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Urbit

urbit.org

151–160 of 309 posts

Re: Urbit

#151
post #135

The goal is noble, but Urbit is destined to become a case study in the dangers of isolation and obstinacy. This project has gone so deep into its own inner sanctum that they've lost tabs on wider reality. While the result may have glimmers of technical excellence for brave souls to excavate some day, the impact of the juxtaposition between latent expertise and overwhelming derangement is enough to scare away (literal…

>the One True Way" never works, It works for Apple.

Only because they explicitly refuse to solve a large amount of problems, focusing narrowly on certain profitable ones.

Re: Urbit

#152
post #5

The project founder’s wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin It has leaked over to the project WP page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit I personally choose not to run this software or support this project. YMMV.

The reason I found Yarvin’s (awesome) writing in the first place was because of a post like this on Twitter.

I figured that if vinegar-drinking scolds hated him, he might have something interesting to say. Your post will probably have a similar effect for a couple lucky people.

Re: Urbit

#153
post #135

The goal is noble, but Urbit is destined to become a case study in the dangers of isolation and obstinacy. This project has gone so deep into its own inner sanctum that they've lost tabs on wider reality. While the result may have glimmers of technical excellence for brave souls to excavate some day, the impact of the juxtaposition between latent expertise and overwhelming derangement is enough to scare away (literal…

>the One True Way" never works, It works for Apple.

Apple has "Many little true ways" which integrate beautifully into people's existing lives. Completely opposite from what Urbit is trying to do, which is to dictate that their "one way" shall rule over humans in every aspect, and shall replace everything else that came before.

This is not only arrogant, but stupid approach to building things if you want to get adoption. To build things for the people, you should try your best to integrate into the existing world, not to replace the world itself.

Urbit is literally the opposite of Apple.

Re: Urbit

#154

About the author, Curtis Yarvin: > Curtis Guy Yarvin (born June 25, 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American far-right political theorist, blogger, and computer scientist.[1][6] He is known, along with fellow "neo-reactionary" thinker Nick Land, for developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind the Dark Enlightenment. Yarvin and his ideas are often associated with the alt-r…

Thanks for the heads-up. Although I'd like to evaluate the technical merits of this project independently of the political ideology of the people behind it, knowing this I won't be sending any money their way for "planets" or such, which I might otherwise have done. Not one cent.

Re: Urbit

#155

About the author, Curtis Yarvin: > Curtis Guy Yarvin (born June 25, 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American far-right political theorist, blogger, and computer scientist.[1][6] He is known, along with fellow "neo-reactionary" thinker Nick Land, for developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind the Dark Enlightenment. Yarvin and his ideas are often associated with the alt-r…

Wikipedia has an unfortunate habit of labelling anything as "far right" that is described as such by left wing or gullible journalists in left of centre mainstream publications. Mencius Moldbug may be far right, but he may alternatively just be a thinker not afraid to challenge liberal received wisdom. It's ok to disagree and fervently oppose but it's unfortunate when we descend into soundbite mud-slinging in service…

I'm on the left. I think Urbit is quite neat as a technology. Yarvin has very unusual political views, so I'm not sure where to put them, or if you'd consider this "sound-bite mudslinging" (if you do, please suggest a more palatable way of providing evidence:)

He seems pro-monarchy:

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.[29]

but anti-democracy:

When we look at the astounding violence of the democratic era, it strikes me as quite defensible to simply write off the whole idea as a disaster, and focus on correcting the many faults of monarchism:

He seems to regard political power as property, which makes a sort of sense with his monarchism: 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.[40]

Here is yet another (idea for good government): restrict voting to homeowners. Note that this was widely practiced in Anglo-American history, and for very good reason.[41]*

(He also favors property ownership as a requirement for voting, which aligns with Urbit's governance but seems... dated, politically.)

And he seems to view slavery as a potentially healthy relationship:

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

It's hard to classify Yarvin anywhere politically, but given some very extreme views on slavery, democracy and dictatorship, I think "far right" is as accurate a label as any. His views are expounded upon in the Dark Enlightenment article in the summary.

(Sources are all from Wikiquotes)

Re: Urbit

#156

For all the other commenters who couldn't understand what the heck this is (like myself)... Wikipedia at least gives a fairly straightforward explanation [1]: > Urbit is a decentralized personal server platform. The platform seeks to deconstruct the client-server model in favour of a federated network of personal servers in a peer-to-peer network with a consistent digital identity. > The Urbit software stack consists…

Worst naming convention I've ever seen. Did they just draw from a hat of cooky names? What ever happened to the concept of choosing names relevant to the thing you're describing? I start to understand what's going on, then they throw words like "Hoon" and "Arvo" at me, and now I'm confused again. I still don't understand what it does, but now I don't care.

Re: Urbit

#157

The goal is noble, but Urbit is destined to become a case study in the dangers of isolation and obstinacy. This project has gone so deep into its own inner sanctum that they've lost tabs on wider reality. While the result may have glimmers of technical excellence for brave souls to excavate some day, the impact of the juxtaposition between latent expertise and overwhelming derangement is enough to scare away (literal…

I couldn't even get through the introduction without repeatedly rolling my eyes at the narcissism scattered throughout it.

Re: Urbit

#158
post #123

All I see is ocean and stone images. Please if you are reading this, hire a marketing firm. I am sure you have worked hard on this but I can't understand what your product is. How can that be that you want to be the last computer but most can't even understand first thing about it.

Agreed (though there are some trees and abstract art too). It seems like a parody or a scam, but some people here are talking about it as if it's real? What is real? It certainly doesn't seem to be a computer like it claims to be. There is no hardware (right?). "No one else can look at it without your permission, it can never show you ads.": These are only possible if it has no visual display or interface at all, or…

>"No one else can look at it without your permission, it can never show you ads.": These are only possible if it has no visual display or interface at all, or if it's so limited as to be useless.

I think this is in contrast to Windows being the most popular OS in the world, an OS which does show you ads.

Re: Urbit

#159
post #127
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see a problem. If things get repetitive people will start complaining, but in the meantime these posts have been upvoted out of interest.

"Obscurantist racist vapourware" feels like it ought to be a problem, especially if it deliberately tries to obscure these properties in seemingly direct contradiction of the curiosity mandate.

How exactly is this racist

Re: Urbit

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less useful than it might seem to post a random Wikipedia extract when the subject is highly controversial / politically charged.

It's certainly not "random" as you say - the subject is the founder of the project. The entire project is politically charged. The software was literally modeled after monarchy and fascism. IMO this doesn't belong on HN.

> The software was literally modeled after monarchy and fascism.

Show me a software project modeled after liberal democracy.

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