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Urbit: an operating function

urbit.org

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Re: Urbit: an operating function

#161

Post by jpt4 »

ClintEhrlich wrote: post #160
yarvin9 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually like that we're having a substantive discussion in a snarky way. But 1980s? Not to make it personal, but I finished Brown in 1992 and dropped out of Berkeley in 1994 (where I arguably invented ASLR [0], though the basic idea was Larry Peterson's) My field was OS in general and networking in specific, I took Mark Weiser's ubiquitous computing seminar from Mark Weiser, and if there are pieces of paper entitl…

It must be evident at this late juncture, Chancellor Yarvin, a full half decade since your Durdenesque doppelganger deemed the denizens of earth prepared for his prolix proclamation of Martian supremacy, that the more Carlylean your Urbit apologetics, the deeper your detractors' disposition for derisory dismissal of your loving labors as the grandiloquent, malformed products of, inter alia , luddite nostalgia for the…

I have added you to the dossier, Mr. Ehrlich - do not fear, this is a good thing.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#162

Post by ClintEhrlich »

jpt4 wrote: post #161
ClintEhrlich wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must be evident at this late juncture, Chancellor Yarvin, a full half decade since your Durdenesque doppelganger deemed the denizens of earth prepared for his prolix proclamation of Martian supremacy, that the more Carlylean your Urbit apologetics, the deeper your detractors' disposition for derisory dismissal of your loving labors as the grandiloquent, malformed products of, inter alia , luddite nostalgia for the…

I have added you to the dossier, Mr. Ehrlich - do not fear, this is a good thing.

Duly noted. Feel free to shoot a message to my Gmail.

My address is my first name, followed by the first initial of my last name, then the letter Q.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#163

Post by loqi »

ClintEhrlich wrote: post #160
yarvin9 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually like that we're having a substantive discussion in a snarky way. But 1980s? Not to make it personal, but I finished Brown in 1992 and dropped out of Berkeley in 1994 (where I arguably invented ASLR [0], though the basic idea was Larry Peterson's) My field was OS in general and networking in specific, I took Mark Weiser's ubiquitous computing seminar from Mark Weiser, and if there are pieces of paper entitl…

It must be evident at this late juncture, Chancellor Yarvin, a full half decade since your Durdenesque doppelganger deemed the denizens of earth prepared for his prolix proclamation of Martian supremacy, that the more Carlylean your Urbit apologetics, the deeper your detractors' disposition for derisory dismissal of your loving labors as the grandiloquent, malformed products of, inter alia , luddite nostalgia for the…

Library gap aside, Lisp has an FFI. If you want to use libpng from Lisp, you just make some C calls. If you want to use libpng from Hoon, you first have to re-implement the functionality of interest in Hoon just to have a sound basis for using the C library (as a drop-in optimization, or "jet").

This obviously makes for slower going, especially near the beginning.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#164

Post by yarvin9 »

ClintEhrlich wrote: post #160
yarvin9 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually like that we're having a substantive discussion in a snarky way. But 1980s? Not to make it personal, but I finished Brown in 1992 and dropped out of Berkeley in 1994 (where I arguably invented ASLR [0], though the basic idea was Larry Peterson's) My field was OS in general and networking in specific, I took Mark Weiser's ubiquitous computing seminar from Mark Weiser, and if there are pieces of paper entitl…

It must be evident at this late juncture, Chancellor Yarvin, a full half decade since your Durdenesque doppelganger deemed the denizens of earth prepared for his prolix proclamation of Martian supremacy, that the more Carlylean your Urbit apologetics, the deeper your detractors' disposition for derisory dismissal of your loving labors as the grandiloquent, malformed products of, inter alia , luddite nostalgia for the…

Hoon didn't really work properly until 2012 or so. Actually I've paid very little attention to it since 2013.

Most of the time since mid 2012 (me for about a year, me and a few other for two for two more) has gone into writing Arvo, a purely functional operating system. Arvo is not enough like anything else to be seen as anything else but research.

This is a fairly typical timeline for CS research. What's unusual is just the depth of the stack. I would also point out that if you look at the normal cost of developing any sort of operating system, even to the alpha level, the metrics are pretty good.

Where the project looks really unproductive is in objective measures of content production. For instance, Nock took me roughly from 2002 to 2008, which is something like a bit and a half of output per day.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#165

Post by eru »

emmelaich wrote: post #151
JulianMorrison wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't blame Nock, Bash does that too. Return code 0 = true.

I call it the Tolstoy model: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" You only need one value for success/true. But you need many to indicate the modes of failure.

How about not using numbers for Booleans?

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#166

Post by yarvin9 »

ClintEhrlich wrote: post #138

The flaw in this white paper is that it starts by explaining the solution instead of the problem. So everyone should start by skipping to the bottom and reading the conclusion: >In 1985 it seemed completely natural and inevitable that, by 2015, everyone in the world would have a network computer. Our files, our programs, our communication would all go through it. >When we got a video call, our computer would pick up.…

A hint: consider the difference between calling web APIs from a cloud appliance controlled by a third party, versus calling web APIs from a personal server controlled by the user.

