71–80 of 173 posts
I wrote for it an "unix-like shell simulator"[2] (see [3] for example session log) and earned honorary title "early adopter". :D
It was not really usable, mostly fantasy console running in another fantasy console, but I learned coroutines while working on it.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120503001002/http://luaos.net/...
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...
I had Curtis pitch urbit to me in the very early days and I can assure you that he did not intend it to be a prank. He was deadly serious about it. I think his true motives were much darker. I think he wanted to start a cult following the model of L. Ron Hubbard. And I think he succeeded.
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Interesting. I thought that I was tearing down the fact they took the brilliant new idea, and bastardized it beyond recognition, and in multiple ways. I loved the promise of Urbit, and was disappointed by the execution.
You mean "after spending just a few hours poking around it"? It's a big, ambitious project that's been worked on now for nearly two decades. It seems more likely that you're disappointed by your understanding of the execution, which can be nothing but extremely limited.
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This is also the most compelling aspect of it to me as well. Domains being essentially free allows for too much easy spamming of internet users. Raising the cost of an identity online really helps solve a lot of the bad actor problems.
I mean if that's the only value. Facebook, but only for people who pay $100/yr, would be an easy way to create a high signal-noise social network and unfortunately it isn't.
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>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…
> My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be extremely democratic. More democratic than all previously existing currencies, even. What I mean is, imagine 20 people come together in a little society. They use something like Bitcoin as their currency, and one of them has far more wealth than the others combined. They cannot decide by majority vote how to use the wealth democratically. If the one doesn'…
>It just comes down to this: Certain uses of technology, especially from people with a libertarian or anarcho-capitalist agenda, give me the creeps.
I strongly agree with the former and largely agree with the latter. At the same time, I think there are enough interesting aspects of some cryptocurrency technology that it'd be a mistake to write off the whole field. The different cryptocurrencies have different communities; they're not all anarcho-capitalist.
(And, again, I don't think they line up with Yarvin's weird anti-democratic hierarchy and caste ideas at all. I think they're the polar opposite. I think him, his project, and his ideology are completely separate from cryptocurrencies and most other decentralized projects.)
>What I mean is, imagine 20 people come together in a little society. They use something like Bitcoin as their currency, and one of them has far more wealth than the others combined. They cannot decide by majority vote how to use the wealth democratically.
Isn't this the case for just about anything, though? If there's a society of 20 people and one person holds the majority of the wealth in the form of cash or diamonds in a vault in their house, and they refuse to share any of it, what's the difference? Your options are exactly the same whether it's cash or gems or a cryptocurrency: you can threaten or assault them and force them to hand over the cash/gems/private keys; you can expel them; you can try to impose sanctions and penalties; you can just grumble about it and continue trying to ask nicely, etc.
> And usually the way you'd protect the minority would be by law or constitution.
Right. Ideally in this society of 20, all 20 people would be protected by the same laws so that you couldn't just extort someone through violence. Or perhaps the law instates taxes or something, in which case the person would have the option of either paying the taxes or no longer living there. It's the same whether it's cash or Bitcoin or seashells.
>Because crypto is not "credit" in a book, but a proven mathematical algorithm, there is no room for negotiation, discussion, redistribution.
But this isn't how things currently work pretty much anywhere. Credit is a big part of the economy, but it's not the entirety of the economy. The IRS can't remotely wave a magic wand and subtract numbers from your virtual money balance and add it to theirs. They can tell you to pay them and have law enforcement arrest you if you refuse - just like what might happen if in the society of 20 a wealthy person refuses to pay taxes.
If any government or powerful entity had the ability to arbitrarily manipulate anyone's digital money balances at will, don't you think that'd be even more dangerous for democracy than just about any other system? Thankfully, the world doesn't work this way, and hopefully never will.
>I wonder if you could make a cryptocurrency from the opposite principle - everything is up to negotiation, and you could have crypto councils or parliaments which can reallocate resources as neccessary?
There are many Ethereum-based organizations and apps that work exactly in this manner. The currency (ether) operates like cash as well as computational "fuel". The protocol supports smart contracts that allows cash to be automatically redistributed, transferred, donated, destroyed, etc. based on the logic of the smart contract.
If this society of 20 entered into a smart contract that caused wealth to be equally split among the rest once it reaches a certain percentage, this would serve the purpose you desire better than anything you can do with standard cash. Or you could enter a smart contract that relies on voting instead of automation; e.g. some redistribution occurs if 2/3 of the smart contract signees vote for it. Disputes, adjudication, negotiation, and pretty much all other form of social coordination are possible with smart contracts.
