Urbit 2.0 just dropped
Urbit 2.0 just dropped
no excerpts yet cause work destroyed me, but this just got posted on the orange site. apparently a couple of urbit devs realized urbit sucks actually. interestingly they correctly call out some of urbit’s worst points (like its incredibly high degree of centralization), but I get the strong feeling that this whole thing is an attempt to launder urbit’s reputation while swapping out the fascists in charge
e: I also have to point out that this is written from the insane perspective that anyone uses urbit for anything at all other than an incredibly inefficient message board and a set of interlocking crypto scams
e2: I didn’t link it initially, but the orange site thread where I found this has heated up significantly since then
PLAN is an evaluation model for a purely-functional database.
Actually, this "purely-functional database" phrase is a bit misleading, it's an attempt to describe a novel programming paradigm for which we don't yet have good vocabulary.
this novel programming paradigm is just urbit’s badly plagiarized Nix store combined with Nix’s lazy evaluation semantics and large parts of Nix’s syntax (with pointless extra bits stuck on, as is tradition). not one citation in the whole thing, of course
and these fucking doofuses still use Nix to build their shit! they’re gonna claim with a straight face this bullshit is so novel they can barely describe it?
but also, y’all wanna see what Lisp s-expressions look like on urbit brain?
holy fuck this one is just painful
e: imagine if Lisp looked like this fucking cacophony (a basic HTTP hello world that uses a bunch of library functions for the difficult parts)
Just visually, that looks like some unholy forth dsl, rather than lisp.
lol, Plunder the coherent version of Urbit, eh
I am really very pleased to see that the hackernewses are starting to react to Urbit the way they've already been reacting to crypto
Tired of dealing with shitcoins from the crypto currency world? Too bad, because we're making shit-urbits now.
At least "Plunder" is an honest name.
@self Why don't they just double-down on evil and market it as the OS for supervillains? There's a perfectly good bacronym for it already—SPECTRE, the Software Executive for Cryptocurrency, Intrusion, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion. (Maintainer: Ernst Stavro Blofeld. And he doesn't use git, he uses sccs—collaborators get the shark tank.)
I think Urbit exists not because it's actually meant to work or do anything, but because Yarvin wanted the aesthetic of being a hacker founder tech guy. Proximity to tech folks was his bread and butter, right? Otherwise he'd need to get a real job and couldn't spend all his time generating bullshit.
the use case for Urbit is as a techfash identifier. Only one sort of person has an Urbit ID in their bio. For this use case, it works perfectly.
Urbit is a ball of mud
Can’t say I disagree.
Tuple<"Do you expect these chucklefucks to ever release a full stable 1.0 let alone 2.0?", "Perhaps one day Urbitals will release a text I'm simultaneously drunk enough and not too drunk to read.">BTW the latter string in English evaluates to
false.There have actually been multiple attempts at doing actual computer science from a starting point of Urbit.
Here's one I wrote up in 2017, whose proponents were so outraged at the Ethereum plan that they forked, and wrote their fork's constitution in Lojban.
Oh hey, small world; I operated a star for that fork. However, I no longer think that Urbit's codebase is worth reusing, and I've stopped participating. Instead, I developed a Hoon alternative (Cammy) and decided not to pursue Arvo compatibility.
I just want to say, as someone who's pretty well-versed in functional programming and has a decent grasp of category theory, that wiki article is absolutely impenetrable to me. I get that it's an esolang so the goal isn't a broad audience, just thought I'd share my perception. It looks very cool still, and I do want to understand it.
Omfg I have a coworker who writes stuff like this it's actually uncanny
I am just now learning about Urbit 🤔
That's the downside of the XKCD unlucky ten thousand.
I am sorry.
I didn't find the thread you are talking about, but I found this instead, which is probably much worse.
(Edit: I did eventually find the thread!)
Oh, lordy.
oh christ, that’s worth its own thread if you’d like to post one
the original thread for this one had 4 points and 0 comments at the time so I didn’t link it, but I probably should have in case it picked up. I’ll try and find it again
my mistake, there’s gold in the orange site thread
e: ah, we found it around the same time!