Hackers

I still rememeber watching The X-Files and marveling about all these rather grotesque hacker characters, while clearly seeing the common trait - living with minimal interaction to the society.

Another common trait was doing everything their own way, by relying on their own minds, and this is the definitive trait, which can be traced to the Upanishadic seers, living on the outskirts of the ancient society.

Hacking is not some skillset (as in a trade), like knowing what parts of the fucking Win32 API is vulnerable due to fixed size buffers, but a particular mindset of habitually trying to understand hows and whys of everything around.

Once you understand how thing really are (and why), so there is no barbie-worlds or wishful thinking, you can do your small hacks. The perfect match with reality is an absolute necessity (it is both necessary and sufficient).

The more you know (as It Is) the more you understand. This particularly true for socially constructed (and maintained) phenomena, from individual memes to whole modern “scientific” sects and “political” cults, things like “trading shitcoins” and what not.

Almost everything around you is socially constructed and driven by memes. This is why almost everything around fells like crap. Because it is.

Paul Graham loved to write about “hackers”, but for him they were people who are “really onto something”. The “Lone Gunmen” (from The X-Files) would be a perfect fit. But we are those rare freaks for whom they gasp on.

And yes, isolation and loneliness are requirements and are not ancidental. Some sort of “freakness” is just a direct consequence of losing connections to the society, not some idiotic counter-culture cosplay.

We run Gentoo and i3 full of terminals and Emacs windows not because it is cool, but because this is the most optimal way to squeeze every last bit from a cheap, crappy Intel-based Lenovo laptops (yes, It runs a smooth as high-end intel Macbooks).

There is, of course, a lot more to it. One have to understand all the social movement behing major open source projects and ecosystems - why things are as they are, what drives whom, where it all goes to. This is how one understands the sofrware.

So, what do I hack? Socially constructed bullshit. A lot of it. From trolling Chuds on HN, to challenging the most famous narcissistic bullshitters, “celebrities”, talking heads and “experts”. To see things as they are one has to remove bullshit first.

“Exploiting” vulnerabilities in PHP is just a primitive “cracking” not worth practicing.