your body is getting damaged constantly and it is repairing the damage constantly. You are able to do this - in terms of entropy - because you are not a closed system, you are eating food and breathing air. Entropy is not an insurmountable problem for an animal unless it stops eating and breathing, just as entropy is not an insurmountable problem for an electric refrigerator unless it stops receiving power
The mysterious part would be a joke. The actual reasoning, which Yarvin himself has explained, is to unify the underlying data values between booleans and c-style return codes. In C and unix, the convention is that 0 indicates program success and any other value indicates some kind of program failure. It's strange for the fundamental success code to be false when cast as a boolean, so it makes sense to either change the success codes or change the booleans. Changing the success codes would actually be pretty incoherent - what would you do, 0 and >1 values are failure and 1 is success? - so it makes more sense to change the booleans if something is going to change
Not saying I agree it's worth the trouble. Even Yarvin agrees it wasn't worth the trouble. But he didn't just pull this idea out of nowhere
As someone with a good amount of hoon knowledge, I'd say there are definitely some cases where new terminology does more harm than good, but in other cases simply using the name of a similar concept in other languages would hide complexities or differences that the learner will need to know eventually
* The original vision for the internet was decentralized: if I want to send you a message or do some computing work together, I would have my computer talk directly to your computer
* This vision actually failed and today virtually all computing on the internet has become centralized in big corporate servers. Instead of my computer talking to yours, my computer logs into Facebook's server and we communicate through Facebook controlled accounts. These big corporations control our accounts and identities and often our data too. They can censor us at their whims, serve us ads, and data mine us
* The decentralized vision failed because decentralized software is much harder to build than centralized software and servers are much harder for everyday people to operate than regular client operating systems
* It seems unlikely that these problems can be solved from within the current ageing technology stack, so what if we built a new tech stack - designed from scratch to make decentralized networked computing easier - where running your own server is no harder than running your own web browser or smartphone
> a new tech stack - designed from scratch to make decentralized networked computing easier
It's important to emphasize how very deeply from scratch it is, renaming absolutely everything, even the most basic concepts, with lots of abstractions.
That's maybe important and interesting to developers, but the value proposition of urbit is to the regular computer user. John Doe doesn't care what names or concepts are used in ECMAScript, he just cares that his browser works. John Doe doesn't care what names or concepts are used in the urbit stack, he just cares that his personal server works
The value proposition depends on developers, so mentioning the mysteries they have to go through is relevant to making a summary. It's a huge part of what makes urbit urbit.
