838
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
838 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
69098 readers
4321 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I've been online since usenet. I try to use the current meaning of words. I fully understand that trolling has been coopted by bad faith actors.
Originally it was a fun little bit of sarcasm or an inside joke that became a proto meme or some copypasta to share around.
Now it's a path to the US presidency.
I guess it's like "hacking." In the good old days, a "hacker" was a particularly clever software developer, now it's someone who breaks into computers.
Can we please stop ruining the good words?
Hacking is using something in a manner in which it was unintended by hacking parts of it, as with an axe.
Good discussion of it here with etymological references.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70658/what-does-the-word-hacking-or-hacker-come-from
Exactly!
Hacking into a system is like hacking your way through a door to steal stuff. Hacking around hardware or software limitations to get what you want is creative and more similar to creating furniture with an axe, you're doing things the tool was never meant to do, and doing it incrementally until you get the desired result.