IIRC, a trivial but telling example of the latter is that for whatever reason, Yarvin decided that in all languages and code for all things Urbit, the boolean value true should be represented in binary form as 0, and false should be represented as non-zero.
Now it's fundamentally *arbitrary* whether 0 represents false or true, but deliberately making it the opposite of virtually every modern language implementation seems a perfect recipe for introducing unnecessary bugs.
Yeah, there's a number of people here who actually met Yarvin before he
Many of us also have SW experience and have tried to look into Urbit and all came to the same conclusion - it all seems to be based on both giving stupid names to existing concepts, and blindly doing the opposite of whatever anybody has done before without regard to reason.
Google Maps once directed me and my family up a logging road in Washington state which became fainter and fainter and finally ended in a dead-end clearing. There had once been a further road (maybe connecting to someplace) but it was now blocked with boulders, and closed for so long that trees were growing in the middle of it. By this point all GPS and cell reception had cut out.
I was lucky that my sense of direction is good enough that we could backtrack out again.
Oh I'm in total agreement with you on all these points.
I really detest the bizarre self-delusional stuff that masquerades as "Altruism" for the TREACLES people. (Yes that's a deliberate mis-acronyming.)
What I was trying to express, but not clearly enough, was that I'd really like someone to help with working out what's a genuinely effective use of effort and/or money. It's doubly frustrating that the people who looked like they might be trying to do that were just a crank AI cult.
Well, because (most) governments (mostly) *don't* throw money at the problems that *could* be solved by throwing money at them.
Look at the malaria prevention or guinea worm eradication programs, for instance. Ten years ago or so, my first encounter with EA was a website talking about how many lives you could save or improve by giving money to NGOs focused on those issues.
Hell, look at homelessness in most "Western" countries, except Finland. Look at UBI. etc.
@bitofhope
Yeah, that was the only motivation I could think of. And even there it doesn't mean true/false, it means "no errors" and that only sometimes.