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What Urbit is

urbit.org

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Re: What Urbit is

#131

Post by yebyen »

zardgiv wrote: post #129
yebyen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm not saying he's a Nazi, but if he was..." -- Every post about Curtis Yarvin, ever. Sorry for knee-jerking, but there is really no basis for equating Mencius Moldbug to a Nazi, and I think it hurts the discussion when you do! I have read some of the texts in question, on the insistence of people who say I should disavow this person who I consider to be a real pal. I read the post "Why I am not a White Nationalist…

I am stating that there are plenty of beliefs that do not cause society's collapse if we shun them. The only reason I mentioned Moldbug was that he's part of the dialog here, and I wanted to make sure people did not misconstrue what I said as a claim about him. Since you just misconstrued what I said, I was clearly unsuccessful.

I apologize, since you obviously did not come up with the idea to equate Yarvin to Nazis. Your point is valid.

Re: What Urbit is

#132

Post by mroll »

captainmuon wrote: post #87

So ignoring the abstruseness and pretentiousness for a moment [x], what I don't like is this model of immutable networking Urbit has. Maybe I am in a minority position, but I fear the future where everything is cryptographically signed, verifiable and irrefutable. I want to be able to go on a website and post bullshit that I'll regret 15 years later. And if after 15 years someone unearths that post, I want to be able…

Refutability is a quality of many a good crypto system

Edit: spelling

Re: What Urbit is

#133

Post by isthisracist »

kefka wrote: post #60
mundo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>racists, sexists, and bigots.

Here we go, I've got no arguments of my own lets just throw out buzzwords because person A doesn't agree with my views.

I guess this guy must be hitler

Re: What Urbit is

#134

Post by isthisracist »

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?"

Yes

Re: What Urbit is

#135

Post by zardgiv »

yebyen wrote: post #131
zardgiv wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am stating that there are plenty of beliefs that do not cause society's collapse if we shun them. The only reason I mentioned Moldbug was that he's part of the dialog here, and I wanted to make sure people did not misconstrue what I said as a claim about him. Since you just misconstrued what I said, I was clearly unsuccessful.

I apologize, since you obviously did not come up with the idea to equate Yarvin to Nazis. Your point is valid.

No worries, I've tried to be precise but text is sometimes a difficult medium to get my point across.

Re: What Urbit is

#136

Post by urbit »

tzs wrote: post #113
urbit wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say this problem is best solved not by having no cryptographic identities, but by using disposable identities. If you bound an identity cryptographically to your real name, that's permanent -- no getting around it. We all make mistakes. However, one of the benefits of Urbit is that you can build a reputation around a pseudonym that isn't linked to your real-life identity. There's a place for the 4chans of the wor…

> I'd say this problem is best solved not by having no cryptographic identities, but by using disposable identities. A problem with disposable identities as usually implemented is that they are too cheap and easy to make. This makes it easy to make a new identity every place you want to be an asshole. The end result is that places get tired of this, and ban such identities from their spaces. I think what we might nee…

This is exactly the way Urbit works. (It's sincerely hard to tell from your post whether you've read the documentation, or you just had the same simple idea yourself.)

Anyone can create a 128-bit comet. But once the comet system starts being abused by assholes and bots, signs will go up all over Urbit. These signs will say "humans only" and deny admission to comets -- essentially blocking anyone who has not invested any real stake in their identity.

The normal quantum of reputation and of human identity is the planet (32 bits, like an IPv4 address). Ideally a virgin planet would cost about $10.

Basically, if this cost is far above the amount of money that a spammer can make before a reputation system catches up with the swine, there will be no commercial abuse. This leaves reputation systems to deal with the much easier job of wrangling random creeps and weirdos.

So if you invented this design yourself, yes, it's a very good one...

Re: What Urbit is

#137

Post by mordocai »

zardgiv wrote: post #125
mordocai wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a belief they are subhuman, which is inherently negative. So yes, that would be racist.

Where would that subhuman line be? If they think an adult from one ethnic group is as intelligent as an infant in another, but that there's nothing wrong with that, is that believing they're subhuman and hence racist?

These things have no clear lines, welcome to reality.

This response applies to the previous line about being the intelligence of cattle as well, now that i've given it more thought.

Intelligence can be measured so more context would be needed here. In this hypothetical scenario has one group of humans either fallen through some kind of circumstance to a lower level of intelligence(not knowledge) or another has gained significantly more intelligence through some means? In that case they should probably be considered separate species not separate races so we're in a whole new ballgame.

Either way, when "humans" are potentially that different (there's no defensible claim today that any group of humans is significantly less intelligent than any other really) this issue gets very hairy.

Someone thinking that today would definitely be racist.

Re: What Urbit is

#138

Post by urbit »

xemdetia wrote: post #104
urbit wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your question about the lookup service is an excellent one.

One: it costs 20 bucks a year to run urbit.org in its capacity as a DNS server for binding 256 names to IPs.

Two: at present, there are about 50 galaxy holders, so if between them they can't scrape up 20 bucks a year to keep urbit.org registered, Urbit has worse problems than centralization.

Three: the use of DNS as a root routing table is an implementation detail in the Unix process, completely isolated from Urbit. When Urbit wants to route a UDP packet to galaxy X, it routes to the reserved range X.1.0.0. If the DNS itself collapsed, we could probably find other ways of mapping this table.

I would not call bash/Perl/PHP "esoteric" either -- it has a very specific meaning:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language

Hoon is a little under-documented and should have its grammar specified somewhere, although the easiest way to do so would be just to clean up the Hoon parser (a parser combinator written in Hoon).

(The original plan was for the Hoon parser to look as pretty as a spec grammar, which many parsers in Hoon do. But looking at ++vast in hoon.hoon, you'll see we fall a little short of that goal.)

Re: What Urbit is

#139

Post by lhnz »

cwyers wrote: post #121
Karunamon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean aside from the project under discussion? Why are his personal views even relevant here?

Because there are a great fewer purely technical decisions in the world of software than some people around here seem to believe, and people's beliefs, worldviews, experiences and identities matter. They matter a lot. And to the extent that software is, as they say, "eating the world," the kinds of people who are writing software and the kinds of people that aren't has a profound impact on our society. If you look at…

Unfortunately grandiose ideas like Urbit only seem to come from and get executed by minds like Curtis'.

You can't have one without the other.

If people want to a clean state restart of the world of computing without an infestation of corporations they'll be against attempts to shun him.

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