Ageism here is unwarranted. I'd assume there are now more 40something years olds keeping the traditional hacker values (before "hacker" became to mean "dude stealing money from gullible strangers over the internet") than there are 20something years olds. Because they actually might have been the part of that old hacker culture (not sure if it even exists now?). Now even in the best tech schools they'd probably teach you the most important thing on the internet (after the adtech of course) is to make AIs to ban "hate speech" and "misinformation". And if the independent hacker culture still exists, it's certainly not easy to find among the noise.

It has been wild watching this crowd slowly morph over the past decade or so, largely, into exactly what feels like this.