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.
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?<p>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.
In ancient days, I printed out the original and hung it on the wall by my computer.<p>This one I'd regret wasting space in my trash.
From the article<p><i>> Then: Phrack was the Rosetta Stone. 2600 was gospel. IRC was sacred ground.
Zines were copied, not monetized. We earned respect by contributing tools,
ideas, or code, never by chasing clout.</i><p>2600: The Hacker Quarterly is definitely not quite what it was decades ago, but I was still so giddy when my first article got published there that I dereferenced a null pointer on purpose.
Man everyone says every article/blog post that is on HN is written by an LLM. Almost every single post.. I actually didn't get strong AI vibes from this one but maybe I just am bad at recognizing. Sure it's a bit cringy but I think that's kinda the point? idk...i like the idea of keeping the culture of exploration of technology just for the sake of it (not to monetize everything) alive.
what hits harder, the fact that this was written by an LLM or inspecting the monospace font and finding cloudflare analytics javascript
I'm a professional hacker, and I love what I do, but this is one of the most cringe articles I have ever read. You shouldn't idolize the activities that you do and elevate them to a quasi-religious practice. Can you imagine a plumber or an airline pilot writing a manifesto like this? This happens with a lot of professions, but particularly in tech and ESPECIALLY in the offensive disciplines of cybersecurity. It makes for some of the most insufferable people you can ever interact with. They put all the eggs of their identity into one basket and it makes them overly self-important on that one topic, prideful, snobbish, and insecure. My advice to other hackers: pick up at least one or two other hobbies. Realize that it's not what you do that matters, but how you do all things, and most importantly how you engage with people.
This resonates. I have just got back to hacking an old flip-dot display after sitting on the shelf for years.<p><a href="https://www.bobek.cz/buse/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bobek.cz/buse/</a>
The original "manifesto" was a deeply cringe zine article written about a group of people who would go on to run IT security practices at the major I-banks.<p>This update applies a fresh layer of vaseline to the camera lens: "creators in a world of closed systems", "anarchists with a cause". "Our goal was not destruction." Who are you calling "we"? I was there. It was for the most part a bunch of people trading scripts and running them in the hopes of possibly shutting people's phones off or stealing mail spools.<p>I'm not high-horsing or condemning 90s hackers. They were teenagers fucking around doing what teenagers do (though: I cough a bit when I read Blankenship writing about how we all "existed without skin color" and not "judging people for what they looked like").<p>What's insidious about this piece is how they use hagiography to cover for a pure gatekeeping argument. Bug bounties commoditizing vulnerability development to produce CVEs! Why, I never: the audacity to pay teenagers in Indonesia to document vulnerabilities when our forebears had to surreptitiously trade source trees on EFNet to participate in the scene.<p>This piece was written about 6 months before LLMs upended vulnerability research. What LLMs are going to do to the scene is a can of worms, so let's just put a pin in that, and judge it by the standards of August 2025, which by the standards of 1994 were a golden age of hacking, both in opportunity and in the intellectual depth of the field and the possibilities for engaging meaningfully with computer science.
this doesnt really reflect the vibe old school hackers give. "solder a wifi module to a calculator" sounds like a cartoon-inspired project.<p>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.<p>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.
For me, I still tend to use the older definition of “hacker” (not necessarily someone exploiting systems which feels more like a “cracker” to me), but someone who has an innate curiosity about the world around them, and finds interesting ways to solve problems or create new things.
Ironically, the guy who soldered a Wi-Fi module to a calculator did so to gain access to AI slop with it <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/secret-calculator-hack-brings-chatgpt-to-the-ti-84-enabling-easy-cheating/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/secre...</a>
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.
Blue box and phreaking.
Because phreaking in the traditional sense hasn't worked for decades?
It was written by ChatGPT which would avoid examples that are explicitly illegal, and would stop short of advocating things that contravene ToS agreements.<p>Sad.<p>Who is in charge of this shit now?
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 <i>one</i> 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.<p>Honestly I don't understand how anyone can defend this LLMish garbage.
Emmm...dash?
Some of us use em-dashes habitually, and did so before LLMs. Call it <i>le ponctuation juste</i>.
Read the original instead of this AI slop:<p>Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"... Damn kids. They're all alike.<p>But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him? I am a hacker, enter my world... Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me... Damn underachiever. They're all alike.<p>I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..." Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.<p>I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.<p>And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is
sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is
found.
"This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all... Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...<p>You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.<p>This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.<p>Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.<p>I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
Hacker culture is still alive at NetBSD community
This sounds like ChatGPT.
