submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by self@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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

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[-] self@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

my mistake, there’s gold in the orange site thread

e: ah, we found it around the same time!

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 6 points 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.systems 4 points 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.systems 3 points 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?

[-] self@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

it’s weird that they omitted the historical MIT projects that led to scheme (PLANNER, Conniver, SCHEME(r, they ran into a filename length limit when implementing)) but found time to mention an obscure Lisp with no impact that stopped updating 16 years ago

maybe cause in the actual historical context of Lisp-1 names, “plunder” doesn’t even fit the pattern

this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023

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