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Urbit

urbit.org

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Re: Urbit

#81
Oh dear. Let me start by saying that I find Urbit interesting in it's own right. I'm generally interested in distributed systems, and Urbit's Nock and Hoon are weird languages that I'm interested in despite not coming close to groking. That said, we should also remember where it came from (without throwing the baby -- if there is a baby -- out with the bath water). Curtis Yarvin previously wrote a blog called Unqualified Reservations under the penname Mencius Moldbug. Urbit takes it's name from this blog. He voiced a number of regressive views there, including very racist and anti-democratic ones. Some choice quotes:

> No one who condones Che, Stalin, Mao, or any other leftist murderer, has any right to ask anyone else to dissociate himself from a rightist who didn't even make triple digits. Anders Behring Breivik is a terrorist. Nelson Mandela is a terrorist. Nelson Mandela is the most revered living political figure on our beautiful blue planet… If you ask me to condemn Anders Breivik, but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you'd like to fuck.

> Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery. And others still are badly suited to either. These characteristics can be expected to group differently in human populations of different origins. Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences.

> Political power is a property right, however you slice it. It is owned, not deserved. It is not a natural or "human" right. And it has no more to do with freedom than brake fluid with fondue.

Curtis Yarvin is a libertarian. As an anarchistic, I consider libertarians my non-committal brethren. I don't have a̶n̶y̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ much against libertarians, but the weird thing about Curtis Yarvin is that he's a monarchist libertarian. He literally wants a strong man ruler who enforces libertarian policies through an iron grip. He also believes in binary genders, which is reflected in Urbit's requirement of the user to identify as a Lord or a Lady. His personal views aren't just an aside, they're reflected in the name and workings of this system.

Some more quotes, in case you're not yet convinced of how horrible Curtis Yarvin is:

> Was royalism a perfect system? It was not. But if we imagine a world in which the revolutions and civil wars of the last four centuries had never happened, it is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer, more civilized, and more pleasant.

> Modern Americans have enormous difficulty in grasping hierarchical social structures. We grew up steeped in "applied Christianity" pretty much the way the Hitler Youth grew up steeped in Hitler. The suggesting that slavery could ever be or have been, as Aristotle suggests, natural and healthy, is like suggesting to the Hitler Youth that it might be cool to make some Jewish friends… We think of the master-slave relationship as usually sick and twisted, and invariably adversarial. Parent-child relationships can be all three. But they are not normally so. If history (not to mention evolutionary biology) proves anything, it proves that humans fit into dominance-submission structures almost as easily as they fit into the nuclear family.

> In my opinion just about every country on earth today would benefit from a transition to military government…

> It's a reality of modern American life that race confers privilege. As a reactionary, how can I possibly object? A society without hereditary privilege is like a cheeseburger without cheese.

Again, none of this means that Urbit doesn't have interesting ideas that could be used/forked. But this is the context that this system was created in, and it is reflected in the system.

Re: Urbit

#82
post #64

I heard of Urbit a while back and still cannot for the life of me figure out what it does or what it's for. The comments here are helping me figure out how it works, but it still leaves me with the question of what can I do with it that I can't accomplish with my good ol' OS or internet or (whatever the closest conventional analogue for Urbit is).

It's because it's a system trying to pitch itself as a product. The system being a top to bottom rewrite of the stack in such a way so as to sidestep the client/server relationship entirely. A lot of services rely upon positioning themselves as the server, as the big computer you have timeshared access to, and they monetise your usage. For things like photo storage, or basic communication, or permissioned access to your files, this is pointless. Any computer could do it, but the internet is itself based upon asking a server for something and getting it. And running a server sucks.

Any other peer to peer solution is partial, and therefore not able to compete with the internet as is. Urbit basically plans around an identity system that prevents spam and abuse; a hierarchical packet routing structure for those identities that doubles as a de facto governance model (due to having a vested interest in the network, the higher up you go); a kernel designed to freeze, and its entire OS on top a series of event logs that mark down computations and new states; a functional language for this "internet where every computer is a database", and the encrypted networking protocol that uses UDP while still ensuring packets always find you.

So if you wanted to, say, have a group of people set as a peer list that others can subscribe to or join, or build or use applications that lets that peer list join chats or see a set of files based upon some arbitrary marker (like giving you $5/mo?) ... you don't need a million services to spread the load, one task per service, each person joining each service. You can just use your own computer. It's a personal server platform for a peer to peer internet. It's an internet designed to resist bad actors, and to resist AOL, to resist Facebook and Google — an internet that facilitates and preserves a Usenet-esque model of small communities doing stuff together on their computers.

(Obvious disclosure that I work on the project, again.)

Re: Urbit

#83

Is this some kind of over-the-top joke that I'm not in on? I've browsed and read but honestly still can't understand what Urbit is. When I saw the picture of the stone with the thing on top I thought I was finally "in" on the joke, but they seem to continue on.

Based on all the things the intro page says about where all my social connections are and such, I think Urbit is a web browser.

Re: Urbit

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it a personal server if I need a personal server to run it? Am I buying compute power on other people's computers? Also, why call it an OS if it doesn't replace existing ones?

