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Esperanto has more actual speakers (around 2m apparently, compared to just 20 for klingon) but Klingon obviously has had more impact in the world
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The mystical optics are like 99.99% vibe noise that probably hurts more than it helps at this stage. It's an alt compute stack based on some theoretical conceits that later bolted on some cryptoish elements. The only other important fact is Thiel funding.
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Replying to @vgr
I love reading these pieces—and your thread as well. But I’m so remote from the scene described that they absolutely read as Borgesian speculative fiction about an imaginary secret society. (Tlön, Clandestino, Urbit Tertius.)
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There's probably a later stage of maturation where it helps to have a live "mystique scene" around an sacredness product like this, but if it emerges while the thing is unusable even to geeks but girls are posting party selfies proclaiming themselves "urbit girls" I go 👀
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But this is an interesting extreme data point on the spectrum between utilitarian design and opinionated design. Urbit and Esperanto are about cranking opinionatedness to 11 and making that the main selling point rather than a confidence signal of conceptual integrity
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Most products are 0/10 or 1/10. Purely utilitarian design-to-spec. A 3/10 product is a routine enterprise SaaS product like say Salesforce that's entirely designed to practical concerns, so the company, despite its forced "fun" culture trappings, is basically a regular business.
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Roam is a 5/10 opinionated product. You may or may not agree with Conor's product-embodied opinions, but they do send costly signals about conceptual integrity and if you vibe with the product in use, you can trust the roadmap. But the product itself is categorically familiar
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Most blockchain things, bitcoin, ethereum and the rest, are like an 8 or 9 in opinionatedness. The product itself has a categorical unfamiliarity due to the underlying design opinions putting you in an adjacent possible alt reality
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Many things can outgrow their founder's intellectual conceits and dispositions, but some things structurally can't. For eg. Palmer Luckey is similarly controversial to Yarvin, but Oculus is basically an evolution in VR tech that is indifferent to the politics of the person
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A full tech stack is much more of a fluid medium of ideological expression. I got definite moldbug vibes from the design descriptions of urbit A VR headset is mainly about biology and physics limits. Your opinions on politics can’t find easy expression in that medium.
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Very cool observation. Also, advantages don’t map from politics onto stack architecture. Your expression of ideology could be making your design worse.
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The repeated invocation of Thiel is mostly ideology ("sacredness") on your part, Venkatesh. How much in total dollars did Thiel put into Urbit? A tiny amount, by startup standards – an amount that could (and has been) raised from other VCs.
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