[jlehman]

For anyone out there that's not content outsourcing their views to a mob with a bone to pick:

Urbit is not intentionally obfuscated. It's intentionally different from the rest of the modern software stack, because that's the point. It makes sense that that would make it look obfuscated. There are claims out there that it was in fact intentionally obfuscated years ago in its early days as its founder's personal project. Maybe? Not sure. Regardless, things change and this project is over a decade old.

If you find the state of discourse here off-putting, malicious, and obviously ideological, like I do, and would rather see for yourself, I'm happy to onboard you to Urbit personally for free and show you what it's actually about.

Follow our Getting Started guide (https://urbit.org/getting-started), boot a comet for free, and send ~wolref-podlex a DM, and I'll get you a planet.

[tptacek]

There's a long-running strain of arguments that Urbit isn't intentionally obfuscated; people involved in the project have been apologizing for its official descriptions since its inception. Ron Garrett isn't a "mob with a bone to pick" and he's been doing yeoman's work for years on HN debunking Urbit and pushing back on those apologies. To my eyes, he's got by far the better argument:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

An especially admirable thing about the way Garrett has approached this mess is that he's managed, as far as I can tell, to reliably avoid taking the bait on the drama about the project's founder; he's just a Smug Lisp Weenie, in the best possible sense of the term, critiquing a language and computing platform.

[jlehman]

> An especially admirable thing about the way Garrett has approached this mess is that he's managed, as far as I can tell, to reliably avoid taking the bait on the drama about the project's founder...

Well, your link shows that this statement is false:

> ...But Curtis is more than just a bad reinventor of things. He is also Mencius Moldbug, a prolific pseudo-intellectual influencer of the alt-right. His politics worry me much more than his coding style. And because of my personal dealings with him, I am not sanguine about his ability or that of his followers to separate the two.

It clearly colors his thinking, as he admits, to some degree.

[tptacek]

I encourage people to actually read Garrett's comments, which include repeated admonitions to take Urbit seriously because Yarvin "isn't an idiot"; he believes it's bad on the merits, not by association to Yarvin. If you ask for a litigation of Curtis Yarvin on this thread, you'll get one, and it isn't going to help your project.

[jlehman]

Which part of my response do you read as asking for a litigation?

[dastbe]

If you hadn't cut off the first part of the statement you quoted, it would explain that he's investing effort in criticizing this particular bad reinvention because of the impact Curtis Yarvin has been able to have elsewhere. He admits that it colors his prioritization, not his thinking.

[habsul-rignyr]

Likewise, feel free to msg ~habsul-rignyr and I'll help you find your way and get you a full ID, too.