Conversation

There's a weird adjacency between the urbit scene and the erstwhile refactor camp scene I don't know quite what to make of. I would not have thought there was any harmony in the energies of the two scenes.
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Now of course the urbit scene has thiel-sized up and the refactor camp scene has wound down, so it's an academic curiosity
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But I think I've figured out why urbit leaves me entirely meh, setting aside my distaste for all things yarvin. It feels like the tech stack equivalent of an esperanto project.
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In initial look at it, to the extent I could get past what seemed like perverse and deliberate arcana, it seemed like a ted-nelsonian xanadu style vision. Except it wasn't vaporware pretending to be the One True Thing, but actually getting built. But it still struck me as similar
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Esperanto projects, unlike Xanadu projects, can and do get built. But their success factors resemble those of a church rather than a utilitarian building or bridge. The sacred architecture *is* the project.
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Sacred architecture is on my mind having just spend a couple of days at a major chola temple. Beautiful, but from any practical point of view a thoroughly unusable building. Except the point is not utility but signification of various cosmic ideas/vibes/feels.
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This isn't to say that things oriented towards constructing the sacred as opposed to responding to the real can't succeed wildly. After all, Esperanto failed as a language, but Klingon kinda worked.
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interesting because esperanto has a bunch of unanticipated structural problems (would totally read the history of esperanto) but klingon only has to function as far as barking the occasional provocation on a tv show
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(also thinking how programming languages are all designed but they don't have to function as general-purpose languages which is actually orders of magnitude less ambitious than something like esperanto)
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Don't programming languages succeed in rough correlation to how they're driven by demands of actual problems as opposed to desire to express theoretical conceits? Though that's not as sharp a divide in computing since some theoretical conceits turn out to be useful. C vs Lisp
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yeah i'm thinking haskell in particular, but also common lisp and clojure and stuff: i appreciate haskell but i don't use it because it's hard (and because of this has fewer libraries to draw from); common lisp, rather, is a pain in the ass to get it to connect with reality
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