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What Urbit is

urbit.org

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Re: What Urbit is

#191

Post by lisper »

state wrote: post #184
lisper wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We had this argument in person! Sorry, I didn't recognize your handle. (And just for the record, I wasn't trying to start an argument, just asking a question.) > it's my fault OK ;-) > I'm really not the person to answer that question sufficiently. OK. > But I would like to see you and Curtis have this out at greater length. Well, we're already having something out in another branch of this thread ( https://news.yc…

> Sorry, I didn't recognize your handle. No problem. Just, you know, hi! I'm actually happy to pick this thread up. I remember really enjoying the last discussion. As (I think) we discussed last time I basically have two views: - Urbit actually works . Like, I actually build stuff on top of it. That's really the layer I'm most interested in. If it were built in Lisp, well, I probably wouldn't know the difference. I'm…

> I remember really enjoying the last discussion.

Very happy to hear that.

> I'm not sure I'm able to understand the implicit criticism at the user level.

Let me make the criticism explicit then: inventing a new language is not hard. People do it all the time. It's an elementary exercise. However, inventing a good new language, i.e. one that actually advances the state of the art and provides a substantial advantage over existing languages -- that is very hard. That happens very rarely, probably less than a dozen times in the history of computing.

Although I have never heard Curtis say so explicitly, the rhetoric surrounding Urbit strongly implies that Nock and Hoon are languages of the second sort, that is, that they provide some benefit that existing languages lack, and without which developing Urbit would be substantially more difficult or even impossible. My question for the last four years has been: what is that benefit? Do Nock and Hoon really advance the state of the art in programming language design, or is their sole purpose to be the Shiny New Thing that gets people excited? Because if it's the latter, that does not bode well for Urbit's long-term prospects. Nothing gets to be the Shiny New Thing forever.

> It's very difficult to think clearly inside of someone else's intellectual framework.

That may be true, but do you not see the irony here? You didn't invent Nock/Hoon, Curtis did. So if you are thinking clearly, then you are doing it in someone else's intellectual framework, precisely the thing you say is very difficult.

> What Nock does seem to unlock is incredible amount of enthusiasm.

That I don't doubt. Curtis is a master marketeer. But Donald Trump is unlocking an incredible amount of enthusiasm too. Just because a lot of people get enthusiastic about something doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea.

Re: What Urbit is

#192

Post by kazinator »

yarvin9 wrote: post #182
kazinator wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone knows exactly what every line is doing At least, until you start to define functions, whereby a line now says "something happens according to a definition elsewhere which is just invoked here". Oh wait, that's also what a piece of syntax or macro also says, pretty much. > I hope you can see the UI advantage to functional programming in an environment of controlled evaluation complexity What I do know is th…

The difference between a language with symbolic names, and a language with names and macros, is a difference between one level of indirection, and two levels of indirection. My view is that one is hard enough. Macros aren't functions. A function call is one thing. A macro can expand to arbitrary code. This code may contain function calls or other symbols. Before you can even interpret these symbols, you have to expan…

A function can contain arbitrary code behind the call. It can be a remote procedure call to a server, such that it is impossible to reverse-engineer what it does, beyond black-box testing.

Re: What Urbit is

#193

Post by Rusky »

mixedCase wrote: post #187
ksrm wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you seriously not see how someone discussing how good a slave you would make is (at the very least) 'unwelcoming'?

Was that on Urbit's homepage? The docs? The IRC? The subreddit? Over e-mail? Was it something like "yeah it is a functional system... hey have I mentioned how much potential you have for whenever you feel like dedicating your life to slavery?" ...or was it just the guy rambling on a blog of his under a pen name? It's pretty obvious to anyone that the guy's views are obscenely offensive, but if the guy is strictly pro…

Because people don't just see Urbit, if they end up participating long-term. They see Yarvin, and he definitely is not one to hide his worldview.

As much as some people like to pretend it's only about tech, tech is made by people and it requires them to interact with each other, and that can never be completely confined to code.

Re: What Urbit is

#194

Post by brogrammer6431 »

Gaelan wrote: post #173
urbit wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are eight billion people in the world. There are 4 billion possible planets. What is your plan for when urbit takes off and reaches internet-scale? BTW, ~bitret-worwyd here. ;)

Planets can also issue moons. I believe somewhere down the line when the number of planets becomes an issue (a good problem to have, it must be said), it would be technically possible for moons to be given similar functionality to a planet. One could imagine a future in which a household, or even a group of close friends who share a planet that issues each of them a moon to hold their primary identity.

