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What Urbit is

urbit.org

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Re: What Urbit is

#51

Post by justadude1 »

gjm11 wrote: post #45
adbge wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "leader" is an avowed racist and nasty person in general. Oh, good. This again. Curtis has stated publicly, "I am not an 'outspoken advocate for slavery,' a racist, a sexist or a fascist." See: https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lam...

Anyone can say they aren't an outspoken advocate for slavery. Take a look at this http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/why-c... and see whether you find it plausible to say that the author is not an outspoken advocate for slavery.

I have read it and I don't think the author is an outspoken advocate of slavery.

The passage most frequently cited as evidence of this charge is:

Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences.

A charitable reading of this, in my mind, goes:

Some slavers had an opinion about who made good slaves and who didn't. If one wanted to rationalize a basis for that opinion, which historically existed, the easiest/laziest answer would be genetic traits common to the populations in question

Check the definition of "parsimonious" and assume the author used it on purpose.

Re: What Urbit is

#52

Post by pcmonk »

faizshah wrote: post #29

If you're having trouble viewing the page (like I was) the text is here: https://github.com/urbit/urbit.org/blob/master/main/posts/ov... At least I think this is the text, I can't check.

This is correct.

Re: What Urbit is

#53

Post by kungfooguru »

adbge wrote: post #34
kefka wrote: post #28

I was looking into this, as I have connections to the devs via our hackerspace. After research, I steered away, and hard. 1. Newbies trying to grok the platform are mocked mercilessly. Publicly over reddit and twitter. 2. The "leader" is an avowed racist and nasty person in general. Now, ad hominems aren't "good"... but if I work on it, I get lumped into the similar group. Just no. 3. It uses "Hoon" to program, which…

> The "leader" is an avowed racist and nasty person in general. Oh, good. This again. Curtis has stated publicly, "I am not an 'outspoken advocate for slavery,' a racist, a sexist or a fascist." See: https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lam...

Actually, he writes pretty clearly in this post that he is a racist. He simply claims he isn't racist because he says while whites are smarter than Blacks that doesn't make them 'superior', just having higher IQs...

So yes, he is a racist, but also stupid.

Re: What Urbit is

#54

Post by pvg »

zimbu668 wrote: post #44
kefka wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure do. Yarvin's AMA. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv... http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/sjws-urge-programmi... Its the sum of these views, writings, and his own AMA that steered me clear of his stuff. Mainly, if he treats fellow members of the community like this, I'm sure not going to have a good fit in ... wherever he works on.

"As for "race," you can learn way more about someone from a minute of conversation than from a full genome sequence -- even if we knew how to decode the information in the sequence, which we don't. As for politics, there is essentially no one sane who thinks of themselves as evil or wanting to do evil. I have lots of progressive friends, and you'd be surprised how many ways we can find to see the world in the same wa…

It's the paragraph before that. "It's actually quite possible to recognize that human population genetics has a lot of impact on politics and history, and also recognize that human population genetics has nothing at all to do with your individual, personal and professional human relationships. Nor does politics."

You can't really make that non-racist by adding "I have progressive friends and quite like puppies"

Re: What Urbit is

#55

Post by mundo »

zardgiv wrote: post #47
state wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello! I'm one of the Urbit devs. 1. Has this ever actually happened? I'd be quite disturbed by that. We're more than happy to have people learning about Urbit, although we're not particularly active on social media. 2. Curtis is certainly controversial. None of us share his views, but we do enjoy working together. I'd like to think we live in a world where people who don't agree can still collaborate professionally.…

"Controversial" is the pinnacle of weasel words. How do you feel about his belief that some ethnic groups are genetically better slaves, and do you think that his views would make people from those ethnic groups feel welcome in your community?

It would demonstrate a lot about the HN community if we could get through an entire Urbit post without it devolving in to yet another debate on Curtis Yarvin's (incredibly lengthy, vague and contradictory, and entirely irrelevant) views on race.

