[gonehome]

If he thought Martian computing was actually about terraforming the literal planet mars he hasn’t been following it in any depth.

My take is he has a personal history with the founder that’s influencing his judgement unfairly (it’s come up before in previous urbit threads iirc).

Often this kind of thing can actually be a signal because it’ll cause a smart person to dismiss something for bad reasons rather than on the merits.

There are genuine reasons to be skeptical of success - building something like this from the ground up is insanely hard, there are lots of ways it could fail, but the criticisms he lists here are weak imo.

[lisper]

> he has a personal history with the founder that’s influencing his judgement unfairly

It is true that I have a history with Curtis, and that my opinions are informed by the history. Whether that's "unfair" or not is unclear, even to me.

But my opinion is not informed only by my personal interactions with Curtis. It is also informed by my having taken a fairly deep dive into the technology, and my technical background (Ph.D. in CS among other qualifications).

> If he thought Martian computing was actually about terraforming the literal planet mars he hasn’t been following it in any depth.

Not recently, no. But the technical underpinnings of Urbit have not changed. It's still based on Nock and Hoon, and so it still has all that baggage. Urbit's technical underpinnings look weird, and that makes people wonder if there might be something interesting under all that weirdness. My real central message is: there isn't. It's all BS, designed specifically to make people think it is something new and interesting when in fact it is not. It is a fraud. A sham. Whether or not it technically qualifies as a "cult" is kind of beside the point.

[UPDATE]

I originally wrote, and then deleted: "I know this because Curtis told me so, though obviously he didn't use the words 'fraud' and 'sham'." I decided that if I was going to say something like that I'd better be able to back it up, so I went back through my correspondence with him, and found this (from 2012):

> Humans are very bad - surprisingly bad - at abstract math. They are surprisingly good at mechanical, rote calculations and rote memorization. (Think of all the people who've memorized the Koran.) I design languages for the species expected to use them. Perhaps somewhere in outer space there are beings for whom denotational semantics is trivial, and integer tree addressing is bizarrely counter-intuitive. But this is not our planet. Nock does not feel like an abstraction - it feels like a machine. Play with it and you'll see what I mean.

So Nock and Hoon were not designed to deceive (or, if they were, Curtis never said so to me). They were, however, specifically and explicitly designed to fit a mental model that Curtis likened to memorizing the Koran. IMHO that is a very counter-productive goal, irrespective of the words you choose to characterize it.

[gonehome]

We clearly disagree and that's ok - but the example of people being generally bad at abstract mathematics, but good at playing with machines points towards making something more accessible and usable, not less.

It's why haskell is hard for people.

In a lot of ways stuff in Urbit (while unfamiliar) is more usable than the older stuff, but it is different.

It's hard to put yourself back in the mindset of someone new to computers and all the jargon and complexity you get inundated with. I'd argue what you see as intentional obfuscation is just something new/unfamiliar.

I also suspect your dislike for his politics is making it hard to separate the tech from the person. I don't agree with the politics either, I don't agree with Peter Thiel's politics or Palmer Luckey's politics, but I can recognize the value of the companies and tech they help build independently of that. Similar arguments were made going all the way back to early computing and the web (protests against computing because it was used by defense agencies). IMO it's not a good framing for evaluating a technology.

[lisper]

> I'd argue what you see as intentional obfuscation is just something new/unfamiliar.

I first encountered Nock and Hoon ten years ago, so these are neither new nor unfamiliar to me at this point.

> I also suspect your dislike for his politics is making it hard to separate the tech from the person.

Why should I separate them? My hypothesis is that the tech is a vehicle for advancing his politics.

> I can recognize the value of the companies and tech they help build independently of that.

So can I. The fact that I don't call Tesla or PayPal cults should led more credence to my position on Urbit.

I've read the Urbit literature and I've taken a pretty deep dive into the code and I've reached the conclusion that Urbit does not have any valid value proposition. I could be wrong, but that is my assessment, which will be of value mainly to people who know me and trust my judgement. If you're not such a person, well, my opinion comes with a money-back guarantee if you aren't satisfied.

[vorpalhex]

I appreciate you probably aren't a fan of a skeptic documenting your project, but the rest of us would appreciate it.

[gonehome]

I like healthy skepticism, disagreement, a high level of discourse etc. - just based on the comments here I don’t think that’s what you’re likely to get.