n1 wrote: post #15

Hackers were like the hotrodders before. Here's a thing. Make it work. Make it faster. Improve it. Change it. Know how it works. Master it. I don't think its died. Its more likely morphed into something you don't recognise because its always been dynamic and now you're attempting to apply a static definition. Then you get frustrated or lament "its not the same as in the good old days". But the reality is that people…

> Make it work. Make it faster. This is not hacking.

Why not?

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#56

Post by lsofzz »

javajosh wrote: post #42

If you define hacking as gaining access to scarce compute resources, then yes, hacking is dead because compute scarcity is dead . If you define hacking as controlling your computer hardware at the lowest level, then hacking is dead because no-one wants to write device drivers . If you define hacking as *making the lights blink in interesting ways"[1] then hacking is incredibly, richly, and totally alive! You can make…

> If you define hacking as controlling your computer hardware at the lowest level, then hacking is dead because no-one wants to write device drivers.

This is absurd. Dude, let me be clear - Just because you write Java all day long does not mean that there are hundreds if not thousands of embedded system developers who engineer (quite passionately!) the thing that powers your SSD or your wireless card or the thing that heats your home.

We often take these substrates (in this context - the firmware and device drivers etc.) for granted in the modern hardware and often fail to even acknowledge them. I am not one of them and I vehemently defend these silent heroes of our generation.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#57

Post by saagarjha »

kart23 wrote: post #38

Graduated high school a couple years ago. Plenty of people coded, but I had only had one friend that actually was interested in doing more with computers. We found some pretty cool stuff on the school network, and ways to screw with our less tech-savvy friends. It even cost me a trip to the principal's office one time, due to my stupidity and inexperience. I guess I'm not part of the right forums or boards, but I jus…

> I go to a UC. Sure plenty of people know a bit of linux and networking, but how many people actually want to go past their classes and actually take the time to research and learn more? It's hard to find those people.

Those people do exist, but they’re probably not in a classroom for much longer than it takes to complete the final.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#58

Post by atoav »

Heyso wrote: post #24
peteforde wrote: post #16

There was a time when I used to fret that the era of tinkering was coming to an end. Crypto was going to be illegal, they were going to put DRM on speakers, and our computers are designed to be completely locked down to the degree that you can't even add more RAM to a MacBook Pro. However, I think that the rise of Linux, Raspberry Pi and Arduino, OSS and Github and massive package repos for every language, Adafruit,…

Unity is amazing, I agree. Moving from scratch to unity seem like a big step. Why not play with a 2d game library on the browser (with typescript, and a teacher to give a starter project and the basics) ? Making games in 2d is a very similar experience a smaking game in 3d, just easier. Unity can be overhelming with the richness of what it propose.

I was getting into games when Unity was around. But I didn’t just wanted to make a game. I wanted to understand how it works. I knew a bit about computers and played games since beeing a child, but could never understand how a computer does games.

And Unity would never have been able to teach me that. So the obvious next step was to write my own little sidescroller from the ground up, with naive physics and collision etc.

I think the whole discussion about “true” hacking is a generational shift combined with a change of the role technology plays in society. It became bigger and more accessible and that is a good thing.

It is just a bad thing in the eyes of people who tie their whole identity to beeing some kind of mysterious tech wizard only to have the kid next to you solve the same problem with some mobile app in a fraction of the time.

That must be how those mathematicians who first operated computers must have felt when a ton of people started flooded in who had no or little math knowledge.

The thing that worries me more than easy instructions and tutorials on any possible thing is the degree of abstraction. It is necessary to make understanding tech easy, because it is everywhere and it is getting more and more invisible.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#60

Post by lonesword »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #11

I don't think true hacking is dead, its just lost in a sea of non-hacking. The number of students who could write code in my high school of 2000 was perhaps 35. Those 35 were amazing because they had to work to get access to a computer, so we had already eliminated everyone who was just "oh that's too hard". Of the 35 perhaps a dozen kept at it beyond one class in BASIC. In my daughter's similarly sized highschool 40…

> Compulsive puzzle gene

Did you observe this in _all_ of the mentioned 35 students in your high school? Do you think that an aptitude for puzzles is a de-facto pre-requisite? I know that it shouldn't be, but I'm wondering if you have actually met people who are not good with puzzles but are extremely good when it comes to making a computer do things.

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