Urbit is a republic. Its government has one task: promoting, preserving and protecting Urbit. It may take any legal action which advances this goal. That sounds a bit scary!
Just wait until you read the political views of those who are developing of which Urbit is an instantiation. It's a political philosophy designed to appeal to the Silicon Valley elite who want to imagine themselves as kings: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Neoreactionary_movement Unqualified Reservations + Bitcoin = URBit
Urbit is now in open developer beta
31–40 of 163 posts
Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#32This might be the most revolutionary technology in the world, but I really have no idea because your landing page is full of the vaguest most utopian promises. You might say, well, you should go read the "technical docs", but have read about so many hyped techonologies that came to nothing at this point that I am incredibly skeptical. If you can't tell me what you are doing in a single paragraph, then you've got a pr…
Agree. Feels like it was written by someone with schizophasia. Like: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ What are they talking about? Dry/wet arms? Batteries? Metal cores? Bridges? Gates? Superpowers? For me it looks like they've just replaced common concepts with random "cool" words, deliberately obfuscated the syntax and try to sell it as an innovation.
Like, Urbit time: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/library/3c/
Where the hell are timezones, Leap seconds etc.? They just store constants!
Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#33This might be the most revolutionary technology in the world, but I really have no idea because your landing page is full of the vaguest most utopian promises. You might say, well, you should go read the "technical docs", but have read about so many hyped techonologies that came to nothing at this point that I am incredibly skeptical. If you can't tell me what you are doing in a single paragraph, then you've got a pr…
Agree. Feels like it was written by someone with schizophasia. Like: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ What are they talking about? Dry/wet arms? Batteries? Metal cores? Bridges? Gates? Superpowers? For me it looks like they've just replaced common concepts with random "cool" words, deliberately obfuscated the syntax and try to sell it as an innovation.
At its core? I think it's kind of interesting. Would have been more useful if he had made it simpler to understand/develop in. In its current form, it seems like a vanity project to me.
Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#34This might be the most revolutionary technology in the world, but I really have no idea because your landing page is full of the vaguest most utopian promises. You might say, well, you should go read the "technical docs", but have read about so many hyped techonologies that came to nothing at this point that I am incredibly skeptical. If you can't tell me what you are doing in a single paragraph, then you've got a pr…
Agree. Feels like it was written by someone with schizophasia. Like: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ What are they talking about? Dry/wet arms? Batteries? Metal cores? Bridges? Gates? Superpowers? For me it looks like they've just replaced common concepts with random "cool" words, deliberately obfuscated the syntax and try to sell it as an innovation.
Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#35Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#36I'm very confused.
I'd love to see another project like this that doesn't talk down to its user base and doesn't use a strange language or unreadable source code.
Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#37It would be nice if they would give a clear description of what is they've made. Does this enable running a server jointly with a partner you don't trust, with neither party having physical access, and without involving any third party?
Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#38Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#39What they want to build, from the user perspective, seems to be a federated social network. Like Diaspora, only with some of the problems solved. The two big user-level problems they claim to solve are 1) spam, and 2) being tied to a service provider.
The solution to 1) is that you have to buy an identity from someone. You can't create identities for free. This is a profit center for someone, although I'm not clear whom. Not clear how much a personal identity costs, but there are only 2^32 of them.
The solution to 2) is that you can pick up your ball and go home - take the entire state of your online presence and move it to another server. The routing gets fixed somehow. Sort of like cell phone number portability.
Those are both good features. Right now, they apparently power only an online chat system and the ability to host web pages driven by programs in their language. Somebody could potentially build a Facebook-like system on top of that.
The terminology and the cult-like aspects are seriously annoying. It reminds me of Xanadu and its team. (I knew that crowd. Mostly extreme libertarians. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu.)
I wonder if this could be used as a lightweight container system for server-side web applications. It has a container system, and those containers can serve web pages and talk to other containers. Unlike, say, Docker, you don't have to lug around a whole Linux environment in your container. Being able to move your container to a new hosting service very quickly would force hosting services to be competitive.
Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think if people read Curtis's writing under Mencius Moldbug, nobody would touch urbit with a ten foot pole. He believes that white people are genetically endowed with a higher IQ than black people. Why are people giving him money? This is why we can't have nice things.
I do not believe IQ is heritable -- racially, or otherwise . Full stop. Intelligence is, by my estimation, entirely a function of nurture, not nature. Those exceptions are in situations where it is lacking due to handicap. Which is to say, everyone's brain has the same chance at brilliance (barring fetal alcohol syndrome, neglect, etc.) if they are not intellectually handicapped, and are provided the same child-reari…
However, why do you believe that IQ is not heritable? It's hard to believe there is no genetic component that is heritable. Humans evolved over time from other species, and in the process of evolving into Homo sapiens sapiens, their intelligence was inherited and selected for strongly. There's nowhere else for the foundation of human intelligence to come from in the first place other than inherited genetic traits.
As a peer comment asked, "If IQ is not heritable, then how did it evolve?"
I suppose it's possible that a large component of intelligence could come from society and nuturing. Humans have gotten more intelligent as their diet has improved, and as their diet has become more stimulating, and with writing and education. Still, the fundamental capacity to have a verbal or written culture, and to teach and learn, arises from our baseline intelligence which is possible due to our genetics.
To be fair, you might believe that all living humans have indistinguishably similar IQ at birth. There are reasons to believe it's not true, but it's a consistent belief. However, it would not be sensible to believe that IQ is stable over time, since we know that humans evolved IQ that was not previously present in proto-humans and ancestral species. Therefore IQ must be subject to genetics, and therefore must be partially heritable. From this position you might believe that IQ is heritable but does not genetically vary to a meaningful degree in modern populations. This position makes sense.
However, by comparison, it would be fairly incredible to believe that IQ is not heritable whatsoever, especially given that intelligence is affected by physical traits such as size of skull and brain, and by metabolic pathways and disease and disease resistance. Brain size for example is correlated with intelligence [1]. A number of diseases are known to affect intelligence, such as phenylketonuria. I understand in your comment you acknowledged that such diseases might impair someone and drag their intelligence down -- but just as different people have different potential as athletes, as measured by their VO2max, why wouldn't you believe that the physical systems underlying intelligence couldn't be just a little bit different in one population versus another, thus resulting in a little bit of an edge in IQ? Humans are so different in height, weight, muscle, skin/hair/eye pigment, that it would be incredible if we all were exactly, immeasurably different on some treat that also distinguishes humans from other species.
Science has explored this topic, and my understanding is that modern research on this topic suggests that IQ is heritable. Studies examine factors like twins who were separated at birth, and grew up in different households. Could you share the reasons why you think it is not?
> Various studies have found the heritability of IQ to be between 0.7 and 0.8 in adults and 0.45 in childhood in the United States. A 1994 article in Behavior Genetics based on a study of Swedish monozygotic and dizygotic twins found the heritability of the sample to be as high as 0.80 in general cognitive ability; however, it also varies by trait, with 0.60 for verbal tests, 0.50 for spatial and speed-of-processing tests, and 0.40 for memory tests. In contrast, studies of other populations estimate an average heritability of 0.50 for general cognitive ability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Estimates_o...
[1] "Overall, larger brain size and volume is associated with better cognitive functioning and higher intelligence. The correlations range from 0.0 to as high as 0.6, and are predominantly positive." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_and_intelligence#...