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.
  • @selfMAEnglish
    15•1 year ago

    this is awesome! it fits well with a lot of the (mental) notes I made tracing Urbit history as part of a deconstruction of the earlier inroads technofascism made into the wider tech world. some loose notes to expand on a couple topics:

    • very little of Urbit is actually original. the language itself (called hoon if I remember correctly) is a lambda-calculus-heavy ML with a Lisp-style type system and runtime, with all the names changed to blur the line between Yarvin’s bad ideas and the ideas from computer science that Yarvin implemented poorly
    • notably, hoon inherits the computational inefficiency of lambda calculus but none of the safety of ML or the usability of Lisp. the resulting language is an awful cacophony
    • these sources were most likely used not because Yarvin is any good at functional programming, but because Urbit was a partially successful attempt to insert yarvin’s ideas into the conversation on places like hacker news, where paul graham primed a bunch of folks to accept both Lisp and right-wing libertarianism as the same bundle of ideas
    • the few unique parts of Urbit are interesting only in that they seem to be early attempts at things we’ve seen done by other techfash projects. for example, Urbit claims to be decentralized, but hoon programs are permanently linked to code controlled by the Urbit foundation (most likely still owned by Yarvin even though they claim otherwise), which compliant Urbit implementations must pull from the network (also controlled by the foundation). this allows programs to be effectively broken on the whim of whoever controls their access to their upstream dependencies, effectively making whoever controls the foundational Urbit libraries the rulers of Urbit’s neo-feudal network — and it’s built so that swapping out those dependencies is as hard as possible. I haven’t checked the implementation to see if it prevents changing the meaning of downstream programs yet (because hoon code is brain rot — see the example linked above)
    • I need to dig through Reddit and find the AMA, but yarvin claims that Urbit is the first and only functional language that can pull functions and dependencies from the network. this is false and he probably knows it — Eelco Dolstra’s foundational paper on the Nix package manager was published (this is from memory, probably not accurate) about a year and a half before Yarvin’s first blog post on Urbit, and there are enough similarities between the two that I don’t know if I want to call this a coincidence

    last time I brought this up on r/SneerClub, some weird fascist found the post and made the mistake of linking Yarvin’s original blog posts, which are kind of hilarious. I’ll dig them up and link them here when I can

    • SteveEnglish
      10•1 year ago

      where paul graham primed a bunch of folks to accept both Lisp and right-wing libertarianism as the same bundle of ideas

      PG gets off way too lightly as a mere annoying vc most of the time. There is plenty of sneer project potential in each of his pointed, dumbly confident “essays”

      • @kunaEnglish
        6•11 months ago

        deleted by creator

        • SteveEnglish
          4•1 year ago

          This is a masterpiece. Thanks for sharing, I’d not seen it before.

          • David GerardOPMAEnglish
            4•1 year ago

            back before Maciej’s brain was also eaten by worms

            • SteveEnglish
              4•1 year ago

              I hope you’re gonna put all this knowledge in a book one day

      • @selfMAEnglish
        5•1 year ago

        oh fuck yes there is. I posted his latest LinkedIn-style blog essay about “how to love your work” (from a guy who doesn’t need more money) on TechTakes a few weeks back. at some point I need to start pushing on paully g’s “father of modern Lisp” nonsense, cause there’s a lot there that doesn’t add up either

        • SteveEnglish
          5•1 year ago

          Did he ever release the “dialect” of lisp he was working on?

          • @selfMAEnglish
            5•1 year ago

            he did! it died almost instantly because it’s a mediocre language built by someone with no idea why Lisp is good and it requires you to install a much better Lisp to use it because it’s not even self-hosting. I was hoping arc’s failure would be when the shine came off of his image as a Lisp hacker, but the tech industry isn’t that smart

            here’s one I’ve been wanting to ask for a while: did anything of value come out of paully owning a Lisp machine?

            • SteveEnglish
              4•1 year ago

              Arc is designed for exploratory programming: the kind where you decide what to write by writing it.

              Haha, fucking wot?

