I don't know what secret of the universe do you expect to find there. If it would be highly practical technology or pareto optimal to anything else that's popular, it wouldn't be obscure.

If you did a deep dive and regret spending time, for things like these I suggest not going deep if you are not enjoying the dive. Life's too short for things you don't enjoy when you have your basic needs covered.

Also, while I enjoyed talking with Curtis I think it's important to be able to separate great things that people create from those people themselves. You don't want to throw out most of physics, math and computer science.

Like the Cenobites of Hellraiser who after running out of territories of pleasure to explore are forced to venture into pain just to find new experience.

But if you just want to explore the programming language design space I think you're much better off designing your own language than trying to wrap your brain around Nock and Hoon. And even before you do that, there's Haskell and Rust and Webasm and Clojure and Prolog, which I think give you a lot more bang for the learning curve buck.

How is paying $20, once, for an Urbit planet different than paying $20/month to play an online game? How else would you propose to have at least some minimal level of protection against spammers / bad actors?

My take is that they went with all their bizarre design decisions in order to keep normies and entryists out for as long as possible.

But it's just complexity for the sake of complexity with no discernible benefit. It's contradictory and self-defeating to encourage developers to adopt Urbit while simultaneously purposely designing it just so developers won't adopt it. Urbit makes many weird and contrarian design choices without explanation. It's fine to explore ideas and try different different methodologies but you should at least be able to explain why you're choosing to do it and how it would be beneficial. Here's a good example from the documentation:

A loobean is a Nock boolean - Nock, for mysterious reasons, uses 0 as true (always say "yes") and 1 as false (always say "no").

So they create an alternative to booleans that's just a backwards boolean? And their explanation for this? 'mysterious reasons' What?!? The only thing mysterious here is why any developer would use this.

Not saying I agree it's worth the trouble. Even Yarvin agrees it wasn't worth the trouble. But he didn't just pull this idea out of nowhere

Yes, the crowdsales priced individual addresses at less than one cent, but it's a 64-bit address space, so even at one cent that puts the gross valuation of Urbit at many orders magnitude greater than the gross planetary product since the dawn of human history. I'd say that's overvalued. Also, the addresses are not sold individually but in large blocks, with part of the pitch being that people who get in early can turn around and sell parts of their holdings to greater fools. If memory serves, the first crowdsale raised $500k. So even at 1 cent per, someone ended up writing some pretty big checks.

https://urbit.org/blog/the-urbit-address-space/

But they're not. There are 2^32 planets. A planet is the minimum unit of personal identity and is meant to correspond to a "responsible adult human". Within a planet you can have 96 bits of sub-identity, if you want to have things subordinated to your own identity (e.g. your IOT stuff, your phone, your router, your car, your kids, whatever). No one is buying a 128 bit identity.

You can buy planets right now for $10-$20 on opensea. $20 * 2^32 is about 10% of the annual military budget of the United States, not several orders of magnitude larger than the total economic output of the known universe.