>this is not a eulogy, it's a reckoning<p>100%
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Argue with the content, not the methods or risk being boring and uninteresting and generally easy to dismiss
It matters if an article was written by an expert or someone that only has surface knowledge about the topic. It matters if it’s written by someone talented with words or by someone that has to churn 10 articles a day for a content farm.<p>So clearly not all sources are equal, and that applies to LLM too.<p>If you spend 4h of your time writing an article on something you care about it’s likely to be interesting. If the extent of the effort you are willing to put in the topic is 10 seconds of your time to ask ChatGPT to « write an article about phrack », then just don’t bother. We can all ask our own GPTs to do it for us whenever we want.<p>In theory someone could iterate for 4h with ChatGPT to get to the exact words they wanted to say without having written a line of it, but unfortunately for those folks, 99% of the content generated in that way will be nice sounding emptiness, and people don’t want to read 100 pieces of BS just to find 1 good one. There is too much content online and not enough time to read it all, we gotta filter somehow, and LLM sounding prose is one of the best filter available today.
when i say 'written by an llm' i am skipping a step. it assumes the reader knows that llm style and diction is bad. but of course there are many reasons why it is so bad.<p>for example, i would describe this article as grandiose, overdramatic and excessively ornate. ironically those styles show a lack of humanity.<p>it has vanishingly little substance. take "a poetic snapshot of a subculture forming in the shadows". this is meaningless!<p>it's generic, everything about the article is stating the mean belief. where is the controversy, where is the drama that would justify these massive sentences?<p>you can also notice that everything about an llm text has this repulsive corporate optimism, a desperation to deliver a redeeming conclusion.<p>so this article says, the hero meets the challenge in the journey, "We used opcode charts like musicians used sheet music. We owned the stack." oh no. we reached the bottom. but! watch out! because, we will be <i>redeemed</i>, "That spark is hard to find now, but it still lives in the rarest of places". how about this: no it fucking doesn't, the spark is dead, bled out and buried in a block of concrete. end of article.<p>i studied humanities but i hope that readers of any subject would react the same way.
The Hacker Spirit was largely subsidized on the (relatively) high salaries afforded to engineers*.<p>What happens when that well dries up?<p>Plus the relative freedom available to said hackers in the past, that is now being choked by the very same tools they've built.<p>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.<p>* 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.
>Yet, somewhere the spirit persists. Hidden away in encrypted Matrix rooms,
deep inside dead drop Git repositories and onion forums, the real work
continues. The underground never died — it just moved to quieter places.<p>You wish. True hackers wrote HAKMEM <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAKMEM" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAKMEM</a>, wrote ZMachine
interpreters in PostScript, wrote compilers for the Subleq machine with memory indirection
and ran GNU/Linux on it. You pale against Lisp hackers who almost ate Discrete Math books
for breakfast.<p>The PC "hacking" was nothing more than a bunch of kids playing with really underopowered toys.<p>There's more hacking spirit in Fabrice Bellard and Common Lisp/Scheme books than the whole PC hacking/cracking and phreakign scene.<p>This is a genuine hacking act:<p><a href="https://bellard.org/dvbt/" rel="nofollow">https://bellard.org/dvbt/</a><p>This too:<p><a href="http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/" rel="nofollow">http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/</a><p>The same with Emacs hackers repurposing the editor for <i>anything</i>. IRC, Email, ZMachine interpreter, music and video player interfaces, web browsers, equation solvers, controlling aiports in Germany as an ATC messaging router (and I am NOT kidding about the last one)...<p>This might be the craziest achievement from a GNU product <i>ever</i>. Repurpossing a text editor to manage a civil infraestructure:<p><a href="https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsStories" rel="nofollow">https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsStories</a>
[flagged]
> The "hacker spirit" doesn't require being a Luddite<p>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 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.<p>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.<p>> I run an "abliterated"/uncensored local model on a spare PC downstairs.<p>Exactly like that.
> LLMs are here to stay. The "hacker spirit" doesn't require being a Luddite and rejecting LLMs ...<p>You've got it all wrong. I pay three AI subscriptions and I use LLMs every day, for various tasks.<p>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).<p>I'm all but a luddite but this doesn't mean I don't find itprofoundly lame when such a venerable institution as <i>Phrack</i> can't even bother to write one page of text without using a LLM.<p>Also they use a monospaced font and there's <i>ONE</i> fucking non-ASCII character in the entire prose that appears several times: the em-dash from LLMish.<p>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?<p>They didn't even bother to replaced these em-dashes.<p>Here's what Gemini (on purpose) has to say about the text:<p>There is exactly 1 unique non-ASCII character in the provided text (see what I'm doing here? I'm using a LLM):<p><i>The Em Dash (—): Used throughout the text (e.g., "2025 — 40 years", "Dead—Long Live", "criminals." — The").<p>All other characters—including the quotes (", '), ellipsis (...), and formatting symbols (|, =, -)—are standard ASCII characters."</i><p>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?
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a><p>>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.<p>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
Would love some abliterated model suggestions.
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.<p>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?<p>You are lost.