Is true hacking dead? What we lost

It's always been difficult to discover this stuff. There has always been a very small subset of people who were driven to figure it out, in part at least, because it was hard.

To reiterate what ChuckMcM said at the top of this thread. The "hackers" who would figure that stuff out are still there still doing things no one expected could be done systems that no one thought would be used in those ways. We didn't actually lose anything. It's just a little obscured by the sea of consumers of computing who aren't hacking on those systems.

The filters that kept the consumer away from computing are mostly gone but that didn't make the consumer magically become interested in tinkering with those systems.

Your first 3 points reassembles too much to embedded programming + electronics. And no, there is not just a few or no-one of them: it's an entire industry. I do it all day long and I don't feel like I'm hacking if I know and understand what I am doing.

You don't need to necessarily code to hack. You can hack with just electronics.

Perhaps you are too inclined to java or upper layers of abstraction.

You can have the best of both worlds. In some Smalltalks (like Pharo), the image is bootstrapped from the source code but you can still use image persistency.

I think there's other types of compulsive people too. I'm not, in my view, a compulsive puzzle solver. Rather, I'm obsessive about understanding elegant solutions to complex problems. Usually I define elegance in different ways, but nevertheless that's the thing I most enjoy.

So puzzles by themselves don't often hook me too much. Especially if the puzzle itself has 1 way to solve it. But I'll spend days obsessing, losing sleep, forgetting to eat and etc all because I "feel" a problem has a more clean solution.

Though, I'm probably not a hacker in this sense.. hmm. /shrug

> An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they want the computer to do!

I feel this way. I've been at this a long time but all my non-work computing is either futzing about or incredibly low-value. Spreadsheets are pretty nice but I could do without them. Some kind of instant messaging or email is pretty useful. Calendar reminders are nice. But there are decent alternatives to all of them that aren't really that much worse, for personal use, while computers are expensive and take up a lot of time, especially to get good enough to use them without constantly being confused and mystified (see: any non-nerds using computers).

90%ish of what I get out of all this, personally, is media access, which could be almost perfectly replaced by living somewhat closer to a library and having a Netflix DVD subscription. I kinda think the everything-always-available aspect actually makes things worse, so a little extra friction or forcing choices might be an improvement. Ditto spending—I think any savings from online shopping is probably exceeded, for most people, by increased total spending.

It's looking increasingly likely I'll never start a significant side-project, let alone found a product of any significance whatsoever, because I just can't think of anything useful to do with these magical boxes that's not already being done. Since everyone says that business ideas are the easy part I guess I'm truly fucked because I can't even come up with one of those that survives a day of thought and research. I look at computers and the Internet and see a time-suck that is, most of the time, ill-applied, dangerous, and probably harming productivity in most areas.

[EDIT] to support the "expensive" thing, say it's about $2000 every four years per person to keep in smartphones and larger computing devices that don't take up too much space (laptop or tablet), that work well enough to actually be semi-useful rather than just a constant pain in your ass, and that will actually probably last and remain usable for four years, on average. Two adults in a household, that's about $1,000/yr in hardware, no tinkering, no gaming consoles, no bling'd out new phone every year, no peripherals, just to basically get the "job" done. Two streaming services of some kind, call it $20/mo, and that's a pretty low count. Good home Internet plus the Internet portion of your cell phone bill, for me, that's about $110/mo combined for the two of us (kids don't have their own stuff yet, and hell, may not at all until they can pay for it, because this stuff's expensive). That totals to about $2500/yr. You can buy a hell of a lot of physical media, (physical) games, postage stamps, puzzle books, whatever, for $2500/yr, and if you don't just throw it away you can keep using all that stuff the next year, and the one after, without paying again.