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  • also: remember that urbit literally doesn't work. the funding issues are cos they lost a huge chunk of the urbit ecosystem, who were techfash neoreactionaries like themselves and 100% on board with what urbit wanted - but they still needed a base system that like worked at all, so they moved to conventional Lisps instead

    @self and i both keep saying we'll write that one up but never do, but it was a hoot

    • @self and i both keep saying we’ll write that one up but never do, but it was a hoot

      oh yeah! I need to dig up my notes for that and finally polish it into a long post. the prominent post-urbit still-reactionary system I’m thinking of took a ton of (cited, this time) inspiration from Nix, and I’m wondering if I’ll notice a change in that project’s focus after Nix went openly fash and accepted a ton of funding from the same types of sources that fund urbit and its descendants

      • the proximate example is Holium - who are 100% believers in what Urbit and Yarvin want - who had to move off Urbit to a more, ah, functional functional programming stack because Urbit didn't work

        c.f. https://x.com/tiller_tolbus/status/1764787058906628347

        • I need to look more into this, but I’ve got the sinking suspicion that the technofascists have come to a realization: that ultra-obscure non-functioning systems like urbit play well if your techfash inroad is forming an influential technocratic thinktank (and there’s plenty of precedent for exactly this type of shit working to gain lasting political influence), but it’s utterly worthless if your path to fascist takeover is through, say, the defense industry. urbit is useless for reliably launching or controlling a missile; urbit can’t even do normal desktop shit right, and unlike a lot of defense contracting failures, this is utterly obvious and can’t be papered over.

          NixOS is too heavy to run on a missile (it might have a place onboard a drone, maybe), but Nix can easily be (and has been) sold as a massive boon to missile firmware development, and a way to modernize a number of launch and control systems external to a missile. that’s why Nix was a good fucking get for the fascists — it’s working, unique technology none of them were smart enough to come up with, its creators are too socially immature and hateful to know what happens when they become a nazi bar, and Nix itself is still obscure and impenetrable enough (and the techfash element of the community has absolutely ensured this has gotten worse) that having a monopoly on software engineering contractors with Nix expertise and clearance can still be used as a wedge to establish an unassailable position with a high level of political control.

          Kinode can’t be used in a missile or a drone, but it’s definitely an adaptation of the non-language parts of urbit to something that wants to look like a more typical cloud deployment. I wish I could analyze what Kinode’s political inroad is, but all the docs on their terrible website 404, so I should dig in and see if they’re still active, or if their funders have decided there’s a more promising inroad elsewhere.

          • ah shit, I wrote the above before the edit to Holium — I remember that twitter post! (also, xcancel link for anyone who wants to see this weird shit and can’t)

            now that’s definitely worth digging into — I want to see the specific political angle these shitheads are going after. it really could be a renewal of the “web3 crypto OS, whatever the fuck that means” angle now that Thiel and company are pumping so much money into getting pro-crypto politicians elected

          • Nix is fash now? That's too bad, I love nix and nixOS :(

            • the technology is excellent, which makes what happened a shame. I’m still astounded that the fash elements of the community had this easy of a time getting their way.

              and speaking of what happened, check out the little fascists who run the NixOS wiki (the third party one that was the only source of docs for a bunch of things for several years, to the point where the new official wiki just copied the third party wiki’s text on a bunch of topics) telling on themselves

              • Jesus Christ

                I did find lix, which is a nix fork that is at least run by very much not nazis, so I think I will be putting that into my system.

                • lix is really cool! it’s very important to have a Nix evaluator that isn’t under fash control because none of the technology can exist without the language, and they’ve made some big improvements already to Nix’s build system, ergonomics, and internal docs — namely, a lot of the improvements the fash parts of the community fought hard to block, because technology that’s both powerful and obscure like Nix can easily be leveraged for political gain (see my previous post on this topic if you’d like more details on what the political side of this most likely looks like). I’m hoping lix proves generally resistant to assholes coming and ruining things — unfortunately, what happened to Nix keeps happening with other open source projects.

                  aux is another project that’s along the same lines as lix. it used to be a nixpkgs replacement, but since then it’s become something that’s a bit harder for me to decipher but probably more promising if it works — I believe it’s a reworking of the Nix standard library and other foundational pieces to be less dependent on a centralized repo and more modular. they seem to be planning a package set (tidepool) on top of that new modular foundation too, plus they’re writing up a bunch of missing language docs. if what they’re doing pans out, aux and lix could be a good basis for a Nix replacement.

                  the full NixOS system is unfortunately still irreplaceable for me, which fucking sucks — every computer I touch still runs it (my desktops, my laptops, the Lemmy instance where this thread lives, my fucking air conditioner thermostats…). replacing the NixOS options set and all its services and mechanisms is definitely a big job, and nobody’s managed it yet — I’ve even briefly considered GuixSD, but it’s actively becoming more hostile to running on real hardware (in the stupidest GNU way imaginable) including the hardware I run NixOS on, and the packages I rely on the most are weirdly primitive in guix (including emacs of all things).

              • External links: the fucking motte. All of it, not any particular discussion.

                • now I’m wondering if themotte was one of the places where they coordinated flooding the nix community with fash horseshit, or if they just feel that comfortable signaling that only fucking nazis are allowed in the Nix bar

                  • Doesn't look like they did any coordinating (openly, at least), only 9 comments on NixOS, 4 in November when Srid went straight to themotte crying about being banned for CoC violation, and 5 on 5 May where they are baffled and unable to even understand criticism of JR/Anduril.

                    Incidentally, the "woke invasion" page says the author got banned in November, so I guess Shivaraj is an alias of Srid.

    • Eagerly awaiting the writeup.

52 comments