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Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

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

#41

Post by captainmuon »

The only good thing about Urbit are the Jorge Luis Borges references.

Fun fact, the creator of Urbit, Curtis Yarvin, is a far-right blogger with some pretty crazy ideas:

http://distributedweb.care/posts/who-owns-the-stars/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

> Curtis Guy Yarvin (born 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American far-right blogger. Yarvin and his ideas are often associated with the alt-right. From 2007 to 2014, he authored a blog called "Unqualified Reservations", which argued that American democracy is a failed experiment, and that it should be replaced by monarchy or corporate governance. He is known, along with fellow neo-reactionary Nick Land, for developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind the Dark Enlightenment.

I find there are tendencies among some people in tech to bring upon what I would consider the crypto dystopia. Cryptocurrency is one such idea. Like money, but every bit of democratic control and negotiability is removed. It enshrines a kind of cutthroat capitalism with the ruthlessness of an algorithm. (When it works as indended. Currently it's mostly used as a ponzi scheme or to buy drugs, but that's a different story.)

An immutable publication record and undeniable cryptographic identity is another idea which is dystopic to me. In more benign form you find it in IPFS etc., but the culmination of this idea is certainly Urbit.

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

#43

Post by NationalPark »

_peeley wrote: post #31

I also did a deep dive on Urbit a few months back (shameless plug: https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/urbit ), and I really agree with the author for the most part. Definitely the most concerning part of Urbit, for me at least, is the obscurantism of Hoon. Much like the author says, it's totally incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read through every bit of the (lacking imo) documentation. Even a domain-specific langu…

Doesn't Yarvin still have a personal interest in the address space?

I think if they insist on not rebranding, they need to make it clearer that they disavow his political stuff, since the project sort of started as a vanity implementation of his ideas about monarchy or whatever.

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

#44

Post by etcet »

_peeley wrote: post #31

I also did a deep dive on Urbit a few months back (shameless plug: https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/urbit ), and I really agree with the author for the most part. Definitely the most concerning part of Urbit, for me at least, is the obscurantism of Hoon. Much like the author says, it's totally incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read through every bit of the (lacking imo) documentation. Even a domain-specific langu…

I feel the need to mention that Curtis Yarvin owns "a few thousand" Urbit stars [0]. If your goal is to make Urbit succeed, you'll end up making him very powerful and wealthy in the process.

[0] https://urbit.org/blog/a-founders-farewell/

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

#45

Post by juancampa »

NationalPark wrote: post #43
_peeley wrote: post #31

I also did a deep dive on Urbit a few months back (shameless plug: https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/urbit ), and I really agree with the author for the most part. Definitely the most concerning part of Urbit, for me at least, is the obscurantism of Hoon. Much like the author says, it's totally incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read through every bit of the (lacking imo) documentation. Even a domain-specific langu…

Doesn't Yarvin still have a personal interest in the address space? I think if they insist on not rebranding, they need to make it clearer that they disavow his political stuff, since the project sort of started as a vanity implementation of his ideas about monarchy or whatever.

I'd like to see a list of Galaxy owners. Shouldn't that be public info? who's routing my data? who am I giving my money to?

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

#48

Post by meowface »

captainmuon wrote: post #41

The only good thing about Urbit are the Jorge Luis Borges references. Fun fact, the creator of Urbit, Curtis Yarvin, is a far-right blogger with some pretty crazy ideas: http://distributedweb.care/posts/who-owns-the-stars/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin > Curtis Guy Yarvin (born 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American far-right blogger. Yarvin and his ideas are often associated…

>Like money, but every bit of democratic control and negotiability is removed.

My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be extremely democratic. More democratic than all previously existing currencies, even. (Whether those ideas are feasible or those goals are being achieved is another matter.)

I'm not sure where Yarvin stands on cryptocurrencies. He's indeed very anti-democracy and pro-monarchy, but that's exactly why I think the attempted connection doesn't work. I don't think it's fair or accurate to tie him or his ideology to the general concept of cryptocurrencies or their advocates.

I'd wager the vast majority of advocates probably strongly disagree with him on most things. I think they would largely consider themselves democracy maximalists, even.

Also, no need to add "fun fact"; Yarvin's involvement is by far the most well-known thing about this odd project. If you ask anyone what Urbit is, their answer is very likely either going to be "what?" or "that inscrutable thing that neo-reactionary blogger made". It usually takes up about 95%+ of any Urbit discussion anywhere online.

>An immutable publication record and undeniable cryptographic identity is another idea which is dystopic to me.

Why? Also, there are some cryptocurrencies that don't have either of those things. And for the ones that do, "cryptographic identity" just means "a public key", like a PGP key; not necessarily your real personal information.

>In more benign form you find it in IPFS etc.

Why the need for the equivocative qualifier? What's potentially unethical about the core idea of IPFS or those general categories of ideas? (Perhaps beyond the sorts of illicit activities any sort of decentralized technology, like Tor, can enable.)

I'm not a big cryptocurrency supporter and recognize ~99.9% of it is Ponzi schemes and other varying degrees of hot air - and there are certainly a lot of highly pessimistic ideas I disagree with that are common among the community (e.g. that central banks are malevolent or that the US dollar is likely to collapse in the not-too-distant future) - but it's unfortunate how these things seem to always reduce to two radical poles that are pretty much equivalently ideologically closed-minded.

(I'm certainly pulling a https://xkcd.com/774/, with zero qualms. I 100% agree with the character on the left, in this context.)

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

#49

Post by oneearedrabbit »

NationalPark wrote: post #43
_peeley wrote: post #31

I also did a deep dive on Urbit a few months back (shameless plug: https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/urbit ), and I really agree with the author for the most part. Definitely the most concerning part of Urbit, for me at least, is the obscurantism of Hoon. Much like the author says, it's totally incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read through every bit of the (lacking imo) documentation. Even a domain-specific langu…

Doesn't Yarvin still have a personal interest in the address space? I think if they insist on not rebranding, they need to make it clearer that they disavow his political stuff, since the project sort of started as a vanity implementation of his ideas about monarchy or whatever.

This partially answers your question [0]:

> Urbit started back in 2002 as Curtis Yarvin’s personal project. Curtis developed the original prototype for Urbit and, separately, wrote a blog on history and politics under the pen name ‘Mencius Moldbug’.

> In early 2019, Curtis left the Urbit project and gave all of his voting interest (both as address space and voting shares in the company) back to Tlon. He retains a non-voting, minority interest in both the address space and the company — but is not involved in the day-to-day development or operations.

> Curtis laid the foundation for Urbit by delivering its first prototype but, since 2013, it has been refined and almost entirely rewritten by a community of developers. No one working on Urbit today had anything to do with Curtis’s writing. For the most part, we couldn’t be less interested in it.

> The community of people who build Urbit have widely varied ways of thinking and looking at the world, but they all share two things: the desire to build neutral infrastructure for all people and to think from first principles about hard problems. We welcome spirited debate and disagreement as a primary tool for refining our work. Successful infrastructure, we think, serves all people — no matter their background, culture, or worldview.

[0] https://urbit.org/faq/

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

#50

Post by dwb »

mjfl wrote: post #15

Urbit is a prank that has somehow lasted for a long time. If you look at their version of machine code, Hoon or whatever its called, it's purposefully obfuscated so that, just to add two numbers together requires I think 4 different instructions. I did my OS class final project on it 6 years ago...

You could choose to not read it as a prank, then it might be more interesting. I don't doubt there is an amount of purposeful obfuscation in the naming at least, and there clearly is a desire to be different. But looking beyond the surface, there is a coherent system there that I think deserves being judged as such, if you're going to judge it at all.
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