everything about it reinforces the feeling that it's all just retroactive justification for finding a toy they made more fun than expected
ETA: to be clear there's nothing wrong with making a toy and then turning that toy into it's own all-consuming hobby (TTRPGs for example) and one of the best parts of programming is how easy it is to do just that. It's just kind of annoying watching people wax rhapsodic about nonsense instead of copping to "yeah we're having a lot of fun, i feel like a kid again"
fwiw they actually live on a sailboat and have sporadic internet access and limited electricity, so saying it's retroactive justification isn't really true and minimizes the real problems they face.
The problem is that none of their problems are real problems and there's nothing to minimize when they're not real. You cannot minimize made up first world problems
No, they really do live on a sailboat with intermittent power and internet access. Unless you take "made up" to mean "as a result of their choices" these are real problems, and ironically enough not problems faced by most people in the first world.
> Unless you take "made up" to mean "as a result of their choices"
Not the original poster, but that’s my view exactly. If you impose the limitations upon yourself then it’s not really a “problem” for you, is it now. You just can afford to make your life shittier for an “experience” to then have fun solving the issues you’ve created for yourself
One of the (many) fascinating things here is that - even if by virtue of their 'self-imposed' stringencies - their output showcases production values that are very applicable throughout.-
> , so saying it's retroactive justification isn't really true and minimizes the real problems they face.
I wouldn't call any of the listed problems "real problems" in the context of my long winded disability and homelessness lmao. I used to be in their community, the mods, and indirectly, them, were abusive as hell. Their community is, last I heard, hemorrhaging queer folk (or maybe it's bled dry and queer folk just don't stick around there anymore!) because they have repeatedly shielded abusive members and placed them in positions of power, and ignored, silenced, and ejected their victims when they finally kicked up a fuss about it. Part of the move from an internal chat to Mastodon was specifically so it would take the pressure off them having to actively perform any sort of moderation duty or deal with the abusive people directly.
They are, fundamentally, rich people playing at being poor and living in a tiny sustainable island while the rest of the world burns. Their stuff is very interesting, sure, but stating "real problems they face" ignores the fact that every one of the problems they are facing are ones that they themselves have created. I actually really love some of the things they've come out with, but it's important that all of their work comes with the context that it was formed in, at least in my opinion.
edit: I forgot about the 'cult' thing... they are absolutely a cult. at least one of their members made explicit reference multiple times to being part of a cult and it was never actively denied outside of a "well, not yet, we don't have the numbers ;)" kind of thing.
Wow, you're the first person I've seen speak up about having similar experiences with them as me, thank you. I was a merveilles member some years back until I had some really rude/abusive interactions in IRC from Devine and a prominent moderator. I really would love to play with uxn and varvara but gosh I simply refuse to be around people like that.
Honestly, adding your voice here is incredibly kind; and likewise, I'm so grateful to hear of another with this sort of experience.
Their design sensibilities are very good, and I feel exactly the same -- it just... doesn't sit right, feels bitter, somehow, to create things with their tools, in the full context of everything.
I've often mulled over starting up a little group sharing some of the same sensibilities but without the toxicity, to be honest.
Thanks for writing this. It matches my experience 100%. I just signed up to comment because I know people will desperately want it to not be true but there are plenty of us ex-mervilles folk out there who've experienced the cult element and abuse, we just don't talk about it.
Is this the right forum for accusations lacking evidence? We appear to be very reluctant about it, if it’s someone like Sam Altman, but it’s just fine for random developers?
I have logs of some interactions stored somewhere, but they're very patchy and stored in plain text. They also contain personal interactions between server members, so I would not feel comfortable releasing them (I also lack any way to get in touch to obtain consent for releasing the logs!)
I do not have logs of direct messages because it escaped my intention -- while I planned to get them, that never happened. At the time, I was lied to and told I would be able to return, and then 3 months later I was informed I was not going to be able to return to the space. They also did not inform anyone that I was leaving, either. I had long friendships with many in that slack instance, and not only would they not know where to find me, but none of them were informed that I had even left -- as far as any of them know, I ghosted them. There was absolutely zero transparency of moderation both at the time, and as far as I am aware, to this day.
