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Urbit: a personal cloud computer

doc.urbit.org

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Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#271

Post by gojomo »

pyre wrote: post #169
gojomo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You seem to be using "too ambitious" as a synonym for "unlikely to succeed". But that's something different.

"Too ambitious" implies someone shouldn't even be trying for this goal. That's a corrosive attitude, and I'd like it kept-in-check by a requirement that sources of such negativity show their reasoning/experience/work.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#272

Post by loqi »

VexXtreme wrote: post #156
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.

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.

Would you use software from some anti-gay-marriage person? Do these types of policies sound at all pathological to you upon further reflection?

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#273

Post by loqi »

Quequau wrote: post #263
yebyen wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that democracy is not actually immune to authority, and it's really a reflection of this, rather than a window into the designs of one crazy person? (hi Curtis) Maybe every system that comes along and says "impossible to be subverted by centralized governments" in reality is just saying "come and try to stop me, Federales". Do you think that is that what we all should be doing instead?

Actually, I have. I understand that there is complex tension between fundamental human rights (like freedom of expression, freedom of association, & privacy) and realities of the intrusion & abridgment of these rights carried out by various state security agencies and corporations. I agree that any project which claims "impossible to be subverted by centralized governments" is just saying "come and try to stop me, Fe…

> 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"

Speaking as a semi-informed bystander who's been following Urbit for a while now, it certainly seems like one of the problems it's trying to solve is the typical notion of "user data" as something controlled by third parties. Eg [1]:

> Where is Joe's financial data in mint.com? In, well, mint.com. Suppose Joe wants to move his financial data to taxbrain.com? Suppose Joe decides he doesn't like taxbrain.com, and wants to go back to mint.com? With all his data perfectly intact? [...] Imagine the restfulness of 2020 Joe when he finds that he can have just one computer in the sky, and he is the one who controls all its data and all of its code.

[1]: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2011/10/persona...

That said, the current implementation has been explicitly called out (in past incarnations of the docs, at least) as not-remotely-trustworthy with sensitive private data.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#274

Post by tromp »

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…

My Binary Lambda Calculus is specified in a few paragraphs in http://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/hint.html and includes basic IO. It blc-zips to only 29 bytes (size of self-interpreter).

The 25-lines-of-obfuscated-C interpreter is on the very shirt that I wear on my (clickable) homepage picture.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#275

Post by loqi »

urbit wrote: post #178
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…

IANAM, but I thought really if there was one great lesson of 20th-century mathematics, it's that nothing (ie, no system of axioms) is fundamental and superior to all others. For instance, Church-Turing equivalence does not tell you that Church's model of computing is more fundamental than Turing's or vice versa. If you look at where lambda comes from, it comes out of this same project of metamathematics that originat…

It's been sorta mentioned elsewhere on the thread, but there is another (IMO simpler) mathematical intuition behind 0:1 :: false:true that doesn't involve any lambda fundamentalism. It's the algebraic analogy disjunction:conjunction :: addition:multiplication :: union:intersection :: ... which also turns up pretty often in computing.

For instance, if you've got anything like regular expressions, then you've got something with a structure where the "unit" (trivial match) is an identity for sequencing, and the "zero" (failed match) is an identity for disjunction and a zero for sequencing. It's not exactly a formal argument for preferring booleans to loobeans, but a failed regex match sure feels like a "false" to me.

I don't doubt that it's not worth changing at this point, but don't throw the semiring baby out with the lambda bathwater.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#276

Post by javaexpert101 »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #144
lumpypua wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Yarvin's weird political views aren't really part of Urbit.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#277

Post by javaexpert101 »

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…

Or you could consider that they are freaking isomorphic to each other and therefore neither is better than each other

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#278

Post by javaexpert101 »

gfodor wrote: post #19
pxndx wrote: post #3

This 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."

And it also doesn't matter one bit, because they are `%.y` and `%.n` for all practical purposes.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#279

Post by javaexpert101 »

jevinskie wrote: post #111
k2enemy wrote: post #66

I found this video helpful in understanding the project: http://vimeo.com/75312418

128-bit submarine vs 32-bit destroyer reminded me of IPv6 vs IPv4.

Its fairly distinct. A destroyer is like owning a bunch of submarines, in a way. This is the one point where the model kind of breaks this layer, though.

Basically, it can't run out of address space because of the abundance of subs.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#280

Post by javaexpert101 »

yebyen wrote: post #199
perlgeek wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The keyboard HID drivers are not. The terminal (dill), HTTP server (eyre), socket UDP layer (ames), and shell (batz) are really expressed using the language in the spec. The filesystem (clay) has a reflection in your unix filesystem, but it's also really clay. In a very real way, even if they are not fully expressed by the Nock spec, they are built using the primitives that are entirely laid out there in Nock 5K. Hoo…

Strictly speaking, this isn't true. All of these components have code in the C/unix layer.
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