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Is true hacking dead? What we lost

c0de517e.blogspot.com

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Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#181

Post by majewsky »

DagAgren wrote: post #118
majewsky wrote: post #37

Other people have already commented on the core message. I have a nitpick instead: > That's probably why we still have textual source (great for git and merging) over more expressive formats or even the old idea of serializing the entire state of a VM (again lisp, smalltalk) which sacrifices merging entirely to make hotpatching (dynamic software updates) trivial. Good. Not being able to merge squarely belongs in the…

More expressive representations of source code enables better merging. Merging code as opaque strings of text is a bad choice, and causes lots of problems to programmers every day.

> More expressive representations of source code enables better merging.

Merging is usually easy regardless of representation when all changes are comparatively local. The problem is always merging big far-reaching changes like a complete refactoring of an entire module, and I don't immediately see how any non-text representation would do significantly better (by a wide-enough margin to justify changing paradigms) than text at assisting with the merge process in this case.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#182

Post by yoz-y »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #121
bambataa wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discoverability. Knowing how to connect together multiple services isn't obvious. What kind of information can IFTTT take in and what does google sheets output? That's not obvious. I use Beorg (an org-mode interface) on my iPhone and I still look up recipes the developer puts online showing how to hook it up with the Shortcuts app and do clever things. Mostly because I don't have a good idea of what interfaces betwee…

Right. Discoverability. And I'd also add, paradox of choice. If you have 20 different ways you could use to automate some things you need (but not all, and solutions only partially overlap in the problem space), you may as well have none. Defaults matter. I doubt we would be able to have a third-party solution reach ubiquity again, the way e.g. Flash had, so having powerful functionality integrated at the OS level wo…

macOS had automator for a long time and even usage of that must have went quite down for them to let Sal go. It's quite sad because as others have said I think the percentage went down mostly because of more people coming in.

Now that they have introduced Shortcuts to iOS I would be curious about how many people use them and to what extent.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#183

Post by pjc50 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #174
pjc50 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people do sometimes want to "communicate directly with the machine", but they don't want to deal with the huge and often crufty layers of abstraction that are currently in the way. In the AT era, reading a byte from the keyboard could be done with a single IN instruction. In the present PC era, the bare minimum for doing that is a multitasking operating system capable of enumerating USB. Or indirecting it thr…

Right this instant you can talk to the bare metal of a computer with more power than anything you had way back when C64's roamed the planet. Get yourself an ESP32 and you can talk directly to the metal with no OS to get in your way. Get two, they only cost a few bucks each. > I see this occasionally on electronics.stackexchange: "how do I attach a light to the end of a USB cable and turn it on and off from the comput…

> It is astonishingly complicated because what they are asking the wrong question.

No, I see this argument a lot on electronics.stackexchange and I think it's over-used. That's their question. They have some larger objective in mind, which it may be useful to know; if they want to control the light from UI on the PC then that's a natural way of phrasing the question.

If you want to do this over the ESP, sure, then you've got to get networking involved, and that's how you end up with all the usual IOT disasters. How do you "securely pair" an ESP32 with a PC? Again it involves a huge amount of software. Whereas if you just had a wire you wouldn't have to worry about security.

Answers of the form "buy a different computer" or "install a different OS" serve to make the answerer feel smug without usually helping the questioner at all.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#184

Post by eeZah7Ux »

watwut wrote: post #89
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why "hacking" aka "going fast and breaking things" is so glorified This is not hacking in the proper ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_Manifesto ) sense.

If that is proper definition of hacker, I dont want to have anything to do with that nor understand why would anyone see it as a good thing. Thankfully, there are many other competing definitions around that do not require one share the exact same feelings as this dude. Just because someone believes he is all there is to hacking and that his personal feelings and gripes should define the word, does not mean we have t…

Many of the "competing" definitions have been made up decades after the manifest e.g. the ominous "growth hacker".

Or the one in "hacker news", for that matter.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#185

Post by [deleted] »

wccrawford wrote: post #125
lsofzz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thousands do care. So here's what I mean: When you take the ratio of the thousands that do compared to the millions who don't, you get a number that's pretty close to zero (one tenth of a percent, back of envelope). Fair enough.

His same argument means there were never any hackers if you compare it to the entire human race. There have always been very few "true hackers". That continues to be the case. It doesn't mean they died out, it means that nothing has changed other than that it's harder to find them using the same search terms.

[deleted]

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#186

Post by crankylinuxuser »

c0de517e wrote: post #179
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #96

So, what does C0DE517E think hacking is? I'm surprised nobody picked up on it... 2/3s of the way down is a link (by the way - wanna see something weird?). That link goes to [0] which is about 'Dark Enlightenment'. The key takeaways here are: democracy is bad, white people are smarter, Urbit, and Yarvin. But surely someone can link without advocating? And then we get to this bit, "Whatever the causes, we have software…

Author here - no, that link was to show something bizzarre, how (some) people lose their minds in weird elucubrations on the politics of software - instead of actual hacking. I am definitely not endorsing in any way ever that cesspool that is D.E., I'm sorry if it wasn't clear from the text.

My apologies then.

I've dealt with Yarvin's people in person and online. Many a times, they will sneak these kinds of things into conversations and slide these things like DE and Urbit in on the side. Had one, at the hackerspace I used to attend, quote Mussolini about how good an idea the DE was. So yeah I'm a bit on guard.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#187

Post by DagAgren »

majewsky wrote: post #181
DagAgren wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More expressive representations of source code enables better merging. Merging code as opaque strings of text is a bad choice, and causes lots of problems to programmers every day.

> More expressive representations of source code enables better merging. Merging is usually easy regardless of representation when all changes are comparatively local. The problem is always merging big far-reaching changes like a complete refactoring of an entire module, and I don't immediately see how any non-text representation would do significantly better (by a wide-enough margin to justify changing paradigms) th…

Have you never got large merge conflicts because one branch made some changes to a block of code, and the other left it intact but changed its indentation?

That kind of thing would not happen in a better representation.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#188

Post by animal531 »

_y5hn wrote: post #169
shantly wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 us…

Some of us started around with ZX Spectrum and C64, playing some games we wouldn't bother glancing at today. You actually can find emulators for this stuff, but we're living in a much higher vibration for this stuff to even trigger a yawn. What did we "create" at the time? 10 PRINT HELLO 20 GOTO 10 Aside from futzing around with C++, x86 assembler (never could find a book for C64, so never got to learn it on 6510), t…

My first program on my Spectrum was

10 GOTO 20

20 GOTO 10

I quite enjoyed but was baffled at the time that this caused the loading screen behaviour to kick in.

Re: Is true hacking dead? What we lost

#190

Post by peteforde »

scoutt wrote: post #180
peteforde wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I just don't agree. I don't think you (or we) get to decide what makes someone feel that hacking feeling . There's a term for not finding "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" exciting: jaded. "What's the fun about that?"... seriously, dude? Listen to yourself. It's only not fun because you've done it so many time…

> get to decide what makes someone feel that hacking feeling I agree, but I wasn't deciding for anyone; just saying what happens in my case. > It's fucking incredible. I totally agree, but it's not hacking . It assembling LEGO with instructions. I am not saying I'm a better hacker or that it has to be done the way I say. What I'm just saying is that if you follow the instruction books, tutorials or videos, you are no…

I guess you tell your current or future children that their feeling of excitement at the realization that they can build anything they can imagine with time and effort is less legitimate than the pure rush you experienced on a C64 just because you didn't have any access to reference material?

I just think you're being a bit of a temporal chauvinist. I'm not angry with you and it's okay if we disagree. :)

https://vimeo.com/312006066

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