Re: What Urbit is

#56

Post by cwyers »

lhnz wrote: post #50
zardgiv wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also claims that some ethnic groups are genetically predisposed to being good slaves. Please think critically about this, instead of just saying "well, he says he's not racist!"

He tried to explain that opinion further: "The ability to survive as an agricultural slave is a talent." I've no idea whether Spaniards and Englishmen really did find Indians unfit for slavery but I guess the argument that is being made is that more of them might have been kept alive if they were able to provide greater economic value to their conquerors. Sick, I know. Agree that it's not an opinion fit to be voiced…

> He tried to explain that opinion further: "The ability to survive as an agricultural slave is a talent."

Oh, well, that makes everything better.

Re: What Urbit is

#57

Post by chc4 »

zardgiv wrote: post #48
chc4 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I'm really not sure how that happened to you. I'm interested in Urbit and play around with it (and actually own a galaxy), but am not an employee, and I've been more than happy answering questions from people via :talk who are starting out or wanting to learn more. I've never seen anyone mocked, publicly nor privately, and I really hope that it isn't still happening if it was. 2. The author had an alt-right blog u…

Claiming that some ethnic groups are genetically good slaves is "not racist except in the non-PC way?"

He defends what he posted under Mencius Moldbug in a Medium blogpost here[0], which is nominally level-headed. There are in fact genetic differences across ethnic groups (sickle cell anemia comes to mind immediately), and it would be silly to think that the only possible generic changes are changed skin color and a specific blood disorder.

You can say that since men have a statistically higher muscle density, they are genetically better slaves than women are. That does not mean that I'm advocating we enslave all men, or that slavery is anything other than abhorrent.

0: https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lam...

Re: What Urbit is

#58

Post by xemdetia »

This is the first time I've heard of this, there just seems to be a bunch of holes in it. OK, so you have a basic embedded-style ROM vm with a light layer of application code above it. Hard, solvable problem that they seem to have covered.

If it is supposed to be for the people how am I supposed to find a route between hosts behind a NAT? Is this galaxy.urbit.org the DNS and the TURN relay? Is the expectation of the 'server cluster that is yours alone' still dependent on someone else running the relay? How can my servers have friends that aren't part of my trust network? How do I run my own trust network between people I want to trust?

The weirdest thing is that there doesn't seem to be a designed way for an operator of an Urbit to talk to their/other Urbits. Where's the classic plain text protocol to at least say HELO? How do I fix it?

This just ends up looking like a specific-use estoeric lang + runtime to me, which I do enjoy as an exercise. I just can't see how the UX problem is going to pan out based on what is presented.

Re: What Urbit is

#59

Post by blacksmith_tb »

justadude1 wrote: post #51
gjm11 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can say they aren't an outspoken advocate for slavery. Take a look at this http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/why-c... and see whether you find it plausible to say that the author is not an outspoken advocate for slavery.

I have read it and I don't think the author is an outspoken advocate of slavery. The passage most frequently cited as evidence of this charge is: Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by g…

It's a very strange interpretation, especially given that there is a strong body of historical sociology on exactly this question. I'm thinking primarily of Orlando Patterson's _Slavery and Social Death_ - which would suggest that while Native Americans could potentially escape back to their people, African slaves had a much harder time alone, which was precisely the slavers' plan.

Re: What Urbit is

#60

Post by kefka »

mundo wrote: post #55
zardgiv wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Controversial" is the pinnacle of weasel words. How do you feel about his belief that some ethnic groups are genetically better slaves, and do you think that his views would make people from those ethnic groups feel welcome in your community?

It would demonstrate a lot about the HN community if we could get through an entire Urbit post without it devolving in to yet another debate on Curtis Yarvin's (incredibly lengthy, vague and contradictory, and entirely irrelevant) views on race.

Its the whole of collections of views he is public about.

We talk a great deal of "Good Fit" and the like when working on projects with others, or working for someone. This is a case where he would work better with his own kind: racists, sexists, and bigots.

Like attracts like.

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