this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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SneerClub

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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

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

[–] CliftonR@wandering.shop 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

@V0ldek @dgerard

Yeah, there's a number of people here who actually met Yarvin before he

  1. became a complete asshole, you can not even imagine,
  2. became a proud fascist and *monarchist*, and
  3. lost his mind.

Many of us also have SW experience and have tried to look into Urbit and all came to the same conclusion - it all seems to be based on both giving stupid names to existing concepts, and blindly doing the opposite of whatever anybody has done before without regard to reason.

[–] CliftonR@wandering.shop 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

@V0ldek @dgerard

IIRC, a trivial but telling example of the latter is that for whatever reason, Yarvin decided that in all languages and code for all things Urbit, the boolean value true should be represented in binary form as 0, and false should be represented as non-zero.

Now it's fundamentally *arbitrary* whether 0 represents false or true, but deliberately making it the opposite of virtually every modern language implementation seems a perfect recipe for introducing unnecessary bugs.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Bourne shell inspiring yet another language!

[–] CliftonR@wandering.shop 6 points 2 weeks ago

@bitofhope

Yeah, that was the only motivation I could think of. And even there it doesn't mean true/false, it means "no errors" and that only sometimes.

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

@CliftonR @V0ldek @dgerard No, Curtis was a weirdo as far back as the early-to-mid-90s when I knew him

[–] Orc@chaosfem.tw 6 points 2 weeks ago

@cstross @CliftonR @V0ldek @dgerard Weird, yes, but not (visibly) such a nasty royalist as he has become.

As I've said before, he's the worst t.b character arc ever.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks 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.