I found that feeling again while building a game on the EVM. All of the constraints were new and different. Solidity feels somewhere between and high and low level language, not as abstracted as most popular languages today but a solid step above writing assembly.
A lot of people started building projects like mine when the EVM was newer. Some managed to get a little bit of popularity, like Dark Forest. But most were never noticed. The crypto scene has distracted everyone from the work of tinkerers and artists who just wanted to play with a new paradigm. The whole thing became increasingly toxic.
It was like one last breath of fresh cool air before the pollution of AI tools arrived on the scene. It's a bitter sweet feeling.
I hated this movie the first time I watched it. And the second. The third time I let go of the need for things to be realistic and took it all in as an artistic representation and snap... I loved it. One could argue that I loved it all along given that I watched it so many times... but there was a distinct moment where I let go and that's when I was able to see just how wonderful this movie really is.
I adore it. And some of the representations are the best I’ve seen anywhere. Kids exploring for the fun of exploring, not to hurt anyone but just to learn? The clock whirling at 4AM while someone hyperfocuses on code? The way they tease each other but genuinely respect their abilities? It’s beautiful.
There are some niche 3D file system browsers/shells out there, but none as captivating as what's shown in the movie (or the linked "animated experience") that I can find.
Not quite filesystem navigation, but SGI IRIX's Performance CoPilot software had an IrixGL (OpenGL's precursor) UI for monitoring things like memory state, CPU/storage loads, etc.
The PCP is absolutely nowhere _near_ the graphical wizardry of the state of this app, and the overlay of executing code atop a given directory structure is quite beautiful (practicality be damned), but I can see the inspiration.
I do wonder if, on a modern Linux system with SELinix, this model (code accessing a directory) is actually closer to viable? SELinux's contexts/labels for subjects overlaying with the same for objects can, I imagine, be visualized. The normal access patterns would be way too overwhelming, I think - but exceptions/policy violations? :ponder:
PCP is still in active development. It's very cool, but probably made obsolete by otel and others. I used it on servers and services regularly until a few years ago. Very lightweight, robust and powerful.
I remember being at Summercon before this movie opened and Ericb addressing hotel conference room we were seated in talking about how Iain Softley had directed Backbeat and how happy he was that he was doing this movie and that you had to get in the right headspace to understand what it was going for.
(I think the movie is wildly overrated just as a piece of storytelling; the hacker fan-service in it is just fine, they clearly got some tfile kids to consult with the script.)
See, I can push back on that! Dazed & Confused barely has a plot. It knows what it's about. Hackers has one of those shake-and-bake 80s plots; it's like a Save The Cat movie. I get that people like the subculture stuff in it, but the movie was trying for something else and faceplanted.
Honestly I think Lawnmower Man might have had more cultural impact.
> I hated this movie the first time I watched it. And the second. The third time I let go of the need for things to be realistic and took it all in as an artistic representation and snap... I loved it.
I never managed to reach your third time. Once was enough for me, at the time, to decide it was an awful movie which didn't have anything to do with hackers or computers and which was terribly overacted, and that was that. Filed under yet another "Hollywood just doesn't get it", subsection "so bad it's embarrassing".
Much later I realized I had missed a cult classic. Oh well. I still think it's a bad movie, but I'm ok with other people loving it... maybe that's my growth moment.
I love it, but I know it's bad, but I also think it was intentionally what it is, which makes it good or even great.
If you can unlock that teenage feeling of wonder at the potential size and scope of the world and, at the right age at the right time, feeling like that world is your oyster, that's the feeling in which to watch this movie.
I refuse, however, to get into that feeling-zone for other 'high school' movies; they're stupid...
Hackers is weird in that the tech part of it is so obviously fake, but then you have the hacker culture part that goes to the point of actually quoting a large part of the "Hacker's Manifesto" in the movie.
I let go of fanboying on what Hollywood "did to" the story and instead just decided to be thankful something I love was given a new medium / audience / interpretation... and voila! now I have two things to love.
It's still fun to point out where things could've been done differently, but instead of actually disliking the film(s) because of those things, it's just another mechanism that lets me talk to my friends about something. Much more fun than riding home in silence in any case. ;)
(1) I read the book. it was awesome. If the movie fails to deliver that awesomeness then it's really upsetting as it's ruining something great for everyone that didn't read the book / see the original. They're unlikely to go check the original. They're more likely to just think "That was dumb".
