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Comment by marcusestes | Hacker News Reader

Yarvin's formative influence on this project will prevent it from ever achieving scale and that seems problematic for a decentralized system that relies upon an active network of peers.

His neo-reactionary thinking bled directly into the architecture of Urbit and I don't think there are very many "normies" out there who would support it, if they realized all of the long-term implications of a feudalistic social computing system.

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I think the larger problem slowing down their growth is not his "neo-reactionary" thought bleeding into the architecture of Urbit. I think a big part of it is the massive technical debt that Yarvin straddled the project with via his C code. It is written in a hard to read style that I at least have never seen before anywhere else.

[0] https://github.com/urbit/urbit/tree/master/pkg/urbit

>_reck_orchid(): parses only a number as text

>Parses a text string which contains a decimal number. In practice, this number is always '1'.

Amazing.

Yeah, seems like a bottleneck constricting in two dimensions: technical and social.

This is a pretty short critique about apparent issues with Urbit, from a non-ideological viewpoint and detached from referencing the author- though a reply points out those technical criticisms may have been inspired by ideology!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13597419

That is definitely a very insightful post you linked, but I think the project is terrible even if you block out every single possible connection between the tech and ideology. I quite literally mean that I can't read the code. They designed a variable and function naming convention which obscures what the C code is doing. The naming is all nonsense syllables and seems deliberately intended to confuse anyone trying to audit the code.

The app for example claims to be end-to-end encrypted peer to peer connections. Is this true? Is it implemented correctly? I'm not sure they could find a reputable security auditor who would willingly subject themselves to this codebase regardless of how much pay was offered.

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