The Hacker's Renaissance
phrack.org57 points by yu3zhou4 3 hours ago
57 points by yu3zhou4 3 hours ago
I think it captures the original motivation and thrill of exploration beautifully. Who doesn’t remember as a kid seeing a blinking cursor and the feeling there was an entire universe to be discovered?
I’m 100% on board with the message of getting back to exploration for its own sake, and that conformity gets in the way of that.
I feel like the irony of a post complaining about the death of hacker culture written entirely by ChatGPT pretty well summarizes where we're at.
Hacker culture is still alive at NetBSD community
I was about to say, it is still these but pushed tot he outer regions. There are still many Linux distros that have this spirit but they are usually used by maybe a few thousand people at best.
This resonates. I have just got back to hacking an old flip-dot display after sitting on the shelf for years.
this doesnt really reflect the vibe old school hackers give. "solder a wifi module to a calculator" sounds like a cartoon-inspired project.
Why not reference call spoofing (i forgot the name) where they were able to call for no charge because they were able to spoof a real call. that's the kind of hacker vibe i want continued.
The word "hacker" comes from MIT students who would cut up circuit boards with a hacksaw and connect the pieces together in different ways. Soldering a WiFi module to a calculator is very oldschool hacker.
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.
That is not something that should be encouraged. Hacking together projects like a wifi calculator is fun, harmless and builds knowledge. Hacking a phoneline can land a kid in jail. Attacking public infra is not something that should be treated lightly.
Forbidden knowledge is the tastiest of all knowledges.
> fun, harmless and builds knowledge
I'm not entirely sure what the hacker spirit is, but I'm pretty sure that's not it.
This sounds like ChatGPT.
is that why it's impossible for me to read? my brain has read so much llm output that i can only skim it now.
Uh, should have used Claude. Gpt is embarassing.
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.
You’re right. The content sucks, because it was created with an LLM.
No. It doesn’t matter whether it was created by an LLM or an Indian - as long as it is good. The methods are not important.
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
The Hacker Spirit was largely subsidized on the (relatively) high salaries afforded to engineers*.
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.
The hacker culture in Latin America was largely driven by frustration with the subpar hardware/software options available to the general public, and the financial inaccessibility of better options. So I wouldn't say that financial stability is a prerequisite for hacker culture to thrive.
I see it the other way. Applying the skills to a job is much more lucrative, so most do that instead.
Here is an exercise, find one character usage that the original didn't have and that this new one is littered with...
The original phrack was (i'm assuming) 7-bit ascii, so obviously it wouldn't have used characters that aren't ascii...
The text written in LLMish for that Phrack intro uses ASCII characters for everything, including quotes and ellipsis. There's one non-ASCII Unicode codepoint that made it through and it's the telltale sign of LLMish. They also use a monospaced font and ASCII art (well at least ASCII aligned titles) to make it look old-school cool.
Honestly I don't understand how anyone can defend this LLMish garbage.
Some of us use em-dashes habitually, and did so before LLMs. Call it le ponctuation juste.
Everything we love about human creativity is being destroyed by AI models and when some of us point it out, we're getting downvoted by an army of AI kool-aid drinkers. It's plain insane.
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.
Human creativity only dies with the entirety of the human race. As bleak as things may look the simplest thing to do is just not use AI if it bothers you. Focus all your efforts on some great tech based on risc-v. If one does that it would develop an amazing skill set.
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.
[dead]
Edit:
LMAO, this comment at the time of this edit is one of two top level comments about the actual substance of the article, but now it's at -2 while a bunch of whining about em-dashes is voted higher.
Why even bother putting thought into a comment?
I fucking hate this website sometimes. LLM bad, corporations good.
Whatever
> The "hacker spirit" doesn't require being a Luddite
Just to be pedantic, the Luddites weren't anti-technology, they were fighting against a means of production that they could never hope to own and which was ruining their livelihoods.
Why engage with the substance of my comment when you can be pedantic am I right?
I'd accept that challenge, but I can't now because it's been edited out. For what it's worth, I remember somewhat agreeing with it.
I love that Luddism(?) is coming back into mainstream discussion. Growing up I had the pop culture understanding of what a Luddite is. Wasn't until the last few months that I really understood, thanks in part to comments like this.
> doesn't require being a Luddite and rejecting LLMs merely because they're new and corporate.
I'd say the opposite is true. Taking that new and corporate thing and making it into something that works for you as a tool for hacking is exactly what the hacker spirit is about.
> I run an "abliterated"/uncensored local model on a spare PC downstairs.
Exactly like that.
> LLMs are here to stay. The "hacker spirit" doesn't require being a Luddite and rejecting LLMs ...
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?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I can't think of any comment less interesting and more tangential these days than yet another screed about LLMs using em dashes or particular speech patterns. Seriously who fucking cares
The other thing is who really knows if it was human or LLM. I think I have been accused of writing like an LLM.