What Urbit is • Hacker News Board

Re: What Urbit is

#221

Post by carapace » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 5:04 PM UTC

swsieber wrote: post #128

carapace wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ooo, I'm jumping into the firepit here. I haven't even read the article. But if he's talking about what happened to groups of people, isn't it correct then to talk about characteristics of groups of people? Normally, I would stay away from stereotypes and generalizations, and yet aggregate characteristics are useful about talking about what happens to groups of people. The real trouble comes when you try to apply an…

I consider "racism" to be a mental/emotional disease and you describe it well: a logical confusion between "group", which is a mental construct, and the real individuals encountered in real life, leading to severe anti-social behaviour. Generalizations are useful, but people get fucked up on "race".

To answer your question, I am upset that someone as intelligent and otherwise interesting as the urbit fellow should suffer from the logic-disease of racism. It's like how Konrad Zuse is always neglected because he worked for the Nazis, so "fuck him", eh?

Generalizations can be useful, "race" typically isn't. "IQ" can be a useful shorthand, but if you take it too seriously... Let's just say that Mensa is a group of people who are almost, but not quite, as intelligent as they like to think they are.

To paraphrase Deckard, '"IQ" is like any other concept, it's either a benefit or a hazard. If it's a benefit it's not my problem.'

Re: What Urbit is

#222

Post by captainmuon » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 5:57 PM UTC

urbit wrote: post #91

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…

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…

That's a good point! One favorite idea of mine is that you have a trusted identity provider, that knows you, and hands out pseudo-anonymous identities. E.g. Facebook vouches User123 is female, 20-25 years old, has been active for 2 years, and is likely not a spammer. This gives you disposable identities and the benefits of proven identity.

The problem with any kind of long-lived pseudonymous identity though is that it is really hard to do proper opsec and keep it distinct from your real identity, but I'm not sure there is a technological solution for that. I mean even your grammar can give you away (stylometry).

Re: What Urbit is

#223

Post by placeybordeaux » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 6:08 PM UTC

urbit wrote: post #149

profeta wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so it is a place that will centralize all my credentials so it can fetch and parse my mail, IMs, stock trades, files, etc to then inter-process that to my liking and possible talk to a client on my phone or such? why a chain of specialized posix programs would fail for that?

Yes, Urbit is (or at least is designed to become) a personal server which solves this problem among others. One: a chain of specialized Posix programs would work for that. You would have to be someone who can manage a chain of specialized Posix programs, though. Two: serving as a general-purpose stateful HTTP client is a subset of what Urbit does, though an important subset. It's also a server on a public network. Th…

You still haven't made it clear who is running 'my' urbit programs and why they are doing that.

If they are doing it for free this won't scale. If I am paying them why don't I just pay someone to maintain standard software.

I find this very strange because I love all of the work on distributed and decentralized systems. I am normally excited to read more about a new approach, but I still don't understand what you are trying to do and feel like I am just being fed marketing terms like "The browser for the server side" wtf? Do you mean CGI?

Re: What Urbit is

#224

Post by captainmuon » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 6:25 PM UTC

ZenoArrow wrote: post #118

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…

> "a new kind of society based on free association (rather than labor & money)" I'm all for that, but for that to really work you'd have to change what people understand about ownership of material goods, and I suspect that'll be a hard battle to win. Perhaps a good place to start would be experiencing life in an ecovillage, some of them work with a minimal reliance on money.

That's true. Thing is, I don't have a great thought-out plan. I sympathize with a couple of ideas from the corner of anarchism or communism (that's why I dropped the term free association), but I would strongly hesitate to call myself e.g. a communist, because there has been so much crap running under that term that I can't really identify with it.

I find interesting that sometimes technology wants to push society in a certain direction - that can be good, bad, or neutral - and society resists with new technology, and this creates an curious interplay. Like file-sharing made it trivial to share music. Either we change society, everybody can access music for free, and we find a new way to feed and reward musicians. Or we keep society the way it is, invent DRM, and pretend files are material goods. Or for an older, more drastic example, think of the effect of widespread contraception on sexual morality.

About changing people, I think a widespread objection against utopias is to say they are trying to create new people, and I think this objection is not entirely unfounded. I'd personally try to change society, so that what's between people and not the people themselves, if you know what I mean. I wouldn't even want to try to put everybody through an ecovillage or a kibbutz etc., although I'm sure it's a valuable experience. Rather make small, incremental changes, and set incentives such that people automatically do the 'right' thing. But, as I said, I have no concrete plans, and fixing human society is a really really hard problem :-)

Re: What Urbit is

#225

Post by Karunamon » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 7:55 PM UTC

cwyers wrote: post #217

tzs wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's worth noting that slippery slopes are a rhetorical fallacy[1] -- most slopes aren't slippery and most things aren't even slopes. I outlined why I think these personal views are relevant to the discussion. I don't think it's useful or necessary to lay out a general principle as to when personal views are relevant to the discussion, and I don't see any danger that Hacker News will be overrun by irrelevant discussi…

Such discussion has a habit of derailing threads.

For instance, instead of talking about Urbit, we're instead mired in the finer points of one guy's murky theories on sociology.

This is not an interesting discussion on Hacker News! Racists are not exactly a rare breed, nor do the outspoken ones ever (intentional Sith absolute) bring anything interesting to the discussion.

