> They didn’t ask permission. They reverse engineered. They read RFCs like scripture. Their idea of “AI” was Eliza on the school computer lab’s terminal—and they probably rewrote it in Perl for fun.
> Today’s AI dev isn’t dropping shellcode into memory via a buffer overflow—they’re fine-tuning GPT on sentiment-labeled customer complaints for a mid-tier CRM startup. The tools are slick. The stacks are vast. The logs are in JSON. And the energy is… agile.
Also, I like em dashes still but the number here seems high. --- As an additional test, I asked Claude to write a post on the topic given just the title, so it couldn't copy the style from a snippet. Here's a snippet from the conclusion. Notice the similar style and structure between it and one of the OP's concluding paragraphs:
Claude:
> The hacker ethic hasn't died; it has evolved. Where once it meant breaking into systems, now it might mean breaking open black boxes. Where once it meant sharing code, now it might mean sharing compute. The tools and targets have changed, but the fundamental drive—to understand, to share, to democratize—remains.
OP:
> What the 90s hackers did with port scanners and punchy manifestos, today’s AI rebels do with open weights, privacy-preserving algorithms, and Git repos that mysteriously disappear from major platforms.
Look, I'm not in principle opposed to posting LLM writing, but it does seem like bad form to post an LLM's output on the topic of LLMs and not at least call it out as such. This is doubly true given that if I had to guess, not very much curation was done on top of this.