This comes from a project which uses loobeans, because booleans are too mainstream. "In short, use _() to turn a loobean into a boolean, __()to go the other way." Thank you for making it easier for me to reason about stuff.
I think most Urbit devs hate the C codebase just as much as everyone else does, and there's a fair few "legacy" Hoon files that are a nightmare to read compared to more recent Hoon. Loobeans are generally considered a mistake, and not worth alienating everyone else for errno semantics.
You should use TLVs much the way math people use Greek letters. The same concept should in general get the same name across different contexts. When you're working in a given area, you'll tend to remember the binding from TLV to concept by sheer power of associative memory. When you come back to it, it's not that hard to relearn. And of course, when in doubt, comment it."
If only there were some way to put, like, a comment right inside the name itself somehow. Almost as if the name of the thing could be a meaningful description of what it represents. But I guess that's just a language design pipe dream.
This was described in a pre-Urbit blog post by Yarvin. Something along the lines of “personal computing in 2020”.
Yes, very reasonable.
B) You have the logical entailment flipped. Know arcana => in-group. ¬ in-group => ¬ know arcana. It's designed to reject out-group members efficiently, even at the cost of a high false positive rate.
I think talking about 'entryist parasites' and 'urbit insiders shielding themselves from people wanting in', is on its face pretty obviously cringeworthy.
Like, is that a problem that Urbit has, hordes of people at the door wanting to jump in, like some coveted nightclub?
William Gibson called this very aptly anti-marketing in his Blue Ant trilogy, and like you point out in your first sentence, it's nothing but a manipulative tactic by people who want to inflate the value of what they're selling by making it artificially scarce and exotic.
Yarvin's goal was to preempt this issue before it might become a problem.
Don't get mad at me for explaining this - I'm not even convinced any of this makes sense. I'm just articulating Yarvin's arguments.
I'm not "selling" anything. I don't have any stake in Urbit.
The projects I think of as overly subject to corporate control (the Linux kernel, for instance) had the existing technical leadership voluntarily submit themselves to that corporate control, because it suited their desires.
If what you're really trying to say is "It keeps out the SJWs," you have no guarantee that being an SJW is anticorrelated with technical expertise, and there are several highly technically competent SJWs. So you leave yourself vulnerable to a small number of folks who are willing to learn the terminology and develop genuine expertise and then take over consensus in the project, because you've arranged things so that there are so few people deeply involved in the project in the first place.
"Gurdjieff was a magnificent old rascal, who lived a joyous life, and most of his disciples live extremely restricted, rigid, and serious lives -- because the object of Gurdjieff's method was to weed out those who understood from those who do not, and those who understood went away and those who did not understand remained."
The conclusion Yarvin draws is so stupid IMO but people should know how much of a gatekeeper he desires to be with this platform.
Hmm, paying to become a citizen...where have I seen that before?