our boy Moldy is back at Urbit (gosh! etc), as interviewed by an Urbit loving crypto bro. Anyway, they're gonna solve their funding problems by doing a shitcoin

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 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
- the proximate example is Holium - who are 100% believers in what Urbit and Yarvin want - who had to move off Urbit to a more, ah, functional functional programming stack because Urbit didn't work
  
  c.f. https://x.com/tiller_tolbus/status/1764787058906628347
Eagerly awaiting the writeup.

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!

I'll say it again urbit is the most unintentionally funny software ever created
- Didn’t the maintainers vote to rewrite all the documentation in Lojban once or something?
- to the extent that it's been created

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In 2015, a technical conference rescinded his speaking invitation.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?

“what kind of a boy is Curtis Yarvin?”

well… he’s a birthday boy
and Hochstein is 100% on board
Somehow ~~Palpatine~~ Yarvin returned

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"?

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
- 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
- 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
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”
- Wait so it's a decentralised network with a rigid authoritative hierarchy?
@V0ldek @dgerard

> What the hell is this

It's still a giant model of a toothpick made out of toothpicks.

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

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?
Hochstein is 100% an urbit in bio guy

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?

He's exactly the Gilfoyle looking mother fucker you think he is.

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?

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.

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.

Maybe he realized it wasn't important after all.
- Fair.

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.