Something I forgot to mention in the above is that at the time they had a code of conduct, and this code of conduct listed a two strike system, along with a resolution system. Neither of these were followed in any capacity (likely because they didn't exist), and there was never any communication by the moderators that I had had strikes raised against me.
Living on a sailboat approaches some very very hard life/existential pinnacles that most people never even attempt to climb.
Yeah, you can have a simple regular life; that's lower on problems maybe. But man, sailing around & futzing with interesting barefoot developers projects sure sounds challenging in a lot of very very excellent ways.
Satellite internet is expensive, let’s all move down town! Housing in the city is expensive, let’s all move to sailboats! So you see at some point you have to address difficulties with some kind of approach besides avoiding them
"We choose to make this video game and do the boat life thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win!"
It's like how you can say that VT100 emulation has an expiration date, but you can't say that about the underlying concept of some UI based on a screenful of monospaced text, which is immortal.
I apologize for an off-topic question, but I'm curious why you choose to write "." as ".-". Is it an internet convention I'm unaware of, or maybe punctuation from a language other than English?
LessWrong had some pretty good advice in the early months of the pandemic, despite their terrible track record on politics and AI. There's a lot right with the Amish. You could write an entire book about the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Cults can have a lot to offer.
... in no small part perhaps because they remain isolated "pockets" of culture where - often - "progress" is slower or more controlled. Where idiosyncratic behavior becomes the "new" orthodoxy as behavior or culture "degrades".-
Where was it ... "Nightfall" (the novel) I think it was where a cult periodically saves civilization - by being the only ones that know how to handle the aftermath.-
cults are generally the only way to solve deep-rooted problems. otherwise people's habits are too strong and they keep reproducing the existing traditions that create the problems through unexamined avenues
... I was going to add certain forms of cryptography to that, but then realized that we've always have had some sort of cryptography that was "hardware-appropriate" (ie. sufficiently hard to break, to be useful) for the age. So older hardware was just fine ...
Any crypto you did couldn't be future-proof in the way it is today though. Don't know if that's mainly due to better algorithms or from the fact modern CPUs are optimized to rapidly decrypt/encrypt things.
It was algorithms. Back in the 90s there was no AES or ECC. There was RSA, and it was feasible to generate long keys, but it was impractical. Keys from back then could probably be easily factored nowadays. I think the spread of the Internet pushed demand for longer keys and better (more secure and efficient) algorithms.
Just because I was there (I agree with your general point) I wanted to say that I made my first PGP key in 1995 and it was a 4096 byte one, which is just as uncrackable now as it was then. I even remember being vaguely confused, because it gave you options, and I was thinking to myself "wut. Who wants the weaker-than-necessary key. I'll take the big one, thx"
Neural nets using individual tubes as nodes? Although the current trend seems to be quantizing down to a minimal amount of bits to process more in parallel, in an analogue system you could have a near "continuous" range of values.
Chat rooms and bare bones text editors aren't supposed to be process-heavy, and yet the popular communication platform Slack requires outrageous amounts of ram and CPU to function. [...] Making software this way is costly to off-grid users, or those on slow connections, [...]
What the boat couple is doing strikes me as the most romantic sort of bricolage and just gives me the warm fuzzies all over. But Urbit just pisses me off for a variety of reasons.
For me any potential technical argument and innovation is completely drowned in the needlessly pervasive anti-capitalist genderfluid digital nomad hippie talk.
Fascinating that you seem to think that taking the time and energy to write a trollish shitpost about your offense at someone’s use of pronouns is somehow not acknowledging or caring about that someone’s use of pronouns.
I don’t think you’re an activist, I just think you’re yet another someone who is unable to see the Amazon forest for the chip on your shoulder.
Absurd: Not enough power on our sailboat to run Ableton and Photoshop.
Real: So we replaced it with open source technology.
Absurd: That technology was based on Electron.
Real: Electron was too bloated.
Absurd: So we ported everything over to the NES.
Real: And now you can run our software anywhere you can emulate an NES