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Urbit

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Re: Urbit

#261

Post by NaggingGranpa »

tptacek wrote: post #255
NaggingGranpa wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignorant? He probably read more old books than you -- which does not mean he understood much. He spent 7 years of early retirement burning his dot-com loot on Amazon.

That seems unlikely, since 'pron has repeatedly identified himself as a (former?) history grad student / PhD candidate, and, in various threads on the site, has gone into enough depth on the topic that I'd be disinclined to doubt them.

Moldbug allegedly acquired enough loot during the dot-com bubble to afford spending 7 years at home reading something like 1 book per day. That could be 2500 books in total.

History grad students have to TA. They have to produce research. It's hard to consume as much as Moldbug when one has such demands on one's time.

More importantly, Moldbug almost certainly has more brainpower than the vast majority of history grad students. Whether he used such brainpower wisely is highly debatable.

Re: Urbit

#262

Post by [deleted] »

NaggingGranpa wrote: post #257
pron wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> How would you know if that's a dollar better-spent? You bet and you learn which bets pay off. If some bets never pay off, perhaps it's time to cut losses. > WWI was also very much a product of Romanticism WWI was very much a product of Germany's ascent as a unified, major power. And, while Oxbridge was wasting time on classics and Latin, the Germans had several research universities working on things that translate…

[deleted]

Re: Urbit

#263

Post by pron »

NaggingGranpa wrote: post #257
pron wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> How would you know if that's a dollar better-spent? You bet and you learn which bets pay off. If some bets never pay off, perhaps it's time to cut losses. > WWI was also very much a product of Romanticism WWI was very much a product of Germany's ascent as a unified, major power. And, while Oxbridge was wasting time on classics and Latin, the Germans had several research universities working on things that translate…

Whoa, I don't know if I would start by teaching you history or the basic mathematics of natural selection. I'm always impressed by how the ability to form coherent explanatory narratives is inversely proportional to the amount of factual knowledge possessed (of course it is -- fewer points require a lower-degree polynomial -- but still, it does require some level of oblivious confidence that I've never had). I'm sorry, but I completely misjudged the nature of this conversation. Stepping away now, and I hope you get better.

By the way, my great grandparents weren't elites so much as they were poor tradesmen, except maybe in the addled minds of the followers of ignorant "great men," armed with a romantic ideology of an imagined past and pseudo-science -- and, of course, guns -- who brutally murdered them. Apparently, my great-grandparent's "superior Ashkenazi cognition" wasn't enough to ensure their survival -- maybe because of some other "weaknesses associated with their race," but I think that the more plausible explanation is that it was because of racism, a force that seems to trump intelligence time and again.

Re: Urbit

#264

Post by zozbot234 »

NaggingGranpa wrote: post #261
tptacek wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems unlikely, since 'pron has repeatedly identified himself as a (former?) history grad student / PhD candidate, and, in various threads on the site, has gone into enough depth on the topic that I'd be disinclined to doubt them.

Moldbug allegedly acquired enough loot during the dot-com bubble to afford spending 7 years at home reading something like 1 book per day. That could be 2500 books in total. History grad students have to TA. They have to produce research. It's hard to consume as much as Moldbug when one has such demands on one's time. More importantly, Moldbug almost certainly has more brainpower than the vast majority of history gra…

The "amateur scholar" is a well-established 18th- and 19th-century tradition, and Moldbug would be merely following in it. While the 20th-century model of academia has more overall throughput and perhaps even more output, it's not clear that it's anywhere near as efficient in its use of human effort or brainpower.

Re: Urbit

#265

Post by throwGuardian »

It's like a Hollywood sci-fi writer first wrote a bad script describing tech in fictioud terms, and someone though it a good idea to use the movie script as the site copy, user manual and FAQ.

How can anyone take this seriously if there's not even a half attempt to describe the product and features honestly

Re: Urbit

#266

Post by jevgeni »

mellosouls wrote: post #213
_glsb wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How on earth is the first link in a Google search "cherry picked"? At least half of those states in your own link are monarchies! Placing quotes around the archetypal monarchy seems like an act of last resort tbh - as do the repeated insults; so I'll consider this particular micro-debate conceded to me.

