This Month: HOPE

Publication date: Aug 31, 2026

Tags: this-month

This month I attended HOPE - Hackers on Planet Earth. As always it was quite interesting and inspiring. I left full - overwhelmingly so - of excitement and ideas to do interesting things.

Some of the highlights for me were:

A talk from a non-profit that helps North Koreans get rooted devices to be able to have access to foreign information (sometimes simply to watch South Korean soap operas). I was surprised both by the extent and the simplistic nature of the government's surveillance techniques.
Joybubbles movie screening (more below)
A talk on how a guy built a gadget to block ads from streaming services at the HDMI cable level
At the Wikimedia NYC table in the hall, I had my fortune told by a thermal printer that printed the most recent Wikipedia edit at that moment. It read:
```
Vietnam national football team
- 8
+ 9
```
I was impressed.
At the ham radio village table, the guy tabling eagerly answered all my newbie questions on the topic. This led me to buy the RTL-SDR which was suggested as a good entry point. Excited to start playing with it!
A talk about zines got me inspired to make and distribute zines at the library to bring more attention to topics I think are interesting and underrated. The idea that the zine can be a way to share knowledge in a local and physical way captivated me.

The journey

During one of my trips to the library this month I read the following in a piece titled "Saying 'Google It' Makes You Sound Old. Search It Up!" by Sophie Haigney for The New York Times magazine:

"[..] as a mode of looking things up, I love Googling. It feels like wandering in an infinite library. Searching something up with a chatbot leads immediately to a conclusion: The journey happens without you, and the answer simply arrives. The search is over, almost as soon as it began."

This really resonated with me. I keep coming back to this idea of the journey being the point rather than just a means to an end.

Hyperbeat (which I previously praised in the "Favorite Game: Hyperbeat" post) talked a lot about that through its narrative. My movie recommendation for the month below, "It Ends", also does. Such a simple yet powerful idea. How many times have I looked at how many pages were left in a book, anxious to finish it so I could get to the next one, instead of enjoying what I was currently reading? The end will be reached in time, so put your focus on the journey and you'll actually get the most of it.

Photos

Some random photos I took throughout the month that I liked:

Movies

Movie recommendations of the month:

Joybubbles: A documentary about a fascinating person that is simultaneously an icon in the history of hacking and a treasure trove of life lessons.
It Ends: The movie feels like a deep exploration of a simple metaphor in a surreal atmosphere, and it just really captured me. It had double the impact on me because it touched on some ideas that have been constant in my head recently as I mentioned above.

Music

Music recommendations of the month:

Bernard Herrmann - Twisted Nerve: Accidentally stumbled upon it despite not having watched any of the movies it plays on. I was familiar with the melody, but was surprised by the piano harmony which is somehow haunting and peaceful at the same time.