That's one example of how certain cryptocurrencies can help create more democratic and more fair systems, and are already doing so. (It doesn't necessarily have to be Ethereum; many other cryptocurrencies also use smart contracts. Ethereum is just the most-used smart contract protocol, at the moment.)
In my opinion, most of the value and interest of cryptocurrencies lies within this new smart contract-based way of managing coordination and addressing certain coordination problems in ways that were much less feasible in the past. The "money" part is just a tiny piece of it.
Ethereum projects you might want to look into:
(Politically, I've found that, on average, the Bitcoin community tends more towards center-libertarianism or right-libertarianism, and the Ethereum community tends more towards left-libertarianism / a fusion of social democracy and libertarianism. Obviously these are crude, sweeping generalizations, though.)
>People are getting into hot water due to stupid stuff they said 10 years ago on Twitter. Imagine how bad this will be when everything is stored immutably in a blockchain or journal
I think this is kind of orthogonal to cryptocurrencies. But, personally, I also think this is kind of looking at it the wrong way. The war is already lost, technologically. It's like saying "imagine how bad things will be if every teenager had a device that could let them watch porn at any time", or "imagine if people could determine your interests based on what websites you visit or social media actions you take". The technology is already here and isn't going away. It's now a policy and sociological problem rather than a technological one.
If you post something online, there's always a risk it's going to be retained somewhere, and that risk will continue to increase, regardless of IPFS, cryptography, cryptocurrencies, decentralization, peer-to-peer networks, etc. It's a matter of being aware of that risk, and of trying to build a society that's less judgmental and more charitable, as well as perhaps associating with people and organizations that one aligns with and being okay with cutting ties to others.
Of course I and many others agree that a world like Richelieu's would be bad, but the answer isn't to go after technology that adds additional availability and integrity guarantees; especially when the technology probably won't be involved with any of the big platforms (since they'll want to retain their centralization).
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>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…
> My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be extremely democratic. Do they? They don't seem to be succeeding very well. Bitcoin mining is certainly very concentrated. And a lot the nominal cryptowhatever projects are effectively more centralized than that. Which of them do you see as democratic?
>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 also discussed it a bit in my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27270693
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...
> Urbit is a prank I had Curtis pitch urbit to me in the very early days and I can assure you that he did not intend it to be a prank. He was deadly serious about it. I think his true motives were much darker. I think he wanted to start a cult following the model of L. Ron Hubbard. And I think he succeeded.
As someone who has never met Curtis but has been initiated into both the cult of urbit and the cult of lisp, I've sometimes wondered how familiar he was the works of the latter, as you can often see some familiar things when you squint, but it's covered up with strange materials, quite possibly of alien origins.
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What were the political views of the people who wrote my current OS? My current browser? The channels on my chip that the electrons flow? The drive of the server that stores this comment? Can you truly be woke if a bigot designed your RAM?
For a second, don't distinguish between political and other views. The ideals of the developers certainly shape the product. - Apple: Elegant, powerful, not much user choice but generally well-thought-out. And every bit is designed such that Apple keeps control of the platform. - Unix hackers: Powerful command line interface, do one thing and do it well, KISS, adherence to tradtion (manpages etc.) - Moxie Marlinspike…
For example the creators of the first rockets wanted to go to the moon, that was their goal - which eventually happened. But not until well after it was co-opted to create ICBM’s.
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Of course he's controversial, he thinks differently and he wrote his thoughts down. How dare he. Honestly in this age of this Marxism takeover, his thoughts aren't that crazy.
The guy appears to be sympathetic to white nationalist views, harbors racist ideas, and advocates for authoritarianism. That's a little far to write off as "thinks differently". Given that your account is "throwaway", I'm guessing you sense that there is something to be ashamed of or at least lost in social capital by defending him publicly?
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Have you never lost a private key? I definitely lost the private key to my original PGP key. And I wouldn't say "nobody can ban you" - quite the opposite, in fact: with Urbit every major network node gets to make its own choice about banning, and the system encourages that. And the obvious end state is for a setup like Mastodon (or, frankly, Twitter blocks) where nodes collaborate on identifying spammers, griefers, a…
> And I wouldn't say "nobody can ban you" [...] And the obvious end state is for a setup like Mastodon It is indeed quite similar to mastodon in the sense that other instances can ban you. The difference is that in mastodon your identity is usually located on an instance, and if that instance bans you, you lose your identity. In Urbit every identity has its own instance so your personal contact list will still be abl…
Second, if you choose to keep your keys on a third-party service, then that third-party service can ban you.