To construct the Badthink Wrongtribe Brush you must first venture to find the ancient Badthink Handle (hewn from ancient oak), and then defeat a herd of viscious Sealions for the Wrongtribe Hairs.

When the stars are right the Brush can be forged anew, in the Forge of Usenet.

type systems are censorship

You jest but trying to convince C people to just use Rust please god fuck stop hurting yourself and us all kinda feels like this

We’d be better off not trying to censor it

Those mfs would refuse to change their code when it fails a test because it restricts their freedom of expression and censors their outputs to conform to the mainstream notion of “correct”

I was thinking about this after reading the P(Dumb) post.

All normal ML applications have a notion of evalutaion, e.g. the 2x2 table of {false,true}x{positive,negative}, or for clustering algorithms some metric of “goodness of fit”. If you have that you can make an experiment that has quantifiable results, and then you can do actual science.

I don’t even know what the equivalent for LLMs is. I don’t really have time to spare to dig through the papers, but like, how do they do this? What’s their experimental evaluation? I don’t seen an easy way to classify LLM outputs into anything really.

The only way to do science is hypothesis->experiment->analysis. So how the fuck do the LLM people do this?

You’re dodging the question. How do you evaluate if it’s good at predicting words? How do you evaluate if a change made it better or worse?

How do you measure good/bad at predicting words? What’s the metric? Cause it doesn’t seem to be “the words make factual sense” if you’re defending this.

worse at what, exactly?

Wait so it’s a decentralised network with a rigid authoritative hierarchy?

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

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”?

Very chill and ethical behaviour daddy Microsoft

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?

Artists using GenAI tools are among the most hardworking and innovative creators I’ve encountered.

oh sweet fuck, dude, it’s not our fault everyone you hang out with has the innovativeness and work ethic of a concrete slab

His probably most famous venture was trying to construct and sell a self.-contained BTC miner in an RPi form factor, which crashed and almost literally burned hilariously.

Oh, I remember that one! That’s a claim to fame if I’ve ever heard one.

10x smaller doesn’t mean 10x cheaper when things you’re cutting corners on are warhead and rocket engine that is cheapest components per gram that also make the entire thing work.

Wait, what else is there in a missile though? I’m obviously a complete ignorant in this space but in my head a missile is the thing that goes boom (warhead), the thing that goes vroom (engine), electronics, and the packaging. I’m assuming the packaging is also not the main cost here since “smaller doesn’t mean cheaper”, sooo, what, are the electronics that expensive?

Shout out to my senior teammate at Microsoft who sanitised my comments for external consumption.

We’d have a group chat with some folks from another team, they’d say something stupid, so I’d private message my teammate “jesus fucking christ what the fuck are they talking about I swear to god those fuckers don’t read any docs we send them I’m going to print them out and staple them to their bloody foreheads” and he’d laugh and then post “Hey, thanks for your comments, we discussed this previously here [attachment], but we can go over it again on our Wednesday meeting, cheers”.

I swear he was the only reason I wasn’t fired and forcefully escorted out of that building.

Wait, are those people so fucked in the head they genuinely tricked themselves into thinking users… Like ads?

Wait isn’t that the only kind of DAO

Okay, first of all, classic question from me, who the fuck is this? How many chuds were produced by the crypto bubble, it’s insane, you could have a fucking Pokemon card deck with them. My brain already struggles to retain information about both SBF and Wrinklewusses, there are no more resources to be allocated to a Balaji.

Second, most of this is irrelevant bullshit even for the standards of a crypto grifter, but I really wanted to read the “Learn” section. First there’s some nonsense about “proof-of-learn” which, again, completely irrelevant, and finally the single paragraph that actually says anything about the curricullum:

Our initial material focuses on founding tech communities, as distinct from tech companies.

Is there a word for stuff like this? Filler? Cruft? Meaningless, utterly redundant words that just pad the text. Anyway, this post is 90% that.

As such it touches on everything from crypto, AI, and social media to history, politics, and filmmaking.

So your idea of “everything” in tech is crypto, AI, and social media, in order: a useless tech that is already dead, an ill-defined hype term for tech that doesn’t exist in the best case and is useless in the worst, and just a general concept of platforms with users? Don’t get me wrong, you can learn a lot of software engineering by analysing the architecture of pre-collapse Twitter, like you can run an entire course on microservices just off the back of that, but I somehow doubt that’s what this guy is selling.

It should be useful even if you’re just growing a traditional company or building a following.

What the fuck does this even mean. This should be useful if you’re growing a company or not actually trying to do or achieve anything? Do you need any sort of education for “building a following”? What does that even mean, like a traditional Jim Jones-style following? You definitely don’t need a school for that shit.

Also what’s a non-traditional company? What’s the avant-garde corporate trend now? Companies that actually turn a profit?

Over time, of course, every branch of the sciences and humanities becomes relevant when building a community.

I’m not sure what he categorises as “building a community” but I’m not sure if like molecular quantum mechanics ever become relevant for what in my head is community-building, as in establishing networks of support and communication between people. Just saying that choosing “building a community” as the guiding principle of what to include in your curriculum might tend to exclude some important branches of science.

Also lol, lmao even, dude how the fuck is AI or crypto relevant to building any sort of community other than a communal fart-sniffing chamber.

But we’re intentionally starting with something simple. Our learning is about continuous education, about solving the problem-of-the-day [emph. mine].

Oh, so they’re gonna tackle climate change almost exclusively! You know, the actual problem-of-the-day we have in this current day! Wonder how crypto helps with that, though… 🤔

Anyway, in conclusion, your “university” doesn’t have a coherent fucking curricullum, what are you even doing. I hope this is going to be a sex island, otherwise this is a giant waste of everyone’s time.

provide just enough service that you don’t go elsewhere.

It’s not even that, is it? As long as they can force you to use their stuff it doesn’t even have to provide any service.

If there was a way for Google to hold you at gunpoint via internet until you pay them $100 every day they’d have a fiduciary duty to do so.