“At last!” you may be thinking, “the old hack’s finally got some self-awareness.” But no, I want to examine a more positive definition of the word ‘hack’, namely the tip, trick or shortcut that makes life that little bit easier.
This week, courtesy of the good people at charity consultancy Action Planning, I learnt several life hacks. For example, a couple of tablespoons of apple cider vinegar in the morning will balance your blood sugar and quell your craving for Gail’s cinnamon buns. This sort of revelation always hits me between the eyes. The NHS spends over £6bn a year treating obesity-related ill-health. Imagine how much of that we could save if we all knew about the vinegar thing.
Another ‘hack’ I was put onto was the artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT, which I mention with some trepidation in that it is clearly designed to make hacks like me obsolete. Chat GPT, in case you haven’t come across it, is an ingenious computerised thing that not only answers your questions but writes whole articles on the subject. I’ve been trying to push it away, wincing whenever I heard its name, like Ron Weasley at the mention of Voldemort. But this week we were brought face-to-face, so I bit the bullet and tried to make friends with it.
“Are you here to destroy copywriters?” I asked it.
The reply was kind, reassuring, even convincing in parts, so I asked it to tell me a dirty joke. It came back with this: “I’m sorry, but as an AI language model, I’m programmed to be neutral and respectful towards all individuals, and therefore, I cannot provide you with any offensive or inappropriate content, including dirty jokes.” Hmm, I think I’ve found a competitive advantage.
All the way home from the Action Planning away day I couldn’t help fixating on the word ‘hack’ as in ‘life hack’ and wondering where it came from. It’s one of those words that just appears at the party with no back story and seems to be on everybody’s lips, leaving you wondering if you must have been asleep for a prolonged period while they were doing the introductions.
Because there are many meanings of ‘hack’, mostly stemming from the verb ‘to chop roughly’ or the noun ‘an ordinary horse’ – as well as the more niche definitions ‘a wooden frame for drying bricks’ and ‘the board on which a hawk’s meat is laid’ – but there’s nothing there that suggests a trick or a shortcut.
So guess what, I asked ChatGPT to explain. “Come on then smart-arse,” I said, “why is a life hack called a life hack?”
It muttered something about computer students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s referring to themselves as ‘hackers’, all of which I’d already found verbatim on Google and didn’t actually explain why they referred to themselves as hackers. Did they do their programming on a horse? Did they do it while chopping through undergrowth, or scything down tricky wingers with a reckless tackle? Did they suffer with violent coughing fits? Did they tap phone lines? Did they keep falcons or make bricks? Did they come from Hackney?
All of the above seem unlikely. My guess is that they learnt to hack their way crudely into existing computer code, like Tarzan chopping his way through the jungle, in order to modify it for their own means. And now I’ve gone and given ChatGPT the answer.
When you rush out to buy your cider vinegar, you’ll notice that some bottles carry the intriguing message ‘With the mother’. Make sure you get this one. The ‘mother’ is the sediment. When I saw it I remembered that last autumn I had attempted to make cider and had since completely forgotten about it. I found it, three bottles of the stuff, looking not unlike the bottle I’d just bought to tackle my cinnamon bun addiction, but with a fine layer of blue mould on the surface. Cider and cheese in the same bottle! Now that’s a life hack if ever I saw one.
