I signed up for the Urbit newsletter many moons ago when I was a little internet child. Now, it's a pretty decent source of sneers. This month's contains: "The First Wartime Address with Curtis Yarvin". In classic Moldbug fashion, it's Two Hours and Forty Fucking Five minutes long. I'm not going to watch the whole thing, but I'll try to mine the transcript for sneers.

26:23 --

Simplicity in them you know it runs on a virtual machine who specification Nock [which] fits on a T-shirt and uh you know the goal of the system is to basically take this kind of fundamental mathematical simplicity of Nock and maintain that simplicity all the way to user space so we create something that's simple and easy to use that's not a small amount of of work

Holy fucking shit, does this guy really think building your entire software stack on brainfuck makes even a little bit of sense at all?

30:17 -- a diatribe about how social media can only get worse and how Facebook was better than myspace because its original users were at the top of the social hierarchy. Obviously, this bodes well for urbit because all of you spending 3 hours of your valuable time listening to this wartime address? You're the cream of the crop.

~2:00:00 -- here he addresses concerns about his political leanings, caricaturing the concern as "oh Yarvin wants to make this a monarchy" and responding by saying "nuh uh, urbit is decentralized." Absent from all this is any meaningful analysis of how decentralized systems (such as the internet itself) eventually tend to centralized systems under certain incentive structures. Completely devoid of substance.

crypto/blockchain UX quality is strongly correlated with risk of getting all your tokens stolen.

The "Thank you Grock" at the bottom made my day

So the top response is asking the painfully obvious question: how is this secure? Some dude (not sure if it's one of the startup employees) responds "Let's just use homomorphic encryption!" then throws a pissy fit because some people downvoted the suggestion of running extremely inefficient computation on rented hardware.

someone re-invented email-threading. It's billed as a way to have "long and complex discussions." Their prototypical example? Yud's utterly pointless thoughts on imaginary scenarios conjured up by his immense brain. Orange site is skeptical and yearns for 4chan instead.

guys, the robot can type rm -rf /, it's so over

This is how The Sequences teaches you to think. Construct a thought experiment and use your feelings about how things "should" work to come to a conclusion.

It's crazy, he co-authored the randomized algorithms textbook for a class I had in grad school. That and the information retrieval book he wrote are probably the two biggest components of his engineer cosplay, even to this day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40139636

will no one think of the poor baby exec who makes 8 figures? how could they be so mean to him??

I wasn't exactly sure where to put it, so I searched "charter city" and Lemmy threw up a few times but eventually showed me an older SneerClub post about prospera. I would have posted it in techtakes otherwise.

Absent from this analysis: reduction in QALYs resulting from perfectly good men being denied a child bride by some evil meddling NGO. Will someone please think of the poor men?

I'm actually somewhat surprised that the rationalists didn't bring this up.

I had a long sneer typed out but my shitty Lemmy app deleted my draft. Fuck the orange site and it's sophists. The whole prison subthread is probably one of the most disgusting things I've read from that shit hole in recent memory.