[xixixao]

Parent is perhaps comedic but has a valuable point: This writeup is unapproachable for a general audience due to heavy use of meaningless (“brand”) names.

For me it’s also a red flag: Neither system seems to be designed to be approachable. One or two brand names are OK, but these systems seem to use them way too liberally.

[hn_urbit_thr123]

If you decided to make a fork of linux, and wrote an article explaining why, would you expect it to be easily comprehensible to someone who's never used linux?

[Nursie]

I'd expect someone that worked on the BSD kernel or SunOS or whatever else to be able to read about your linux fork and come away with a certain level of understanding as to what sort of thing you hoped to achieve vs what's in the existing mainline kernel. People with some kernel theory under their belt, that sort of stuff.

They may not grasp every little thing, but they would be likely to get an understanding.

But the use of deliberately weird terms for things makes it less possible for those who likely have overlapping domain knowledge to understand these systems or posts about them.

[hn_urbit_thr123]

The problem isn't that you're wrong, it's that this is the same cutting insight everyone has in their first five minutes of exposure to urbit. It's like going to Australia and telling everyone you meet that vegemite probably won't take off in America because it tastes weird. We know, man.

But there's also probably some new and interesting criticisms one could make? Perhaps about the actual project described in the article? And maybe after having read it and understand it? That doesn't seem like too high a standard.

[Nursie]

If it wasn’t intentionally obfuscated, and used more standard, accessible terms, perhaps that might happen more frequently.

The fact is that’s a major red flag.

Also I’m not sure you get to claim boredom with the answer to a question you directly asked.

[hn_urbit_thr123]

I'm not bored, just sad. The "personal server" thing is a cool idea. I think the world would be better if it existed and worked well enough for wide adoption, but it seems like it'll never happen because the first guy to try to build one was a weird racist. So sorry to rag on you for something literally every other commenter in this thread is doing, it's just dispiriting to see, over and over.

[theamk]

You know you don't have to use Urbit to get a "personal server", right? You can get a small VM, install Linux or BSD on it (whatever floats your boat), set up email, web server, mastodon instance...

this would be a true "personal server", and it will achieve much more than Urbit ever could.. except insane jargon at least...

[yebyen]

They literally kicked him out of town. If there was any person you could pick that best represents the whole Urbit community now, it would be anyone but this person.

And that's not because I am beefing with him or have any personal beef with him. He's literally not there anymore. He went away, years ago.

[theamk]

yes. I've read some of low-level technical VAX/VMS and Solaris articles, and they were mostly comprehensible. Connection Machine stuff is impractical but _fascinating_ (despite being much farther from Linux than Urbit ever was)

Urbit is really an outlier, with jargon/innovation fraction far exceeding anything else I have seen.