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Urbit: a personal cloud computer

doc.urbit.org

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Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#82
The choice of 0 for true and 1 for false is _wrong:_ On the Curry-Howard correspondence (and above) a type corresponds to a false sentence when it is not inhabited, like 0, and to a true sentence when it is. The Curry-Howard correspondence is fundamental, and so that is the. correct way to go, absent evidence in the other direction. I don't know whether Nock is a better foundation for a programming language than the Lambda Calculus, but it is at least as elegant—I'm glad someone is seeing where it leads I'm a fan of internet freedom, which often requires anonymity, and so I have my doubts about an OS that preserves exerything as a feature of the design.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#83

Seems 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.

A programming language is not a natural language. The quote refers to Hoon specifically.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#84
post #78
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

"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."

I don't know that the solution is overly complicated or that the problem is straightforward. Think of every human being as their own little Y Combinator startup -- everybody is their own little Me, Inc. Or Me, LLC. Whatever. Most people follow SOME version of "outsource everything that isn't a core competency." Like, it varies a lot from person to person -- some people go to McDonalds, some people are making their own meals from ingredients picked up at the local farmer's market, but very few people (not even most farmers) are fully self-sufficient farm-to-table for most of their meals.

So as a result of this, most people don't think of their computer in terms of it being a computer. And that's the most obviously computer computer they interact with! There's all sorts of even more abstracted away computers they deal with -- smartphones, cloud computers, etc. Most people don't care about computers, and don't in and of themselves want computers. They want to do things like "write a document," "share some family pictures with friends and relatives," "play a video game," so on and so forth. For those people, not only don't they CARE about HOW the computer is accomplishing those things, they get very upset whenever they see the wizard behind the curtain. They want all of those things abstracted away from them. From the point of the view of the most typical use case, trying to make computers easier to use by making sure the specification fits on a t-shirt seems to be rather besides the point.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#86
post #72

I 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.

From the article:

"It's definitely air travel. It's not exactly flying."

This phrase has an Alan Kay-ish quality, and was enough to pique my interest. Anyone seriously trying to execute on a project that addresses this concern seems worth following. Who knows, you might even succeed :)

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#89
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in your opinion nothing is ever too ambitious? Or is it just that no one should every be allowed to utter the words "too ambitious?"

That logic is like X "oh, so X is always zero, huh?"

Nevermind the fact that the parent post believes its possible to quantify "exactly the right level of ambition," the poster believes that the only people that should be "allowed" to comment on whether or not something is too ambitious should be people that are currently undertaking ambitious projects themselves.

This smacks of privilege. Not everyone is or can be in a position to pursue ambitious projects. To say that these people should be barred from commentary is ridiculous.

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