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David Gerard @awful.systems

Urbit announced its summer accelerator program as "u/acc". Someone asked me "wtf is an Urbit" so I wrote this. May be useful. "what if networked Lisp machines, but for Nazis"

circumstances.run David Gerard (@davidgerard@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 ...

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  • 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.

    • 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

      • 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

        • 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

41 comments