It may seem irrelevant to his technical qualifications that Curt Yarvin is a racist. Someone can be a good plumber but a bad electrician, so why not a good programmer but a bad human being? But I think it really is relevant in this case because once you realize that Yarvin is just as dumb and racist as your racist uncle at Thanksgiving and he’s just better at writing twenty thousand word blog posts, it helps you see all of his other ideas in a similar light. Is it a good idea or just a lot of words surrounding a bad idea?
Is Kelvin versioning a good idea? It’s an interesting idea on the surface, and it’s interesting to think about converging on a final design rather than evolving forever, but once you allow the version to go from v1 to v0.1 to v0.01 you realize that it’s actually the same as a normal version that always counts up, it’s just way less convenient to work with and it requires twenty thousand words of fog to cover it up.
Yarvin is the human equivalent of an LLM: there’s nothing of substance there, just a lot of hot air surrounding a core of absolute stupidity.
“Racist” is putting it mildly. Comparing Yarvin to a garden-variety racist uncle is like comparing Darth Vader to a stormtrooper. He’s explicitly a feudalist who believes democracy is bad and the world should be run by an elite.
But I think calling him stupid is a cop-out. I’ve read through some of the Urbit docs and there are some fascinating, but convoluted and impractical, ideas in there. I would rather call him evil. I just hope his plans for world domination are as unlikely to succeed as Urbit is.
It’s not irrelevant: people who can be racist have other bad ideas, so you are right to be suspicious!
Version number schemes are also a fetishism: they don’t make your code faster or smaller or more correctly handle inputs. When a racist tells you their fetish, why do you listen?
It may seem irrelevant to his technical qualifications that Curt Yarvin is a racist. Someone can be a good plumber but a bad electrician, so why not a good programmer but a bad human being? But I think it really is relevant in this case because once you realize that Yarvin is just as dumb and racist as your racist uncle at Thanksgiving and he’s just better at writing twenty thousand word blog posts, it helps you see all of his other ideas in a similar light. Is it a good idea or just a lot of words surrounding a bad idea?
Is Kelvin versioning a good idea? It’s an interesting idea on the surface, and it’s interesting to think about converging on a final design rather than evolving forever, but once you allow the version to go from v1 to v0.1 to v0.01 you realize that it’s actually the same as a normal version that always counts up, it’s just way less convenient to work with and it requires twenty thousand words of fog to cover it up.
Yarvin is the human equivalent of an LLM: there’s nothing of substance there, just a lot of hot air surrounding a core of absolute stupidity.
“Racist” is putting it mildly. Comparing Yarvin to a garden-variety racist uncle is like comparing Darth Vader to a stormtrooper. He’s explicitly a feudalist who believes democracy is bad and the world should be run by an elite.
But I think calling him stupid is a cop-out. I’ve read through some of the Urbit docs and there are some fascinating, but convoluted and impractical, ideas in there. I would rather call him evil. I just hope his plans for world domination are as unlikely to succeed as Urbit is.
I dunno, saying Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s first book is pretty uncle-level stupid.
It’s not irrelevant: people who can be racist have other bad ideas, so you are right to be suspicious!
Version number schemes are also a fetishism: they don’t make your code faster or smaller or more correctly handle inputs. When a racist tells you their fetish, why do you listen?
Not trying to kink-shame here, more kink-ask-why.
For more context:
Are there any other non-typical versioning schemes? I know TeX has a system where each version number converges closer to pi.
Metafont follows the same idea but converges on (or rather asymptotically approaches) e rather than pi.