It’s a personal server OS. MS-DOS was emulated on mainframes before it was run directly on hardware. Urbit wants to do the same, starting by being emulated on traditional computer OSes, and eventually moving to bare metal.

[deleted]

Re: Urbit

#85
post #67
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know whether this matters, and I guess it probably doesn’t, but he was kicked off the Popehat blog not long after writing this, for virulent (and, since then, increasingly theatrical) racism.

Was the racism on Popehat or elsewhere? The departure announcement post[1] seems at least somewhat amicable, since it contains an advertisement for Clark's new website. [1] https://www.popehat.com/2015/12/30/i-cant-see-what-my-future...

The relationship between Clark and Ken is decidedly not amicable.

Re: Urbit

#86
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know whether this matters, and I guess it probably doesn’t, but he was kicked off the Popehat blog not long after writing this, for virulent (and, since then, increasingly theatrical) racism.

> he was kicked off At first I thought you were talking about Yarvin himself. It's a bad sign when someone left a project due to their virulent racism and you have to be like "wait, which one of the two people related to this story who did that are we talking about?".

There’s a person on HN who built an overlay network called ZeroTier and whatever else there is to say about ZeroTier I feel like you can at least say that the most persuasive pieces of advocacy for it aren’t written by neo-Nazis or their adjacencies, and that is not something every overlay network can say.

Re: Urbit

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an overlay OS, a VM made to allow anyone to run their own server easily

Well that begs the obvious question, what the hell is an "overlay OS"? It's not an industry standard term and doesn't explain anything.

Overlay OS might not be a great term.

Urbit is a program you can run on Linux or MacOS intended to provide a complete personal computing experience on its own. It runs as a virtual machine for now, although it could run as a unikernel on bare metal (good project for a contributor who's interested!).

This VM acts like an operating system, in the sense that it loads and runs other applications within itself, and in the sense that it presents an application switcher and overall system management tools to the user.

This VM is designed from scratch to be as simple as possible, based on the thesis that the reason everyone has thought of a personal server but nobody runs one is that it's too complicated to do your own sysadmin.

Why is it complicated to do your own sysadmin? Because Linux is 15 million lines of code, and then there are tons of layers on top of that. What percentage of programmers even know how the internet works? A fair number of programmers have a decent sense for some corner of the modern computing world, but even seasoned professionals don't usually know the full structure of the digital world. How does BGP interact with the IP protocol? How do you make sure fsync() actually did what you wanted it to do? How does Linux overcommit_memory work? etc.

Urbit is weird, but that's mostly because it's a parallel universe of computing, not because it's inherently crazier than the alternative. We all have Stockholm Syndrome about 'ls -alH', and don't tell me 'grep' is an intuitive name.

In fact, there are very few basic building blocks in Urbit: binary trees of integers, the idea of a persistent event-log-based computer, and cryptographic identities. Pretty much everything is constructed out of those components.

And it's designed for a modern world with billions of users who might not all be completely trustworthy, so whole categories of complexity go away -- such as NATs.

So there's no standard industry term for describing this system, because there are no direct analogs or competitors.

Re: Urbit

#88
post #41

Somebody's gonna run the servers and it won't be paid for by funny money.

Yes, that's an important point. You'll have a service contract with the infrastructure node responsible for routing packets to you -- you'll pay them to route to you. There are two layers of infrastructure nodes to facilitate scaling and hopefully maintain a healthy competitive market for routing services.

Re: Urbit

#89
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The project is exclusionary by design--instead of using an existing programming language or even keywords/terminology from an existing human language, the creator decided to make everything up, right down to new names for existing symbols. F'r example: gar > hax # hep - kel { sel [ ser ] sig ~ soq ' Have to agree about the screenshots--if there's something useful here, why not show it off?

It may be marketing genius if the goal is to appeal to the type of nerd who loves obscure systems and occult jargon... the kind that geeks out on the complexities of D&D while chatting you up about the rococo details of Eastern Orthodox dietary restrictions and how they may have impacted renaissance fashion. Everything about Urbit seems designed to be candy to these types.

D&D isn't necessarily that complex, systematically, if you really lay it out. It's about shared imagination with your friends, mutually improvising a story, and a framework for actualising personal development.

I'm not helping, am I.

Re: Urbit

#90

> In Urbit OS 1, a community shares a set of modules. (Think of a module like an app without the data lock-in.) One community may choose to chat and share a forum. Another may choose to chat and watch the crypto markets. And yet another may chat, share links, ebooks, and a to-do list. Anyone can develop a module, and anyone can create a community. Sounds awesome, in theory . Website had nothing I could find describin…

Today, Urbit has chat, blogging, a basic weather app, and a lot of programming facilities. Eventually it should be able to run a document editor, and you can do things similar to internet browsing even on today's Urbit.

Urbit is a long-term project starting from the foundations and working up the stack. It'll be stable soon, but it probably won't be ready to run something as heavy as a modern web browser for a while. That being said, it does work, and it's fun to play with as-is.

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