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What Urbit is

urbit.org

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Re: What Urbit is

#101

Post by drhayes9 »

ci5er wrote: post #97
aaroninsf wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shame on you. Why are you and other devs are collaborators in behavior that should _never_ be tolerated? I don't give a FF how 'smart' (sic) Curtis is. When he crosses the line, YOU have a moral choice, and you should and will be judged accordingly. Do nothing to reinforce the line, enforce no consequences? _You are a coward, you are complicit, and your place should be removed from the table as well._ _Smart (sic) do…

> collaborators in behavior that should _never_ be tolerated? Why? What has he done to anyone? Do his designs have built-in genome detectors? Or are you encouraging us all to join in as collective arbiters of wrong-think? Doesn't that seem a little too Maoist Cultural Revolution to you?

A community is defined by the people and views it accepts. I'm currently reading up on Curtis as much as I can and withholding judgment in his case. But I wouldn't want to be part of a community that lets racist views go unchallenged, no.

Re: What Urbit is

#102

Post by 5F36B5F62640 »

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?

The comments that I have seen from him on that topic (and it should be noted that I have only read a small part of his comments so this may not be representative of his thoughts on these matters) implied that those groups were better slaves because they were more resilient or stronger, so were able to better survive slavery than less resilient or weaker groups.

I don't see why that would make people from those groups feel unwelcome. If anything I would expect people from the groups that he says were genetically not as good as slaves to be the ones who would feel unwelcome. The implication is that they are weaker or less resilient.

Re: What Urbit is

#103

Post by [deleted] »

chc4 wrote: post #57
zardgiv wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

[deleted]

Re: What Urbit is

#104

Post by xemdetia »

urbit wrote: post #70
xemdetia wrote: post #58

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…

A planet, like ~tasfyn-partyv, has a parent chain going back to the galaxy: ~tasfyn-partyv (32-bit), ~doznec (16-bit), ~zod (8-bit). zod.urbit.org is directly DNS mapped. Not using TURN and STUN specifically as the RFCs, but in effect it's the same. Routing will STUN (establish a direct peer-to-peer connection) so long as either side has full cone NAT. As a planet, you need some star to route for you. Right now, the…

> Urbit is not PGP. It's designed to feel more like the early Internet, ie, a wide-area world of nontrivial default trust. At present, it would be foolish to go full cypherpunk, because we're a long way from being worth attacking.

It's not as much that. If I am going to be owning a service that I want to use among my peers generally someone has to run the thing and generally I am that person. If I am relying on urbit.org then the goal described in this overview of "Your urbit presents your whole digital life as a single web service. And since it's yours, open source and patent-free, it never shows you ads. Or loses your data. Or updates without your consent." is not met. If urbit.org is so entrenched and the galaxy lookup so well defined how do I use this when you are gone? The galaxy lookup is clearly one of the most critical pieces of the design yet seems the most weak. In the world of online games the lookup service is what has a community live or die, and I did not see a better answer after writing the comment.

It seems that the only way is to recompile and distribute an alternate version of the software.

> Hoon is unusual, but I wouldn't call it "esoteric" -- that term is reserved for languages which genuinely don't care about usability.

I would class it as such because there doesn't seem to be a description (going by the whitepaper) of modularity/code layout/best practice sort of thing. There is also the complexity of symbol management from bash/perl/php land that seems to be in Hoon too. I work with grammars all day and I guess I was just looking for a more formal description of the language.

Re: What Urbit is

#105

Post by chc4 »

mundo wrote: post #100
chc4 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure! I like a lot of the ideas, both on the merit of being weird and fun and genuinely being better. The view of having an operating system that has: * a built-in identity system and PKI * a typed and versioned file system * a typed command line * all apps being state machines (both being able to be upgrades over the air and operating based entirely on RPC primitives) * having the entire thing be a function on an at…

Any resources you found helpful? A google search on "hoon tutorial" seems to produce mainly urbit.org broken links. Does one need a galaxy/invite/whatever to be able to build it and play with it?

urbit.org[0] has new Hoon tutorial docs, and it's really helpful to ask questions in :talk if you get stuck. The people there are friendly and will try to answer any questions you have.

