tinycombinator

Manipulating a remote computer to give yourself access you shouldn't have can be cool if that computer was used in phone scam centers, holding the private data of countless elderly victims. Using that access to disrupt said scam business could be incredibly cool (and funny).

It could be technically illegal, and would fall under vigilante justice. But we're not talking about legality here, we're talking about "cool": vigilantes are usually seen as "cool" especially when done from a sense of personal justice. Again, not talking about legal or societal justice.

And how would you know if something is actually "great" or important enough to never quit? That your efforts aren't better spent elsewhere?

Sure, for the beneficiaries.

I got into programming through making small games. It was very much a means to an end, a solution oriented path. I personally can't imagine trying to learn programming now in a similar manner to high school math courses, where problems are presented so abstractly. If I can't see a reachable and tangible end product in sight, it tanks my motivation to learn.

I always have situations like these in the back of my mind when people try to justify their salaries, their self worth, by arguing they bring value to the world and those who make less don't.

(Not saying everyone doesn't genuinely contribute to the world, but moreso a propagation of a toxic, externally-based-worth mindset.)

I find that this attitude is also great for life in general.

Could you elaborate on "demoralization campaign" and the "psychological warfare" happening?

The comparison may be superficial, but this article really reminds me of the times when I wrote essays for college admissions (not in a good way).

I loved having spam with kimchi stew too. Growing up, I didn't even realize spam was a brand.

The point I gleamed from the article was not that city driving was an easy problem, but rather that freeway driving has unique issues when it comes to reliability and safety. Simply stopping the car could be an acceptable minimal risk condition for a crowd of cyclists and pedestrians, but that's no longer the case in a freeway. On top of having to deal with sensing range + on-board offline decision making + truck stopping distances, having no safe fallback like "just brake" seems like a pretty difficult problem.

There's also the "interesting events + training" argument in the article, which I'd love to see points for or against.

Humans are more than capable of distrust, but I think manipulating people to erroneously trust something is still a threat as long as scams exist.

I think a significant factor of individual trust is someone's technical knowledge of how their systems or tools work, shown by how some software engineers actively limit their children's exposure to tech versus a lot of mothers letting the internet babysit their kids. Apparently we can't rely on that knowledge being widespread (yet).

There's definitely a bunch of crazy unmoderated stuff going down in those places, but it does seem more underground and out of the way unless you specifically look for it.

Actually, I'd guess that it's probably easier for people to find themselves in such weird spaces today. There's a lot of resources and guides out there, and if you want to, you can most likely find them.