shall I presume many of you have no objection to being called ‘nazis’ in the standard twitter-left definition

I didn’t know there was a standardised definition, or that it was somehow political-side-specific. If I were to steelman this then this could be about a pedantic distinction between a fascist and a nazi?

Hey, you know what you can do if you feel bad about being called a nazi? STOP BEING A FUCKING NAZI.

Shall I treat all drunk sex as ‘rape’ because kidnapper-rape and frat-sex have the commonality of reduced consent

Yes. Yes you should. Hey, see, you understand this! Also consent either is or isn’t, there’s no “reduced consent”.

Shall I treat your remarks about this-or-that group as ‘hate speech’, or ‘violence’, in the form of speech?

Emm, depends on the remarks? If they’re hate remarks then ye dude, that’s what the word means?

Clearly, we have some sense by which concept creep exists; by which definitions can be stretched dishonestly.

Ye, like how you would define “censorship” I’m sure

MDMA, however, is meth; it’s literally its name: thre-four-methylene-deoxy-methamphetamine

Rust, however, is iron; it’s literally in the name iron oxide

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. What’s a “runtime implementation of an OS”? What’s Arvo if it’s not implemented or doesn’t run, a fucking abstract concept of an OS in someone’s head?

A “single-function operating system” doesn’t even mean anything. Do they mean a unikernel? That at least is an actual term.

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”?

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?

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.

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.

he signed up with a cryonics company called Alcor, which cryogenically freezes dead bodies so that they can be resurrected at some future date, when the necessary technology becomes available

wait wait wait wait, hold up, record scratch

I thought the cryogenics thing was about being frozen while alive so that you can be woken up in the future once we know how to extend human life to like hundreds of years or so, kinda like the Walt Disney urban legend. That at least has some intuitive appeal to it. Now you’re telling me it’s about literal fucking resurrection? Like they want to become lich kings or something? That’s somehow an order of magnitude dumber, like you’re not betting on “we figure out waking people up and cure cancer sometime in the future” you’re betting on “WE WILL RAISE THE DEAD AND RELISH IN THE NEW AGE OF UNDEAD MAN”

Cosigned by the author I also include my two cents expounding on the cheque checker ML.

The most consequential failure mode — that both the text (…) and the numeric (…) converge on the same value that happens to be wrong (…) — is vanishingly unlikely. Even if that does happen, it’s still not the end of the world.

I think extremely important is that this is a kind of error that even a human operator could conceivably make. It’s not some unexplainable machine error, likely the scribbles were just exceedingly illegible on that one cheque. We’re not introducing a completely new dangerous failure mode.

Compare that to, for example, using an LLM in lieu of a person in customer service. The failure mode here is that the system can manufacture things whole cloth and tell you to do a stupid and/or dangerous thing. Like tell you to put glue on pizza. No human operator would ever do that, and even if, then that’s straight-up a prosecutable crime with a clear person responsible. Per previous analogy, it’d be a human operator that knowingly inputs fraudulent information from a cheque. But then again, there would be a human signature on the transaction and a person responsible.

So not only is a gigantic LLM matrix a terrible heuristic for most tasks - eg “how to solve my customer problem” - it introduces failure modes that are outlandish, essentially impossible with a human (or a specialised ML system) and leave no chain of responsibility. It’s a real stinky ball of bull.

Nice Sneers For Winners 😥

FAANG came about because of “unexpected growth” in how those could “surprisingly” capture money

I don’t know the origin, but I came to know the term itself from my time as a freshman Computer Science student, where “working at FAANG” was to be the highest career thing you could aspire to.

It was always extremely confusing, cause like, Amazon, Apple, Google - I get those, they actually have things they work on, I’m sure working on AWS or like the internals of Google Search has to be interesting for a CS person, but fucking Facebook? The fuck does Facebook do? What unsolved technical challenges lie in a message board? Same goes for Netflix.

Mosaic creator Marc Andreessen

Best thing about it is that a normie read of this would be to think Assdreessen is just a weird guy who’s really into mosaics.

as of all the various media providers like Netflix, netflix is often not considered that highly from what I can tell.

Well, it should not be considered that highly, but for some god damn reason they occupy a letter in FAANG since forever.

Probably only because if you remove the N the acronym stops being that cute.

oh god, I’m gonna have to make part 2 aren’t I

Damn, I thought it was some arxiv-style place where you could upload anything and get a DOI, but this is a concentrated effort to make very specific brain farts look semi-legitimate.

Ye, it’s in the paper lulz

Ignoring pseudoscientific interest in a topic, we can observe that in addition to several noted thinkers who have explicitly shared their probability of belief with regards to living in a simulation (ex. Elon Musk >99.9999999% [54]

cosmic gated community

If I am actually an insufferble rich asshole that willingly put myself into the simulation because I was afraid Those People were coming for my precious bodily fluids then I insist I am let out of this so I can dutifully shoot myself in my stupid real face.

Jesus christ mate, they’re listening! Don’t give them ideas!