no excerpts yet cause work destroyed me, but this just got posted on the orange site. apparently a couple of urbit devs realized urbit sucks actually. interestingly they correctly call out some of urbit’s worst points (like its incredibly high degree of centralization), but I get the strong feeling that this whole thing is an attempt to launder urbit’s reputation while swapping out the fascists in charge

e: I also have to point out that this is written from the insane perspective that anyone uses urbit for anything at all other than an incredibly inefficient message board and a set of interlocking crypto scams

e2: I didn’t link it initially, but the orange site thread where I found this has heated up significantly since then

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      The power here is supposedly that no authority can override your desires on your plunder system because it will eventually be a frozen spec, and so virtual machine runtime implementations that are correct must run any program from any time after the freeze. That means a vm I make today will run programs a thousand years from now (probably inefficiently) and a vm created in a thousand years must run programs from today. Theoretically speaking.

      Yes that’s what a spec means. Like wow I can write puts("Hello, world!") and it does the same thing on every ANSI C compiler, how novel!

      • self@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        this is an incredibly bad idea for security of course, and is in any case is a garbage version of what javascript VMs already do successfully (much to javascript’s detriment, in some cases)

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Dev is asked why it’s called “Plunder”

      Think of it as being a Scheme implementation: Racket, Stalin, Larceny, Plunder.

      TBH this is the first time I’ve heard of a Scheme named after the notorious Soviet dictator. What’s next, a Lisp called Hitler?

    • kuna@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Picture, if you will, a Porcupine Orchestra System, architected on a foundation of Jellyfish Gargoyles and Bamboo Fairies. In this system, the user interacts with the Crocodile Concierge, a unique interface layer that acts as a portal to the Foggy Marshlands, the computational region of the application.

      outjerked