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Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

wejn.org

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Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#5

Post by voldacar »

I don't know much at all about Urbit, but this doesn't seem like it was written in good faith tbh.

The mention of security holes seems to be the only real serious critique. Hopefully some urbit people could address those, since claiming to be a secure personal VM and just exposing your data on disk to the cloud provider is crazy.

Other than that, the author seems to be mostly making fun of urbit for being weird and alien, which is strange because its goal basically seems to be weird and alien. This is actually quite excellent. Computing needs fewer javascript frameworks and more truly weird and alien shit, with a healthy dose of NIH.

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#7

Post by wejn »

voldacar wrote: post #5

I don't know much at all about Urbit, but this doesn't seem like it was written in good faith tbh. The mention of security holes seems to be the only real serious critique. Hopefully some urbit people could address those, since claiming to be a secure personal VM and just exposing your data on disk to the cloud provider is crazy. Other than that, the author seems to be mostly making fun of urbit for being weird and a…

And there I was, thinking that the first four paragraphs pretty much summed up the frame of mind with which it was written.

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#8

Post by jlehman »

codezero wrote: post #3

Speaking of Urbit, I had/have a relatively old "ship" I got long long ago, what can I even do with it? How do I get it up and running? I think they transitioned to Ethereum, but what does that mean? lol, it's so confusing!

Just reach out to support@urbit.org if you want to get this figured out. They're very helpful.

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#9

Post by sillysaurusx »

voldacar wrote: post #5

I don't know much at all about Urbit, but this doesn't seem like it was written in good faith tbh. The mention of security holes seems to be the only real serious critique. Hopefully some urbit people could address those, since claiming to be a secure personal VM and just exposing your data on disk to the cloud provider is crazy. Other than that, the author seems to be mostly making fun of urbit for being weird and a…

It may not have been. The author of Urbit is Moldbug, who is... controversial.

On the other hand, I just read the article, and none of it seems particularly bad faith. I vaguely remember something about Urbit using planets and galaxies as some kind of ownership metaphor, so I expected the article to go on at length about how strange this seems. But it seems to be focusing on the technical aspects of Urbit, and is pretty clinically detached.

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