For those that haven’t checked it out the ideas behind urbit are really interesting, it’s the first attempt I’ve seen to get us out of the local maximum of centralized web services we’re trapped in where success is among the potential outcomes (most attempts are destined to fail because they don’t tackle the underlying issues from first principles). I think it could really work and I’m convinced urbit or something li…
I've looked into it and it sounds like a ton of pretentious crap. How is this any better than IPFS, I2P, tor onion services, or Gnunet? It's nice that it helped introduce you to linux though. You make a few good points about usability, but I don't think the internet was designed to be a distributed network from the get-go. https://secushare.org/broken-internet
App School Live
21–30 of 53 posts
Re: App School Live
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
It didn’t help introduce me to Linux - I used Linux for 15yrs before I heard about urbit. I was disappointed that Linux would never be able to solve the incentive problems that lead to centralized companies handling that complexity. Urbit’s approach actually could. The reasons those other attempts are basically DOA outside of a tiny technical niche is they don’t go deep enough into the stack, they don’t tackle the is…
GNUnet is a pretty comprehensive solution that does address these things, albeit it is a work in progress. Their solution to the identity problem is a pretty ingenious petname system called GNS. Their solution to incentive issues is a cryptographic micropayment system called GNU Taler. I think you can pretty easily solve the problems "up the stack" if you make the systems transport-layer agnostic like GNUnet/IPFS has…
I’ll look at GNUnet - I don’t know enough about it to comment.
GPG is largely a failure imo, I think Moxie is right about this - complexity is high (even when people’s life depends on it they won’t use it) and the core issue is that it’s distinct from the system itself.
Urbit nodes cannot be separated from the ID - you can’t run it without an ID which is a pretty clean way to solve a lot of this stuff out of the box (also adds a lot of cool features/guarantees you can make about collaborating with users over the network, ability for pseudonyms to accrue reputation, easy ability to moderate, and make spam not economically possible, etc.
I’ve become convinced you can’t solve these things separately in parts on the Linux stack, maybe someone will - but there’s been 30yrs of failure so I’m not optimistic.
Re: App School Live
#23> We’re running a cohort class of App School to teach you how to terraform Mars Why is the Urbit project completely unable to produce anything approachable, set any practical goals, or explain anything in terms of existing approaches? It seems like an extreme level of hubris to think that Urbit is so far beyond the current level of technology that everything must be started from scratch. I've bounced off Urbit becaus…
Have you dug into the docs or watched any of the Hoon videos, or launched a comet?
Re: App School Live
#24For those that haven’t checked it out the ideas behind urbit are really interesting, it’s the first attempt I’ve seen to get us out of the local maximum of centralized web services we’re trapped in where success is among the potential outcomes (most attempts are destined to fail because they don’t tackle the underlying issues from first principles). I think it could really work and I’m convinced urbit or something li…
It's in no way interesting. It's a bunch of old, bad ideas duct taped together and renamed with nonsense words to both obfuscate what they're doing and establish an in-group language just as cults do.
Binary trees as a fundamental data structure is not a bad idea, and it's also entirely clarifying for programming purposes. Don't you agree OOP has huge drawbacks?
Re: App School Live
#25Just in case you're wondering whether Urbit is worth looking into, let me save you the trouble: no. Just, no. Urbit is a cult. All of its artifacts are deliberately obfuscated in order to instill a sense of community into those who climb the learning curve. It has no actual technical merit whatsoever. Here is a clue: > We’re running a cohort class of App School to teach you how to terraform Mars. No, you are not goin…
Have you been documenting your findings?
A sceptical followers perspective on Urbit would be interesting to read and probably something worth archiving.
Re: App School Live
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
there's a difference between cults and culture, both tend to generate their own language
That's true, but I stand by my characterization of Urbit as a cult rather than a culture because Urbit's terminology is intentionally misleading . Urbit is deliberately obfuscated down to its very core. And the reason for this is that it is designed to produce an in-group that is separated from the out-group. The founder of Urbit, Curtus Yarvin, is an extreme hard-core right-wing liberatarian. Go read up about him: h…
A shibboleth (a secret language or way of speaking used for identification) isn't unique to cults.
Typically the test for a cult is:
1. Secret knowledge
2. Enforced isolation
3. Some kind of leader/living authority
Eg, Scientology has their secret books, they will attack you and sue you if you share that secret and they have church elders.
Re: App School Live
#27Just in case you're wondering whether Urbit is worth looking into, let me save you the trouble: no. Just, no. Urbit is a cult. All of its artifacts are deliberately obfuscated in order to instill a sense of community into those who climb the learning curve. It has no actual technical merit whatsoever. Here is a clue: > We’re running a cohort class of App School to teach you how to terraform Mars. No, you are not goin…
Have you been documenting your findings? A sceptical followers perspective on Urbit would be interesting to read and probably something worth archiving.
If he thought Martian computing was actually about terraforming the literal planet mars he hasn’t been following it in any depth.
My take is he has a personal history with the founder that’s influencing his judgement unfairly (it’s come up before in previous urbit threads iirc).
Often this kind of thing can actually be a signal because it’ll cause a smart person to dismiss something for bad reasons rather than on the merits.
There are genuine reasons to be skeptical of success - building something like this from the ground up is insanely hard, there are lots of ways it could fail, but the criticisms he lists here are weak imo.
Re: App School Live
#28> We’re running a cohort class of App School to teach you how to terraform Mars Why is the Urbit project completely unable to produce anything approachable, set any practical goals, or explain anything in terms of existing approaches? It seems like an extreme level of hubris to think that Urbit is so far beyond the current level of technology that everything must be started from scratch. I've bounced off Urbit becaus…
Have you dug into the docs or watched any of the Hoon videos, or launched a comet?
I think you need NASA clearance to launch any comets. Possibly the FAA too if you launch from ground.
Re: App School Live
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a pun on a longstanding joke of Urbit as Martian technology; it has nothing to do with the planet Mars.
OK, but that doesn't actually refute my central point, that Urbit is a cult. One of the hallmarks of cults is that they invent a private language that helps identify the in-group. Obviously I am not part of the in-group. Scientology is famous for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_terminology
Can you imagine how unbearable object-oriented programming would be if we couldn't use the words "object", "scope", "function", "class", and so on? None of these terms actually reflect the bits in the silicon; they're abstractions over the bits for the sake of mental modeling. Urbit's language is necessary for exactly this reason; it's technical, not cultic.
Re: App School Live
#30Just in case you're wondering whether Urbit is worth looking into, let me save you the trouble: no. Just, no. Urbit is a cult. All of its artifacts are deliberately obfuscated in order to instill a sense of community into those who climb the learning curve. It has no actual technical merit whatsoever. Here is a clue: > We’re running a cohort class of App School to teach you how to terraform Mars. No, you are not goin…
Thanks for your input. I was looking for a comment from someone who had tried it out and reached a verdict. To people who disagree and think it’s useful: I’m willing to listen - in fact I came here looking for your comments. Please post a link to a useful service of app that Urbit provides now, that’s what many of us are waiting to see.
P2P collaborative CMS for blogs that allows publishing from Urbit to the web: https://blog.tirrel.io/blog/this-page-is-hosted-on-urbit