Punk, or why I don't stream anymore: The death of hacker culture
I stopped streaming because spectacle replaced authentic participation, turning hacker culture into performative signaling. AI and social media now feed us prechewed content, eroding our identity and steering us toward a uniform, corporate reality. The real world has been outcompeted by a digital cage where isolation is impossible, and the machine sells us a degraded version of our own culture back to us.
You won't be killed by bullets, you'll be transmuted into compatible material.
- firasd
This lament about the superficiality of publicly oriented endeavors is interesting cause this guy's life is inseparable from meta commentary.
"George Francis Hotz (born October 2, 1989), known online by geohot, is an American security hacker, entrepreneur,[1] and software engineer. He is known for developing iOS jailbreaks,[2][3] reverse engineering the PlayStation 3, and for the subsequent lawsuit brought against him by Sony. From September 2015 until November 2025, he worked on his vehicle automation machine learning company comma.ai.[4] Since November 2022, Hotz has been working on tinygrad, a deep learning framework."
From the early legal controversy to today, if there's one thing we can expect from geohot, it's that he's gonna think he's god's gift to programming and everyone whose work he disagrees with are losers. But the bluster often doesn't result in much eg his plan to 'fix twitter search' didn't amount to anything (and today in June 2026 twitter search is way less reliable than it was pre-Elon/Hotz/etc in Oct 2022-- but I guess we can't say it's Hotz's fault cause like I said he did approximately nothing)
Punk is actually a good metaphor because the the angst in the music became the blockbuster 'brand' of the music. Being jaded and cynical doesn't make you inherently more interesting it just leaves you--'here', wherever this post is. The programmer equivalent of sporting a studded leather jacket and green mohawk
- torginus
I remember watching this urban exploration video, the guy went into an abandoned Russian nuclear bunker, deep underground. Watching this titanic effort of engineering, made by people who were both highly intelligent and had vast resources at their disposal, yet felt it necessary to build it to have an answer to the unthinkable horrors the future held, all of this reflected in the sturdy but utilitarian design of the concrete complex, rooms filled with all sorts of pumps, air filters, and electronic equipment necessary to sustain human civilization after the bomb fell. As the guy walked from room to room, he noticed that in one of the rooms was a set of old PCs. The power was on. He switched it on, and suddenly the familiar bootup chime of Windows 95 played, and he was looking at a desktop. He sat down, started clicking around, opened Solitaire, started playing. Suddenly all the tension dropped, I forgot where I was. The whole thing felt comfortable, even pedestrian. I had to actively remind myself that the guy was many stories underground in an abandoned bunker, likely patrolled by active military.
Computers even at their crudest have a hypnotic ability to bring you into their world, and somehow make you forget about the reality you live in. This is not the only mechanism of society that does this, but certainly one of the most powerful we found in recent history.
- rmunn
From the article: "... there is no other Internet, just a place with five corporate towns and some Chinese ones that are really hard to visit if you don’t speak Chinese."
Yeah, that's only true if you don't hang out in the old-style Internet. I spend most of my time on blogs, reading and replying to discussions on wide-ranging topics, talking to interesting people who know a lot more than I do about many subjects (in fact, most subjects that aren't computer programming) The discussion isn't on Disqus, it's not monetized, it's just... people talking to each other. And it's an active, fun community.
They're out there. Just... choose to disengage with the boring communities. I haven't had a Facebook account in years; I only got one because at the time there was a social group I belonged to that was using Facebook as their primary communication tool, and when I moved to another city I deleted my Facebook account. I never signed up for Twitter. Didn't want an account when it started, didn't want one five years ago, don't want one now.
It's possible to disengage from the artificial, and find real communication with real people. The first step is to just... stop logging onto Facebook. Just walk away.
- everdrive
I really like this style of writing in short bursts, and I appreciate the author's tone and concerns.
I do wonder if the author is very young. As much as I enjoyed his small essay, a few things stuck right out at me:
>I tried having a flip phone once (2014), but you couldn’t find out what time the movies were playing because moviephone just redirected you to their app.
This has been a solved problem for a long time: you look up the movie times and such prior to departing for the movies. No smartphone needed.
>And it’s not like there’s anywhere to go. The real world is strip malls and axe throwing and escape rooms. Oh god people actually go on a hinge date to axe throwing and think it’s the real world.
You can escape, but you'll never hear about it by either checking online, or by listening to very-online people. Go on a hike. It doesn't even have to be a good one. Just go do it. Maybe say hi to some people you meet while you're there. You probably won't develop a deep friendship with them, but you will have a real, face-to-face human interaction.
Living away from the internet can now only be done intentionally. It can be done, though, but it's not the automatic choice. It's not even difficult ... it's just "manual." You must always think about what you want to do and how you want to do it. It's a skill that will come back to you. Or, if the author never learned it, a skill he still has a chance to learn.
What we've lost is getting to feel like you're connected to a common cul […]
- solid_fuel
> I’ve been scraping dating sites and feeding them to ChatGPT, and it’s amazing how few of the profiles still say anything about the person.
Yeah, it's common knowledge now that you can't put many identifying details into a dating profile - there are creeps out there doing things like harvesting them and feeding them into ChatGPT.
- 3form
This really does - I don't mean it in a disparaging way - read like a mid-life crisis writing. Having to come to terms with the fact that the "old world" is not the current world anymore, which is too bad, because you like the old one, and you don't quite fit in the new one either.
This feeling has existed across generations and most of us have to go through it eventually.
The world, however, is not any less real than it has always been and is not collapsing.
- delichon
> But the difference is that you didn’t do anything. And in so much as there is a you, it isn’t steering. Now I realize that the non steering you is everywhere.
Jesse: I was thinking about that thing you said about the universe. Going where the universe takes you? Right on. It's a cool philosophy.
Jane: I was being metaphorical, it's a terrible philosophy. I've gone where the universe takes me my whole life. It's better to make those decisions for yourself.
El Camino, 2019