Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • What is striking to me now that we are three years into the LLM revolution is ... there is no foundational software that has resulted. I keep asking where the good software is now that the miracle of LLM programming has entered the firmament.

    Companies were always huge piles of proprietary custom code. Slowly what would emerge from those would occasionally be foundational software like ERPs, better databases, better message queues.

    What I suspect will happen now is that everyone will simply construct their own distinct stacks of code, or just pile onto the existing proprietary ones inside companies. The "export" of code for general use will functionally disappear.

    It's all throwaway, to be wastefully recomputed/rerendered by armies of H100s and only apathetically checked for utility.

    I could be proven wrong, I'll know if Linux starts to miraculously close functionality and usability gaps with Windows/OSX, which would be the most visible example of LLM acceleration of development, but it so far has not.

    by AtlasBarfed
  • In ancient days, I printed out the original and hung it on the wall by my computer.

    This one I'd regret wasting space in my trash.

    by ergonaught
  • This resonates. I have just got back to hacking an old flip-dot display after sitting on the shelf for years.

    https://www.bobek.cz/buse/

    by bobek
  • what hits harder, the fact that this was written by an LLM or inspecting the monospace font and finding cloudflare analytics javascript
    by lukewarm707
  • From the article

    > 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.

    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.

    by vunderba
  • These sorts of manifesto essays have never resonated with me. To me it never was—- and never has been—- about freedom. It’s about curiosity and knowledge. The essay seems to glorify the bad-old-days of fighting for freedom against corporate control (AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, etc.) as somehow the good-old-days. As far as my technological life goes, we’ve won—- MS, IBM, AT&T are irrelevant.
    by bmenrigh
  • 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.

    by JSR_FDED
  • 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.
    by stonyrubbish

Explore Birbla archives