this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Now that's a rabbit-hole. As far as I can tell, she ran (runs?) a facebook group called "Humanity 2.0". She "leaves neoreaction" every few years and is back within months. In 2019 she violated the by-laws of the Transhumanist Party elections by mentioning "Jeffrey Epstein or the history of Humanity+". What they mean is that mentioning that Epstein donated $100,000 to Humanity+ in 2011 "hurts the public image of transhumanism".
She apparently ran for Humanity+ President in 2013, lost(?), trash-talked Natasha Vita-More, who withdrew H+ support from Haywire since? It's not clear, a lot of links are dead/scrubbed since then.
http://transhumanist-party.org/tag/rachel-haywire/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/transhumanistparty/posts/2389157701305002/
https://hpluspedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Haywire
https://snoo.habedieeh.re/r/Transhuman/comments/139x2s/natasha_vitamore_vs_rachel_haywire/ (alternative reddit frontend)
Bonus: Ye Gods, her interview with an Urbit developer is really, truly, amazingly awful: https://archive.is/5I7Td
That happens a lot with this H+ related stuff there also just seem to be periods where there is no content to mix it all up. (which, if you are going to be a bit delete happy is a good way to hide your deletions in the void, but in our advertisement seo driven world this is not a good method if you want to become well known and get your ideas out there, but I'm digressing and I don't know the real goals of anybody here).
But yeah, looked into Haywire and got a bad vibe from her (and an annoying vibe, I don't know how to put it into words yet, but I have noticed it in places, a sort of manic tech positivist (which can still be negative about the tech in a criti-hype way) writing of boundless opportunities and everything going faster and quicker and better just across the horizon, Don't get left behind! But it remains all words and there is the vague stench of far right/libertarian bs, and no actual real tech. Manic Pixie I Fucking Love Science posting (this is not great as it misses the spiritual element of this style of posting, but I have not found the correct words to describe it, in the case of Haywire that she is an industrial goth musician fits).
Vaguely related but calling the discussion between Haywire and Vita-More a catfight (in the link to some (now dead) Kurzweil forum) is a bit of that unconscious sexism which happens a bit in tech spaces (I'm just assuming it wasn't intentional).
Also I might have physically let out a groan due to the 'trigger warning' magazine name. (I also have some of her music apparently (A few of the Endzeit Bunkertracks collections) and oof she was singing about 'being banned from everything you created' in 2012 already. So very ahead on the curve on that one. (The music itself isn't bad for that kind of industrial cybergoth stuff, just a bit mid (And I don't mean that in an insulting way, bad cybergoth stuff is really bad imho)).
the bad vibe is that she's been techfash forever
Yeah sorry, the bad vibe was 10 hours ago, did more reading and came to that conclusion. A 2012 neo-reactionary.
a long history of being one of those names you see and go "this asshole again"
Amusing how often people go 'she denounced NRx in 201x'
* how often other reactionaries
It always surprises me to discover that there are actual true believers who are worried how to build Urbit on web3, and who fret that Urbit is not compatible with AI. This in the same piece that states that Urbit might be finished/usable in 100 years. Do they really believe that web3 and AI are gonna be around then?
Also LOL that LLM can't grok Hoon. It's a backhanded compliment, but a compliment nonetheless.
In the comments someone asks the dev Jurij "What is the killer application or feature that I must have?" and he replies "No one knows."
The killer app is to filter out the fascists and gather them in one convenient place.
See also Yarvin's idea about people opting out of "the Cathedral" and suddenly taking power.
The Cathedral was such a good memetic thing, super attractive to talk about for anybody with NRx/far right brainworms, incomprehensible why you would use that term to normal people, and made you instantly recognizable as a person to be careful around for anti-fascists, or person of interest for any gov orgs looking into people radicalizing. A bit like the globohomo dogwhistle, it fails because it just looks weird to normal people. At least the alt-right picked a cartoon as their icon.
@Soyweiser @gerikson
But it’s weird because NRx/far right people are often very into the sort of people associated with Cathedrals. Royalty; conservative cardinals who wear the full antiquated costume and gewgaws; etc.
what this means is that there isn't a mountain of Hoon code on StackOverflow for Copilot to crib. I wonder if he understands that's the reason.
how does it always come back to urbit?
I can only skim it for now, but it feels like this article deserves its own post. it looks like this was written as a reaction to the articles we’ve already seen that call out how fucking weird the fascists around urbit and the community/cult they’ve formed are; notably, the summary of urbit’s history here specifically elides any talk about the neoreactionary politics that led Yarvin to start urbit in the first place (references to which are themselves scattered across the system’s early specs)
It probably does deserve its own post, I'm not sure I can do it justice. "Urbit is an attempt to make computers great again", the phrase "from scratch" appears 7 times, "Urbit is doing God’s work to make the perfect computer", [in a linked tweet] "Urbit fulfills prophecy", "It’s [Urbit] a massive virtue signal".
I missed the comments section at first. "This is one of the things Urbit got right. Especially useful to pique people's interest and keep them invested by giving them a unique, cool identity." Jurij claiming that Urbit is amazing because...usernames?
And then there's the link to Plunder, which the NixOS-heads will have to investigate to figure out if it does what it says:
"Plunder is a new programming model where programs run forever. Hardware restarts are invisible to the software, as is moving a running program from one physical machine to another."
Finally, Haywire has such lovely readers as *squints* "Eva Brawn".
urbit is the most unintentionally funny software ever created, the more posts about it the better
oh I got you covered! as soon as I get the chance I’ll draft a new urbit thread for this. I believe our last one covered Plunder which is indeed a trip from a Nix standpoint; I should dig that thread up to reference
also it's Rachel fucking Haywire