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David Gerard (@davidgerard@circumstances.run)
circumstances.runUrbit 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.
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
%boilis just Nix’sderivationbut 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 beIs straight out of a product marketing text book. Macromedia mastered it in the software space in the late 90s
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