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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

#151

Post by lisper »

vzcx wrote: post #149
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…

There's being aware of Lisp and then there's having learned Lisp's lessons. Urbit is interesting to me but it is also interesting for me to imagine what it would be like if, perhaps, Curtis had attended MIT instead of Berkeley. Where you see nefarious intentions I see someone pursuing their own aesthetics, something that is very admirable and that I think more systems engineers should do. It's obviously not your aest…

If Urbit were only a bad reinvention of whatever it's a bad reinvention of I would be totally unconcerned. The world is full of bad reinventions of all kinds of things. I've built a few myself. But Curtis is more than just a bad reinventor of things. He is also Mencius Moldbug, a prolific pseudo-intellectual influencer of the alt-right. His politics worry me much more than his coding style. And because of my personal dealings with him, I am not sanguine about his ability or that of his followers to separate the two.

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

#152

Post by lisper »

dwb wrote: post #147
lisper wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scientology started off as a fairly innocuous-looking self-help book and look where it is now. These things take time. By the time it is obvious that a nascent cult is fully fledged it is generally too late to sound the alarm.

Sure, and I'm not saying it's impossible. But cults based on some deep self-improvement and/or transcendence plus charismatic leadership, I can broadly understand why they developed. Based on an open-source software project, seems much less likely – imho certainly not enough to start openly worrying about it at this stage.

Are you aware that Curtis Yarvin is also Mencius Moldbug?

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

#153

Post by anon_d »

sneak wrote: post #100
anon_d wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should encourage people to express dissenting views. The idea that we should do anything in our power to avoid good outcomes for someone that expressed ideas that we don't agree with is worse than hateful and evil: it's stupid and self-destructive.

I do not think it is stupid nor self destructive to avoid enriching people who believe certain humans are more suited to being slaves than others, no. There is diversity of ideas and dissenting views, and he's free to blog about them, but I am also free to go work on other projects/communities that don't enrich landowners who I find morally repugnant. Not wishing to contribute work to directly financially enrich raci…

I do not think it is stupid nor self destructive to avoid enriching people who believe that Taiwan is a country, no. There is diversity of ideas and dissenting views, and he's free to blog about them, but I am also free to go work on other projects/communities that don't enrich landowners who I find morally repugnant.

Not wishing to contribute work to directly financially enrich Taiwanese nationalists is very different from thinking that they should be silenced.

----

I do not think it is stupid nor self destructive to avoid enriching people who use God's name in vain, no. There is diversity of ideas and dissenting views, and he's free to blog about them, but I am also free to go work on other projects/communities that don't enrich landowners who I find morally repugnant.

Not wishing to contribute work to directly financially enrich heretics is very different from thinking that they should be silenced.

----

I spent a years traveling and living in different cultures. "Racism" is basically ubiquitous everywhere in the world. Everywhere else, people (even liberal, educated people in big cities) are openly prejudiced. I found this shocking at first, and eventually came to terms with it. This huge stigma about talking about race literally only exists in one culture, and for this one tiny sliver of the history of that culture.

You are in a cult. This is a religion. You are condemning heresy.

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

#154

Post by meowface »

wpietri wrote: post #148
meowface wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends what layer you're considering and what properties you want. At the base layer, the core idea is that the community opts into the protocol and ideally has some say into future protocol changes. In terms of network consensus, democracy indeed isn't universal in terms of network users, since in PoW the huge mining pools have disproportionate votes, and in PoS the huge staking pools and whales have disproporti…

Again, I think you must be using "democratic" to mean something entirely different than I am. I just reread the original Bitcoin paper and there's nothing in there about democracy. From the beginning of the use of computers, computational capacity has been about access to capital and that has not changed. If you're claiming that Satoshi's goal was something democratic, either you're using the word differently or you'…

Individualism is a feature, too, but I think he really cared about trying to be more democratic than the alternatives. The core precept and summary of the whole paper is the phrase he used: "one-CPU-one-vote". (Not as good as "one-human-one-vote", but the idea is that that's the closest he could get to it while preventing Sybil attacks.)

I believe he thought that even if powerful entities bought a lot of CPUs, the end users of the network would still have a lot of consensus power distributed between themselves. As far as I can tell, it seems unclear if he foresaw just how huge of an advantage GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs would have and that no one else would be mining anymore. Perhaps he was fully aware and knew centralization problems would occur, but it's difficult to be sure.

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

#155

Post by dwb »

lisper wrote: post #152
dwb wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and I'm not saying it's impossible. But cults based on some deep self-improvement and/or transcendence plus charismatic leadership, I can broadly understand why they developed. Based on an open-source software project, seems much less likely – imho certainly not enough to start openly worrying about it at this stage.

Are you aware that Curtis Yarvin is also Mencius Moldbug?

Yes, I even tried to read some of his blog posts under that name before I came across urbit. Didn’t bother finishing any because they were interminable and objectionable in about equal measure. I’m aware of the posited connection between his views (including the whole feudal thing) and urbit; I guess I just don’t see the need to be afraid of a shadowy presence behind the project, given what it is.

