David Gerard (@davidgerard@circumstances.run)
circumstances.run
Urbit announced its summer acceleration program. Being made of smarmy edgelords, they called it "u/acc". I mentioned this and someone asked wtf is an Urbit. So!! Urbit is the OS founded by Curtis Yarvin, aka the creator of neoreaction Mencius Moldbug. Urbit is a new paradigm for computation that combines functional programming with what happens when libertarian anarcho-capitalism goes so right-wing reactionary that it openly turns into Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s vision of neo-feudalism. And that sentence needs a Wikipedia article per jargon word. Think "what if networked Lisp machines, but for Nazis." Urbit isn’t useful for anything. The apps don’t work, and the ones that do work bypass the language that the functional programming vision of the system is supposedly based on. I would call Urbit "TempleOS on the blockchain", but that makes it sound too interesting. Urbit outdoes bitcoin for the degree to which it combines "interesting" in the sense of "what the hell even is this" and "I'm not even mad, that's amazing" with utter unfeasibility and utter uselessness. This is what gives Urbit what little life it has: it's technically technically-interesting, but utterly unusable. Other functional programmers think it's trash. The only FPs who take it seriously are also techfash. So Urbit has no technical merits to succeed on, and only its political cult. So it leans *hard* into that cult. Urbit's only function is as an identifier to fellow fash. Which it's serving admirably. Only one kind of person has an Urbit. If you see a string of the format "~abcdef-ghijkl" in someone's bio, they're that kind of person. If you really want to understand "yes, but *why* Urbit?" "why the *fuck* Urbit?" then the answer is still Elizabeth Sandifer's book Neoreaction a Basilisk. I believe the approved method is to libgen it and *also* buy the paperback. As we all know, the use case for social media is to get laid. So I wonder if there's pent-up neoreactionary passion just waiting to be unleashed on Urbit. I expect the incel forums there are a delight.
  • @geriksonEnglish
    6•1 year ago

    I’m active on lobste.rs and from time to time the resident alt-right commenters and fash-curious try to push Urbit.

    I composed a reply to an old thread but didn’t post it, so I’ll just copy it below

    https://lobste.rs/s/c5gp8j/understanding_urbit#c_bdghos

    Let’s focus on technology.

    Yes, let’s, and let’s focus on the fact that the technology behind Urbit is obscure enough to be considered poetry

    https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/arvo/ford/

    %bake

    Tries to functionally produce the file at a given beam with the given mark and heel. It fails if there is no way to translate at this level.

    %boil

    Functionally produces the file at a given beam with the given mark and heel. If there is no way to translate at this beam, we pop levels off the stack and attempt to bake there until we find a level we can bake. This should almost always be called instead of %bake.

    %call

    Slams the result of one silk against the result of another.

    %cast

    Translates the given silk to the given mark, if possible. This is one of the critical and fundamental operations of ford.

    The Urbit project cloaks itself in the trappings of open source development, but the true knowledge is literally esoteric[1]. It’s explicitly exclusionary, as evinced by their own documentation:

    Urbit OS is a solid alpha. We use it every day to coordinate and chat about the future of Urbit. You’re welcome to join. Our standards are high, so we aren’t asking everyone to use Urbit OS yet.

    Investing in an open-source project, whether as a developer or as an advocate, is a commitment of time and attention. Before committing, it’s good to know what aims the project has.

    [1] meaning that to contribute, you not only have to be invited, you also have to internalize a bunch of purposefully obscure terms.

    • @selfMAEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      meaning that to contribute, you not only have to be invited, you also have to internalize a bunch of purposefully obscure terms.

      getting people to write shit like “slams the result of one silk against the result of another” with a straight face is absolutely the result of indoctrination, because by the time you’ve learned all the bullshit terminology, you’re in too deep to admit none of it is unique and all of it is garbage

      for example, I’m pretty sure if I look I’ll find out %boil is just Nix’s derivation but very limited and written in asshole language by fascists. but even though I’ve described Nix as fucking incomprehensible, at least it’s not trying to be

      • SteveEnglish
        5•1 year ago

        by the time you’ve learned all the bullshit terminology, you’re in too deep to admit none of it is unique and all of it is garbage

        Is straight out of a product marketing text book. Macromedia mastered it in the software space in the late 90s

        • @200fiftyEnglish
          5•1 year ago

          oh man, I had forgotten about all the silly theater-themed names for everything in Shockwave/Director. They toned it down in Flash and used more normal words like “library” and “instance” instead of “cast” and “actor” or whatever, though I guess we still ended up with “stage” to describe the viewport