Urbit • Hacker News Board

Re: Urbit

#201

Post by maehwasu » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 1:42 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #199

maehwasu wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appro…

I actually agree strongly: one of the best things in his writing is his references to primary sources, many of which I found extremely enjoyable to read. The past is a foreign country more interesting than any tourist trip you can take.

If the only thing the Moldbug posts did was link to that material, that would be a service in itself.

To give Yarvin his due though, he does a good job synthesizing it all into a general theory of power being a necessary and sufficient explanation of motivations in most cases.

Re: Urbit

#202

Post by _of » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 1:44 PM UTC

A completely bizarre project. Not very far from ”TempleOS”. Urbit is the outcome when spending too much time alone.

Re: Urbit

#203

Post by maehwasu » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 1:45 PM UTC

blotter_paper wrote: post #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 Unquali…

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that HN is the HR department at your company. Pointing to someone's opinions and shrieking doesn't really fly here.

Particularly when the opinions are fairly defensible. (I.e. the only moral principle by which Breivik (whom I abhore) is worse than Che is "anything done in the service of left-wing causes is ok.")

Re: Urbit

#204

Post by jstewartmobile » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 1:52 PM UTC

Everyone's going off on Yarvin's vanity politics, but has anyone read the BS on this urbit site? Reads more like an advert for skin cream than the "next big thing" in computing.

A small number of contributors, re-inventing the wheel, in systems where giants have struggled, and fell short of the mark. Hard pass.

https://github.com/urbit/urbit/graphs/contributors

Re: Urbit

#205

Post by yebyen » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 1:56 PM UTC

Nursie wrote: post #178

jbotz wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In this case the two are hard go separate because the originator of urbit pretty explicitly wrote his politics into the system.

I'm not going to ask you for a citation about that (as I don't know what part of Urbit you imagine embodies the political philosophy that you are in disagreement with, and I don't imagine that I want to know) but I will let you know that Curtis Yarvin has nothing to do with the Urbit project anymore, as has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread.

Re: Urbit

#206

Post by pouta » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 2:15 PM UTC

ajflores1604 wrote: post #54

I've never come across this project before, but I've been playing around with a similar idea... Essentially I want to scrape data from my own accounts and anything I'm interested in following, on a home server and push that data to a sort of "dashboard" interface. To watch either on my phone or laptop or, in theory, anywhere. I've always hated current phone interface paradigm. I see a grid of app icons like having a…

I'm willing to contribute to this. The only way forward is opensource

Re: Urbit

#207

Post by blotter_paper » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 2:23 PM UTC

basilisks wrote: post #200

blotter_paper wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you back up this claim?

Here is the ending of the second-to-last entry in Unqualified Reservations by Curtis Yarvin (AKA Mencius Moldbug)[0]:

> Anyway. UR will reemerge, of course. But not here, and not soon—and probably not even in this form. I’ll also try to do something non-lame with the archives. Thanks for reading!

If the name alone isn't enough, I feel like this context makes it pretty obvious that he named Urbit after his racist blog.

[0]: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2014/08/hiatus/

Re: Urbit

#208

Post by basilisks » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 2:43 PM UTC

pvg wrote: post #127

dang wrote: 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.

Weird post. I am running my own Urbit, happily learning FP and network concepts along the way. I’m not even a programmer or an engineer, so it can’t be that obscurantist, and it certainly isn’t vaporware.

I’m very interested to know how an operating system can be racist.

It’s a purely functional operating system, and it’s pretty neat. It’s also open-source. The author’s naughty blog posts play absolutely nothing into this.

Re: Urbit

#209

Post by NaggingGranpa » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 2:48 PM UTC

jevgeni wrote: post #164

mellosouls wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yarvin claimed himself that he is “not allergic to white nationalism”.

Patrilineally, Yarvin is Jewish.

Re: Urbit

#210

Post by iudqnolq » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

OceanSunfish wrote: post #186

jevgeni wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, so how is it better than a trusty OpenBSD box?

Perhaps the idea is that updates provided by OpenBSD or another OS for example could be compromised or simply directed to an unpopular path, but in this way a "senate" of code reviewers with known biases provides a more democratic way of reviewing updates before publish.

This is incorrect. Urbit has two paths for changes, a vote by the senate or a decision by the developers on the git repo. It only adds more ways of making updates, it doesn't fix the the devs can do anything "problem"

https://urbit.org/community/governance/