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

#156

Post by wpietri »

meowface wrote: post #154
wpietri wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, I think you must be using "democratic" to mean something entirely different than I am. I just reread the original Bitcoin paper and there's nothing in there about democracy. From the beginning of the use of computers, computational capacity has been about access to capital and that has not changed. If you're claiming that Satoshi's goal was something democratic, either you're using the word differently or you'…

Individualism is a feature, too, but I think he really cared about trying to be more democratic than the alternatives. The core precept and summary of the whole paper is the phrase he used: "one-CPU-one-vote". (Not as good as "one-human-one-vote", but the idea is that that's the closest he could get to it while preventing Sybil attacks.) I believe he thought that even if powerful entities bought a lot of CPUs, the en…

CPUs are not people. CPUs voting for blocks of transactions is in no way people having political power over the system. Even at the time, systems with hundreds of thousands of CPUs were operating, so even if voting for transactions were something akin to deciding on how to organize society, which it isn't, letting IBM outvote whole states is not democracy, it's oligarchy.

Again, I don't think we have even vaguely similar definitions of what democracies are.

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

#157

Post by lisper »

dwb wrote: post #155
lisper wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware that Curtis Yarvin is also Mencius Moldbug?

Yes, I even tried to read some of his blog posts under that name before I came across urbit. Didn’t bother finishing any because they were interminable and objectionable in about equal measure. I’m aware of the posited connection between his views (including the whole feudal thing) and urbit; I guess I just don’t see the need to be afraid of a shadowy presence behind the project, given what it is.

The mere fact that Urbit is still a thing, that it has not yet collapsed under the weight of its own intentionally induced baggage, is worrisome to me. Something is keeping that project alive, and it's not technical merit. I don't see a lot of viable options other than some kind of fanaticism.

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

#158

Post by dunnof »

anon_d wrote: post #153
sneak wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not think it is stupid nor self destructive to avoid enriching people who believe certain humans are more suited to being slaves than others, no. There is diversity of ideas and dissenting views, and he's free to blog about them, but I am also free to go work on other projects/communities that don't enrich landowners who I find morally repugnant. Not wishing to contribute work to directly financially enrich raci…

I do not think it is stupid nor self destructive to avoid enriching people who believe that Taiwan is a country, no. There is diversity of ideas and dissenting views, and he's free to blog about them, but I am also free to go work on other projects/communities that don't enrich landowners who I find morally repugnant. Not wishing to contribute work to directly financially enrich Taiwanese nationalists is very differe…

I don't see how replacing "racist" by "Taiwanese nationalist", "liberal", or any other qualifier counter the point being made : you don't have to work enrich people whose ideas you do not support if you have a choice in the matter, period.

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

#159

Post by dunnof »

creamytaco wrote: post #102
sneak wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not think it is stupid nor self destructive to avoid enriching people who believe certain humans are more suited to being slaves than others, no. There is diversity of ideas and dissenting views, and he's free to blog about them, but I am also free to go work on other projects/communities that don't enrich landowners who I find morally repugnant. Not wishing to contribute work to directly financially enrich raci…

Wikipedia is pretty biased and far from an arbiter of truth, especially when it comes to summarizing someone's life, beliefs and personality. A lot of what Yarvin has written is prescient and extremely incisive. Just because his views and models of the world do not align with the current cultural zeitgeist does not mean that he should be silenced or branded a racist. I get the feeling that most of the people that cri…

He is not silenced, he can write all he wants on his blog and his ideas are available to the public. He is labelled a racist because he defends racist views, this is what he actively promotes. It might be against the zeitgeist, but a lot of people "against he zeitgeist" are not labelled racist just for being so.

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

#160

Post by geofft »

samatman wrote: post #150
_d7dt wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is correct, there are plenty of Mastodon instances with a very low number of users (1-5 users).

I already spelled out the difference, and even highlighted it in the hope that people would notice, but I don't mind doing it one more time: in urbit, there is no difference between an instance and a user. If everyone in Mastodon ran an instance with exactly one user, then sure, it would be possible to ban a user, but not strip the database of all their posts and take their identity away, because both of those things…

First off, you're wrong about Urbit - Urbit explicitly does not have the address space to give each human their own planet, believing that it's a political ideal that not all humans deserve the same rights. (It might be true that each human currently using Urbit does have their own planet, but the stated long-term goal of Urbit is for this not to be the case.)

But even if you were right about Urbit, it wouldn't change my claim. I understand your claim. I am not trying to claim that Mastodon is just like Urbit. My point is that sometimes, in Mastodon, there is no difference between an instance and a user, just like you claim about Urbit. Yes, sometimes, there is, but Mastodon's norms had to figure out how to handle the case where there is no difference, because that case exists. And yes, when people collectively refuse to peer with an instance, the user(s) on that instance are not stripped of their posts and do not have their identity taken away, because those things are under the Mastodon instance's control... but it would be pretty misleading to say "If you set up your own Mastodon, you can't get banned."

And there's no reason to expect that Urbit, if it grows to the level of popularity as Mastodon, won't develop analogous norms.

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