Not quite dead yet. For me the rise of LLMs and BigTech has helped me turn more away from it. The more I find Ads or AI injected into my life, the more accounts I close, or sites I ignore. I've now removed most of my BigTech 'fixes', and find myself with time to explore the fun side of hacking again.

I dug out my old PinePhone and decided to write a toy OS for it. The project has just the right level of challenge and reward for me, and feels more like early days hacking/programming where we relied more on documentation and experimentation than regurgitated LLM slop.

Nothing beats that special feeling when a hack suddenly works. Today was just a proximity sensor reading displayed, but it invloved a lot of SoC hacking to get that far.

I know there are others hacking hard in obscure corners of tech, and I love this site for promoting them.