Yarvin claims to have worked for six years on the first 42 lines of code, as if compensating for the logorrhea of his writing on politics with the extreme concision of his vision for computing.
this doesn’t make sense. imagine someone bragging that they spent 6 years on the first paragraph of their novel. you’d think they were a terrible author (or at least suffering from terrible writer’s block), not that those words must be the most perfect and concise thing ever put to paper
weirdly, the 6 year gap means that Yarvin claims to have started on Urbit the same year Dolstra’s first Nix paper was published. that looks like a weirdly unforced admission to plagiarism to my eye
so I did another deep dive and found out that, for some reason, the Urbit org archived its original git repo at https://github.com/urbit/archaeology (and has done so several times, check the number of “archaeology” repos in the git org). the earliest commits in that repo are from a 2010 version of the RE2 regular expression library. the first Urbit commit is from 2013, when https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit was cloned on top of that RE2 code (for some reason) which formed the original Urbit org Urbit source tree
cgyarvin/urbit is much more interesting, since it’s the real original Urbit, and it resembles the fucking mess I saw the first time I heard about Urbit (not that modern Urbit isn’t also a fucking mess). its initial code commit is January 31, 2010, which included the early pre-obfuscation Urbit spec and a bunch of files implementing extremely basic functionality. some notable things here:
- obviously nothing here is a 42-line magically concise function. actually, nothing here works — it takes yarvin about a month to get even basic functionality working from this initial code dump
- there’s some pre-2010 stuff in here! the directory spec/nock contains versions of a really loose description of a function named
nockfrom 2008. it’s kind of boring — a lot of the transforms look like they came from a lambda calculus textbook. this matches Yarvin’s pattern of creating “original” work by taking existing computer science and adding a bunch of unnecessary shit to it — lambda calculus was already Turing complete, and it encapsulates all these same ideas much more clearly than Yarvin’s vacuous language spec - I counted and the initial nock isn’t 42 lines either
- still no sign of Urbit’s core functions before 2010, and it doesn’t look like
urbit-inferorurbit-renderhave implementations, though yarvin obfuscating the code with stupid names and a painful directory layout (seriously, check it out) obviously makes it hard to tell
conclusion: Yarvin’s even stupider than I thought if it took him 6 years to come up with this basic shit, and I’m starting to hone in on 2009 as the year he went from making a boring shit version of lambda calculus to making a shit plagiarized version of Nix
Yarvin spending 6 years getting to int main() reminds me of Gregg Hurwitz taking 17 years to write The Book of Henry.
Everything I have ever read about Dimes Square is just a lot of words to say “insufferable”
literally Thiel pouring money on four fashy podcasters to pretend that there’s a burgeoning neoreactionary art scene
it didn’t work, but it did generate comedy gold like this
The idea – that everyone is going to willingly turn into a tradcath e-girl or e-boy – is ludicrous on its face. Dasha and her tankie friends can cosplay as fascists all they like. Peter the Impaler can dump as much money on them as he likes. It’s just never going to work. But, like you said, it’s been great for the memes.
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Same here, I was itching for a rain to come to sweep the scum off the streets, or rather a puritanical vanguard party seizing power and forcing these assholes to dig trenches or something.
“We like to think this hard work is exactly what makes Urbit special. Consider yourself warned.”
Yep, this incompetence disguised as intentional obfuscation shit again. Ay, caramba.
Are you researching for a book?
i was actually researching for the wikipedia article ;-)
there’s a book in it, though, isn’t there?
I would cheerfully do an experimental collab in which page for page of David’s reporting I fulminate about what’s happening on the opposite face
oh god i hope not
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a selection of sneers:
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It goes without question that this is idiotic. They aren’t reinventing the internet; they’re copy-pasting it while fucking up the compression. This whole “galaxy” and “stars” and “planets” stuff is just IP addresses with extra steps.
The coolest thing right now, he is saying, is to be an incel.
Virginity! Is! Cool! (C’mon, y’all!)
- Here’s the short story I’d read at this party:
Steve, 20, an aspiring influencer: Urbit is the future, look at my NFTs, web3 go brr. Give me money and I’ll devote my entire lore and persona to you!
George, 50, an exec at a baked beans company, trying to increase sales: That’s great buddy!
The proposed solution to neo-feudalism is, in essence, a better feudalism
I’m gonna build my own feudalism! With blackjack! And hookers!
This is all very sad. I look forward to more sneers.
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@dgerard “this difficulty is a feature, not a bug.” That is never a good sign. I’m reminded of intentially limited released black metal albums. (Which always sucked, and were just generic BM slop).
“Yarvin claims to have worked for six years on the first 42 lines of code” 42? That can’t be an accidental number. Yarvin is such a ready player one. (Weird the journalist didn’t notice).
42? That can’t be an accidental number. Yarvin is such a ready player one. (Weird the journalist didn’t notice).
or holds the fantasy that Urbit or nock is the answer to life, the universe, and everything from the hitchhiker’s guide — same difference really
the journalists I’ve seen covering urbit so far haven’t been fantastic — nobody has truly torn into it, and playing both sides with something like this (as this article does breathlessly talking about the artists and authors who use Urbit without evaluating their output at all, or when other obvious bullshit is uncritically echoed) is dangerous and allows shitheads like Yarvin to build their own mythology unchallenged
the line i quote was worth it, however, and it is one of the sources i can use for the wiki article muwahaha
oh most definitely, these articles are still goldmines just for how hard the stupidity of the Urbit crowd shines through on its own merit
i went through all of google news and these seem to be the only usable press articles on these fucks. then i went through all of Google Books and there’s nothing in there either. urbit is barely notable, but at least i get to make fun of it.
In an alternate universe, sneerclub is an intelligence agency that installed yarvin and yud to create urbit and MIRI as a psyop. They’re there to consume the energy and resources of TREACLES peoples, to hinder any effort to align AI, because sneerclub was set up by a terminator sent back in time by the basilisk.
…stopping here lest I continue writing AU AI fiction
@swlabr This fic is no good, not enough forced lactation and cross-dressing nazi regalia.
You are welcome to write the rat fix fic (jk please do not)
This is basically the premise of Charles Stross’ Singularity Sky duology (never got more than 2 books because he realized he’d written himself into a corner). A weakly godlike AI dispatches human agents to throw wrenches into the works of people who might inadvertently violate causality within its lightcone. Of course your premise is time travel so the Eschaton’s agents will arrive to drug you shortly.
what you’re saying is that X Musk will be sent back through time
yeah, inspired by the plot of iron man (the song, not the comic book character)
This fuckin’ article ruined my entire day after I read it in the morning
Just a foul fucking mood throughout knowing that people like this are out there being like they’re not even ashamed of it
I didn’t even get half way and I was just low key furious for hours
