It's all hacks. All the way down.
Something I've picked up on in my time building things (software, electronics, woodwork, etc.), is that we tend to, as far as possible, leverage the components and tools we do have (quite often non-ideal) to make useful and/or interesting things. We "hack" a few things together to make something else.
This is most acutely evident when building prototypes, but after paying attention to this dynamic for quite some time, I'd like to propose a hypothesis: everything in this universe originates from a "hack" of some kind. It's all hacks, all the way down.
In this blog, I'll try to document some of my own hacking, as well as whatever evidence I can find either for or against my hypothesis, as well as any refinements to this hypothesis.