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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by dgerard@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems
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[-] CliftonR@wandering.shop 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

@V0ldek @dgerard

Yeah, there's a number of people here who actually met Yarvin before he

  1. became a complete asshole, you can not even imagine,
  2. became a proud fascist and *monarchist*, and
  3. lost his mind.

Many of us also have SW experience and have tried to look into Urbit and all came to the same conclusion - it all seems to be based on both giving stupid names to existing concepts, and blindly doing the opposite of whatever anybody has done before without regard to reason.

[-] CliftonR@wandering.shop 9 points 3 months ago

@V0ldek @dgerard

IIRC, a trivial but telling example of the latter is that for whatever reason, Yarvin decided that in all languages and code for all things Urbit, the boolean value true should be represented in binary form as 0, and false should be represented as non-zero.

Now it's fundamentally *arbitrary* whether 0 represents false or true, but deliberately making it the opposite of virtually every modern language implementation seems a perfect recipe for introducing unnecessary bugs.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 6 points 3 months ago

Bourne shell inspiring yet another language!

[-] CliftonR@wandering.shop 7 points 3 months ago

@bitofhope

Yeah, that was the only motivation I could think of. And even there it doesn't mean true/false, it means "no errors" and that only sometimes.

[-] cstross@wandering.shop 8 points 3 months ago

@CliftonR @V0ldek @dgerard No, Curtis was a weirdo as far back as the early-to-mid-90s when I knew him

[-] Orc@chaosfem.tw 7 points 3 months ago

@cstross @CliftonR @V0ldek @dgerard Weird, yes, but not (visibly) such a nasty royalist as he has become.

As I've said before, he's the worst t.b character arc ever.

this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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