[deleted]
Really, you didn't read the whitepaper.
Urbit: an operating function
111–120 of 177 posts
Re: Urbit: an operating function
#112The aesthetics is what is making this thing possible. Thinking with the old words would not allow development of new things.
I don't know if this is good or bad, but it is sincerely trying to do new things, so a new language is appropriate.
Re: Urbit: an operating function
#113Re: Urbit: an operating function
#114The best tagline for the project is what is written on the whitepaper, that a planet in Urbit is "the browser for the server side."
Re: Urbit: an operating function
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really, you didn't read the whitepaper.
Hey, don't delete your comment like that!
Why not? You were right, I didn't read the paper, I just skimmed it, so my original comment was completely bogus. Deleting it seemed to be the best way to clean up the mess.
Re: Urbit: an operating function
#116I think it's important to note that Urbit - a very interesting piece of work that deserves more attention - would've been presented at Strange Loop if not the PC crowd made Strange Loop disinvite Curtis Yarvin (the creator of Urbit) for reasons unrelated to Urbit. Using throwaway for obviously reasons.
Re: Urbit: an operating function
#117Re: Urbit: an operating function
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
At a certain scale, it's often a lot easier to build one system that solves all the problems . Building a building: hard problem. Building 1/3 of a building: impossible problem. Building a cow: hard problem. Building 1/3 of a cow: impossible problem.
I mean, this is pithy and all, but it obviously doesn't rebut my point. You could apply the same logic to any disparate collection of engineering problems.
No, you're right, it's a highbrow dismissal. Let me be a little more detailed.
Once you've built a system that's both a protocol and an OS, you realize that putting an abstraction barrier between them is like building a cow by building two halves of the cow, then sewing them together. It's incredibly hard and the resulting cow doesn't work very well.
Take a problem like identity. Is this an OS problem, or a protocol problem? Earlier I mentioned validation of message / content types. Is this an OS problem, or a protocol problem? Is the spinal column part of the cow-frontend, or the cow-backend?
These are just the most obvious examples. For instance, the standard way of building protocols assumes that message processing isn't transactional, and the OS is a dual-level store that loses its mind all the time. If your OS is a single-level store, you can essentially use persistent sessions. Which means you can get exactly-once messaging. Which is a very desirable feature that's impossible to achieve if you assume that the endpoints can lose their minds.
So the appropriate comparison is: build the front-end of a cow, and stitch it to the back end of an alligator, creating the mighty alligow; or, build a whole cow.
Granted, Urbit isn't perfect and I'd hardly call it done, but the whole stack (counting apps!) is only 25K lines of code. So the "whole cow" doesn't seem appalling. The alligow -- I wouldn't even try.
Re: Urbit: an operating function
#119I think it's important to note that Urbit - a very interesting piece of work that deserves more attention - would've been presented at Strange Loop if not the PC crowd made Strange Loop disinvite Curtis Yarvin (the creator of Urbit) for reasons unrelated to Urbit. Using throwaway for obviously reasons.
I obviously find this a very interesting subject. However, I suspect there are better times and places to discuss it...
Re: Urbit: an operating function
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
This right here is what I mean when I suggest Urbit is unserious. "Green is just yellow and blue. Why do we call it 'green'? That name sucks. From now on, we're going to call it 'yellue'." There's overreaching first-principles boil-the-ocean dorm room rethinking of concepts, and then there's renaming the ASCII characters.
This definitely counts as a highbrow dismissal! As I age, I find it harder and harder to remember how easy and natural it is for young people to learn new things: ideas, theories, languages, and yes -- names. Alas, we can't rejuvenate our brains. I know of only one (partial) cure: have your own kids. You'll feel jealous all the time, but it's worth it. It's painful to admit that I'm probably too old to learn other pe…
I wonder if it's hard because we don't try enough, because reality and pragmatism bolt us to dry reuse rather wheel reinvention.
Even more digressing, I'm very curious if young brains have an innate sense of 'new' in the most complex and abstract sense. It's as if they smell it.