Back then, if you were a phreaker, you basically got a few free phone calls. And learned a lot about the telephone system. I think for all intents and purposes you were a rounding error and really weren't doing any major harm (i.e. lowering slightly the profit of huge hulking corporations that were quite well). If you were a classic MIT hacker, you never even entertained criminal activities in the first place. I guess the 2600 culture and the Hacker manifesto is more descendant of phreakers and early internet hackers in the "break into computers" sense. But even then, as it says, "their crime was curiosity", and the purpose still was never to steal stuff. That's what criminals do. If you break things as you learn, you have the responsibility for your breakage. If you harm people that can be real harm. There's a difference between unsanitized (and harmless) and plainly an asshole. You gotta learn the difference.

Honestly I think this point is really important to drive today, because if we had script kiddies a few decades ago, today we can have Uber-Script-Kiddies, probably you can get a hold of some jailbroken LLM model and break serious things without technical knowledge or good intentions. Don't do it, kids.

But overall I don't see how it's worthwhile to actually do this kind of hacking today, specially the more attacking kind. I think there is today so many more resources for learning things non-destructively (although I'm sure there always were some).

The hacker mythos in my opinion is due to the mythos that are always built around power. There were the mythos of warriors, of sorcerers, etc., there was the shadowy ninja, and so many others -- they usually wielded some special skill, power or ability. In the case of hackers, they wielded special control and knowledge of computers to do their bidding. I think this kind of myth would happen regardless of intentions -- to break or to defend. It draws our attention and imagination I guess. Kind of like being a magician in an era dominated by communicating machines.

Naturally, the distinction between wielding those powers for good reasons and bad ones would emerge. That's the black hat and grey/white hats. Side note I think the black=bad, white=good association is just a kind of bad one, and nonetheless extremely overused at this point, but I digress. The thing is, what you do have consequences. If the only consequence is you learning stuff, maybe some minor nuisance to a megacorp (like downloading a e-book you don't plan on buying for ), then I think that's the good ole' hacker spirit.

I think the observation and a little bit of daredevil spirit is useful because almost every experiment we do IRL tends to carry at least a little bit of risk. We need to manage this risk wisely. For example, if you're messing with electronics you can run the risk of electrocuting yourself or destroying your device. The right spirit is not don't do it, but learn to do it safely enough, and at an acceptable risk to your device. If you wanted to play with radio transmissions, you run the risk of disrupting communications from emergency services and medical devices. Again, it's not "don't do it", but "know what you're doing". If you're playing with computers, (and you were skilled enough; which most of us (thankfully?) aren't) you can basically unleash a minor disaster. The answer is as always not "don't do it", but "know what you're doing and what you're playing with". Also of course for entrepreneurship as well, it's not "don't do it, never make anything". Everything carries risks. The important thing is to study well enough the risks of what you're doing until you can be reasonably sure (in proportion to the risk) the benefits outweigh the risks. Have integrity. Else yea, don't do it. Don't shove a gazillion ads into my eyeballs until I almost lose my mind, thank you very much.

Hackers are all part of society. That's what Hacking the Planet means in spirit. Use the magic sand to save the world. Wield the beauty of the baud... the mastery of the switch. Or Just learn and have some harmless fun, make someone smile, that might be better than any software or widget you could ever make.

I wonder what it would be like for most cars to be replaced with flying cars (i.e. helicopters). I think the noise alone would be a huge issue. Helicopters can be heard from extremely far away and are quite noisy. If you multiply that by like 1 million in a metropolis, I think that would approach unbearable, specially at nighttime, etc.. Also I don't think noise can be reduced too much, including electric propulsion. Propeller engineering would give you some reduction but still I think too much for near universal usage.

But I think the main thing is just cost. Electric aircraft like that would really be just too expensive for everyone to have em. Not everyone can afford a good old (electric) automobile today.

There's also battery technology needing a significant improvement.

Regulation and infrastructure is comparatively solvable I think.

