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Urbit

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Re: Urbit

#241

Post by Nursie »

yebyen wrote: post #205
Nursie wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's been pointed out to you elsewhere in the thread that his ideas of hierarchical, feudal society are writ large in the network organisation. Plus the comments he made about address sizes etc.

I guess it's in your interest not to see/admit this, but it's pretty fundamental to the whole thing as far as I can tell.

Re: Urbit

#242

Post by Merg »

chippy wrote: post #171
Rainymood wrote: post #63

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.

It's intentionally made to feel like that. It's exclusionary and puts a barrier to learning explicitly to only allow people in who have made significant mental investment. It's not worth it to me, I'd rather do other things and this is almost absurd levels of exclusion but I like the obscurity-as-a-quality-control method approach in general for some projects.

I mean, significant mental investment sound like typing "sunk cost fallacy" to me.

The whole Urbit system could be described in terms of linked-lists and S-Expressions. Even languages as obscure as K, J or APL have better reasoning than Urbit.

Obscurity only leads to smaller number of people wanting to explore something. Only people who stays with it are "believers" and not experts.

Re: Urbit

#243

Post by matildepark »

chippy wrote: post #174
cryptozeus wrote: post #97

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.

> most can't even understand it That is the point, they want it like that! The crazy idea is that only those who have devoted significant time can understand it and should use it (and I suspect that it plays into some kind of non egalitarian idea about how society should be structured with only elite brainy people on top).

It's not deliberate, just a bit of an ongoing challenge. We've historically been very engineering-focused while honing the system; poking our heads out into the world, we now have to describe it.

The problem, I think, is that there's a lot of inference gaps to clear in terms of how people understand computers and how they understand the internet that we simply dispose of. A lot of the project is an attempt to re-architect the entire stack to resist the flaws of the modern internet — everything we take for granted as 'the way it is,' from the annoyances all the way to the downright evil.

High level, start with the Wikipedia entry. [1] Then peek through some higher-level, overview docs. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit

[2] https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/arvo/

Re: Urbit

#244

Post by pron »

zozbot234 wrote: post #238
pron wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It emerged as a result of both . Reactionary/romantic ideals have always co-opted what they viewed as scientific knowledge or technology in the service of their imagined past. That progressive ideals may have also ultimately employed horrific tools goes without saying, and that some conservative forces have sometimes opposed them is also true. But that's my point: any presentation of history as some appealing narrati…

> But that's my point: any presentation of history as some appealing narrative leading to a conclusion is wrong All simplified models are wrong. Some are useful. (And it's very hard to avoid 'appeal' being a critical factor in the popularity of any model or narrative. It acts as a single point of failure in any truth-seeking mechanism, including academia and the like. This of course explains much about the popularity…

Well, Yarvin's "model" is both very wrong (much more wrong than most models by actual scholars) and not useful; we know that because that "model" was once mainstream, and quite harmful.

Re: Urbit

#245

Post by NaggingGranpa »

pron wrote: post #244
zozbot234 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that's my point: any presentation of history as some appealing narrative leading to a conclusion is wrong All simplified models are wrong. Some are useful. (And it's very hard to avoid 'appeal' being a critical factor in the popularity of any model or narrative. It acts as a single point of failure in any truth-seeking mechanism, including academia and the like. This of course explains much about the popularity…

Well, Yarvin's "model" is both very wrong (much more wrong than most models by actual scholars) and not useful; we know that because that "model" was once mainstream, and quite harmful.

Harmful to whom?

Re: Urbit

#246

Post by pron »

NaggingGranpa wrote: post #240
pron wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A little predictive power can go very far. Yeah, but I don't think intelligent people are better at predicting things (weighted by impact). Again, look at the current US president; or at stock traders. > It was not charisma that cracked Enigma and built the A-bomb. No, but arguably neither would have been done when they were done if it weren't for a war that started largely due to charisma. > But united tribes of m…

> I don't think intelligent people are better at predicting things I never claimed such a thing. I meant predictive power when it comes to allocating resources, especially from the budget devoted to education. A dollar wasted on trying to educate a moron could be invested in military R&D. > a war that started largely due to charisma. Charisma? Do you mean Napoleon? Or von Bismarck? You don't need much charisma to mak…

> A dollar wasted on trying to educate a moron could be invested in military R&D.

