jlehman

Yes, it’ll be much easier to put the surveillance measures they’ve been trying so hard for into EU-based companies.

As annoying and ill-formed as your takes usually are, the central point of this one seems correct to me. Using an in-group reference on a page designed to onboard new people is probably ineffective, so thanks. We've removed that.

You've given zero justification for this assertion. Pointing to the years-absent founder's background and your personal speaking relationship with him (?), whom none of the people that worked on the content in the OP have EVER worked with, sounds like a straw man. At the very least it's lame reasoning.

Your central point is "A is a cult, because X is a characteristic of cults and A has X characteristic, therefore A is a cult." By that reasoning, all domains that have a need to use precise language to describe their concepts are cults. Like physics. Quark? Definitely a cult.

It has enough users to be useful now, which number in the thousands. It's also not a service that anyone maintains on behalf of others, so there's no one that needs to have a critical mass for it to be useful. Nearly everyone running Urbit is self-hosting locally or on some VPS somewhere, and they can do that indefinitely even if no more code was ever pushed.

If this kind of stuff made anyone want to throw in the towel Urbit wouldn't be a thing anymore. There's only a millstone around its neck on HN, but HN is gradually becoming more and more irrelevant. To our base and the people finding us, "I don't think about you at all" reflects their sentiment for HN conversations and the tenor of conversation that happens here.

I'm just here because someone told me (from within Urbit) that this post went up, it's Friday and I don't have as many meetings, and I couldn't resist myself. You seem fine though, so boot a comet and hit me up on the network if you want a planet or something to keep the conversation going.

Which part of my response do you read as asking for a litigation?

Ideas are cheap, and Urbit isn't just an idea any longer. It's a working system that's been built by dozens of people over the years, and it's only picking up steam.

In Ron Garrett's words:

> The mere fact that Urbit is still a thing, that it has not yet collapsed under the weight of its own intentionally induced baggage, is worrisome to me. Something is keeping that project alive, and it's not technical merit. I don't see a lot of viable options other than some kind of fanaticism.

Looks like he and his ilk are just wrong and having a hard time believing that. It's alive because an increasing number of people want it to be, and no amount of theorizing can deny the reality of actual growth — which, in case everyone forgot, is what the OP is showing.

> An especially admirable thing about the way Garrett has approached this mess is that he's managed, as far as I can tell, to reliably avoid taking the bait on the drama about the project's founder...

Well, your link shows that this statement is false:

> ...But Curtis is more than just a bad reinventor of things. He is also Mencius Moldbug, a prolific pseudo-intellectual influencer of the alt-right. His politics worry me much more than his coding style. And because of my personal dealings with him, I am not sanguine about his ability or that of his followers to separate the two.

It clearly colors his thinking, as he admits, to some degree.

The views of an employee who left the company years ago and has been completely uninvolved since should hardly be treated as canon.

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

You mean "after spending just a few hours poking around it"? It's a big, ambitious project that's been worked on now for nearly two decades.

It seems more likely that you're disappointed by your understanding of the execution, which can be nothing but extremely limited.