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Urbit

urbit.org

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Re: Urbit

#291

Post by pron »

pron wrote: post #221
NaggingGranpa wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> his understanding of the material is well below that of a first-year history student Met plenty of history grad students in grad school. Well-read but intellectually very limited, and very herd-minded. But, then, I did not go to an Ivy with a tradition of excellence in the humanities. > Second, there is nothing new about his positions Of course there is, it's just the nutty cypherpunk stuff like crypto-locked nukes…

Oh, I have no doubt Yarvin's writings could unleash something, if only because they already did. They're a rehashing of what became mainstream opinions following Romanticism [1]. Eugenics [2] was taught in numerous universities at the beginning of the 20th century. Clearly, some people can find Romanticism appealing today for the same reason they found it appealing in the 19th c., and they will find it appealing, yet…

P.S.

For those interested in a direct response by a scholar to another, perhaps less extreme and more sophisticated, charlatan of Yarvin's general milieu, see: https://thebaffler.com/latest/peterson-ganz-klein

Re: Urbit

#292

Post by dfinityap »

matildepark wrote: post #82
_rkz1 wrote: post #64

I heard of Urbit a while back and still cannot for the life of me figure out what it does or what it's for. The comments here are helping me figure out how it works, but it still leaves me with the question of what can I do with it that I can't accomplish with my good ol' OS or internet or (whatever the closest conventional analogue for Urbit is).

It's because it's a system trying to pitch itself as a product. The system being a top to bottom rewrite of the stack in such a way so as to sidestep the client/server relationship entirely. A lot of services rely upon positioning themselves as the server, as the big computer you have timeshared access to, and they monetise your usage. For things like photo storage, or basic communication, or permissioned access to y…

legendary!! thank you Matilde.. Im a longtime urbit and dfinity bug.. but wonderful explanation

Re: Urbit

#293

Post by theamk »

bronzejaguar wrote: post #101
phs318u wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> custom cryptography Just lost me. > you are only supposed to interact with it by running it and typing commands So, "the last computer you'll ever need" ... other than my phone, because the last time I wanted to type commands on a phone-sized device, was back when I was wet-dreaming over the Sharp Zaurus. Given the artificial scarcity of the IDs and the semi-mystical woo describing the proposition, my spidey-sense…

As far as I’m aware, there is no custom cryptography, and you can interact with it through a web UI now, not just through commands. Not sure where they got that idea.

Re custom crypto: random searches in github show plenty of it. I have no idea if this is an experiment or used in main code, but it is certainly present. Here is one example: [0]

> This raw interface is vaguely modeled on the haskell aos-signature package, but is written in terms of ed25519 primitives instead of general ECC and changes how linkage tags are computed...

Re command line: I was based it off the public docs. Go to "https://urbit.org", click on "install". The very end of the instructions say:

> Type (add 2 2) into the Dojo.

Maybe "install" is wrong section? I went to "docs" instead, from that "operators manual" seems most user-friendly. But it is text only as well:

> Let's join the ~dopzod/urbit-help channel. Use ctrl-x to switch from the Dojo prompt to the Chat prompt. Then:

> ~sampel-palnet:chat-cli/ ;join ~dopzod/urbit-help

The only reference to web UI I found was in "Using Bridge" section, but that seems a pre-requisite to set up the system, not part of the system itself.

If there are web UIs, you really need to document them better. Some screenshots would be great, for example.

[0] https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/7ce50ad75e23fcec0c8cb6ad...

Re: Urbit

#294

Post by buboard »

question: can we have such a network with conventional internet , if we all run a number of web services on our home routers?

Re: Urbit

#295

Post by bianothername »

kemonocode wrote: post #220

I'm still unsure what this actually brings to the table and what necessity it actually tries to solve. Bitcoin actually tries to solve the issue of trustless, decentralized money (Whether or not it actually does that is a topic in itself, but it tries), then you've got endeavors like Ethereum but for distributed computing (In fact, as far as I can tell, some of Urbit's aspects are built on top of Ethereum), Namecoin…

What it brings to the table:

- peer-to-peer networking for every node on the network

- secure networking as the default

- an identity system built in to the network layer (no more usernames and passwords)

- A functional programming language that doubles as a serialization layer (no more JSON/XML impedance mismatch)

- A simplification of the local software stack OS (- Deterministic computing

The urbit developers imagine that in the future, things like twitter or hacker news will be peer-to-peer apps rather than giant mainframe computers controlled by a single entity

Re: Urbit

#296

Post by dang »

recycle_away wrote: post #145
dang wrote: post #22

Many previous threads—good luck: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Are you aware that this project is inherently political? (not just because of the founder's odious and divisive beliefs, but because the project is modeled after them). Does this not break the guidelines?

Many HN submissions have political overlap. That doesn't make them off topic here, as long as their intellectually interesting aspect is stronger than their politically inflammatory aspect. I think that's probably fair to say about this submission.

If you want more explanation, I've written a lot about this in the past, such as at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

Re: Urbit

#297

Post by ZguideZ »

I find it completely interesting that I came across Urbit while doing a random search about alternative operating systems - and then I come back to HN and find a raging discussion going on. I tend to think that such 'coincidences' are not coincidence at all. I wonder what is going on in the world right now that is driving new interest in Urbit? I've also seen quite a few references to Industrial Society and its Future of late - What else is the online intelligence driving people towards?

Re: Urbit

#298

Post by unlinked_dll »

huevo5050 wrote: post #250
um_ya wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 commit…

Anyone else ever work on a project without a firm definition?

Anyone ever finish those projects?

Re: Urbit

#299

Post by matildepark »

cryptozeus wrote: post #272
matildepark wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-arch…

Instead of us doing the work of going through Wikipedia links and your docs, you can explain this by one simple diagram or video. Unless your goal is to be mysterious, I cannot understand how can a company go through all this trouble of creating something, building a website and can’t get the message across even to the HN community.

I agree. I think this feedback is super valuable.

Re: Urbit

#300

Post by core-questions »

blotter_paper wrote: post #276
yebyen wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original Urbit system also included a scheme of political "banners" so that you could avoid speech which was unpalatable to you, in order to allow conscious self-organizing into groups of like-mindedness, and as I recall also wrote about the idea that political speech being shared across these boundaries was necessarily violent (and as such clearly undesirable, as all violence.) edit: this system was removed, I s…

> 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…

Why do you have such a bone to pick on this? So one eccentric political commentator has a pet project - do you need to go piss in his cornflakes?

Moldbug is not a fascist (and he'd make the claim that most folks like yourself have no idea what that even means). He's a neoreactionary, which seems to be a mostly dead movement usurped by traditional Catholics of all things these days. Moldbug himself moved on from Urbit a year ago.

It's time to stop evaluating the software (well, _all_ software) based on whether you're in some kind of complete ideological harmony with its authors. It's not like you apply that same rubric to the food you eat or the clothes you wear, at least some of which came from totalitarian regimes implemented in modern reality that are far harsher than anything Moldbug's internet commentary seems to be after.

The "denouncement" crap you're after never appeases people like yourself, anyway, so how about you move along with your life and stop preventing someone interested in the actual technology from potentially joining up based on your witch hunt?

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