How would you know if that's a dollar better-spent? All humans are pretty bad at flying, yet airplanes are pretty useful. All of technology is spending on the respective meaning of "educating morons." Military R&D is a great example. A weakling with a gun can easily beat a strong sword-wielding knight. In fact, the difference between a strong fighter with a sword and a weakling with a sword is pretty much erased by guns.

> Do you mean Napoleon? Or von Bismarck?

I meant Hitler. Napoleon was a different story, but WWI was also very much a product of Romanticism.

> you outed yourself as a non-European

Well, I'm Jewish.

> You're implying that a hunter-gatherer society, an agricultural society and an industrialized society select for the same traits.

Traits? Have we already established that natural selection in the past ~10000 years since the agricultural revolution has had any significant impact in shaping human society? (To be clear, that was a rhetorical question; no, we have not established that).

Re: Urbit

#247

Post by pron »

NaggingGranpa wrote: post #245
pron wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Yarvin's "model" is both very wrong (much more wrong than most models by actual scholars) and not useful; we know that because that "model" was once mainstream, and quite harmful.

Harmful to whom?

To a far greater portion of human society than those it was perhaps useful for, if anyone.

Re: Urbit

#248

Post by matildepark »

IronBacon wrote: post #132

I don't recall to have heard about it before and to be honest the far right and racists remarks posted by others about the project founder make me uncomfortable, but the last few lines where they introduce the "Dojo" with a REPL and a Lisp like syntax, that was interesting...

Check it. [1]

A lot of people work at Tlon with a lot of different perspectives on the world. It's not a vehicle for one guy. This is sadly a frequently asked question in itself. [2]

[1]: https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/hoon/setup/

[2]: https://urbit.org/faq/#who-is-curtis

Re: Urbit

#249

Post by yebyen »

Nursie wrote: post #241
yebyen wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's been pointed out to you elsewhere in the thread that his ideas of hierarchical, feudal society are writ large in the network organisation. Plus the comments he made about address sizes etc. I guess it's in your interest not to see/admit this, but it's pretty fundamental to the whole thing as far as I can tell.

My understanding of the design is that scarcity and hierarchy facilitates a scalable network, with respect to reputation and spam prevention. If the cost of an identity is non-zero and non-negligible, and the supply of permanent identities is gated through individuals (who don't want to be associated with bad actors, lest their own reputation as good actors become negatively affected), then aren't the actors all incentivized to maintain a collective reputation, positively?

The definition of "feudal" that I found when I went looking for it depends on the definition of feudalism, but also on subjective measures like "outdated" or "old-fashioned."

If you want to argue that scarcity is an outdated mode of thinking, then we can have a different conversation, and I think one that is perhaps not suited for this thread. But perhaps we can agree that if a fixed supply of 4.3 billion Urbit planets ever represents a true scarcity, we should be having a different conversation altogether, as it will have become a runaway success, surpassing far above either yours or my own expectations for it?

Re: Urbit

#250

Post by huevo5050 »

um_ya wrote: post #156
crazygringo wrote: post #42

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.

From https://urbit.org/blog/a-founders-farewell/ :

"Urbit's internal opacity persists for two reasons, one good and one bad. The bad reason is just laziness. The good reason is justified fear of premature explanation, which like premature optimization ruins the annealing process.

When you don't know exactly what you're doing, preserve as much ambiguity as possible. For example, a name that means something is a commitment to one specific explanation; a name that means nothing is no commitment at all. A cryptic name is productive procrastination; it lets the hard problem of naming get solved later, and hence better."

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