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of hacking a few years back (2004?).
Well thought, written and shared. Thanks for putting your message into words (did it take long to edit this?).
Now what systems are you interested in hacking next?
By the way the folks at HackerNews are really enjoying this post as much (or more!) than myself: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=880730
The book teaches systems thinking and that there is high-leverage and low-leverage solutions. The better you understand the system, the better you'll know where the high-leverage areas are.
Great book for advanced system hacking ideas.
thx.
The gap between the intended and actual rules of a system varies in size depending on the system itself. Java kinda does what you expect it to, or nothing at all. JavaScript does not, (particularly in the early days of version 4 browsers when I cut my teeth on it). ActionScript is a great example of that changing over time. ActionScript 1.0 was rife with weird tricks that were a combination of bugs, poorly documented features, and ideas the developers hadn't quite finished. Making ActionScript do anything expected was a fine art, and it took a particular type of programmer who is willing to deal with these "I can't tell you why, but I know you need to rub your belly while patting your head" solutions. Over time ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0 saw the language become strictly Object Oriented and a lot of that "quirkiness" got flushed out, and it seems like a more deliberate application development approach has come with it.
In fact, one might define "personality" as the size of the gap between the expected and unknown results of any system.
My wife has a LOT of personality. Frequently I say something to her and I get a completely different response than I did to the same statement a day or even an hour earlier.
My fish don't have much in the way of personality. I feed them, they eat.
My Apple is /supposed/ to have more personality than all the PC's I've owned in the past, but in reality I love my Apple because it works as expected. With PC's, I loved them because /only I/ knew how to make it work. I found myself naming my PC's and thinking of them as characters in my life I had to keep happy with finesse. It was an entity with personality that had to be paid attention to, or you'd suffer the consequences. My Apple I've just grown to expect will do what it's supposed to without question. Practically I prefer the experience of my computer just working, but in terms of "personality" - my PC's all had a lot more "spunk" and "character" than these macs, which tend to all behave the same from machine to machine.
So yes.. In my world, "consciousness" is a by product of complexity, and "personality" is the frequency with which you get unexpected results.
-frz
ceo, http://concrete5.org
Or even acknowledging that we may not even be converging on the truth, or that if we are, it's happening too slowly to matter in our lifetime!
This is one of those things that everyone has thought about at one point or another, but here it's made explicit. Great post.
(a) Imagination
(b) Trial and Error
(c) The gradual discovery of our prejudices by way of (a), of (b) and of critical discussion"
Karl Popper - Conjectures and Refutations, pp.474
I was at a conference and having lunch with a colleague. He was telling me a bit about formal Judaism.
Jews are bound to moral behavior, but the line between moral and immoral is poorly defined. So most Jews must err on the side of caution, to remain moral. However, a scholar has a finer understanding of where this line is drawn, and hence actually has greater license in his or her behavior.
His interpretation was interesting because it was counterintuitive to traditional moral viewpoints. That having deeper understanding grants you more freedom in your possible actions. But that is also the point of your article.
If a novice hacker is one who first realizes there are multiple "levels" that one can jump to (e.g., Godel, Escher, Bach's notion of Jumping Out of the System), and an intermediate hacker is one with sufficient experience to be able to jump between various levels of abstraction with facility and competence (yet still requiring concentrated effort), then a master/wizard-level hacker would be one where the process of moving between levels of abstraction is as second-nature as walking or breathing; thus, the process of hacking itself becomes intuitive, and thus mastery is attained.
RT
www.anonymous.ua.tc
In those words you have hacked the philosophy of my (coming) hack at several levels at the same time.
Roland Orre/researcher/hacker/entrepreneur
I've spent a good portion of my life "making the implicit, explicit" to both good and (very) bad results. As such, I realize that knowledge is not necessarily self serving and I've learned to layer "politik" on top of it (for better or worse).
It's soulless. Sure, you can figure out how humans/society work and use that to get ahead, but, as you point out, that's akin to cheating. Sure, you can type in iddqd and waltz through the game, but then you miss the fun of playing.
And this may just be from my experience, but the people I know who try to do this stuff are certainly proud of their achievements, but also seem oddly disconnected from the world. Anyways, just a thought.
It is less about "just typing in iddqd", and more about figuring out that you can type in "iddqd." Enforcing the trip is most of the fun, arriving just the icing on the cake. Enough clichés for now.
The point is in the journey - in figuring out that you can bounce yourself to the next level rapidly. And then you can spend your time how you want, instead of grinding to go through the traditional paths.
In my opinion, the grind is the soulless option.
Once you're bored running over people and shooting them in GTA3, you can start building your own mods. Once you get bored of mods, you can look for ways to beat the physics engine or introduce things to the game that the modding engine typically doesn't allow.
Once you're bored with that, you can hack the exe, or write outside programs that interact with the game at a lower, more technical level. Once you're there, your imagination is the only limit.
The real world is the same way. Think about serial entrepreneurs. They start a business, grow it, sell it, then start a new one - often in a completely different field! Just like in the OP, a new business has to find cracks in the system and slip through.
There are an infinite number of possibilities. As soon as you start to get bored with something, strive to find the next level.
However, at the same time, I feel there are some real world limits. For example, I have friends who can hook up with girls way out of their league, even wrangle a 3-way with said girls. Which is awesome, but seriously, how do you keep that interesting without the thrill of the hunt?
At the other end, suppose someone hacks a chemical production process to use 25% less energy. This hack is the opposite - a pure production of value.
Both are done by manipulating systems of rules to see strategies that other people didn't, both benefit the hacker, but only one of them benefits the world. Tim Ferriss competes in tournaments, so his success comes at other people's expense to a large degree. But Seth Roberts diet hacks are creating value.
This transfer vs. creation issue (related to neoclassical "economic efficiency") is very important in a number of systems, so I recommend thinking about it until you internalize it.
Damn, this was a good article.
http://www.amazon.ca/Hacker-Ethic-Spirit-Inform...
Thanks!