Like many things in life, hackers are victims (and I use the word loosely) of stereotyping. You won’t find much stock imagery depicting hackers that doesn’t involve a hoodie, a dimly-lit room and several monitors full of scrolling binary text. And whilst that’s definitely sometimes true, it also makes several assumptions about hackers in general, which is at best misleading and at worst leaves you wide open to attack.

Computers are making humans now. Sort of. In a recent discussion at Bulletproof, someone casually mentioned ‘thispersondoesnotexist.com’. It’s a fairly harmless experiment in which AI randomly generates an image of a person who does not exist, thus solving the mystery of the name. This has since prevented me from sleeping at night, not least because I have turned up on it more than once.

80% of all human endeavour is committed to making money, with the remaining 20% spent finding interesting ways to spend it. These are figures that I’ve just made up, but I said it in the Bulletproof office, and everyone nodded, which either means it speaks a certain truth or, once again, everyone is doing their best to ignore me. With this in mind, it’s fair to say people tend not to put a lot of effort into something unless they know they’re going to be financially rewarded for it.