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Urbit: a personal cloud computer

doc.urbit.org

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Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#161

Post by perlgeek »

newuser88273 wrote: post #155

The project is based on a fundamental insincerity, which makes me suspicious. All material about Urbit makes a big point of their minimal spec, again so in the linked piece: "The spec fits on a T-shirt and gzips to 340 bytes." What do people expect when they read a thing like that? I don't know about you, bit I'd expect that I could ignore the obfuscated strangeness of their higher level languages etc and just implem…

> The project is based on a fundamental insincerity, which makes me suspicious. All material about Urbit makes a big point of their minimal spec, again so in the linked piece: "The spec fits on a T-shirt and gzips to 340 bytes."

Last I read something like this (I don't know if it was about Urbit or something else), it turned out that there was no IO included in that spec. So, useless for any real-world purpose, and as you said, insincere.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#162

Post by niels_olson »

lexcorvus wrote: post #158
VexXtreme wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They even seem to have a subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkEnlightenment/ The whole "ideology" is basically just fascism and institutional racism dressed up as something else. Despicable. I would never use any software from some Hitler-reboot type of person. Don't empower and feed such people. They are usually narcissistic megalomaniacs who think they are fit to rule and tyrannize others.

Before accusing someone of being a "Hitler-reboot type of person", perhaps you should, you know, actually read what they have to say about Hitler. For example: Since most people are neither historians nor philosophers, the fact that Hitler was on the extreme Right, and this Reaction is also on the extreme Right, raises some natural concerns. Again: the only way to face these concerns is to (a) provide a complete engi…

What if his engineering concern with Hitler is the the mode of failure?

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#163

Post by VexXtreme »

lexcorvus wrote: post #158
VexXtreme wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They even seem to have a subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkEnlightenment/ The whole "ideology" is basically just fascism and institutional racism dressed up as something else. Despicable. I would never use any software from some Hitler-reboot type of person. Don't empower and feed such people. They are usually narcissistic megalomaniacs who think they are fit to rule and tyrannize others.

Before accusing someone of being a "Hitler-reboot type of person", perhaps you should, you know, actually read what they have to say about Hitler. For example: Since most people are neither historians nor philosophers, the fact that Hitler was on the extreme Right, and this Reaction is also on the extreme Right, raises some natural concerns. Again: the only way to face these concerns is to (a) provide a complete engi…

I mean look, I understand what the philosophy is about, and I think it would never work in the real world. We've learned time and again that entrusting a lot of executive power to one person is a horrible idea - extremely exploitable and subject to corruption.

Looks almost like a product of a deranged autistic mind. I have no interest in such asinine "philosophies".

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#164

Post by guscost »

JDulin wrote: post #129

Oh, Urbit! Where to begin?... First of all, this is staggeringly brilliant. You should pay attention to it in the coming months. I am not sure if it's destined to be the future, but I sure as hell hope it is. I had the privilege of interning at Tlon, the company working on Urbit's development, this summer. It owns most of the namespace (Personal cloud computer IP addresses, essentially.) and is where the architect of…

I never would have guessed that Urbit has funding. That sounds like a very interesting job.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#166

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

mikeash wrote: post #153
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He does have really odd political views. I know HN shouldn't be about politics, but this was a really interesting read: http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/ It looks like he thinks that the benevolent-dictator-for-life model is how countries should be run. And Peter Thiel seems to agree with him.

I thought it was pretty common to think that a benevolent dictatorship was a great way to run a country. The problem is in making sure your dictator is benevolent. Nobody knows how to do that, so we try non-dictatorial systems instead.

Exactly.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#167

Post by urbit »

Estragon wrote: post #65

Is nock designed to run untrusted, potentially hostile code with guaranteed identical results on all platforms? I'm looking for a virtual machine (or NaCl-like sandbox) which does this. Edit: To anyone who downvoted me, could you please let me know why?

Yes - although actually achieving this result in practice (and efficiently) takes a lot of doing right.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#168

Post by urbit »

dasvadanya wrote: post #146
Pxtl wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can field that one. If a has A reference to B and B has a reference to C and C has a reference to A, then we have q cycle. Cycles play merry hell with garbage collectors and reference count destructors. Languages that force references to be a strict tree or DAG get cheap destruction in return - see C++ without pointers for example - I pop a local object off the stack and it's gone, along with all its children - no…

So "you really want your data model to be acyclic" means, "you want your programming language to forbid construction of cyclic data structures"? So, for example, connected graphs are not objects you can represent?

You can represent them symbolically, of course, as you do for instance in XML.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#169

Post by pyre »

gojomo wrote: post #54
pyre wrote: 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?"

No, some projects can be too ambitious, including even recklessly or dangerously ambitious. But I'd rather hear that judgement from someone with a reputation for appropriate, successful ambitiousness, and with some supporting reasoning. The grandparent comment comes from a pseudonym linked to no evaluable projects. It offers a costless, totally-generic pooh-poohing of a real project as "too ambitious". But that proje…

> But that project is actually shipping code that works

I get that this is more than just vaporware, but getting past the vaporware stage doesn't necessarily prove that something isn't too ambitious. When something is attempting to enact a paradigm shift, the final goal is adoption/usage, not just a working/functional product.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#170

Post by djur »

guscost wrote: post #164
JDulin wrote: post #129

Oh, Urbit! Where to begin?... First of all, this is staggeringly brilliant. You should pay attention to it in the coming months. I am not sure if it's destined to be the future, but I sure as hell hope it is. I had the privilege of interning at Tlon, the company working on Urbit's development, this summer. It owns most of the namespace (Personal cloud computer IP addresses, essentially.) and is where the architect of…

I never would have guessed that Urbit has funding. That sounds like a very interesting job.

Peter Thiel is known for his financial support of both neoreactionarism and various types of out-there futurism; I wouldn't be surprised if he's involved, and I'm sure he's not the only jillionaire with similar interests.
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