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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

#131

Post by fvdessen »

geofft wrote: post #126
samatman wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Still not following how this is different from Mastodon. Some users run their own instance (= planet), which cannot be "banned" by ordinary Mastodon means; you can only refuse to peer with it. Some users have accounts on someone else's instance, which can be banned by the admin of the instance. If you start tooting, I dunno, reactionary pro-slavery nonsense that takes asymmetrically more effort to refute than to clai…

To make a real life analogy,

In mastodon, people all live in big collectivist housings centered around a project, If you get kicked out you become homeless, or you need to start your own collective, where you will be initially alone

In urbit, people all live in individual houses, where they can invite friends over. People can ban you from their house, but you can't get kicked out of your own house

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

#132

Post by wpietri »

meowface wrote: post #76
wpietri wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I think the point I was trying to convey is best expressed in the paragraph and not the isolated sentence: >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?…

Skimming that long comment, I still don't see any evidence for your claim. My best guess is you mean a different word than "democratic".

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

#133

Post by vzcx »

hderms wrote: post #97
deegles wrote: post #83

For those that are curious to try Urbit, you can boot a free identity called a comet in just a few minutes: https://urbit.org/getting-started/ Once you have it running, go to http://localhost:80 to use the web interface (Landscape). The Urbit Community group is the most active. Just hit "Join Group" the main page and enter "~bitbet-bolbel/urbit-community"

What do people commonly discuss on it?

On that group, they mostly discuss urbit.

There are a lot of other interest groups with varying levels of activity: cat pictures, art, cryptocurrency, tech, emacs, politics, finance, ham radio, weightlifting, cars, tea... All the different kinds of stuff that people discuss on the web.

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

#134

Post by vzcx »

Nzen wrote: post #109
tombert wrote: post #39

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.

I'm of the impression that it is an internet reimplemented on top of the internet that we are using right now. So, you download a vm emulator, like uxn [0]. This able to use a specific protocol to reach out and communicate with other vm emulators of its kind. But, like the tls namespace, my vm doesn't just reach out to macwrite.com/index.html . It has to go through my switch, through a series of switches of my and ot…

You are somewhat wrong about how urbit works.

Stars and galaxies don't really work as routers. They are more like DNS servers: they provide the peer discovery mechanism, translating from urbit IDs to public hosts and ports. Most communication is peer-to-peer. Software updates still flow down the tree from the root, but as I understand, they are looking to make that more flexible, though this poses some technical challenges.

When you have an urbit planet, it's yours, and no star or galaxy can take it from you. There isn't a "lease" arrangement, it's bona-fide cryptographic ownership.

Comets are currently served by the galaxies and can communicate with any other VMs that are willing to talk to comets, and at this stage in the network, that's basically all of them.

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

#136

Post by jolux »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #116
jolux wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know Urbit itself was an attempt to realize the author's neofeudalist/monarchist political ideas through technology. I don't think he succeeded but I have to say I'm not entirely clear on why the people who maintain it and use it are still interested in doing so, because that association seems pretty hard to shake.

As far as I know, the author's ultimate goal was libertarianism, but believed democracy was sub-optimal for achieving it. I suspect be saw in Urbit a non-political technological means of realizing his ultimate end, which was libertarianism, and not dictatorship. On the subject of his views, my opinion is that the only way to really secure liberty is to inform the whole public of its value, and have those ideas of lib…

> As far as I know, the author's ultimate goal was libertarianism, but believed democracy was sub-optimal for achieving it.

That's a euphemistic way to say he thought his views should be forced upon other people rather than having to convince them of their correctness in the public sphere.

> I suspect be saw in Urbit a non-political technological means of realizing his ultimate end, which was libertarianism, and not dictatorship.

You should read more about his views. I can't in good conscience recommend his writing because it's riddled with factual errors, but he definitely went far beyond libertarianism. He sees democracy as a failure and believes that absolute rule is more stable and prosperous and even more free than liberal democracy, and he's also unquestionably a racist.

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

#137

Post by lisper »

dwb wrote: post #118
lisper wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curtis definitely was aware of Lisp. I pointed out to him that he seemed to be reinventing Lisp, but very badly. He actually acknowledged this, or at least acknowledged that this was a possibility. He specifically said that this was part of the Grand Plan (my description, not his): making Urbit radically different from anything that had gone before was an explicit design goal. That is one of the reasons I came to the…

He strikes me as enough of a self-important dork to say (and mean) something like this, and what I’ve seen of his politics are extremely bad to me, but let’s not lose perspective: we’re talking about an open-source VM here. There’s no lock-in. If I got into it and then found out that it was worse than I’m seeing right now then I would shrug my shoulders and move on.

> There’s no lock-in.

There is very rarely any externally visible lock-in. That's not how cults work. Cults work by building a community of people who perceive non-members as the enemy. Urbit builds that community by enticing geeks with the promise of something new and interesting and then keeps them in by leveraging the sunk-cost fallacy (people don't like to admit that all the effort they put into learning Hoon was a waste of time) and all the derision that comes from the outside from people who "don't get it".

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

#138

Post by arthyn »

cropcirclbureau wrote: post #122

Anyone know other similar projects? (personal VMs in the cloud for everyone. Bonus points if it supports for deployment of dApps) 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 r…

No need to clone just come build on Urbit :)

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

#139

Post by arthyn »

deegles wrote: post #83

For those that are curious to try Urbit, you can boot a free identity called a comet in just a few minutes: https://urbit.org/getting-started/ Once you have it running, go to http://localhost:80 to use the web interface (Landscape). The Urbit Community group is the most active. Just hit "Join Group" the main page and enter "~bitbet-bolbel/urbit-community"

It'll get even easier on Thursday, check out https://github.com/arthyn/port for a preview.

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

#140

Post by tyui44 »

k2enemy wrote: post #127
tyui44 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The other reply was correct. Transferring a star is simple. I wanted to figure out how to sell it. I suppose that is also my fault of not understanding ethereum/nft terminology, not just Urbit.

The sales process consists of you transferring ownership to an address the buyer provides you after they pay you; it's not programmatic. The fastest/simplest way to sell is probably to list your star on opensea.io, though there's also a marketplace group on urbit.
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