Posted by yu3zhou4 11 hours ago
You downvoters really cannot see what's wrong with a Phrack article written in an insufferable LLMish tone that reads just like a 2026 LinkedIn feed?
You are lost.
I work with tech and the phase of my current development doesn’t leverage AI.
Once I know exactly my needs I will likely start to adopt AI to fill in the details of my plan.
You wish. True hackers wrote HAKMEM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAKMEM, wrote ZMachine interpreters in PostScript, wrote compilers for the Subleq machine with memory indirection and ran GNU/Linux on it. You pale against Lisp hackers who almost ate Discrete Math books for breakfast.
The PC "hacking" was nothing more than a bunch of kids playing with really underopowered toys.
There's more hacking spirit in Fabrice Bellard and Common Lisp/Scheme books than the whole PC hacking/cracking and phreakign scene.
This is a genuine hacking act:
This too:
http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/
The same with Emacs hackers repurposing the editor for anything. IRC, Email, ZMachine interpreter, music and video player interfaces, web browsers, equation solvers, controlling aiports in Germany as an ATC messaging router (and I am NOT kidding about the last one)...
This might be the craziest achievement from a GNU product ever. Repurpossing a text editor to manage a civil infraestructure:
Just to be pedantic, the Luddites weren't anti-technology, they were fighting against a means of production that they could never hope to own and which was ruining their livelihoods.
I'd say the opposite is true. Taking that new and corporate thing and making it into something that works for you as a tool for hacking is exactly what the hacker spirit is about.
> I run an "abliterated"/uncensored local model on a spare PC downstairs.
Exactly like that.
You've got it all wrong. I pay three AI subscriptions and I use LLMs every day, for various tasks.
I know models are here to stay (not just LLM ones). At least 12 computers at home (well counting the Pis and NUCs as computers) and at all times at least half of those turned on. And more VMs than that (and agents running into those VMs).
I'm all but a luddite but this doesn't mean I don't find itprofoundly lame when such a venerable institution as Phrack can't even bother to write one page of text without using a LLM.
Also they use a monospaced font and there's ONE fucking non-ASCII character in the entire prose that appears several times: the em-dash from LLMish.
Now I wrote (and typeset) books: I can tell you about various types of dashes and spacing characters (in both english and french). I'm not saying we shouldn't be using em-dashes. But when you use a monospace font to look old-school cool using ASCII art, then maybe you could have removed that one LLMish artefact and use, I dunno, two minus signs like in the good old days?
They didn't even bother to replaced these em-dashes.
Here's what Gemini (on purpose) has to say about the text:
There is exactly 1 unique non-ASCII character in the provided text (see what I'm doing here? I'm using a LLM):
The Em Dash (—): Used throughout the text (e.g., "2025 — 40 years", "Dead—Long Live", "criminals." — The").
All other characters—including the quotes (", '), ellipsis (...), and formatting symbols (|, =, -)—are standard ASCII characters."
Why, just why? Why are ellipsis ASCII ... ? Did they replace the Unicode ellipsis codepoint with three ASCII dots? They forgot to replace the em-dash?
>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I can't think of any comment less interesting and more tangential these days than yet another screed about LLMs using em dashes or particular speech patterns. Seriously who fucking cares
I learned about em-dashes from one of clients who used them. She used Microsoft Word it took a chord key sequence but was in her skill set. I think it was shift-option hyphen.
I think using em-dashes to detect LLMs reveals the divide between computer science and liberal arts.