Was this written by an LLM? I'm not highly confident, but there are some telltale signs. For example, the negative preceding multiple positive contrasting examples pattern is quite common in LLM-written text, and it appears multiple times throughout the text.
> 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.
gurkenjunge97 · 7h ago
What struck me was the phrase "[...] trying not to hallucinate in meetings or machine learning models". This sentence is super incoherent and tells me that whoever wrote this piece of text doesn't have a clear understanding of the subject matter.
I don't care either wheter this is from an LLM or a real person who just doesn't know their stuff, but it tells me to not expect any meaningful insights from it and that engaging with it is probably a waste of my time.
echelon_musk · 7h ago
It's a shitty article serving as a thinly veiled advert for a web store that's trying to sell t-shirts to nerds.
Thanks for calling it out for what it is.
bawolff · 7h ago
Sheesh. There were corporate devs in the 90s too, and their culture also had nothing to do with the movie hackers.
wizardforhire · 6h ago
We used to call them suits, now they’re fleece vests. Different uniform, same mentality… conformity & control.
echelon_musk · 7h ago
Trashing! They're trashing our rights!
skwee357 · 7h ago
Zero Cool? Crashed fifteen hundred and seven computers in one day? Biggest crash in history, front page New York Times August 10th, 1988. I thought you was black man. YO THIS IS ZERO COOL!
dkdbejwi383 · 7h ago
RISC is going to change everything
skwee357 · 7h ago
Yeah, RISC is GOOD *looks at Angelina Jolie*
echelon_musk · 7h ago
I hope you don't screw like you type.
alganet · 7h ago
Meet the 2000s web developer culture:
Not hackers, we just want to build stuff.
Easy to learn technologies and practices. No elites.
You don't need to be Johnny Mnemonic or Neo. The kid playing soccer or the girl writing poems could be web developers. Everyone is invited.
> 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.
I don't care either wheter this is from an LLM or a real person who just doesn't know their stuff, but it tells me to not expect any meaningful insights from it and that engaging with it is probably a waste of my time.
Thanks for calling it out for what it is.
Not hackers, we just want to build stuff.
Easy to learn technologies and practices. No elites.
You don't need to be Johnny Mnemonic or Neo. The kid playing soccer or the girl writing poems could be web developers. Everyone is invited.