Is true hacking dead? What we lost
There was a time when I used to fret that the era of tinkering was coming to an end. Crypto was going to be illegal, they were going to put DRM on speakers, and our computers are designed to be completely locked down to the degree that you can&#x27;t even add more RAM to a MacBook Pro.<p>However, I think that the rise of Linux, Raspberry Pi and Arduino, OSS and Github and massive package repos for every language, Adafruit, even 3D printers have replaced stuff that didn&#x27;t want to be hacked with an endless array of stuff that is literally begging to be hacked. Between YouTube and coding bootcamps, you have to actively not want to learn technical skills.<p>The author also calls out Unity as part of the problem, which pretty much confirms to me that we&#x27;re not reading advanced analysis. Unity is fucking incredible; not only is it an engineering marvel with cross-platform compilation capacity that makes Babel look like a total joke, but it is probably the single most capable, interesting and fun platform for artistic expression in modern computing.<p>Seriously, the way to get kids to keep interested once Scratch gets dull is to throw them into a AAA 3D engine that lets you build a compelling VR creation in an hour from free, downloadable assets. Unity should be in high school classrooms. The breadth and quality of assets available on their store is shocking. If you have artist&#x27;s block, just scroll through a few pages of assets. Problem solved.<p>I think what really got to me was the overwhelming sense that the author wasn&#x27;t talking about hacking but recreating the exact same conditions that existed when he was a young person... while completely ignoring the huge amounts of privilege that he enjoyed to be able to have a computer in the house and have such a incredible headstart on his learning compared to the other 99.99% of the population - many of whom don&#x27;t look like him or believe the same things.<p>Today, even relatively poor kids have access to tablets which means that they can build games in apps like Roblox. Who makes him the authority on what counts as hacking? If a young woman makes a game where her friends all want to hang out together after school and talk about their lives in a safe space, isn&#x27;t that the ultimate hack?<p>I really didn&#x27;t enjoy this op-ed, and I wish people wouldn&#x27;t bring it a larger audience by posting on HN.