Honestly it is quite obvious that the writer of the article has issues with fringe politics and people of differing opinion not only that but they don’t even explain Urbit but instead waste the readers time on yelling “muh nathzees” look I disagree and dislike some of his ideas and don’t care about the rest of them and he has only said a couple good things from what I know but being dishonest about a tech project he isn’t involved on anymore is pathetic so perhaps the author should stop being dishonest and giving people he doesn’t like free publicity?
Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit
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Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit
#12I don't think I'm alone in not understanding what the fuck urbit even is supposed to be. I suspect Yarvin is lost so far up his own ass he's lost the ability to clearly communicate. Whatever urbit is meant to be, it's doubtlessly dead on arrival due to virtually nobody knowing what it's meant to be.
it's a secure identity system where instead of having to log into a bunch of different shit and put your data in a bunch of different places and keep it updated to do your day-to-day life stuff you can do everything using publish subscribe and hold all your data in one place. Suppose you use a lot of banks (and/or your friends' personal sites), imagine being able to update your address just once and automatically push that information to all banks you're subbed to and only the banks you're subbed to and have the push still go through "immediately" (on startup) if one bank is experiencing downtime. Could be interesting. This is part of the "personal server" idea...everyone should easily be able to create a personal server that's a pure function of its event history and that is logically consistent with the network (clients, other servers, routing tables, blah blah). You can make a personal server without having to worry about downtime because your server's event history will always be consistent with the network's.
Then there's a mesh routing protocol built over current infrastructure so that any identity can figure out how to contact another and have the routing be correct.
Limited address space, spammers can just be blocked.
That's the best I can do off the top of my head. Criticize the execution all you want but I think the idea is really interesting.
Edit: imagine dealing with the fookin IRS using all this cool stuff. I can only dream
Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit
#13So is Urbit a piece of performance art, or is it software that does a useful thing?
Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit
#14I don't think I'm alone in not understanding what the fuck urbit even is supposed to be. I suspect Yarvin is lost so far up his own ass he's lost the ability to clearly communicate. Whatever urbit is meant to be, it's doubtlessly dead on arrival due to virtually nobody knowing what it's meant to be.
Yep! This strikes extremely true for me as well. I've been casually following urbit for 3 years now. And by "casually following" I mean "every now any then, they have some crypto meetup in San Francisco with free drinks, a tech talk, and stuff and sometimes I accidentally end up there". And of the half dozen or so meetups that I've stumbled upon, for the free drinks and to meet people for fun, what I know about Urbit…
I don't think any amount of sobriety is going to help anyone better understand Urbit, in fact I think the opposite is true. You'd have to be shit-faced drunk for Urbit to seem like a good idea.
Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit
#15I don't think I'm alone in not understanding what the fuck urbit even is supposed to be. I suspect Yarvin is lost so far up his own ass he's lost the ability to clearly communicate. Whatever urbit is meant to be, it's doubtlessly dead on arrival due to virtually nobody knowing what it's meant to be.
The closest comparison I can think of is keybase. It's pretty similar when you cut out all the esoteric crap. Basically a chatroom, and other things, based on a distributed identity.
Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit
#16As far as I can tell from this (this is the first I've heard of Urbit and Yarvin), Urbit essentially is a form of social network that that tries to create a self-governing, "ideal state" in cyberspace. The author of the article credibly argues that the project is governed by a political theory ("neocameralism"), explained as "right-libertarianism taken to its logical conclusion". The network is described as based on a set of principles that considerably differs from common democratic principles ("one person one vote") and instead posits a hierarchical structure much reminiscent of a feudal system with tiered voting rights and privileges based on (in-system) virtual property. The anti-modern gist is underlined by Yarvin quoting lead Nazi theorists (at least once) in his writings.
I'm sure I've missed something (but, I deliberately skipped the technology as that just seems like an outgrowth of the ideology), it is what I've gleaned from a quick readthrough, but my main point here is not so much what Urbit is and wants to accomplish in detail (which seems "a bit" over the top tbh) as highlighting the category of systems that Urbit belongs to: by the users self-governed cyber-networks with internal assets that need to be distributed and ruled over in some way.
I expect this to be an increasing area of study moving forwards - at least I think it should be. What are other examples of this? (not counting corporate owned systems)
Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit
#17A lot of people always complain about how hard it is to figure out what Urbit is, but I'm pretty sure the obfuscation is part of the plan.
I've been following Urbit for a while now (maybe 6-7 years?), and over that time, it has gotten clearer about its goals and motives, I believe because initially they wanted to speak to a very small group of weirdos who saw what was on it and were intrigued to learn more. Starting from a small clique of like-minded people.
Now it's possible to understand what the idea is (some sort of VM running an esoteric set of languages to build an operating system that, among other things serves as a 'digital identity' of sorts). This is the point in time when they want people such as HN readers to understand it, so they make it so it can be understood (more or less). I also think the esotericism of the programming languages is also to prevent anyone from having a go, and to limit people who can program in these languages to just those who are heavily invested in them.
But as others have pointed out (including the author of the post), the idea is deeply terrible, and implements a sort of feudal network with kings, lords and peasants (galaxies, stars, planets), because Yarvin is a neo-reactionary who believes life was better when we had monarchies in charge of everything.
He does this at the same time as wanting a clean-slate programming environment, because computers these days are very complicated and buggy or something.
All of this speaks to a desire for things to be simple. Simple politics, simple computers. Democracy and computing these days are not simple, but that's because _humans_ are not simple, and if you want humans to have an equal voice and standing, then that's probably going to result in not-simple systems, in politics as in computing.
We should resist it, for the same reason we should resist anyone trying to agitate for feudal revolution.
Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit
#18https://urbit.org/blog/a-founders-farewell/
> I do regret making 0 true and 1 false.
For the love of God, why would anyone do that ?!?
Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit
#19> Dog-whistles have been identified in some of his writing about Urbit and its design, including his leaning on Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt for questions around Urbit’s governance.
Hmm, I might be mistaken, but Carl Schmitt seems to have made a valid critique of liberalism (just as Marx made a valid critique of capitalism). I've heard that he's being used as one of the essential thinkers in the legal teaching ? (Also, the most anti-liberal "SJWs" seem to apply his theories in practice...)
https://www.newstatesman.com/2019/04/terrifying-rehabilitati...
Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit
#20> We might ask then, is Gab a platform for free speech, or is it a platform for hate speech? Who’s speech does Gab prioritize? It quickly becomes clear that the concept of “free speech” that Gab deploys is not quite the same as what others see it to mean.
Gab's example seems to undermine the author's previous arguments, as Gab is now running on Mastodon, whose founders profess values fundamentally opposed to Gab.
> Obviously, exit in a digital context is logistically simpler than in a physical one, but it is still not easy. People critical of Twitter’s policies still use Twitter, not because they are hypocritical but because it’s a lot of effort to migrate to a new platform and re-establish connections from the former.
The migration part is because Twitter is a centralized network, which has been ever more draconian with its APIs. Federated and decentralized networks shouldn't have logistic issues with exiting. Again, see Mastodon.