• David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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    4 months ago

    also: remember that urbit literally doesn’t work. the funding issues are cos they lost a huge chunk of the urbit ecosystem, who were techfash neoreactionaries like themselves and 100% on board with what urbit wanted - but they still needed a base system that like worked at all, so they moved to conventional Lisps instead

    @self and i both keep saying we’ll write that one up but never do, but it was a hoot

    • self@awful.systemsM
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      4 months ago

      @self and i both keep saying we’ll write that one up but never do, but it was a hoot

      oh yeah! I need to dig up my notes for that and finally polish it into a long post. the prominent post-urbit still-reactionary system I’m thinking of took a ton of (cited, this time) inspiration from Nix, and I’m wondering if I’ll notice a change in that project’s focus after Nix went openly fash and accepted a ton of funding from the same types of sources that fund urbit and its descendants

        • self@awful.systemsM
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          4 months ago

          I need to look more into this, but I’ve got the sinking suspicion that the technofascists have come to a realization: that ultra-obscure non-functioning systems like urbit play well if your techfash inroad is forming an influential technocratic thinktank (and there’s plenty of precedent for exactly this type of shit working to gain lasting political influence), but it’s utterly worthless if your path to fascist takeover is through, say, the defense industry. urbit is useless for reliably launching or controlling a missile; urbit can’t even do normal desktop shit right, and unlike a lot of defense contracting failures, this is utterly obvious and can’t be papered over.

          NixOS is too heavy to run on a missile (it might have a place onboard a drone, maybe), but Nix can easily be (and has been) sold as a massive boon to missile firmware development, and a way to modernize a number of launch and control systems external to a missile. that’s why Nix was a good fucking get for the fascists — it’s working, unique technology none of them were smart enough to come up with, its creators are too socially immature and hateful to know what happens when they become a nazi bar, and Nix itself is still obscure and impenetrable enough (and the techfash element of the community has absolutely ensured this has gotten worse) that having a monopoly on software engineering contractors with Nix expertise and clearance can still be used as a wedge to establish an unassailable position with a high level of political control.

          Kinode can’t be used in a missile or a drone, but it’s definitely an adaptation of the non-language parts of urbit to something that wants to look like a more typical cloud deployment. I wish I could analyze what Kinode’s political inroad is, but all the docs on their terrible website 404, so I should dig in and see if they’re still active, or if their funders have decided there’s a more promising inroad elsewhere.

          • self@awful.systemsM
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            4 months ago

            ah shit, I wrote the above before the edit to Holium — I remember that twitter post! (also, xcancel link for anyone who wants to see this weird shit and can’t)

            now that’s definitely worth digging into — I want to see the specific political angle these shitheads are going after. it really could be a renewal of the “web3 crypto OS, whatever the fuck that means” angle now that Thiel and company are pumping so much money into getting pro-crypto politicians elected

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    4 months ago

    This is hilarious. For ages every time Urbit has appeared in tech aggregators the original connection with Yarvin has been raised, and the proponents have snippily replied he’s not longer involved. No idea what passive-aggressive bullshit they’ll invent next time now that he’s back in charge, baby!

  • o7___o7@awful.systems
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    4 months ago

    Wait, I thought the whole point of the dumb thing was to beak up all the resources into crypto-crypto-objects. Doesn’t anyone want to buy a galaxy or whatever?

  • flavia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    4 months ago

    Late Tuesday, Ball told CoinDesk the foundation would retain 50% of its staff. “Morale is much higher now,” he said.

    50% of their staff were optimists I guess?

    While he said the team is making no commitments, they are leaning toward Base, the network developed by crypto exchange powerhouse Coinbase that is known for its low fees.

    “I chose this suburban house because of the low taxes” “The roads are so bad, where are my taxes going to?”

    people who want to get out have a very liquid way to get out, but they all need to squeeze through the same small hole.

    First off, ew. Second, isn’t this the same as all crypto?

    Eugh, the author has an anime pfp at the bottom

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
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      4 months ago

      people who want to get out have a very liquid way to get out, but they all need to squeeze through the same small hole.

      liquid (…) but they all need to squeeze through the same small hole.

      isn’t that a literal description of illiquid?

