> The fact that the past keeps growing. A slightly different twist: an ever increasing fraction of the hacking that we might want to talk about was in the past

> The fact that the past keeps growing. A slightly different twist: an ever increasing fraction of the hacking that we might want to talk about was in the past or is tied to the past (e.g. retrocomputing). The industry has grown, but it has also become more corporate and business-focused. Normal users, and even most programmers, don't "hack" in the traditional sense of finding clever solutions or workarounds to make computers do novel things. Some of it's just plain, fairly obvious programming, fitting pieces together more than actually creating. Even ChadGPT can do that, which is why younger programmers who don't remember real hacking are so easily impressed by it. Then there's a lot that's not technical at all, but more about arbitrage and rent collecting ... oops, sorry, I meant markets and business models. Not about abusing people's privacy or ripping them off, no sir, none of that in VC-fueled Silicon Valley for sure. But it's still not hacking. It's not that hacking doesn't still occur. Plenty still does, perhaps even more than ever, but it's no longer enough to keep up with the ever lengthening arc of computing history. As a proportion it's less, so those who are interested in such things look more and more to the past.