Hackers never had a very cohesive and consistent ideology or moral framework, we heard non stop of the exploits of people funded as part of Cold War military pork projects that got the plug pulled eventually, but some antipathy and mistrust of the powerful and belief in the power of knowledge were recurrent themes nonetheless

So why is it a surprise that hackers mistrust these tools pushed by megacorps, that also sell surveillance to governments, with “suits” promising other “suits” that they’ll be making knowledge obsolete? That people will no longer need to use their brains, that people with knowledge won’t be useful?

It’s not Luddism that people with an ethos of empowering the individual with knowledge are resisting these forces

I don’t know how we’ll fix it

Just taking what people argue for on its own merits breaks down when your capacity to read whole essays or comments chains is so easily overwhelmed by the speed at which people put out AI slop

How do you even know that the other person read what they supposedly wrote, themselves, and you aren’t just talking to a wall because nobody even meant to say the things you’re analyzing?

Good faith is impossible to practice this way, I think people need to prove that the media was produced in good faith somehow before it can be reasonably analyzed in good faith

It’s the same problem with 9000 slop PRs submitted for code review

I've seen it happen to short, well written articles. Just yesterday there was an article that discussed the authors experiences maintaining his FOSS project after getting a fair number of users, and if course someone in the HN comments claimed it was written by AI, even though there were zero indications it was, and plenty of indications it wasn't.

Someone even argued that you could use prompts to make it look like it wasn't AI, and that this was the best explanation that it didn't look like ai slop.

If we can't respect genuine content creators, why would anyone ever create genuine content?

I get that these people probably think they're resisting AI, but in reality they're doing the opposite: these attacks weighs way heavier on genuine writers than they do on slop-posters.

The blanket bombing of "AI slop!" comments is counterproductive.

It is kind of a self fulfilling prophesy however: keep it up and soon everything really will be written by AI.

VSCodium is the open source "clean" build of VS Code without all the Microsoft telemetry and under MIT license.

https://vscodium.com/

> Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter.

A lot of hackers, including the black hat kind, DGAF about your ideological purity. They get things done with the tools that make it easy. The tools they’re familiar with.

Some of the hacker circles I was most familiar with in my younger days primarily used Windows as their OS. They did a lot of reverse engineering using Windows tools. They might have used .NET to write their custom tools because it was familiar and fast. They pulled off some amazing reverse engineering feats.

Yet when I tell people they preferred Windows and not Linux you can tell who’s more focused on ideological purity than actual achievements because eww Windows.

> Please do no co-opt the term "hacker".

Right back at you. To me, hacker is about results, not about enforcing ideological purity about only using the acceptable tools on your computer.

In my experience: The more time someone spends identifying as a hacker, gatekeeping the word, and trying to make it a culture war thing about the tools you use, the less “hacker” like they are. When I think of hacker culture I think about the people who accomplish amazing things regardless of the tools or whether HN finds them ideologically acceptable to use.

> To me, hacker is about results

Same to me as well. A hacker would "hack out" some tool in a few crazy caffeine fueled nights that would be ridiculed by professional devs who had been working on the problem as a 6 man team for a year. Only the hacker's tool actually worked and saved 8000 man-hours of dev time. Code might be ugly, might use foundational tech everyone sneers at - but the job would be done. Maintaining it left up to the normies to figure out.

It implies deep-level expertise about a specific niche in the space they are hacking on. And it implies "getting shit done" - not making things full of design beauty.

Of course there are different types of hackers everywhere - but that was the "scene" to me back in the day. Teenage kids running circles around the greybeards clucking at the kids doing it wrong.

> but that was the "scene" to me back in the day.

Same. Back then, and even now, the people who were busy criticizing other people for using the wrong programming language, text editor, or operating system were a different set of people than the ones actually delivering results.

In a way it was like hacker fashion: These people knew what was hot and what was not. They ran the right window manager on the right hardware and had the right text editor and their shell was tricked out. They knew what to sneer at and what to criticize for fashion points. But actually accomplishing things was, and still is, orthogonal to being fashionable.

To wit: my brother has never worked as a developer and has just a limited knowledge of python. In the past few days, he's designed, vibe-coded, and deployed a four-player online chess game, in about four hours of actual work, using Google's Antigravity. I looked at the code when it was partly done, and it was pretty good.

The gatekeepers wouldn't consider him a hacker, but that's kinda what he is now.

Ideological purity is a crutch for those that can't hack it. :)

I love it when the .NET threads show up here, people twist themselves in knots when they read about how the runtime is fantastic and ASP.NET is world class, and you can read between the lines of comments and see that it is very hard for people to believe these things while also knowing that "Micro$oft" made them.

Inevitably when public opinion swells and changes on something (such as VSCode), all the dissonance just melts away, and they were _always_ a fan. Funny how that works.

Being anti-ai means you want to conserve the old ways in favor of new technology. Hardly what I would call 'progressive'.

> hackers have always rejected bloated tools [...] Hackers have historically derided any website generators

Ah yes, true hackers would never, say, build a Debian package...

Managing complexity has always been part of the game. To a very large extent it is the game.

Hate the company selling you a SaaS subscription to the closed-source tool if you want, and push for open-source alternatives, but don't hate the tool, and definitely don't hate the need for the tool.

> Please do no co-opt the term "hacker".

Indeed, please don't. And leave my true scotsman alone while we're at it!