Clifton Royston
Me:
Reading SF&F since about age 9, friends with LGBTQ people since age 16, working in software/tech since I was 16, practicing Zen since 17 or 18, on Internet by late 1980s. I helped invent modern credit card terminals at Verifone in 1980s, founded small ISP LavaNet in 1994, back to sw dev from 2005 on.
Usenet (talk.bizarre), Making Light, Twitter.
“I’m normal by Cubetown standards.”
Mostly here to chat, banter, & boost my friends & favorite writers.
Cis/bi, he/him, relaxed about it.
Yeah, that was the only motivation I could think of. And even there it doesn’t mean true/false, it means “no errors” and that only sometimes.
IIRC, a trivial but telling example of the latter is that for whatever reason, Yarvin decided that in all languages and code for all things Urbit, the boolean value true should be represented in binary form as 0, and false should be represented as non-zero.
Now it’s fundamentally *arbitrary* whether 0 represents false or true, but deliberately making it the opposite of virtually every modern language implementation seems a perfect recipe for introducing unnecessary bugs.
Yeah, there’s a number of people here who actually met Yarvin before he
- became a complete asshole, you can not even imagine,
- became a proud fascist and *monarchist*, and
- lost his mind.
Many of us also have SW experience and have tried to look into Urbit and all came to the same conclusion - it all seems to be based on both giving stupid names to existing concepts, and blindly doing the opposite of whatever anybody has done before without regard to reason.