121–130 of 173 posts
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...
The closest I've come across are: https://solidproject.org/ https://polypoly.coop/en-de/polypod
...but these are purely data storage, they expect the processing to happen on other machines. Some powerful scalable server polling everyone's "data pod" to do what it does. Which is much more realistic and efficient than Urbit I suppose but it raises concerns about what the third party software running on somebody else's server's doing with your data.
Running VMs for everyone sounds inefficient indeed. Urbit's opting to provide (what I assume to be) a lightweight OS/runtime for the apps that are accessing your data to run on is reasonable though it's still very much a single process for each single user at the least. Rolling your own OS/runtime allows you to make optimizations for this specific use-case but I don't know how far that'd take you. Maybe you can offload the processing to the client machine when it's available? If you're going to mostly be deploying distributed apps anyways...sounds like an engineering challenge though. Apps written for your platform will be facing interesting requirements (restraining most of it to bits that need to interact with the data stored in the "pod" helps but I suppose that's detail).
But maybe the inefficiency's the toll we'll have to pay to get away from the centralization problem. I personally find the idea of running thousands of VMs used to deploy P2P apps in a data center painful. But maybe that's what we'll have to resort to until we have devices in everyone's pocket that we can reliably deploy P2P apps on.
Besides the distributed chat/forum and social media, I bet you can replace the entire Google suite with this. After all, your Google account is in a sense, a way to access a VM in the cloud where you can run an assortment of apps on. How hard would it be to set up an Urbit clone using software existing today anyways? Top of my head, I can think WASM, WASI, libP2P, IPFS coming in handy.
I have a friend who is into Urbit. It seems like a social club at this point.
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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?
Appears to be sympathetic to? Are there specific examples you take issue with, or is this from hearsay? This account is for political or controversial opinions and is not related to this discussion, no.
"So we see that, at present, in the real world of 2007, there is no coherent moral or practical reason to shun white nationalism."
"I am just suggesting that there are many bad reasons not to be a white nationalist."
Then he proceeds to explain that the white nationalist view of the world is silly because it has two sides and doesn't confirm to his five sided race war view. This post is a seriously bad take. Language and words have power and this is the kind that could reach people on the fringe and bring them into the fold. If you have read this thing, does it not give you pause?
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Why would you think he spent a lot of effort? The second sentence literally says that he did not.
I haven't seen Urbit advocates contest the things he's saying (and he's not the only one that's said them). They'll say "it's a work in progress" or "that's not what were trying to accomplish" or other deflections. A cogent retort would advance the conversation, but it won't happen because what he says is largely correct.
It is unfortunate because we need more weird projects out there, and less articles on javascript framework updates. Given the state of the web and social media today, I think we would do well to encourage projects like this and others like them. Or we can just all download MS Teams, live with FB and uBlock Origin, and say it's all good.
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First off, I'm talking about the case where Mastodon instances collectively ban an instance , not a user. It's pretty easy to set up your own Mastodon instance, and in turn, norms and mechanisms have arisen for coordinated banning of instances with unwanted behavior. Second, if you choose to keep your keys on a third-party service, then that third-party service can ban you.
This is a big part of the point of urbit: there is no difference between an instance and a user . If a star or galaxy wants to refuse to route to a planet, they can. A planet can then look for another star or galaxy which will route packets for them. Also, if a planet ends up on another planet's personal banlist, that's it: the identities are durable and immutable, no amount of moving around will evade the ban. The a…
And if it is different, I don't know that a system that is carefully designed to solve the "problems" of someone who generally should be banned for good reason is what most of is want.
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Yes, exactly this. I've tried so many times to engage with Urbit but at every turn things seem intentionally inscrutable. I have a star that I've wanted to sell several times, but each time I give up after several hours of unsuccessfully trying to understand the bridge/ethereum documentation. It ends up seeming more like an art project than a new technology.
log into bridge w/metamask or whatever you use -> click on your star's name -> click 'id' in the menu that appears -> click 'transfer point' in the id menu -> input the ethereum address you want to send the star to and click 'generate and sign transaction'. did you really spend several hours trying to figure that out lmao
Reminds me of this essay: http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html
There's a lot of survivorship bias in that kind of thinking. They called Galileo mad, but they also called simultaneous five dimensional time cube guy mad.
- Carl Sagan
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...
Isn't Urbit the definition of a Pyramid scam?
My manager at a previous job a few years ago told me about Urbit, I found the website, and I was extremely confused to what it actually was . Re-reading it now, I'm still a little confused.