phf: ascii_field: you're too sane, to comprehend this madness. the way stupid thinks in this case, "want to sell bitcoin device, can't really make pogo, because no "value add", so must add some hardware to make it seem like useful hardware." of course they don't have enough sense to say add a ecc sig verifier asic, so add probably stolen miner asic code, which is not going to mine anything for anybody, hence the dodgy justification code.

phf: ascii_field: i think it's just written for "guy on a street" layman. "no you can't mine bitcoins anymore, because it's totally unprofitable without a giant asic farm, but you can use this thing to buy and sell bitcoins"

phf: i did technical review for it, which was pretty stressful. barsky is a poliglot and writes with a lot of grahamisms, so i rewrote a lot of bits to make them more "common lisp", though i don't think i fully reached that goal

phf: i guess that's why dadaist groups all have long history of denouncement, usually ending with the original founder remaining. otherwise you always have some entrenched fuck proposing a markdown jet, because useful and doesn't hurt and shrug. but when it's the founder itself.. ☟︎

phf: on technical merits i thought it was kind of like if evola fans started writing their own operating system in INTERCAL (with apologies to don woods) hosted on top of brainfuck vm, a dadaist project where impracticality and absurd were the main driving force behind decisions. the reality turned out to be a lot more banal

phf: it's interesting to see how fast urbit "turned" both politically and on technical questions. markdown jet? choosing markdown is a copout in itself (there's a naggum rant where he says that plaintext markup languages are designed by people who don't understand NLP), but why would you outsource something so traditional as a text blob parser? seems like an opportunity to showcase your language's text manipulation facilities, etc.