(2) When they change things so much that they arguably should not have used the name.
Why choose some existing fictional world/characters just to shit on them and make it something else? If you wanted to make something else, then pick a new name, make your own IP.
I actually really liked the live action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop, and was disappointed at it's cancellation.
Unpopular opinion amongst those who grew up on the anime, but I was late to the anime so my childhood-integrity isn't dependent upon requiring a faithful one to one retelling (or whatever would satisfy those folks - possibly nothing).
I enjoyed the "Hollywood" Ghost in the Shell as a stand-alone 'thing', unrelated to the manga / anime. The ending is quite on the nose; ultra-formulaic where formulaic has no place.
I’ve said this before on hating news but the best movie that stands up is sneakers.
Just imagine somebody has invented a quantum computer with a production process that has a very high error rate so a second one can’t be easily produced.
People are seeking multiple things on social media. One common one is connection. I am in Mexico dealing with family business. I am in a rural area. My Spanish skills are developing but are still weak. I can have light conversation here, but I can't deeply connect. My desire to use social media has drastically increased.
But I only want to engage with my friends. Every platform feeds me various flavors of rage bait mixed in with my friends' content. Some of my friends groups have moved to chats on other less public platforms like Discord, Signal, or Whatsapp. But that's not the same experience. And a lot of the people I like to engage with aren't moving over to those platforms.
We all thought maybe social media would evolve into something good... but it was enshitified. So maybe part of the solution here is to develop a tool that offers that connection without the whole being exploited aspect?
I know the feeling but my impression is that interacting with people that are strictly internet friends is a proxy to the real thing, the same way watching porn is a proxy for the real thing. When you spend X hours talking to people on the Internet you're spending at least less X hours talking to people IRL and building the sense of community that we now feel thinning away.
I know people that are internet famous and are terminally online all the time. I'm pretty sure it must feel like they're accomplishing something but for somebody IRL not familiar with the game they're playing their life looks very weird socially.
My current mindset for this is that social media should only work augmenting my real world social life, not take what's left of it away from me.
I once interviewed for a tech job at the Seattle times. I didn't land the job, but the interview was enlightening. I was told that the investigative reporters at the newspaper did all of the "work" of uncovering news. Subsequently, the TV broadcast station would just report on what the newspaper found. Meanwhile, the broadcast news was raking in tons more ad revenue than the newspaper.
Ever since then, I've often brainstormed of ways to remove all of the layers between the actual investigative reporter and the general public looking for a way to get as much of the revenue directly from the public into the hands of those doing to investigations and reports.
I've had ideas though nothing revolutionary enough to share here. Still, I think the overall goal would be good for literally everyone.
Yeah thats interesting. I wonder what a solution would look like for this. Would legislating a 'finders fee' be the right approach for whoever news source was breaking the topic?
A lot of this work was done by Walter |2| Costinak. He was an absolute legend and he's still doing a bit of design work today. I know because he did the branding for my last company and product. I worked with him a lot at Gathering of Developers back in the day. Together we rebuilt the website for Take 2 Games and they used our work for well over decade before doing a redesign. If you like this style, I recommend you reach out to him. Here's his website:
We followed this practice at a Non-Profit I volunteered for some years ago. For us, it was motivated by a few reasons:
- we trained the community around us to look to our website first for the most recent news and information
- we did not want a social media platform to be able to cut us off from our community (on purpose or accident) by shuttering accounts or groups
- we did not want to require our users have accounts on any 3rd party platforms in order to access our postings
- but we still wanted to distribute our messaging across any platforms where large groups of our community members frequently engaged
Another aspect of our process that was specific to our situation and outside of POSSE - we only posted one topic/issue/announcement per blog post. We had a news letter that would summarize each of these. Many organizations like ours would post summaries of many things to a single blog post, basically the same as the newsletter. However, this was cumbersome. For example, if someone in the community had a question, it was much clearer to link to a single post on our site that answered the question AND ONLY answered that question. It made for much better community engagement, better search engine indexing, cleaner content management, and just a better experience for everyone involved.
You can't do transactions with just a database. You'd have to add a payment processor. Now things are getting wildly complex.
x402 is designed with agentic AIs in mind. AIs make mistakes. Having an immutable record that can't be tampered with is a nice layer of security.
And while I haven't worked with it personally, I understand x402 to be extremely straight forward for devs to implement.
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