I've known about Yarvin for many years, but only proximally. He had a reputation of being an intellectual Sith Lord, basically evil but like really fucking smart. Finding out he's like an enormous tool this whole time really makes me consider the role of vibes. - ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

swiftonsecurity.com • 2 days ago

I've known about Yarvin for many years, but only proximally. He had a reputation of being an intellectual Sith Lord, basically evil but like really fucking smart.
Finding out he's like an enormous tool this whole time really makes me consider the role of vibes.

Reposted from Charles Johnson

If you’ve been aware of Curtis Yarvin for years, you probably know how disheartening it is to find out that an absolute bottom feeding jackweasel like this is influencing the president of the US.

Comments

vought.bsky.social•2 days ago

OK, so I’m curious. I’ve read a lot of what he’s written about political alignment and his ideas. Curious what you’ve read.

What made you think he was so smart? Can you point it something that shows some intellectual rigor?

Tool or not, his ideas about government are fucking insane.

swiftonsecurity.com•2 days ago

Again just vibes nothing I can point just stuff that Silicon Valley types referenced

vought.bsky.social•2 days ago

I was wondering if he was one of those crusty old Slashdot posters, tbh

Turns out he is just a lil weirdo

vought.bsky.social•2 days ago

Well, there’s your first mistake. :-)

marypcbuk.bsky.social•2 days ago

The only person with whom Moldbug had the reputation of being smart was himself. Any SV types who thought him smart automatically disqualified themselves from being smart. He sounded “clever” aka he knew a lot of long words and misused most of them

vector-of-bool.bsky.social•2 days ago

Urbit shows some amount of CS smarts. There's a kernel of something interesting there, but it's muddled in layers of opaque nonsense and gross ideological design decisions. He's needlessly clever and obtuse just for the sake of being obtuse.

Also: The Urbit C code is AWFUL

https://bsky.app/profile/vector-of-bool.bsky.social/post/3lo62tblzn22j

dukecarge.bsky.social•1 day ago

I'm an embedded c developer and what the fuck am I reading.

sdowney.org•1 day ago

On the other hand, here is code from an implementation of J, which is insane, but also works?
https://github.com/tangentstorm/j-incunabulum/blob/master/ji.c

andysmaps.bsky.social•2 days ago

I remember thinking he was driven - his wordcount is enormous - but he didn't have a lot of respect for his own ideas. He'd bend his notions to answer the objection in front of him, but that didn't stick. Like he was trying to win the argument, not find a way forward.

andysmaps.bsky.social•2 days ago

But I haven't looked at his stuff in years, so I dunno how accurate that assessment is.

paulhosking.bsky.social•1 day ago

First I heard of him was ESR hand-wringing about his speaking engagement for some OSS convention being cancelled. Couching it not as a condemnation of Yarvin's fascist spin but as an attack on geekdom.

Also my first hint of ESR's fascist tendencies - no longer a Hero of the Computer Revolution.

ibitpichu.bsky.social•2 days ago

🙄

alexqgb.bsky.social•1 day ago

As soon as your hear "Monarchist" you can tune all the way out

birb.mom•2 days ago

Yarvin is literally the real life equivalent of Peter Wiggin (his alter ego 'Locke', specifically) from the first couple of Ender's game novels

pxtl.ca•1 day ago

That doesn't work because Locke was supposed to be the voice of reason, while Demosthenes was the fascist.

birb.mom•1 day ago

Yeah, I think you're right. It's been far too since I read those books and I'm obviously misremembering

poemproducer.bsky.social•2 days ago

always despised sith tools

pxtl.ca•1 day ago

"We should replace local gov't with a King"...

At a certain level we to deal with the fact that the SF Bay area's political culture does need to be held accountable for radicalizing all these freaks against normal democracy by being the most dysfunctionally-run municipality on Earth.

archai.bsky.social•1 day ago

I really don’t think we do. If your response to (let’s be honest) mild dysfunction is to throw out the whole project of self-governance, you were already cooked, and nobody else need own your failure.

pxtl.ca•1 day ago

I mean it's not a coincidence that all of these antidemocratic sociopaths like Thiel and Musk and Yarvin all come from the world's wealthiest slum.

> mild dysfunction

The SF bay area cities are richer than God and have decided to make housing illegal.

archai.bsky.social•1 day ago

Mountain View. You’re talking about Mountain View. And if you’re just hearing YIMBY astroturf nonsense, you’re looking at the problems through a very narrow lens. Our housing comes in two flavors: none, and unattainably luxurious. No developer is interested in building affordable housing.

berndtpetersen.bsky.social•1 day ago

Mild? Lolol

parserexception.bsky.social•2 days ago

I saw part of his thesis the other day. It was the kind of work that 15 years ago would have left me thinking about how little I knew about computers and left me trying to piece that together. Today I still don't understand it but recognize it's because it's not well written but still kinda complex.

pxtl.ca•1 day ago

This covers my feelings on Yarvin's writing when it comes to computers:

https://xkcd.com/483/

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parserexception.bsky.social•2 days ago

Ironically that was a common theme I experienced in grad school. The best and most important ideas were all well written by people who could explain it to a graduate level audience. The more fringe you went the worse the writing was done even if it still got published.

aelkus.bsky.social•1 day ago

when i first heard of him it was for writing insanely long gonzo blogspot posts with scanned 19th century google books supporting his strange arguments

sentry23.bsky.social•2 days ago

Vibefluencing is a thing, I guess.

quarvex.bsky.social•2 days ago

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werwolfram.bsky.social•2 days ago

Wait crap is he where that moon got its name?