Take it this way. People seem to judge that LLMs are not conscious and thus have no real inner experience. And that humans do. So if you replaced a human brain with a very powerful LLM (with some simply residual neural matter), you've basically killed the human. He isn't feeling anything at all anymore, he's just an automaton, basically a flesh robot.

I think this story is a weirdly good discussion point because many people still don't seem to "get it" that success is completely fundamentally irrelevant, and what matters is having a good inner life. You are what happens in your mind -- overall good thoughts and inner life = good life; bad thoughts and inner life = bad life. You can theoretically be the richest man in the world and about the most miserable, and very poor and living the best life.

If we don't kill our definition of good life and success (i.e. reaffirming value as pertaining exclusively to the mind), it will sooner or later kill us, or kill what's good in us. The more we can orient our entire society toward good inner lives and not anything else, the better our lives will be.

I still think people underestimate the power of even minor inconvenience. While you can't just click a button to reveal all pseudonyms of someone (e.g. you need to download some obscure tool or even perform statistical analysis yourself), I think this provides significant (and surprising?) protection for pseudonymous individuals, I'd say even (although to a reduced extent) for sophisticated threats like state-level actors. I hope LLMs continue to be unable to do so for the near future (I just tested and LLMs can't do it with a simple prompt).

Which is why I think privacy safeguards still work quite well even while being technically mostly bypassable.

So probably tools like this should be kept private if possible.

But I've come to realize there are serious downsides to letting things run their course too. Some changes are very hard to roll back (famous 'cat's out of the bag') just taking a lot of time to reverse if ever. For example, once there is a long term contractual agreement, if one parties decides to roll back they may just not be able to until the contract expires (like renting land; or worse, selling). A change in software systems for example that need backward compatibility can be quite difficult in technical and nontechnical ways.

I think people need to also keep some sympathy for the protests and let people protest more. I'm leaning more toward: if in doubt, provide visibility to a cause (even if not full support). It's okay to save yourself some energy (in particular for the most important causes). Some things might have to run their course for people to understand they were valuable, and we will probably have to eat some frogs as a consequence. Don't lose you sanity ;) (As the saying goes, "Don't you dare go hollow.")

But yea this glosses over a bit trial-and-error designs and, so to speak, "genetic optimization" kinds of designs where we just try random stuff and say "Hey, this works. Not sure why, but it works.".

It's even quite healthy, I believe, casting into doubt and analyzing all the things we've long taken for granted (this is something the philosopher Russel, among many others, mentions for example). But this exercise can be made somewhat independent of our daily lives and in a good, not excessive, measure.

QIII while solid feels missing lots of flair, it feels more generic shooter. Good, solid, but a little generic.

I'm not even critiquing any particular cultural stance. But I think it's possible and important to critique anti-intellectualism and specially denialisms specially in things that are actually important and threatening to society -- simply because of greed, most of the time. Let's not fool ourselves, climate change denialism isn't like a random cultural thing they chose to deny, it's specifically because of connections to coal, oil and gas industries.

If things are bad, you should want to know what will be the consequences and what can be done to mitigate things. In fact, I think denial tends to create some reactionary behavior from the left as well, sometimes leading to overblown claims around climate change. All of this leads to increasing polarization.

Slowing down cultural change is perfectly fine (as long as it's respectful of well established things like human rights), cosplaying a farmer is fine, whatever. Or being an actual farmer, or living outside of a big city, etc.. What's not fine is actively denying important scientific facts, being hypocritical (and, largely, stupid) in their positions: for example, farming tends to use very high tech equipment and methods, seeds, and so on; I'm sure most farmers enjoy most technological development, treatment against cancers, all sorts of diseases; computers, the internet, etc.. You can't at the same time want progress in cancer treatment and other conditions and want to cut funding to health sciences. And so on. I am willing to even entertain say technological regression. I don't love every technological change we've been through. But at least be consistent, you can't advocate to stop wearing clothes and want to live in the arctic.