              • @selfMAEnglish
                4•1 year ago

                aka don’t ask for docs because you’re supposed to learn the language by making the REPL crash. paully really doesn’t know anything about good Lisp

                also I just remembered his second attempt at reinventing Lisp, which was much lazier. no website for that one, just a couple of text files, cause he did the bare minimum of what arc couldn’t (a metacircular compiler, theoretically, but nobody can run it) and then just decided that was good and dropped the project

                paul! I’ve seen someone compile Lisp into pure lambda calculus! it was fucking insane! nobody is impressed with this basic shit!

                • SteveEnglish
                  3•1 year ago

                  I mentioned his The Acceleration of Addictiveness essay in a recent blog post because Nir Eyal seems to have justified his whole “habit-forming” brand on it.

    • @selfMAEnglish
      8•1 year ago

      the links I mentioned:

      • yarvin’s Reddit AMA warning: high level of smarmy fascists. I can’t find the post where he claims Urbit is the only networked functional language so it might be elsewhere
      • the original Urbit spec, lots to sneer at here as yarvin decides Urbit is best described as how neo-feudal martians would write software
      • @dgerard@awful.systems linked this in the masto thread but it’s too important not to link: one of Yarvin’s later tech specs with less obfuscation, which literally calls the network address space digital feudalism

      e: holy shit I revisited that last link

      The $2^64 question is thus: who are the dukes?

      My answer is simple. The dukes are the developers of Urbit. They created it - they get to own it. This is standard Lockean libertarian homesteading theory. Lend a hand - earn a slice. Thus Urbit, unlike most open-source projects, offers a rational motivation for contribution.

      this is the most mask off description of the fake decentralization crypto projects build on (and Urbit might have invented, unless we can dig up prior art) I’ve ever seen

      • @selfMAEnglish
        7•1 year ago

        I decided to head the acasualrobotgod off at the pass and torture myself by reading through the early Urbit spec in full (whose content is completely different from the one @gerikson@awful.systems posted), and I found something interesting; the info I gave above about Urbit taking ideas from Nix isn’t quite accurate. the reality is much worse.

        so yarvin’s specs are meandering as fuck of course, but eventually they get to some kind of point. in short, Urbit’s main computational function consists of two other functions.

        • urbit-infer knows how to pull code from the network, cryptographically verify its integrity, and transform (build) it. this is Nix’s fetchurl and half of Nix’s derivation function.
        • urbit-render takes the output of urbit-infer and stores it in a unique path in Urbit’s pathspace. this is the other half of derivation.
        • the Urbit pathspace is a set of paths on a storage device with the invariant that every path must uniquely represent an output of urbit-infer, and that the existence of a path guarantees that its contents are the output of urbit-render for that path’s instance of urbit-infer. this is just Nix’s core data structure, the Nix store, copied wholesale into Urbit but with a much stupider uniqueness algorithm

        now note that Nix is actually a lot older than I indicated before. it was first released in 2003, and Eelco Dolstra’s first paper on it was published in 2004, 6 years before Yarvin’s first posts about Urbit. that 2004 paper featured details on derivation, fetchurl, and the Nix store, all of which exist almost unchanged in modern Nix

        a lot of the differences between Urbit and Nix (like pathspace forks) seem to be attempts to work around implementing the trickier parts of the Nix evaluation model

        given the big similarities in functionality and structure between the Urbit computational function and Nix’s core functions and data structure, the wide span of time during which Yarvin could have read the Nix paper (and Dolstra published about Nix several more times between 2004 and 2010), and Nix’s obscurity until around 2015, I’m willing to upgrade my suspicion to an accusation:

        Urbit’s core functionality is a shitty, plagiarized version of Nix, but intentionally crippled to keep Yarvin in control

        this has got to be my last Urbit deep dive for a while, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to write up some notes here in case Urbit starts marketing hard again

    • @geriksonEnglish
      7•1 year ago

      For funself-flagellation, I checked out Yarvin’s original Nock/Hoon docs, available here:

      https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/tree/master/doc/book

      It contains the following classic sentence, which is basically Urbit in a nutshell:

      We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced “yes”) is true, and 1 (“no”) is false. Why? It’s fresh, it’s different, it’s new. And it’s annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it’s also just intuitively right.

    • mx alex tax1a - 2020 (3)
      4•8 months ago

      @self at one point we tried to figure out how to make Urbit, like, do anything, and every time we got close, yarvin would move something around. we eventually caught on and walked away, hopefully less than a footnote in their history