  • self@awful.systemsM
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    4 months ago

    Most shockingly to Urbit devotees and outsiders alike, the board welcomed back Curtis Yarvin, the project’s founder, who left in 2019.

    nothing has ever shocked me less than Yarvin “returning” to urbit

    In 2015, a technical conference rescinded his speaking invitation. The following year, another tech conference lost sponsors and was almost canceled because it allowed him to speak, over objections that this verbose, bespectacled engineer would make attendees feel somehow “unsafe.” (Perhaps some feared he would bore everyone to death by reading his posts aloud, or torture them with his poetry.)

    […]

    While the cancel culture of the 2010s and early 2020s may be subsiding, bringing Yarvin back remains a calculated risk for Urbit, William Ball, the board member, said on the developer call.

    these fuckers are still fucking seething over their adult baby godking being asked not to come to a functional programming conference because he publicly advocates for a fascist takeover of the United States, receives funding from fascists, does press interviews promoting the fascist influencer circles he hangs out in, and is the computer science equivalent of a flat earther. how will our industry ever recover from the absolutely no value that was lost by disinviting him?

  • antifuchs@awful.systems
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    4 months ago

    Damn you, to this day I had no idea what his face looks like and it’s gotta be this golden retriever looking windwards type of visage?

  • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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    4 months ago

    Didn’t he leave because he thought the project was too important to be tainted with his bad reputation? Guess they really think they are at a masks off tipping point.

    E: Also thanks brain for making me think that ‘Moldy’ fits perfectly in to ‘Bilbo’ from the ballad of Bilbo Baggins.

  • V0ldek@awful.systems
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    4 months ago

    What the hell is this

    Urbit is a decentralized personal server platform based on functional programming in a peer-to-peer network.

    Am I having a stroke? What does “functional programming in a network” even mean? Does it mean anything? Do you torrent lambdas?

    You wouldn’t download a closure

    The Urbit software stack consists of a set of programming languages (“Hoon,” a high-level functional programming language, and “Nock,” its low-level compiled language)

    Weird ass names aside (Hoon sounds like a slur or is it just me?), they built two languages? Also what does “its” refer to here, Urbit’s? From context it’s as if Nock was Hoon’s language, but that doesn’t make semantical sense.

    Also editorial note, just say “a pair” if there are two, not “a set”…

    a single-function operating system built on those languages (“Arvo”); a runtime implementation of that operating system (“Vere”),

    What. A “single-function operating system” doesn’t even mean anything. Do they mean a unikernel? That at least is an actual term. And then what’s that other thing? A “runtime implementation of an OS”? What’s Arvo if it’s not implemented or doesn’t run, a fucking abstract painting of an OS?

    And again, why do you need two languages to build this, it really seems you can have one? You’re designing them from scratch anyway specifically to build this OS, why not make one proper language? Linus Torvalds barely had one and he managed.

    public key infrastructure, built on the Ethereum blockchain (“Azimuth”), for each Urbit instance to participate in a decentralized network; and the decentralized network itself, an encrypted, peer-to-peer protocol.

    What are we doing here.

    The 128-bit Urbit identity space consists of 256 “galaxies”, 65,280 “stars” (255 for each galaxy), and 4,294,901,760 “planets” (65,535 for each star) and comets under those.

    What does any of this mean. Is it also a metaverse attempt? What the fuck is a planet in a network dude, would you call 123.73.41.0 more of an asteroid or a planetoid?

    And now for a shot:

    In 2022, the main software in an Urbit installation was a “bare-bones” text-based message board.

    And chaser:

    Tlon, the company founded by Yarvin to build Urbit, has received seed funding from various investors since its inception, most notably Peter Thiel, whose Founders Fund, with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invested $1.1 million.

    So they built an artificially complex architecture, to the point where half of its description sounds made up, took the most complex kinds software engineering projects (a programming language and an OS), did them twice for good measure, slapped on a blockchain to be cool and hip I guess, for absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever. They didn’t have a use-case that would warrant any of this engineering effort, all they wanted was a message board, a problem we have solved in the fucking 90s (? Maybe earlier?).

