Urbit: a personal cloud computer

If the spec expands does the guy wearing the t-shirt have to eat lots of pizza?

I agree that any project which claims "impossible to be subverted by centralized governments" is just saying "come and try to stop me, Federales". Moreover, I feel that such claims are extremely difficult to substantiate (and so not particularly credible) and for the most part made by groups I'm not really motivated to associate myself with.

Speaking in a very general sense (having kept up with the news & goings on related to technology, privacy, corporate activities, and state security activities for the past few decades); it's my opinion that this tension is not only not in an ethically defensible or sustainable state, it's not in the state that most of the people in the western capitalist nations believe & expect it is.

So I find assertions like: "Despite messages between ships being encrypted, the founders state that they've purposely designed the network to make it as easy as possible for governments to regulate and control. It's not entirely clear why this is supposed to be a good thing." to be similarly worthy of skepticism and disconcerting as the "impossible to be subverted by centralized governments" claims. My feeling is that this statement translates fairly directly into "all user data is available to any corporate entity or state security agency for any purpose" and that this includes purposes like backchannel monetization through data aggregation and industrial scale warrantless surveillance & data collection.

It's pretty obvious to me that you are pretty invested in this project and I've only spent a few hours perusing the various docs, repositories, and blogs. So I'm fairly hesitant to make any sweeping statements or claims of certainty. So, with those qualifications in mind, my conclusion after my perusal is that this architectural design choice is unlikely to be a reflection of some sort of pragmatic policy coming from a non-ideological position of social responsibility that's striving to minimize any intrusion & abridgment of rights while still allowing for the realistic needs of businesses and state security agencies.

Frankly spoken, I personally find a number of the abstract concepts and architectural design choices in Urbit project to be fascinating and compelling. I've spent far too much time dredging around the information that is currently publicly available... Time I honestly can't afford. So it's really disappointing to me to find that there is a pervasive toxicity which is deeply intertwined with the project. My conclusion is that this toxicity makes the project broadly unusable (seriously) & and possibly even unfixable.

Elsewhere in this thread I saw someone claim that there were big things coming in a few months. If this is accurate I look forward to it. Perhaps there will be changes and new developments which will demonstrate my current assessment inaccurate. Honestly, that would make me pretty happy... but from what I've seen so far, I suspect that's really, really unlikely.

I don't claim to know everything about how Urbit works. I do think that superficially, Urbit is more able to respond positively to a demand from a state that sounds like "we think your network is being used to recruit radicals and a subversive element that threatens the nation is using it to communicate operational details and plan their attacks. can you shut it down" than say, BitTorrent...

I mean, it's a centralized network where the leader is able to push out updates to the software, and in a future version you may not even need to ask for them to be downloaded or approve them before they replace your running kernel. This will be considered a feature by anyone who comes from at least a managed Windows domain.

So, it has the potential to carry out a "poisoned updates" type attack, like Apple could do to an iPhone. And the more that I think about it the more ways I can imagine that ~zod can fuck you up. It's true I am interested in this project, more than passively, I am a kind of stakeholder who owns a large part of the namespace. The only thing that keeps my ownership safe is a line of text in the git repository under ames.hoon where my public key is stored, generated by an app called :pope and interpreted by a crypto suite that I cannot audit, simply for lack of time and understanding.

So, if I've led you down the wrong path or led you to believe something about the code that simply isn't true, I apologize! I feel I have to admit this is possible, I may have grave misunderstandings or mischaracterizations about the current state of the software, and to add to it, things are also always still changing now. It's in active development, pre-alpha, not yet sure who the customers are. YMMV, take with a grain of salt.

Personally, I'd rather see the use of some of the new made up neutral pronouns than thinking swapping male to female pronouns is a viable long-term solution.

  ++  add
    |=  [a=@ b=@]
    ^-  @
    ?:  =(0 a)  b
    $(a (dec a), b +(b))

   attribute add {
     function(left-operand: atom, right-operand: atom)
     produce atom
     if equals(0, left-operand) {
      right-operand
     } else {
        recurse(left-operand (decrement left-operand)), 
                right-operand (increment right-operand))
     }
   }

Using "a" and "b" accurately expresses the simplicity of the algorithm, and nothing could be easier to read. OLV in "add" says: there is nothing interesting here. "left-operand" and "right-operand" says: there is some semantic meaning here, which you have to trouble your brain to understand. But actually, it's just pointless wordiness - in this case.

As for the syntax, you no doubt can read my wordy example better. But a programming language is a professional tool, not a toy. Anything new demands a genuine investment to learn - this investment has to be paid off by actual productivity.

And people are, as I've said, much better at learning random associations than they think. Again, we've taught this syntax to everyone from Haskell jocks to JS cruft-jockeys to innocent CS 101 victims. The biggest problem - and it is a problem - is not that it it is hard, but that it seems hard.