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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

#81

Post by johncolanduoni »

bordercases wrote: post #59

I'm not entirely sure I buy the arguments that "made-up words" are a bad thing. All words were made up at some point. And the English language on the surface seems extremely redundant in its vocabulary, but each element of a cluster of words can contain separate nuance, so we keep them around. Perhaps this doesn't have a place in computing, but perhaps it does. Consider, for example, the most jargon-y field of mathem…

> Proofs = Types = Categories; all related, all translatable in terms of one another, yet all different.

Proofs = Some Types and Type Theories = Some Categories, so I think even taken as an attempt to paint the situation in broad strokes what you wrote is at best misleading. Many (commonly studied) categories and classes thereof are not interpretable as type theories, and type theories contain plenty of terms that would not be typically interpreted as proofs.

Also, even in category theory, papers and books take quite a bit of care to be clear when they introduce a new term. Urbit's documentation looks like it took every conceivable opportunity to invent new words for things where we already have words. The complaint is not about made-up words per se, but scores of unnecessary made-up words. It's like they expect to trademark the name of every little internal concept inside Urbit.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#82

Post by comboy »

kovrik wrote: post #20
aaron-lebo wrote: post #2

This 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.

I dived into urbit a while ago, and the way it is described makes sense. It's a completely new paradigm and trying to fit naming from popular programming languages would only lead to confusion. You have some new things, built on top of other new things and so on. When trying to describe higher level abstraction layer you can't afford to spend 2 sentences to describe each element from the lower one. So sure, you could go with some smart sounding names, but they would need to be much longer and they would make things seem more complicated than they are in reality.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#83

Post by vertex-four »

shadeland wrote: post #68
jmspring wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, it seems to fit the current hype around being mysterious, disruptive, etc. That they can't describe what they are doing in plain english is downright silly.

> the ideas appeared to be deliberately obfuscated It reminds me of early days of http://21.co ,the Bitcoin computer, with the same ambiguous wordings. I assume the libertarian socialistic aspects of this genre of technology is prior to its technical and practical aspects.

Actually, I've been following Urbit for a while - it's decidedly not designed to be socialist, or libertarian, it is instead feudalistic. Specifically, the network protocol, once you get past the level of "two computers communicating", is based around a system where users are given land (a "planet") by a landlord (a "star"), and are then tied to that landlord in terms of infrastructure and trust.

The system is also, weirdly, specifically designed so that not every person in the world can have their own planet.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#84

Post by cronjobber »

Sanddancer wrote: post #63
kovrik wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, I doubt they could handle it, their scope is huge: new OS, new programming language, networking, encryption, time, compilation, virtualization etc. I don't believe group of 5 unknown people can handle it. Like, Urbit time: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/library/3c/ Where the hell are timezones, Leap seconds etc.? They just store constants!

Not only that, they are incorrect constants. The definition for :cet, for example, is only correct for non-leap centuries. 2000-2099 has an extra day compared to 1900-1999, or its partner :qad, which has the opposite problem and assumes any 4-year span has a leap year. Of course, the language has other problems too, like 'moar' being used as a serious part of the language's grammar, or worse, more nebulous verbs like…

> difficult to understand for non-native english speakers

Au contraire! They managed to almost eliminate any advantage that programmers who speak english usually enjoy.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#85

Post by jacquesm »

vertex-four wrote: post #83
shadeland wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the ideas appeared to be deliberately obfuscated It reminds me of early days of http://21.co ,the Bitcoin computer, with the same ambiguous wordings. I assume the libertarian socialistic aspects of this genre of technology is prior to its technical and practical aspects.

Actually, I've been following Urbit for a while - it's decidedly not designed to be socialist, or libertarian, it is instead feudalistic. Specifically, the network protocol, once you get past the level of "two computers communicating", is based around a system where users are given land (a "planet") by a landlord (a "star"), and are then tied to that landlord in terms of infrastructure and trust. The system is also,…

> The system is also, weirdly, specifically designed so that not every person in the world can have their own planet.

That's not weird if you look at it from the perspective of artificial scarcity. It took three decades but now IPV4 addresses are worth cold hard cash.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#86

Post by 1ris »

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…

I absolutely agree that this is purposefully obfuscated. It's IMHO some kind of intellectual masturbation. You can see the same pattern for the essays Moldbug writes.

But i disagree with you criticism of Nock. This is not only a good idea, this is brilliant. This should be adopted to javascript. If javascript now introduces a SIMD api this api will have to be supported until eternity, even if maybe different kinds of operations are accelerated in future cpus. And it add to this layers and layers of curft and complexity that javascript stacked in the last 5 years that are impossible to ever fix. It would have been better if there was a convention how to define a normal javascript function (e.g. add two arrays) that the javascript implementation can or not replace with a SMID accelerated function with the same semantics. This reduces the technical dept to almost zero.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#87

Post by vertex-four »

kofejnik wrote: post #76
middleclick wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

ironically, this is what the parent comment is doing - attacking the author and not the message

The software is heavily based on the author's political views - and allows the author to shape the network into whatever they want, being based on a system of "digital landlords" who have significant control over the users who work on their "land" - so it makes sense to look into said political views.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#88

Post by vertex-four »

jacquesm wrote: post #85
vertex-four wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I've been following Urbit for a while - it's decidedly not designed to be socialist, or libertarian, it is instead feudalistic. Specifically, the network protocol, once you get past the level of "two computers communicating", is based around a system where users are given land (a "planet") by a landlord (a "star"), and are then tied to that landlord in terms of infrastructure and trust. The system is also,…

> The system is also, weirdly, specifically designed so that not every person in the world can have their own planet. That's not weird if you look at it from the perspective of artificial scarcity. It took three decades but now IPV4 addresses are worth cold hard cash.

Sure, but as a global personal computing infrastructure, the idea of absolutely ensuring that some people's identities will be worth more than others (not only in terms of monetary worth, but in terms of trust, etc) based on an artificial limit is a bit weird.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#89

Post by jacquesm »

vertex-four wrote: post #88
jacquesm wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The system is also, weirdly, specifically designed so that not every person in the world can have their own planet. That's not weird if you look at it from the perspective of artificial scarcity. It took three decades but now IPV4 addresses are worth cold hard cash.

Sure, but as a global personal computing infrastructure, the idea of absolutely ensuring that some people's identities will be worth more than others (not only in terms of monetary worth, but in terms of trust, etc) based on an artificial limit is a bit weird.

Not if that was the goal in the first place. See also: pre-mining digital currency blocks, land ownership and other attempts to corner the market.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#90

Post by thruflo »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #2

This 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…

Below the intro paragraph on the homepage are two links: "Learn more" and "jump to the technical docs".

Given your aversion to the technical docs, I'd imagine you might click "learn more". This scrolls the page down to another lead in para with links to "overview" and "beliefs and principles".

So sure, it's two clicks not one but are you seriously telling me the https://urbit.org/posts/overview/ (posted on HN the other day) isn't a well written explanation of what Urbit is / does / why you'd be interested in it?

[edit]: typo.

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