It may not have been. The author of Urbit is Moldbug, who is... controversial.

On the other hand, I just read the article, and none of it seems particularly bad faith. I vaguely remember something about Urbit using planets and galaxies as some kind of ownership metaphor, so I expected the article to go on at length about how strange this seems. But it seems to be focusing on the technical aspects of Urbit, and is pretty clinically detached.

The guy appears to be sympathetic to white nationalist views, harbors racist ideas, and advocates for authoritarianism. That's a little far to write off as "thinks differently". Given that your account is "throwaway", I'm guessing you sense that there is something to be ashamed of or at least lost in social capital by defending him publicly?

Curtis is Jewish; he's not sympathetic to white nationalist views. The other two accusations are true, but from my point of view they're also true (to a slightly smaller extent) of nearly everyone from the US, so it seems a bit like pointless flaming.

Appears to be sympathetic to? Are there specific examples you take issue with, or is this from hearsay? This account is for political or controversial opinions and is not related to this discussion, no.

This post in which he declares that he isn't white nationalist https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/11/why-i-am-no... is full of weird apologist asides and reads like "I'm not, or maybe I kind of am but not, but I can see why some people are, and other things are bad too, and maybe this isn't so bad".

"So we see that, at present, in the real world of 2007, there is no coherent moral or practical reason to shun white nationalism."

"I am just suggesting that there are many bad reasons not to be a white nationalist."

Then he proceeds to explain that the white nationalist view of the world is silly because it has two sides and doesn't confirm to his five sided race war view. This post is a seriously bad take. Language and words have power and this is the kind that could reach people on the fringe and bring them into the fold. If you have read this thing, does it not give you pause?

And there I was, thinking that the first four paragraphs pretty much summed up the frame of mind with which it was written.

On the contrary, I think the author spent a lot of effort to understand the underlying tech stack - honestly I can't understand why, but maybe they were exceptionally bored? This is the first time I learned that the underlying VM is single-threaded, for example.

Why would you think he spent a lot of effort? The second sentence literally says that he did not.

I haven't seen Urbit advocates contest the things he's saying (and he's not the only one that's said them). They'll say "it's a work in progress" or "that's not what were trying to accomplish" or other deflections.

A cogent retort would advance the conversation, but it won't happen because what he says is largely correct.

I think the people working on Urbit have learned that it is not productive to engage with the HN community. If you view the previous discussions (going back years now) it rarely goes beyond "hoon is intentionally obscure" and usually devolves in to CY politics bashing (e.g. see current thread). It is safe to say that Urbit is the most hated project on HN.

It is unfortunate because we need more weird projects out there, and less articles on javascript framework updates. Given the state of the web and social media today, I think we would do well to encourage projects like this and others like them. Or we can just all download MS Teams, live with FB and uBlock Origin, and say it's all good.

True. Just a couple of hours.

On the other hand... is walltime the only criterion worth considering?

Well, would you consider someone who'd only spent a couple of hours of wall time on Unix to be an expert whose opinion was worthy of serious consideration?

Not that I'm flogging Urbit -- or not flogging it, for that matter. I looked at it a while back and decided that I didn't understand it, and wouldn't understand it without spending far more time than I had available. However, that just renders my opinion on the topic useless.

Hmm, that's an interesting point.

I would encourage them [= someone who only spent a couple of hours on Unix] to dig further... broader. Mostly by demonstrating that there are real world problems for which Unix is better suited than competition.

IMO in Urbit -- there was not much more to explore after the few hours. Short of digging even further into the guts of it... and that was very unappealing.

Other people here in the comments mentioned that there's no killer app for Urbit. So my intuition was probably correct [to stop digging].

> Computing needs fewer javascript frameworks and more truly weird and alien shit,

Which is why I found the point that they've implemented their UI in javascript interesting

Agreed. That does seem strange. I guess if you want a UI that just works and is flexible, most people will turn to a web browser

I'm not aware of any self-hosted apps that perform encryption at rest. Maybe Urbit should be held to a higher standard because it's an "OS" but then again it's not really.