Also, culture should be, carefully yes, questioned. It's not because it's cultural that it should stay frozen forever. People who want their culture completely frozen forever are dangerous to human progress and flourishing (I imagine most people wouldn't find ancient practices of human sacrifice, or say medieval torture practices nice and acceptable today). Being careful and well-reasoned is a completely different thing, and something conservatism could stand for instead.

Also, I believe citation is usually limited to prior written work. I don't think citing personal communications is mandatory, but at least for me lots of ideas come up in personal communications, random discussions, etc.. I think actually we should give more credit in this case, but it shows that attributing fraud for failing to cite may be a little too harsh. Again, I don't know if that's the case here, or if his thesis is just some pastiche or prior work without any significant or original contribution.

Likewise with math, it turns out, it appears. Likewise with most other things we classify as needing intelligence, I bet. It turns out that intelligence is not the same as humanity or sentience etc..

From what I know it seems we're headed to about +3C (mean temperature rise above preindustrial). It's a pretty dire scenario. But it's far, far from "too little too late". It seems probably large parts of Earth will become difficult to inhabit (like e.g. Phoenix AZ is today) without things like AC, etc.. But that's very far from an extinction scenario or total doom.

Every little bit we don't emit today will prevent probably several decades up to a century of atmospheric warming before it's extremely costly to remove from the atmosphere back into some reservoir.

Reminder that some fossil fuel companies quite enjoy narratives of total doom and change being pointless.

Some people mean "capitalism" to mean: a state should be minimal, everybody should be doing everything in their power to seek profits and become maximally rich, becoming rich is simultaneously the utmost absolute charity you could do, and also the utmost personal happiness such that you shouldn't lift a finger for anyone else (of course, unless to particularly impacts yourself). That's the corrosive part I think. I think hypercapitalism (or money is my God) might be a better name for this, or some other term.

There are a number of associated malaises: along with believing money is the ultimate measure or virtue, come the belief that poor people are worthless (or worth much less), that being "productive" (generating profit or income) is the most important thing in life, that consumption of goods and services (i.e. things you buy with money) give you ultimate happiness (you just have to pick the 'right things' to buy), that any technological development is always perfectly good and can do no harm because it increases productivity, and that civil participation is unnecessary because the market sorts everything out. To name a few.

But it's not just regulation megacorps can use, the most frequent is just various forms of capturing and dominating a market, I guess.

For example, Google is on the process of deciding or severely restricting independent developers on Android. I think by reasonable interpretation, user freedom is being severely restricted. But most people have little recourse, it's either Android or iOS (and by now both are similarly bad in different ways). There are some alternative OSes and devices, but there's a significant chance you may rely on some real world service that needs one of the two major ones.

Without trying to overgeneralize everything, in this particular example I don't see how things could change without regulation.

(and, if you will, in that case you can generalize to the implication that regulation isn't necessarily always bad)

---

I think the lesson to take isn't that the cyberlibertarians were 100% wrong and we need maximum government control and surveillance over the internet. The world tends to be complex and most simple stories we come up with (which are the ones that tend to sound good on our ears and be most comfortable) tend to be wrong in various ways. The world demands, at least, flexibility from ourselves. Sure, be inspired by one idea or manifesto or another, but don't follow it blindly always.

A relative freedom of communication and widespread access to information arguably is pretty good for civilization. When you can talk and relate to people from allover, the justification for war seem increasingly flimsy. But various forms of regulation preventing single megacorps from dominating the global internet (or simply local wired internet access in your region), can be important. Maybe we need to protect more discourse against bad actors and the incoming flood of LLM-generated, possibly propaganda-fed content. Keep an open mind. Whatever decisions we make we can walk back and change course.

The fundamental principle isn't this or that ideological current, but that people are living good lives. Happy, in peace, full of awesome possibilities. As someone wiser has once said, remember your humanity and forget the rest! :)