Seeing him back in the news made me think more about Urbit, his decentralized computing project. For a bit of a discussion of the technical parts of Urbit this

Seeing him back in the news made me think more about Urbit, his decentralized computing project. For a bit of a discussion of the technical parts of Urbit this is decent: https://wejn.org/2021/02/urbit-good-bad-insane/ https://wejn.org/2021/02/urbit-good-bad-insane/ I have this feeling that Nock, effectively the bytecode of Urbit, is inspired by Paul Graham's Hundred-Year Language essay: https://paulgraham.com/hundred.html https://paulgraham.com/hundred.html – for instance Nock only defines minimal math operations, as proposed in the essay. The thing is, Paul's ideas in that essay were quite bad, based on a mathematical aesthetic that is both inefficient and aesthetically a poor fit for computing. That's fine for an essay, you throw some ideas out there and maybe they work or maybe they don't. Then in Urbit Yarvin actually built the thing. And it's _terrible_. Hilariously bad. Some of the worst architecture you'll ever see. As a minor example they have a hexadecimal integer type... I understand i32, i64, etc., but a hexadecimal type is something you come up with if you don't understand how numbers work. There's literally a hundred other things just as embarrassing as that in the design. It's fine to take a bad idea and explore it. But he didn't just try out the idea, he got people to invest, to develop the system, emotionally commit to this thing. Seeing community posts is sad, it's naive folks hoping to find a home and seeing some phrases that connect with them, and they don't know enough to see Urbit for the fraud that it is. The obscurantist terminology helps maintain the fraud, since people think there must be something there if only they could understand it... but there isn't, and most of them will never understand it. Every cool demo is just a regular web frontend with a half-assed Urbit backend. All of which is to say, I think this is Yarvin's schtick: grab onto some ideas, explore them in a way that is so confusing that it hids how moronic the ideas are, while successfully appealing to some latent desire in the audience.