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Urbit is now in open developer beta

urbit.org

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Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#41

Post by middleclick »

JeremyBanks wrote: post #31
notthemessiah wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

RationalWiki is biased trash that can't be trusted for anything.

Without actually reading what it says, you seem to be attacking the source rather than the content.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#42

Post by avip »

>We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced "yes") is true, and 1 ("no") is false. Why? It's fresh, it's different, it's new. And it's annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it's also just intuitively right.

This kind of sums up the approach taken here. I'm out. I'm too dumb for this project.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#43

Post by [deleted] »

hodwik2 wrote: post #27
gaze wrote: post #11

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#44

Post by Camillo »

tree_of_item wrote: post #10

Urbit is purposefully obfuscated. If you don't believe me, just take a look at the docs: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ There is no reason to gensym all of your concepts like this. It is different just for the purpose of being different: apparently you can't sell people on a "revolutionary technology" without appearing to be extremely different. Nock is also not a good virtual machine. Recognizing blessed sequ…

There is what amounts to a direct claim of purposeful obfuscation here: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/1-noc...

> We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced "yes") is true, and 1 ("no") is false. Why? It's fresh, it's different, it's new. And it's annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it's also just intuitively right.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#45

Post by wmf »

Animats wrote: post #39

I dunno. This thing is weird, but they put a lot of work into it, and you can download something that runs. What 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…

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.

Yeah, Sandstorm is pretty cool. :-)

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#46

Post by emmelaich »

Camillo wrote: post #44
tree_of_item wrote: post #10

Urbit is purposefully obfuscated. If you don't believe me, just take a look at the docs: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ There is no reason to gensym all of your concepts like this. It is different just for the purpose of being different: apparently you can't sell people on a "revolutionary technology" without appearing to be extremely different. Nock is also not a good virtual machine. Recognizing blessed sequ…

There is what amounts to a direct claim of purposeful obfuscation here: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/1-noc... > We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced "yes") is true, and 1 ("no") is false. Why? It's fresh, it's different, it's new. And it's annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it's also just intuitively right.

Focus on the intuitively right. I think it makes sense for 0 to yes/true. Think of the Unix exit codes, and golang returns. No news is good (yes/true) news.

edit: as to the "annoying" that's just Yarvin being cheeky. I really don't think it is too serious.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#47

Post by sigusr1 »

avip wrote: post #42

>We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced "yes") is true, and 1 ("no") is false. Why? It's fresh, it's different, it's new. And it's annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it's also just intuitively right. This kind of sums up the approach taken here. I'm out. I'm too dumb for this project.

He said in his recent talk about urbit if he were doing it over he probably wouldn't have done that.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#49

Post by Throwaway585250 »

hodwik2 wrote: post #27
gaze wrote: post #11

Earlier 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…

Heritability of traits can be measured by twin studies. Some people have spent quite a lot of time doing this for IQ. Others have even identified some of the genes that are correlated with high IQ, TOR1A being one of the more interesting ones. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this area of research.

Regarding population genetics, I don't think it matters as much as people seem to think. Han Chinese are short, but Yao Ming is tall, and there's no contradiction in that.

Regarding Urbit, I certainly hope that it isn't heritable, or for that matter infectious, because it seems totally opaque.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#50

Post by asimuvPR »

JonathonW wrote: post #18
asimuvPR wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its ok to set yourself apart. But for some reason this feels very app.net in a way. Not to disrespect the projects or ceeators but the scope and ambitions were rather big.

App.net at least had a couple clear use cases in mind (twitter clone, notifications/pub/sub service), even if they weren't unique/compelling enough to sell people on the service. AFAICT, this platform has a broad scope without any kind of clear vision as to what they want to do with it. Maybe I haven't found the right part of their website yet?

Its probably not public yet. The mystery does help with marketing. Keeping people guessing is an age old tactic. Either way I'm interested.
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