In my hobby groups there has always been a second, smaller, more intimate invite-only space for people doing the deep work. It’s the only way to do the work in the age of 1000-member Discords where important conversations get lost in the scroll back instantly.

The experience in these spaces is largely the same. LLMs can be used there, too, but when the experts are using them with experience to back it up the results are a lot better.

The people who are really struggling in my few hobby groups (not PS5) are those who enjoyed some social status from their knowledge. They were heros and people sought them out and revered their work in 2023. LLMs came along and partially leveled the playing field. When a determined kid with a Deepseek subscription can produce a sloppy version of what took you years to find, that sense of being a heroic figure at the next level is gone.

I think this reveals another wrinkle, which is that the status hierarchy wasn’t that solid or worthwhile anyway. Outside of a few vocal people trying to enforce the status hierarchy, most people don’t care who releases their jailbreak or PS5 exploit. They just want it. Whoever gets it to them first becomes the new king.

This PS5 incident has some strange element where supposedly keeping the reveal secret for 2 more weeks would have changed something with the GTA6 release. There were also 3 people who found the same exploit independent and some large amount of money on the line for the first of them to report it. The person who reported it signed off to spend time with his dying mother, so can’t really fault them for doing the thing they earned according to the rules of the program.

The status thing is probably part of it, but I'm not sure "a kid with Deepseek can make a sloppy version" actually shows that the old hierarchy was meaningless.

You don't have to want to give the policeman status: once he pulls you over after running a red light at 2am and you realise he might let you off the hook if you are nice and deferential, the status gradient almost establishes itself. People knew this, and decided to become policemen for the status. So it was with tech wizards, once you encountered a problem you could not solve without their help.

> This PS5 incident has some strange element where supposedly keeping the reveal secret for 2 more weeks would have changed something with the GTA6 release.

Well it's that GTA 6 comes out in mid-November, so he wanted to wait until then to release the exploit so people could legally run GTA 6 on their hacked PS5s. Disclosing the exploit before the release means that they'll patch it before GTA 6 comes out so this is no longer an option.

I think this is unrelated because it happened after theflow0's statement, but Sony just released a major PS5 update that significantly increases the PS5's security ahead of GTA 6's release. Apparently it's impossible to rip games now without a hypervisor exploit, and since the last one just got reported to Sony this means that even people with hacked PS5s on old firmwares won't be able to pirate GTA 6 because nobody will be able to rip it. https://www.reddit.com/r/PS5_Jailbreak/comments/1wi0gpx/its_...

> Outside of a few vocal people trying to enforce the status hierarchy, most people don’t care who releases their jailbreak or PS5 exploit. They just want it. Whoever gets it to them first becomes the new king.

"Commodification" might be a relevant word here.

You can fight that by "building a personal brand", but then you're suddenly brand building instead of hacking, and hacking was what you actually wanted to do.

I guess it works best if you're not in it for clout but because you want something to exist. But even then it is difficult.

> There were also 3 people who found the same exploit independent and some large amount of money on the line for the first of them to report it.

Ah yes, game theory. Oof.