Re: What Urbit is

#226

Post by swsieber » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 8:25 PM UTC

carapace wrote: post #221

swsieber wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooo, I'm jumping into the firepit here. I haven't even read the article. But if he's talking about what happened to groups of people, isn't it correct then to talk about characteristics of groups of people? Normally, I would stay away from stereotypes and generalizations, and yet aggregate characteristics are useful about talking about what happens to groups of people. The real trouble comes when you try to apply an…

I consider "racism" to be a mental/emotional disease and you describe it well: a logical confusion between "group", which is a mental construct, and the real individuals encountered in real life, leading to severe anti-social behaviour. Generalizations are useful, but people get fucked up on "race". To answer your question, I am upset that someone as intelligent and otherwise interesting as the urbit fellow should su…

Thanks! I can tell you've put a lot of though into this issue.

Re: What Urbit is

#227

Post by zardgiv » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 9:24 PM UTC

kaid wrote: post #206

zardgiv wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please try to follow the conversation. I was addressing the claim that shunning certain beliefs would cause society to collapse, and I've clearly demonstrated that to be false. Not sure how what you've ranted about here ties into that.

In an individualist perspective, I agree with you, shunning won't cause society to collapse. But when people advocating it to an aggressive level-extensively campaigning the rejection of a certain person at social scale, this is dangerous and smells like politics, and was exactly the way how hitler shunned the jews.

I think you're having difficulty distinguishing the concepts of "shunning" and "genocide."

Re: What Urbit is

#228

Post by yarvin9 » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 10:55 PM UTC

placeybordeaux wrote: post #223

urbit wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Urbit is (or at least is designed to become) a personal server which solves this problem among others. One: a chain of specialized Posix programs would work for that. You would have to be someone who can manage a chain of specialized Posix programs, though. Two: serving as a general-purpose stateful HTTP client is a subset of what Urbit does, though an important subset. It's also a server on a public network. Th…

You still haven't made it clear who is running 'my' urbit programs and why they are doing that. If they are doing it for free this won't scale. If I am paying them why don't I just pay someone to maintain standard software. I find this very strange because I love all of the work on distributed and decentralized systems. I am normally excited to read more about a new approach, but I still don't understand what you are…

When I say "the browser for the server side," what I mainly mean is the isolation layer between the browser and the OS.

For example, suppose someone designing the first JS environment at Netscape had suggested that since JS is so great, you should be able to make POSIX system calls from it. Or link to locally stored libraries. Or use a language someone had heard of before. I think you'll agree that if this decision had been made, most people would never have heard of JS.

The browser is a second-level OS which provides a service no first-level OS offers; it loads applications almost instantly and sandboxes them securely.

Now, in theory, you could modify a Unix to solve this problem. Arguably, it's a problem any OS ought to be able to solve. We are certainly much closer with containers. But still, imagine what it would take to replace webpages with Dockerfiles. (sandstorm.io is the closest to something like this; definitely check them out as well.)

Urbit's semantics are isolated from the platform in just the same way. The job of a general-purpose personal server is very different from the job of a general-purpose client -- they have almost nothing in common. But the isolation layer over the current systems platform is the crucial element.

Re: What Urbit is

#229

Post by ZenoArrow » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 11:24 PM UTC

captainmuon wrote: post #224

ZenoArrow wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "a new kind of society based on free association (rather than labor & money)" I'm all for that, but for that to really work you'd have to change what people understand about ownership of material goods, and I suspect that'll be a hard battle to win. Perhaps a good place to start would be experiencing life in an ecovillage, some of them work with a minimal reliance on money.

That's true. Thing is, I don't have a great thought-out plan. I sympathize with a couple of ideas from the corner of anarchism or communism (that's why I dropped the term free association), but I would strongly hesitate to call myself e.g. a communist, because there has been so much crap running under that term that I can't really identify with it. I find interesting that sometimes technology wants to push society in…

Sounds like you have similar ideas to me when it comes to moving towards a new type of society, I like to describe it as evolution over revolution. I recognise that it's not easy, but I do have ideas about how it can be done.

The first thing is to start building alternative living arrangements where people can get what they need to survive without relying on money. I do think ecovillages are a good model to start with, though I'd ideally like to see the culture of each self-sustaining village be more diverse.

After you have a network of these self-sustaining villages, you move from providing the bare essentials to sustainable versions of luxuries. To give you an example of this, you could class medicine as a luxury (though some would class it as essential). The idea is to make the alternative lifestyle more attractive by making it so people don't have to give up as much.

By doing this, more and more people will choose to live in this new way of their own free will, as not only will you be able to live in a sustainable way without giving up on technological progress, you'll also have a diverse range of settlements to live in, and you'd be free to move between them as long as the new village had capacity.

Buckminster Fuller once said "In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.", that's the best way forward IMO. I do think the existing network of ecovillages is a good starting point, and I think it's possible to extend this base to cover more of what people want. That's the way I could see a moneyless society emerging.

Re: What Urbit is

#230

Post by ZenoArrow » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 12:06 AM UTC

gjm11 wrote: post #207

ZenoArrow wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have just taken a look at the blog post you linked to. If you've read that and come to the conclusion that the author is a racist, I can explain what you've missed in one word: intent. The author is exploring ideas. The early parts of the blog post set this exploratory tone quite clearly by framing Carlyle not as someone with absolute moral authority, but as an original thinker, a counterbalance to his time and our…

I didn't say anything about racism. I said that that blog post seems like sufficient grounds to call the author an "outspoken advocate of slavery" even if when that becomes inconvenient for him he says he isn't one. And yes, he frames what he says as an exploration of Carlyle's ideas, but he's not just saying "Carlyle said this; isn't that interesting"; he's presenting his own opinions too. As for whether believing t…

> "he's not just saying "Carlyle said this; isn't that interesting""

From what I saw, that's exactly what I think he's saying, perhaps I missed something you saw, perhaps I didn't. It seems the conversation has pretty much run its course now, so shall we agree to disagree?