It's certainly hidden behind a layer of indirection where you first have to peel off 'how exactly is this anything at all' - a tricky and futile enough proposition. It's like a LaRouche movement for computer nerds, if you bend over backwards to be nice about it.
So what do you get when you peel off the layer of indirection? I am curious about how an operating system project can be this political, but i'm reluctant to dig into it myself, because any time spent learning about Urbit is clearly absolutely wasted. But if you've already done that work, could you share your findings?
Untrue, or at least questionable claim. Monarchies are economically better-performing. Eg. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/monarchies-good-...
They demonstrably do not. Look at any competitiveness index, or standard of living index, or anything measurable. The article you’ve linked is banal. It talks about how monarchies are good at protecting established property rights. Duuuuuh. That’s their entire purpose. Thinking that stability of property rights is equal to economic performance is moronic. So either you think that I am one or you are one. Here’s a qui…
I don't need to look around, a quick Google on monarchies and GDP before your initial post would have given you the information you needed to not post it.
So what do you get when you peel off the layer of indirection? I am curious about how an operating system project can be this political, but i'm reluctant to dig into it myself, because any time spent learning about Urbit is clearly absolutely wasted. But if you've already done that work, could you share your findings?
I just did!
You've given us your conclusion, but not your findings.
His views are all just hand wavey fascism. At no point does he make a tractable argument. As a counterpoint: take all countries today that have functioning (i.e. non-figurehead) monarchies and compare them with democratic, capitalist countries. You can use prosperity, GDP per capita, average literacy - whatever as a metric and monarchies will fail.
Untrue, or at least questionable claim. Monarchies are economically better-performing. Eg. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/monarchies-good-...
The monarchies the articlementions are all liberal, more or less capitalist democracies.
Use case: this conversation, except between our own computers. Typically, we 'log in' to 'our accounts' on some company's server and use whatever fuctions the company grants us. They are not really our accounts in any meaningful way. If one were to be banned by hackernew(or twitter), she would have no access to her data, social connections, et c. In the urbit world, any data you have authored and any messages you hav…
Ok, so what's stopping one party from changing the data? How would one party prove they have the right data? Is this like blockchain messaging?
No, this is not blockchain messaging.
"How would one party prove they have the right data?"
Before two urbit servers communicate, they exchange and verify public signing keys.
Then, all messages are signed with verified public key.
If you mean what's stopping one party from changing their local copy of your data.... Nothing that I know of.
But they're the only ones who will see their local data.
They demonstrably do not. Look at any competitiveness index, or standard of living index, or anything measurable. The article you’ve linked is banal. It talks about how monarchies are good at protecting established property rights. Duuuuuh. That’s their entire purpose. Thinking that stability of property rights is equal to economic performance is moronic. So either you think that I am one or you are one. Here’s a qui…
I don't need to look around, a quick Google on monarchies and GDP before your initial post would have given you the information you needed to not post it. Eg the first link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/07/23/shut-... Btw your jeering tone and determination to classify either of us as morons is unhelpful.
You peddling horsesh*t is unhelpful. Your fluid goal posts don’t help either.
Obviously any U.K. style “monarchies” and republics with a figurehead. Your best bet therefore would be Middle East monarchies, which are obviously a product of the extraction industry. So even that is not an argument.
Remember how China realized that the communist system isn’t sustainable and introduced elements of monarchy? No? Me neither, because they went with (very light) democratization.
But my favorite part is when I suggest you to look for immediate evidence in the real world and you’re like: “No, here’s a cherry picked article”. This disregard for facts is just plain offensive.
You've given us your conclusion, but not your findings.
I'm somewhat uncertain of the precise distinction but we should focus on what we appear to agree on - any time spent learning about Urbit is absolutely wasted and thus, it does not belong on HN.
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 Unquali…
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.
The difference between Yarvin and vinegar-drinking scolds is that Yarvin merely repeats yesterday's vinegar-drinking scolds. If you like his writing, there's literally centuries' worth of it (in fact, it only stopped being the norm rather recently), and if you go study history at a university you'll read quite a lot of it. It does seem less fresh, though, once you read it in proper chronological order, and with appropriate context, rather than somebody posting a stuffy, safe, and dull 1897 text as a surprising, reactionary 2012 blog post. He served cold leftovers and seemed like a chef to people who'd never had a good meal.
from the FAQ: "In early 2019, Curtis left the Urbit project and gave all of his voting interest (both as address space and voting shares in the company) back to Tlon. He retains a non-voting, minority interest in both the address space and the company — but is not involved in the day-to-day development or operations."
Why is the project still named after his Royalist blog? It's hard to take this distancing act seriously when the very title of your project is a fascist dog whistle.