Re: What Urbit is

#195

Post by kazinator »

Gaelan wrote: post #173
urbit wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are eight billion people in the world. There are 4 billion possible planets. What is your plan for when urbit takes off and reaches internet-scale? BTW, ~bitret-worwyd here. ;)

The obvious plan is that most of them can't scrape together ten dollars for a planet.

Re: What Urbit is

#196

Post by mixedCase »

Rusky wrote: post #193
mixedCase wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that on Urbit's homepage? The docs? The IRC? The subreddit? Over e-mail? Was it something like "yeah it is a functional system... hey have I mentioned how much potential you have for whenever you feel like dedicating your life to slavery?" ...or was it just the guy rambling on a blog of his under a pen name? It's pretty obvious to anyone that the guy's views are obscenely offensive, but if the guy is strictly pro…

Because people don't just see Urbit, if they end up participating long-term. They see Yarvin, and he definitely is not one to hide his worldview. As much as some people like to pretend it's only about tech, tech is made by people and it requires them to interact with each other, and that can never be completely confined to code.

>They see Yarvin, and he definitely is not one to hide his worldview.

While talking to Urbit contributors about Urbit?

Re: What Urbit is

#197

Post by prostoalex »

carapace wrote: post #88
Melchizedek wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's simply a fact that ethnic groups differ in IQ.

I've met a lot of black people, but I've never met the black race. I've met a lot of white people, but I've never met the white race. I've never met a race and I don't expect to. I've met stupid people and smart people and a whole lot of people who were stupid one way and smart another, but I've never met anyone with an IQ and I don't expect I ever will.

You seem to be intentionally diluting the terms. The origins of this discussion trace back to BSA's 1995 report on intelligence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence:_Knowns_and_Unk... and that report is caused by some research work done by Herrnstein & Murray, results of which were published in a book https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

What the research addressed was the IQ bell curves among various groups. What the research didn't address was correlation between IQ scores, intelligence, and general life satisfaction, difference between "academic smarts" and "street smarts", presence of various impurities among the ethnic groups, etc.

Re: What Urbit is

#198

Post by ZenoArrow »

rspeer wrote: post #158
ZenoArrow wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider what you would do with a personal server. Now imagine it's easy enough for anyone to use and maintain. Now imagine everyone's personal server could connect and communicate with each other seamlessly and securely, transferring data of any type. That's the promise of urbit.

If you ended with "That's the promise of the Information Superhighway", it would be an MCI commercial from the '90s.

Interesting! I wasn't familiar with that MCI commercial (I don't live in the US), but I can see what I wrote has that type of tone.

Re: What Urbit is

#199

Post by tzs »

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…

> And making this place more welcoming to Curtis Yarvin by focusing discussion on the technical merits of Urbit and ignoring his personal views is a signal to a lot of other people about what we as a community value and what we don't. And I think it's a bad signal, because it alienates people with valuable and important viewpoints that we ought to be finding ways to be more open to, not less.

So if someone working on an open source project were to blog, completely separately from the open source project, their personal views on, say, abortion you'd be OK with it if whenever we tried to have a discussion about that project people started discussing that contributor's views on abortion?

If not, what is the criteria for deciding what kind of unrelated personal views are OK to bring up in technical discussions?

Re: What Urbit is

#200

Post by lhnz »

Rusky wrote: post #190
lhnz wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic example is Linux and Torvalds. But I was referring to the fact that nobody else is solving this specific problem. You either stay happy with your collection of walled gardens or you wait to see if he can unbreak the internet. In fact in this case, the work goes ahead anyway. Perhaps you end up using it in ten years, or perhaps you don't. But neither of us gain anything from this argument at the present time.

There are plenty of people working on this problem who aren't self-inflated racists. For example, https://sandstorm.io/ tackles a lot of the same questions without any of the deliberate obfuscation or insular community of Urbit (and, I might add, without a completely insane and un-optimizable VM underneath).

They recommended it themselves but are solving more:

> If you're interested in that approach, I'd encourage you to check out sandstorm.io. This solves the problem for applications like a blog, email, or gitlab. What it doesn't do is make decentralized applications easier to build.

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