Re:Where have all the hackers gone?
by shadowgovt on Thursday May 18, 2023 @11:00AM
(#35988931)
Part of it is that the systems got really complicated, and a complicated system encourages standardization, not specialization.
When computers were small, dumb, and did very little on their own, creative integration of heterogeneous pieces was rewarded and rewarding. Computers are now large, complicated, distributed, and part of a whole ecosystem. The kind of "hacker-shaped" grit that makes someone do something neat gluing a telephone receiver to a TV tuner? Well that's a fun Adafruit demo, but you could have done it easier and faster on a Raspberry Pi, and hell, there's already the scragglypete/tv-phoner repo that you really should have used (if you'd done a bit of research before you whipped out the glue gun, you'd have found the StackOverflow post from three months ago where someone went "Hey, I want to glue my telephone receiver to my TV tuner" and they were directed to that project). And while we're on the subject, that's not nearly as useful as the telephone-receiver-glued-to-a-tv-tuner emulator in this Docker container, because it does exactly what your workbench solution does but you can deploy eighty of them in one minute with a few shell commands and some money thrown at AWS...
Hacking is less cowboy-shaped for the same reason there are fewer cowboys... Eventually, the pioneer towns give way to the skyscrapers and city streets because once the wilderness is tamed, the city is way more powerful, comfortable, and productive than the cowboy life.
When computers were small, dumb, and did very little on their own, creative integration of heterogeneous pieces was rewarded and rewarding. Computers are now large, complicated, distributed, and part of a whole ecosystem. The kind of "hacker-shaped" grit that makes someone do something neat gluing a telephone receiver to a TV tuner? Well that's a fun Adafruit demo, but you could have done it easier and faster on a Raspberry Pi, and hell, there's already the scragglypete/tv-phoner repo that you really should have used (if you'd done a bit of research before you whipped out the glue gun, you'd have found the StackOverflow post from three months ago where someone went "Hey, I want to glue my telephone receiver to my TV tuner" and they were directed to that project). And while we're on the subject, that's not nearly as useful as the telephone-receiver-glued-to-a-tv-tuner emulator in this Docker container, because it does exactly what your workbench solution does but you can deploy eighty of them in one minute with a few shell commands and some money thrown at AWS...
Hacking is less cowboy-shaped for the same reason there are fewer cowboys... Eventually, the pioneer towns give way to the skyscrapers and city streets because once the wilderness is tamed, the city is way more powerful, comfortable, and productive than the cowboy life.