A new network has no Metcalfe's law effect by definition. So an important early skill is parasitizing existing networks...

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#167

Post by networked »

yarvin9 wrote: post #54
tptacek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notion that Urbit believes it can solve all the problems , rather than tackling a single important problem, is one of the things that makes it unserious to me. The inflexibility of the Internet service model is a serious problem. Poor formal methods for verifying protocols is a serious (albeit not lucrative) problem. Programming languages that make it difficult to express correct programs: serious problem. It is…

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.

>At a certain scale, it's often a lot easier to build one system that solves all the problems.

I have been wondering, are you familiar with Project Xanadu and Ted Nelson's work in general? Project Xanadu took a "whole cow" approach to building a network centered around publishing documents and linking between them. The stated goals for Urbit and Xanadu seem to overlap [1] enough that Xanadu would be easier to implement on top of Urbit than on top of anything else. It could then be Urbit's superior alternative to the World Wide Web for publishing hypertext documents. Last year I emailed Nelson asking whether he knew about Urbit (secretly hoping he might already be working with or for you) but he replied he didn't.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#Original_17_rul...

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#168

Post by api »

csense wrote: post #31

The architecture is exciting. The problem is that the aesthetics of the tooling seems deliberately designed to alienate new users. For example the whitepaper gives new names to every punctuation symbol! And poking around the repo, there are gems like this: "A...variable name is a random pronounceable three-letter string, sometimes with some vague relationship to its meaning, but usually not..." "Nock, for mysterious…

The inversion of 0/1 for true/false is common in good C APIs. 0 as true and 1 as false makes a lot of sense from a perspective of error handling. 0 means everything's okay, while nonzero means it isn't. Various forms of nonzero can then represent different kinds of fail. Variations on this theme are common enough in programming that the inversion is reasonable, and it does no harm in the simple boolean case.

The architecture is no more esoteric than Unix, C, C++, or a submicron-scale polished turd like HTML5+CSS+JavaScript+React+JSX+NodeJS or most other "stacks."

It's just unfamiliar because it's new, and that's okay, because it is not making any pretensions about not being new or about being a baby-step hack on top of our existing heap of hacks. If you're going to try to reinvent the OS and the platform, then go full Yoda and do or do not.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#169

Post by api »

eru wrote: post #165
emmelaich wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call it the Tolstoy model: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" You only need one value for success/true. But you need many to indicate the modes of failure.

How about not using numbers for Booleans?

CPUs grok numbers. This would be inefficient.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#170

Post by api »

colanderman wrote: post #89
oldmanjay wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious. Did you do some research into what was meant, or did the phrase "post opinions about black people" carry some hidden meaning I am not equipped to detect? There's a heavy implication, of course, but you mentioned a fact. I'm wondering what fact you reference.

2nd hit on Google is an interesting article from Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/06/cur... His opinion on colonialism in South Africa is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it": http://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2008/11/07/on-its-sto... Here's a nice post of his where he literally all but claims to be a white nationalist: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/11/why-i-a... He m…

Okay, I read the third post, and it seems like he's saying that he is not a white nationalist but is not afraid to read them.

Okay, fine. I don't see why this is so big and scary.

Personally I think the reason Curtis's writings provoke so much hategasm around here is... well... "methinks you doth protest too much."

If hackerdom and Greater Silicon Valley were bastions of diversity and tolerance, nobody would give a shit about Curtis's alter-persona or any eccentric views he might hold. But they're not bastions of diversity. They're really really really really not.

Back when my own venture was getting off the ground, I did this as part of recruiting research:

https://github.com/adamierymenko/headhunter

I ended up with a monster list of GitHub profiles and projects in the SoCal area, so I started going through them. White dude, white dude, white dude, asian dude, white dude, white dude... I saw probably 2/3 white dudes, 1/3 asian/Indian dudes, and I could count on one hand the number of women I saw without running out of fingers. I mean there are practically no women on GitHub. This is not the result of bigotry on my part. I applied no filter. They are just not there. Why?

There is no significant statistical IQ difference between women and men. There are loads of women in biotech (another field I've studied), and trust me it is no easier than this one. There are more women in aerospace, in actual rocket science. There is no biological or neurological reason there should be no women who hack. There's something wrong here.

Dig a bit and it's not hard to see. Hackerdom is really misogynistic and perhaps also somewhat racist, though the misogyny is in my experience by far the dominant -ism. I mean I am a card carrying penis owner and it annoys me at times.

I think the tech field is self-conscious about this. To cover it over we've applied this thin bullshit veneer of twee politically correct nonsense, and anyone who openly refuses to tow that party line gets scapegoated and blacklisted. But that stuff doesn't work. All it does is drive the bad stuff underground, creating today's spectacle of a field that plays endless lip service to equality and diversity but is made up almost entirely of young white and asian men.

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