You don't need an invite to be able to play around with it, you'll just have to use a comet (which is the functionally same, but you have an uglier name). If you ask in :talk they'd probably send you a planet ticket, too.

0: http://urbit.org/docs/

Re: What Urbit is

#106

Post by toxic_throwaway »

joeykrug wrote: post #73
Karunamon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistically, at least last I checked, that statement is absolutely correct. The reasons for which is a matter of some debate, but the fact will resist any and all efforts to change it by way of insulting its speaker. Were it someone relating this in a less analytical way, that sentence would read "People with higher IQs are not necessarily 'superior'". Which is also true, as it happens.

Yep it is statistically correct. For anyone interested in the potential reasons: one of the most posited ones is that the creators of the tests are inherently biased. i.e. if someone creating an IQ test is a white male, chances are white males will have an advantage on the test. This has some degree of experimental evidence behind it, I remember in one of my psych classes we learned about a study where test creators…

> if someone creating an IQ test is a white male, chances are white males will have an advantage on the test

But why and how would white males consistently create culturally biased tests which advantage East Asians?

> It's very hard to create a "general intelligence" test that isn't biased in some fashion [and many say it's impossible]

Tests of reaction time are probably not culturally biased: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_chronometry#Mental_chro...

Re: What Urbit is

#107

Post by zardgiv »

5F36B5F62640 wrote: post #102
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?

The comments that I have seen from him on that topic (and it should be noted that I have only read a small part of his comments so this may not be representative of his thoughts on these matters) implied that those groups were better slaves because they were more resilient or stronger, so were able to better survive slavery than less resilient or weaker groups. I don't see why that would make people from those groups…

Wait, so your argument is that only Native Americans would feel unwelcome in this community?

Is this supposed to be in his favor?

EDIT: For clarity

Re: What Urbit is

#108

Post by ci5er »

drhayes9 wrote: post #101
ci5er wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> collaborators in behavior that should _never_ be tolerated? Why? What has he done to anyone? Do his designs have built-in genome detectors? Or are you encouraging us all to join in as collective arbiters of wrong-think? Doesn't that seem a little too Maoist Cultural Revolution to you?

A community is defined by the people and views it accepts. I'm currently reading up on Curtis as much as I can and withholding judgment in his case. But I wouldn't want to be part of a community that lets racist views go unchallenged, no.

I understand and respect your point-of-view. I probably even agree with it, as stated.

After I came across Urbit, I heard allegations of Yarvin's writings under his pseudonyms. I went and found his writings - and to the degree I understood it - I didn't agree with the conclusions. At the same time, I found a lot of the quoted material that had allowed me to find his writing in the first place was taken out of context.

But more importantly -- I didn't see even a hint of bad behavior in any of the developer's group discussion. I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of taking what a person does "after hours" and putting it on display in the public square. If he were running some sort of "Boys From Brazil" project after hours, I'd probably feel differently, but that's not what he appears to be doing.

Re: What Urbit is

#109

Post by vectorpush »

Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #76
aaroninsf wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shame on you. Why are you and other devs are collaborators in behavior that should _never_ be tolerated? I don't give a FF how 'smart' (sic) Curtis is. When he crosses the line, YOU have a moral choice, and you should and will be judged accordingly. Do nothing to reinforce the line, enforce no consequences? _You are a coward, you are complicit, and your place should be removed from the table as well._ _Smart (sic) do…

The norm of shunning people for having ideas you disagree with would result in the collapse of society.

This sentiment is selectively applied based on one's values. I am confident that there exists a set of principles that someone could espouse to cause you to shun them, it's really only a matter of where one draws the line.

Re: What Urbit is

#110

Post by mordocai »

zardgiv wrote: post #93
mordocai wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a hugely fallacious argument. Everyone focuses on something, if you want to extend your argument he should have also focused on diet, type of exercise, type of housing slaves are kept in, etc. Focusing on every single factor that could possibly effect slavery would be an endeavor probably greater than the average lifetime. Saying that some group of people or another would likely make better slaves than others…

Do you think there's an ethnic group genetically more likely to be poor or in jail?

I think there are multiple ethnic groups more likely to be poor or in jail.

I have no idea whether genetics is a cause, I doubt it, but it is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis and thinking it is true does not make one racist.

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