    But it’s good enough for the Lich King and Egg Boi to give them a million fucking dollars. God I hope at least they boughy some quality drugs with that money or else this was a giant waste of resources.

    Conclusion: the Wikipedia article on Urbit is absolute garbage. I feel like I know less about what the fuck this thing is after I read it. Can anyone tell me why any of this? Why did they do this? Why do they need a custom OS? Who hurt them so bad they came up with such shitty names for everything? Would you nock a hoon or is that too vere?

    EDIT: Bonus question, how is this pronounced? Instinctively I read the U as in “uranium”, but the article writes “an Urbit”, so it’s a short U like in “full”?

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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      4 months ago

      lol i basically wrote that article

      i’m sorry, i was describing something that is garbage

      the short description is “lisp machines but networked, for nazis, and they don’t fucking work”

      i’ve always pronounced it ER-bit

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
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        4 months ago

        lol i basically wrote that article

        Oops

        To me it looked like someone wrote some babble about the architecture and then a Responsible Adult came in and added the thinly veiled sneers of “all they built is a text board, Yarvin is a certified idiot, none of this works”

        I might read the primary source on this tomorrow if I hate myself hard enough, I am fascinated by why you need two languages and two OS things to run a nazi chatroom, sounds like some absolute pinnacle of human lack of thought

        EDIT: I guess the actual concept might be so insane that there’s no way to write an article about it that makes sense and doesn’t use expletives

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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          4 months ago

          I guess the actual concept might be so insane that there’s no way to write an article about it that makes sense and doesn’t use expletives

          this is basically the problem. there was an article there already but it was based entirely on urbit’s descriptions of itself, which were all cultist gibberish. I went searching and found literally every Wikipedia-quality source I could. Most of these were about the people, not the tech.

      • self@awful.systemsM
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        4 months ago

        lisp machines but networked

        urbit’s even stupider than this, cause lisp machines were infamously network-reliant (MIT, symbolics, and LMI machines wouldn’t even boot properly without a particular set of delicately-configured early network services, though they had the core of their OS on local storage), so yarvin’s brain took that and went “what if all I/O was treated like a network connection”, a decision that causes endless problems of its own

        speaking of, one day soon I should release my code that sets up a proper network environment for an MIT cadr machine (which mostly relies on a PDP-10 emulator running one of the AI lab archive images) and a complete Symbolics Virtual Lisp Machine environment (which needs a fuckton of brittle old Unix services, including a particular version of an old pre-ntp time daemon (this is so important for booting the lisp machine for some reason) and NFSv1 (with its included port mapper dependency and required utterly insecure permissions)) so there’s at least a nice way to experience some of this history that people keep stealing from firsthand

    • AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space
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      4 months ago

      IIRC, “Galaxies”, “stars” and “planets” used to have more sensible, down-to-earth names that described their function. Unfortunately, this was something like “empires”, “kingdoms”, “duchies” and such, making the creepily hierarchical neoreactionary philosophy behind the project a little too explicit, so they muddied the waters to something plausibly deniable as “just some nerd shit”

        • self@awful.systemsM
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          4 months ago

          believe it or not, yes. there’s an extensive early awful.systems thread where @dgerard@awful.systems and I found Yarvin’s original spec that described this (since then Urbit’s gotten much more intentionally obscure, but the ideological base is exactly the same) which I can dig up if you’re interested

          non-edit: fuck it here you go, and if you’d like more psychic damage just search our local threads for urbit because there’s so much more and it gets so much stupider

  • UnseriousAcademic@awful.systems
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    4 months ago

    Based on my avid following of the Trashfuture podcast, I can authoritatively say that the “Hoon” programming language relies primarily on Australians doing sick burns and popping tyres in their Holden Commodores.

  • UnseriousAcademic@awful.systems
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    4 months ago

    Who could have predicted that a first principles ground up new Internet protocol based on monarchism would be a difficult sell.

    *I mean, I think that’s what Urbit is. I’ve read multiple pieces describing it and I’m still not really clear.