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Urbit: a personal cloud computer

doc.urbit.org

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Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#181

Post by rgrieselhuber »

lumpypua wrote: post #130
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…

https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/ames... There are hundreds of lines of noise. This makes perl and forth look absurdly readable. What on earth do the directory and file names mean? I dunno how familiar people on HN are but the original author of urbit is Mencius Moldbug, a neoreactionary blogger. His style of writing is absurdly obfuscated and purposely impenetrable if containing some interesti…

Is that image of associated blogs generated using some tool?

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#182

Post by yebyen »

yebyen wrote: post #180
azeirah wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you mistype q cycle? I tried googling it, but found 0 relevant results.

I have never heard of it either, but I know some hoon and it makes intuitive sense to me. If I tell you a linked list of atoms (@) is made from this tile (type): [p=@ q=*] it becomes obvious, right? [p=1 q=[p=2 ..]] [p=1 q=[p=2 q=[p=3 q=[p=4 q=~]]]] This should look like building a list from 1-4. There are no cycles, ~ is a terminator. Q is the reference to the next item in the list. This would constitute a cycle: z=…

My mistake, I think he meant to say "a cycle"

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#183

Post by newuser88273 »

perlgeek wrote: post #161
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 a…

This goes even deeper. Let's just go on and assume that Urbit's spec-bearing T-shirt includes everything you need for IO. Now consider this promise from Mr Yarvin, found in the older Urbit thread someone linked to: "And actually, if you don't like Hoon [Urbit's strange, obfuscated high level programming language] you can build your own language on this platform. So long as it compiles to Nock [purportedly documented on that T-shirt]"

So you hook up your new Nock back end to your favorite compiler, painstakingly hand-crafted to generate Nock code perfectly conforming to the T-shirt spec. You compile a few programs. You run them. Heat radiates from the CPU... and nothing else happens. You wait, patiently at first, then way beyond patience, yet nothing (except heat). Don't you feel cheated, just a little?

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#184

Post by yebyen »

marknadal wrote: post #17

I really like the foundations of this, but I like design - how could I start building a UX interface for this?

Spoiler: there is already/about to be a new interface you haven't seen yet.

Do you mean the webshell, or the templating markup language? There is something you might want to look at called "Sail"

Having trouble finding you a link, but there are some mentions about it here:

https://github.com/urbit/urbit/search?utf8=✓&q=sail

Ah..

https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/main/pub/...

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#186

Post by jacquesm »

jdpage wrote: post #126
Zillion wrote: post #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…

Aside from the zero/one thing, if I'm understanding this right, Nock is based on the SKI combinator calculus, where the combinators are S: λxyz.xz(yz) K: λxy.x I: λx.x From there, you can express anything from the lambda calculus, and vice-versa. So I think it's reasonable to say that Nock is just a machine-friendly way of expressing the lambda calculus.

The 'I' is optional, all you need is S and K. I = (SKK)

You can go simpler still: Iota.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#187

Post by ricardobeat »

lumpypua wrote: post #130
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…

https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/ames... There are hundreds of lines of noise. This makes perl and forth look absurdly readable. What on earth do the directory and file names mean? I dunno how familiar people on HN are but the original author of urbit is Mencius Moldbug, a neoreactionary blogger. His style of writing is absurdly obfuscated and purposely impenetrable if containing some interesti…

Wow, now I'm curious about the language. Looks like made-up gibberish at first sight:

    ++  lax                                           ::    lax:as:go
      |_  [her=ship dur=dore]                         ::  per client
      ++  cluy                                        ::    cluy:lax:as:go
        ^-  [p=life q=gens r=acru]                    ::  client crypto
        ?~  lew.wod.dur  !!
        ?.  =(fak.ton r.i.lew.wod.dur)  ~|([%client-wrong-fake her] !!)
        :+  p.p.q.i.lew.wod.dur
          q.q.i.lew.wod.dur
        (haul r.q.i.lew.wod.dur)
      ::

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#188

Post by perlgeek »

yebyen wrote: post #177
perlgeek wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

The IO are events, and the events come from unix (for example: signals, files and sockets). Urbit is not meant to replace Unix. "They call us, we don't call them" is the fundamental precept in play here. I assure you there is I/O in Urbit, the vanes include an HTTP server, a Hoon-interpreting shell which accepts keyboard input from a terminal, and a UDP layer for facilitating ship-to-ship communications. All of that…

Does that mean the IO events are part of the t-shirt sized spec?

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#190

Post by clarkm »

djur wrote: post #170
guscost wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Peter Thiel is known for his financial support of... neoreactionarism

Do you have examples?

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