ah good point. He reads "mature and excellent at communication" as a self-description. After that, there's absolutely no way he can resist writing himself into both characters.

I signed up for the Urbit newsletter many moons ago when I was a little internet child. Now, it's a pretty decent source of sneers. This month's contains: "The First Wartime Address with Curtis Yarvin". In classic Moldbug fashion, it's Two Hours and Forty Fucking Five minutes long. I'm not going to watch the whole thing, but I'll try to mine the transcript for sneers.

26:23 --

Simplicity in them you know it runs on a virtual machine who specification Nock [which] fits on a T-shirt and uh you know the goal of the system is to basically take this kind of fundamental mathematical simplicity of Nock and maintain that simplicity all the way to user space so we create something that's simple and easy to use that's not a small amount of of work

Holy fucking shit, does this guy really think building your entire software stack on brainfuck makes even a little bit of sense at all?

30:17 -- a diatribe about how social media can only get worse and how Facebook was better than myspace because its original users were at the top of the social hierarchy. Obviously, this bodes well for urbit because all of you spending 3 hours of your valuable time listening to this wartime address? You're the cream of the crop.

~2:00:00 -- here he addresses concerns about his political leanings, caricaturing the concern as "oh Yarvin wants to make this a monarchy" and responding by saying "nuh uh, urbit is decentralized." Absent from all this is any meaningful analysis of how decentralized systems (such as the internet itself) eventually tend to centralized systems under certain incentive structures. Completely devoid of substance.

crypto/blockchain UX quality is strongly correlated with risk of getting all your tokens stolen.

You contributed to a miasma of chaos around the state violating my parental rights to confiscate my children's reproductive capacity.

Depending on how you parse this sentence, the author could be asserting a parental right to confiscate their children's reproductive capacity which is unbelievably unintentionally poetic.

So the top response is asking the painfully obvious question: how is this secure? Some dude (not sure if it's one of the startup employees) responds "Let's just use homomorphic encryption!" then throws a pissy fit because some people downvoted the suggestion of running extremely inefficient computation on rented hardware.

The lumina saga continues. https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/luminas-legal-threats-and-my-about

TL;DR: Lumina guy sent Trevor a mean letter and Trevor has reworded some things to protect against libel. He still stands by the original blog post.

The orange site has some fairly milquetoast opinions.

someone re-invented email-threading. It's billed as a way to have "long and complex discussions." Their prototypical example? Yud's utterly pointless thoughts on imaginary scenarios conjured up by his immense brain. Orange site is skeptical and yearns for 4chan instead.

Wow, thanks for sharing this. I didn't realize they were so explicit about it.

This is how The Sequences teaches you to think. Construct a thought experiment and use your feelings about how things "should" work to come to a conclusion.

holy fuck man i really wish I hadn't clicked on that hn thread.

It's crazy, he co-authored the randomized algorithms textbook for a class I had in grad school. That and the information retrieval book he wrote are probably the two biggest components of his engineer cosplay, even to this day.

The amount of tone-policing in the comments is sickening though.