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Comment by insertcredit | Hacker News Reader

I've known you (from your posts at comp.lang.lisp) to be eager to present the facts as you see them and thorough in your argumentation. What is it about Urbit/Yarvin that merits this sort of post?

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Have you ever looked at the Urbit code?

[EDIT] BTW, that was not a rhetorical question. I need to know so I can frame my answer. And BTW2, thanks for the kind words.

I've spent enough time (not much) with urbit to write a Nock interpreter/compiler. There are aspects of it that rub me the wrong way such as the needless custom terminology and general esoteric nature that sometimes reads like an occult grimoire but I also think that a lot of the criticism aimed at them, especially the politics, is misguided. Having watched Yarvin present on urbit a couple of times, I would say he is mostly driven by the intellectual atmosphere of the early Internet, before the masses moved in, thus his attempts to not "cast pearls before swine" by making things too accessible so to speak. I do not agree with this stance but I can certainly understand it without having to resort to conspiracies. Other than that, he most definitely reinvented Lisp, badly, but I am willing to give him a pass there too. There is nothing at all that attempts to make real the vision behind urbit around today and I do think it is an interesting vision. Finally, Alan Kay likes it.

OK, well, that's pretty much how I see it, except for one thing: I am vehemently opposed to making things unnecessarily complicated in order to keep out the riff-raff, and I don't think one needs to resort to any conspiracy theories in order to take that position. (If anything, there seems to be a fundamental contradiction between Urbit's stated goal of (re-)democratizing the internet and Curtis's approach. That and the fact that they sold address space for cash. But at this point that is neither here nor there.)

Ironically, I agree with Urbit's stated goal of making it easier to run your own server. The reason I say "good riddance" that I was pretty sure that Curtis's approach would fail, and Urbit would implode sooner or later. But as long as it was alive (and funded by Peter Thiel) it was sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

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