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Urbit

urbit.org

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Re: Urbit

#281

Post by blotter_paper »

yebyen wrote: post #280
blotter_paper wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some of Yarvin's writings are at best eccentric, but as he has not been a part of the project for some time already, I think it's fair for today's contributors to the project to ask you to set aside his intent, or your impressions of it. "Some time" is pretty vague. He left the project earlier this year, and the project is still named after his fascist blog. I asked one of the Tlon employees in this comment section…

When I was made aware of Urbit, there was someone prominent related person, a friend project of Nock or something, who had developed another competitive functional OS of his own, some kind or other, if memory serves, who had also parted ways with the community over some controversy which nobody wanted to talk about, and at the same time nobody else on the outside of it evidently wanted to ask about. I don't want to m…

I see how I could come off that way. FWIW I don't personally wish to exclude people from contributing to projects based on their views and conduct outside of the project; I would accept pull requests from Jeffrey Dahmer. But if Jeffrey Dahmer started a decentralised social network with dog whistles towards cannibalism, I would wonder whether other contributors to the project supported cannibalism. If the project removed some but not all of the cannibal dog whistles, Dahmer stepped away on good terms, and the current project maintainers didn't make any statements for or against cannibalism, I would still wonder. It's not that Yarvin/Moldbug contributed to Urbit, it's that he purposefully associated it with his ideology from the beginning. That seems different to me, and without explicit clarification to the contrary I think it's fair to associate this project with that ideology.

Re: Urbit

#283

Post by NaggingGranpa »

pron wrote: post #263
NaggingGranpa wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sorr…

Pogromming does not require "great men", only envy and resentment.

Re: Urbit

#284

Post by lidHanteyk »

matildepark wrote: post #105
nootropicat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part you buy is dns that runs on ethereum (iirc), but with artificial scarcity because they want to make money. This part is completely pointless, because the actual system could work as well on ens directly, or even dns. The actual urbit is like docker with standard API for communication between all apps on different containers, but it runs on a lisp-machine like architecture, except instead of lisp there's a ne…

That's a bit cynical, I think. The address space has had a few "official" rationales because it serves a handful of duties at the same time; again, explaining a system is different than explaining a product, but pitching a system as a product is difficult. You often end up framing the system-as-product a specific way each time. > Urbit is a friendly network: a network on which you can assume that a stranger is nice u…

These sorts of optimistic beliefs that all people have some inherent good inside them, and that good-faith attempts will rule the day, never seem to survive any actual economic incentives.

Some lessons from neoliberalism are worth considering here. Sometimes people want to be fed trashy content. In those situations, planets offering trash will be popular enough to pay for the cost of (renting) the planet. (And make no mistake, rent and landlords are an inherent part of any real-estate offering!) So there will be spam, but it will look and taste like the offerings of Disney and Vicom, of Hasbro and Mattel, of Unilever and GSK.

Some lessons from other distributed systems are also worth considering. Technically, messages are always delivered by peers, despite the fact that the messages may have been composed by faraway unknown senders. This leads to local topological reasoning, and webs of trust based on peer-to-peer acquaintance. This can offer better performance and resiliency against attacks than Urbit's top-down neofeudal hierarchy of reputations.

I don't really want to support Tlon. If this is truly federated, then there ought not need be any corporate control over the system. History has shown that a few extremely ethical and competent hackers are more valuable in terms of software quality and usability than any sort of corporate planning.

I do appreciate that, by explicitly embracing blockchains, Urbit has demystified one part of its design: What makes Urbit property valuable? Only the hidden cryptographic keys at the base of Urbit's own signing system give any scarcity, and thus any value, to otherwise-uninteresting bitstrings. In other words, it's as valuable as ZCash or Bitcoin or any other digital gold; it's a Satoshi scheme.

u'i n'ae lojbo .i ku'i ka'eku https://zod.that.world/giveaway/

Re: Urbit

#285

Post by huevo5050 »

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…

looks contradictory: "The obscurity and inaccessibility are classic cult tactics" with "If you actually dig into the technical details (and yes, I did) you will find that there is no there there"

Is inaccessible but you dig into it, is obscure but are pieces of code written in C.

Re: Urbit

#286

Post by erikpukinskis »

mendelmaleh wrote: post #107
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…

Sounds like you want to self-host google xD

In what sense has Google implemented the above?

Re: Urbit

#287

Post by trianglem »

These guys keep coming back every few months/year and it worries me. These people are trying to build something esoteric that is trying to tap into the draw of ritualistic enigmas all with the aim of forwarding their racist views on society. I really wish they would go away.

Re: Urbit

#288

Post by trianglem »

So this is the 3rd time these guys are coming back here and because of the tepid reception they’ve received in the past it looks like they bought shills along this time.

Re: Urbit

#289

Post by huevo5050 »

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…

your link [2] is totally unrelated to urbit

Re: Urbit

#290

Post by lisper »

huevo5050 wrote: post #289
lisper wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

your link [2] is totally unrelated to urbit

Heh, you're right. Interesting that there are two things out there both using the label "Urbit" and both with very similar rhetoric, but not at all the same thing.

Here's a better link:

https://steemit.com/crypto-news/@dana-edwards/urbit-and-digi...

and another straight from the horse's mouth:

https://urbit.org/blog/the-urbit-address-space/

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