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Urbit's author, meanwhile, has had nothing but invective for people doing valuable research in the relevant sub-fields of comp-sci that his work touches upon. Purely from a technology perspective, this in an individual who operates in bad faith. I believe that I first found Moldbug via a post he wrote about the corruption and degeneracy in CS research: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-w... I believe his critique to be accurate. There is nothing wrong with invective when it is true. Surely you are no stranger to invective against people who you think are in the wrong. Moldbug has always been someone who can both dish it and take it. Science and technology are moved forward via heated competition of people who are furiously working to prove that the other guy is full of crap, and that they have the true answer. Why not test your own thick skin and look them in the eye when you call them cowards? Thin-skinned is not a synonym for coward. Cowards say: "thank you sir, may I have another." People are thin-skinned because they think they can get their way if they make a fuss. Which they did. I have no interest in saying anything to their face, because they are strong, and I am weak. As for the racism question...I have a proposal for you. Can we make you dictator of an American city? Yes you, Alex Payne. We could shoot for Brooklyn, or Baltimore, or St. Louis, or even my current city of Cleveland. If you are not the imperious type, we could just take the entire Jacobin board of directors, and make them the trustees of the city, and have you guys appoint a suitable executive. As plenary rulers, you get full power to root out racism, correct inequalities, reduce homicide rates back to what they were in 1905, restore the rotting and decaying buildings, solve the wealth gap between the sexes, the races, and the classes, once and for all. You get to reorganize the police, fix the schools, and do whatever else you think is necessary. We'll give you lots of time. How much do you need? 20 years, 30 years, 50 years? That is fine. I'm not actually joking about this. If you want this deal, we can talk about how to make it happen. It won't happen overnight, but I think a lot on the right would actually be amenable to this. You win, we lose. We take the knee, you rule. Seriously. You're going to win any way. As you say, Curtis's views were already soundly rejected. If you're going to win, I would rather have it all above board, so that if your plans fail to restore our cities, then at least you can't blame the wreckers, you can't say that you're ideas weren't truly implemented, etc. And hey, maybe you'll succeed and that'll be awesome. Either way, it is better for everyone if we just formalize the relationship and acknowledge that you are in charge. So what do you say? |
More specifically, his criticism of Haskell seems to be misplaced by his criteria of developing useful software, if you accept that the seL4 microkernel is useful, which I gather it is, otherwise General Dynamics et. al. are wasting money. I can't tell, it's perhaps a bit early to get a list of hardware using it, but previous L4 versions have been used in billions of Qualcomm chips and apparently all iOS devices.
And the related academic Barrelfish OS researchers seem to me to be doing something useful, and the languages they are using are C, with various bits of that generated by Haskell (e.g. hardware descriptions -> C).
It's a pity that Urbit now has no chance of greater success, the SJWs of computing going so far as to say it "has neoreactionary politics hard-coded into the network layer" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9675512), which is obviously worse than the "monarchy" of superuser vs. user.