So, is it back? Launched again?
Not as such, http://urbit.org stands. If people still want to explore unofficially, github is their oyster.
Urbit: a personal cloud computer
71–80 of 281 posts
Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#72I can't say we were expecting this, but it's nice to see that people are still interested in what we're working on. Thanks!
What we're brewing in the lab has diverged quite a bit from what's publicly available. Even these docs are quite out of date.
If you're interested in keeping up with what we're doing: either sign up at http://urbit.org or send me an email, galen at tlon.io.
Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
But can you please explain why you couldn't use existing math (language and compiler) on the bottom layers (1 and 2) before replacing them by your own? That would help me understand the level of your ambition :)
Excellent question! One, as we know from Church-Turing equivalence, lambda and infinitely many other models of computing have the same expressive power. That doesn't mean they have the same practical utility, though. Lambda in its Lisp incarnation is actually a rather poor substrate for something like a Lisp machine, I think, because it doesn't layer very well. You can define quite a simple Lisp model, but when you w…
I love this comment, whether it is serious or satire.
Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#74Seems fun, because I didn't understand everything while skimming the website.
>We use so many of these ASCII glyphs that we like to be able to read them out loud. A language is meant to be said.
That's a very weird idea there. A painting is a form of language, but can a painting be said?
Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#75I definitely was thinking about something like this, but not exactly this. I mean, yeah, the only way to save ourselves from damnation is to finally announce "enough of 70's!" and rewrite everything from scratch, so the idea is dear to me, but that actual implementation of the idea is… maybe "weird" is the right word. I'll continue reading, but I already have a feeling that after I'll get myself completely familiar with it, I will hope it will not succeed.
Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
But can you please explain why you couldn't use existing math (language and compiler) on the bottom layers (1 and 2) before replacing them by your own? That would help me understand the level of your ambition :)
Excellent question! One, as we know from Church-Turing equivalence, lambda and infinitely many other models of computing have the same expressive power. That doesn't mean they have the same practical utility, though. Lambda in its Lisp incarnation is actually a rather poor substrate for something like a Lisp machine, I think, because it doesn't layer very well. You can define quite a simple Lisp model, but when you w…
Can you, for example, spell out what you mean by "you really want your data model to be acyclic and not require GC"? What is cyclic about the "data model" in e.g. Go or Lua?
Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#77Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438320 I've been watching this since it's started. It has some magical atmosphere around it and you never now whether it's serious or not; whether it's a real technical project or some kind of artistic performance. I think I have a destroyer somewhere.
Lots of negativity in the previous discussion. Did the page used to be phrased in a combative way or something?
Earlier versions of the site featured a larger quantity of Moldbug's baroque, trollish prose style. Plus there was an extended argument about language design, due to the author being present in the thread.
Frankly, I'm disappointed. It used to be clearly the personal work of a lunatic. Now it feels more like a quirky open source project.
Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt very much that the average person wants to…fly their own airplane You don't think the average person would want to fly their own airplane if it were as easy as driving a car?
What's so easy about driving a car? Over 30,000 people die per year in the United States due to automobile accidents. And that's after requiring every driver get a license, and teaching basic driving skills as part of our high school system. Driving a car isn't all that easy, and we're terrible at it. There's a reason that Google is inventing self-driving cars, not personal airplanes. And the amount of possible simpl…
I suggest the car / airplane analogy was already strained before we got here.
Driving a car is easy, as evinced by the large numbers of people that are capable of it. Whether driving a car successfully (ie. without dying) is easy is obviously a matter for debate. With 0.000015% failing in this severe way, it might be argued that driving a car and dying is not particularly common, and could (no disrespect to the people involved) be thought of as a rounding error.
We have no evidence that Google isn't trying to invent self-driving or personal airplanes.
Try suddenly stopping your car on the autobahn, and see how tranquil the 'just sitting there' experience is.
Anyway, perhaps we are all missing the underlying point - an overly complicated solution (to an otherwise straightforward problem) has been the received wisdom for decades, and a re-think from fundamentals is almost definitely worth the effort.
Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#79Seems fun, because I didn't understand everything while skimming the website. >We use so many of these ASCII glyphs that we like to be able to read them out loud. A language is meant to be said. That's a very weird idea there. A painting is a form of language, but can a painting be said?
> A painting is a form of language, but can a painting be said?
I suppose if you use a very broad definition of language, that might be true, but in the sense of natural languages, paintings are not generally a form of language. They may be a form of symbolic expression, but that doesn't make them a language.
Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#80This is either a very elaborate joke or the future of computing.
They had me going in the Nock spec until "We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced "yes") is true, and 1 ("no") is false. Why? It's fresh, it's different, it's new. And it's annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it's also just intuitively right."
I absolutely understand your reaction, but, believe me or not, I remember myself wondering as a child why it is opposite. That time it seemed to me completely intuitive and natural that 1 should be "false" and 0 — "true".
However, years later I was introduced to boolean algebra, where 1 should be true and 0 — false, if we want multiplication to be "and" and addition "or". And it feels right, because intersection of two sets is (intuitively) multiplication, and joining — addition.
So, yeah, it doesn't seem like a good idea to me as well after all these years.