Mate, what good is a monarchy if the monarch doesn't have any power? It's just a monarchy in name. Following your logic, North Korea is a democracy, because it has the word "democratic" in its official name. This is a crap level of discourse and hence you are getting all the smacktalk. Don't think that you are entitled to people letting your stupid arguments slide. This is not the USSR.

This is why you are cherry picking. The original comment that you are replying to specified "actual monarchies, not figurehead states": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21674965

What's so difficult to understand? Does UK fall under that category? No. Material power is with the parliament and PM. You are disproving your own point, when you bring them in as an argument!

I even gave you a hint. Saudi Arabia might be a stronger argument. Monarchy has power and they have economical clout. I mean, their GDP is only slightly higher than Walmart's annual revenue, but hey - at least you would've had a fighting chance.

Re: Urbit

#267

Post by jevgeni »

bjoli wrote: post #194
mellosouls wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you.

Re: Urbit

#269

Post by lisper »

retreatguru wrote: post #260
lisper wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urbit is a front for a nascent cult, kind of like Shen Yun is a front for the Falun Gong [1], or "What the bleep do we know?" was a front for Ramtha's School of Enlightenment [2]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/12/shen-yun-falun-... [2] https://whatthebleep.com/portfolio-item/ramtha/

This is a pretty strong statement. Can you provide details to back it up? I’m interested because Urbit seems at the edge of genius that is ahead of its time and obscure and inaccessible. The hoon programming language seem quite ambitious.

The obscurity and inaccessibility are classic cult tactics. The obscurity and inaccessibility and weird terminology is not there to provide functionality, it's there solely to mislead, to make it appear that there's something deep and mysterious going on that only the elect and enlightened can access. (They even admit as much: "Hoon, for the most part, is weird by design...") If you actually dig into the technical details (and yes, I did) you will find that there is no there there. In point of fact, the functional parts of the system are all really written in C (pieces of code which in Urbit-speak are called Jets, again in an effort to obscure the underlying truth).

Other items of evidence:

1. Urbit was founded by Curtis Yarvin, who writes a blog under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He espouses an extreme right-wing Ayn-Randian political philosophy. Go look him up and read some of his writing (he's quite prolific) and see for yourself. I suggest starting with [1].

2. Urbit makes extreme and unjustified claims about itself. The very first sentence on the web site is (as I write this) "Urbit is your last computer." Well, no, it's not. It's not even a computer at all. It's software. It's a badly designed, badly written, badly documented federated social network. And that's pretty much all it is.

3. Buried deep inside Urbit is a scam to take your money. The scam is quite well hidden, but it's pretty obvious once your attention is drawn to it. Part of the Urbit design is an address space analogous to IP addresses. The Urbit people call this address space "real estate" and they call Urbit "the biggest real estate platform in the world" [2]. They claim that these addresses have value because they are scarce [3]. Except that they aren't. The Urbit address space is 128 bits wide, meaning that there are vastly more Urbit addresses than there are elementary particles in the universe. But this fact is conveniently obscured in their documentation.

If you want what Urbit claims to provide, a computer that you control, just get a Linux machine. Gnu/Linux has its own political baggage attached to it, but it's not a scam. It has its obscure bits, but that obscurity is rooted in history rather than a deliberate attempt to mislead.

---

[1] https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-p...

[2] https://coinidol.com/urbit-data-the-next-real-estate-revolut...

[3] https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/urbit-id/

Re: Urbit

#270

Post by retreatguru »

lisper wrote: post #269
retreatguru wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty strong statement. Can you provide details to back it up? I’m interested because Urbit seems at the edge of genius that is ahead of its time and obscure and inaccessible. The hoon programming language seem quite ambitious.

The obscurity and inaccessibility are classic cult tactics. The obscurity and inaccessibility and weird terminology is not there to provide functionality, it's there solely to mislead, to make it appear that there's something deep and mysterious going on that only the elect and enlightened can access. (They even admit as much: "Hoon, for the most part, is weird by design...") If you actually dig into the technical de…

Thanks. I did a deep dive. Fascinating how brilliant people like Yarvin can miss the boat on basics like compassion and empathy for other beings.
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