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Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

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Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#111

Post by meheleventyone »

oneearedrabbit wrote: post #49
NationalPark wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Yarvin still have a personal interest in the address space? I think if they insist on not rebranding, they need to make it clearer that they disavow his political stuff, since the project sort of started as a vanity implementation of his ideas about monarchy or whatever.

This partially answers your question [0]: > Urbit started back in 2002 as Curtis Yarvin’s personal project. Curtis developed the original prototype for Urbit and, separately, wrote a blog on history and politics under the pen name ‘Mencius Moldbug’. > In early 2019, Curtis left the Urbit project and gave all of his voting interest (both as address space and voting shares in the company) back to Tlon. He retains a non…

Wow, what a lame answer it looks like they’re being disingenuous when they describe it as a “blog on history and politics”. The whole new-feudalist/dork enlightenment stuff was also an underpinning to Urbit in the beginning as well. The whole hierarchy of spaces for example.

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#112

Post by dcow »

Fellshard wrote: post #59
_peeley wrote: post #31

I also did a deep dive on Urbit a few months back (shameless plug: https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/urbit ), and I really agree with the author for the most part. Definitely the most concerning part of Urbit, for me at least, is the obscurantism of Hoon. Much like the author says, it's totally incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read through every bit of the (lacking imo) documentation. Even a domain-specific langu…

The obscurantism is both part of what makes it intriguing, and what makes it utterly useless. It's intentionally anti-intuitive at many turns - for every clever name, there's dozens of arbitrary ones. 'Casks' with 'Marks' for a descriptive wrapper around a value? Clever! Doors for generators with cores and batteries? A disaster! It ends up feeling like a very compact /Forth/ fused with a Lisp. There's some ideas at i…

I don't think it's exclusively to create a high barrier (although I wouldn't be surprised if that was part of it). The argument was that in order to prevent the system from experiencing some of the same failure modes as existing internet systems, you had to deliberately fight the brain's desire to draw analogies between Urbit components and existing internet systems. The belief was that this was fundamentally a linguistic problem and could at some level be attacked by inventing an entirely new vocabulary. In other words, you can't just rebuild the stack with the same components used in the old broken stack or you'd just end up with a new broken stack. Not sure how correct this hypothesis is, but it's what I recall.

The Urbit team/project has since walked back from this stance somewhat (or at least progressed Urbit also in the more accessible direction), probably due to criticism.

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#113

Post by meheleventyone »

bruiseralmighty wrote: post #21
fvdessen wrote: post #11

While the Urbit tech stack is clearly insane (some say it’s on purpose), The urbit identity layer is interesting and useful. You basically buy your username as a NFT, and that username is bound to signing keys, ip address and ethereum wallet. This makes it quite practical as an identity for chat / social network. This identity is on the eth blockchain and thus nobody can steal it / ban you, which is a unique value pr…

This is also the most compelling aspect of it to me as well. Domains being essentially free allows for too much easy spamming of internet users. Raising the cost of an identity online really helps solve a lot of the bad actor problems.

It also means you lock out the global poor.

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#114

Post by kragen »

robmccoll wrote: post #64
throwaway292893 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course he's controversial, he thinks differently and he wrote his thoughts down. How dare he. Honestly in this age of this Marxism takeover, his thoughts aren't that crazy.

The guy appears to be sympathetic to white nationalist views, harbors racist ideas, and advocates for authoritarianism. That's a little far to write off as "thinks differently". Given that your account is "throwaway", I'm guessing you sense that there is something to be ashamed of or at least lost in social capital by defending him publicly?

Curtis is Jewish; he's not sympathetic to white nationalist views. The other two accusations are true, but from my point of view they're also true (to a slightly smaller extent) of nearly everyone from the US, so it seems a bit like pointless flaming.

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#115

Post by OldGoodNewBad »

I find it odd that all the comments complaining about Yarvin’s non-leftist beliefs are still up here. We’ve had plenty of threads about things whose creators were raging Marxists and so on, if anybody complains that’s the end of your account here. His politics aren’t n Urbit so if you leftoids can keep your bile down it’d be greatly appreciated.

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#116

Post by CryptoPunk »

jolux wrote: post #90
_peeley wrote: post #31

I also did a deep dive on Urbit a few months back (shameless plug: https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/urbit ), and I really agree with the author for the most part. Definitely the most concerning part of Urbit, for me at least, is the obscurantism of Hoon. Much like the author says, it's totally incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read through every bit of the (lacking imo) documentation. Even a domain-specific langu…

As far as I know Urbit itself was an attempt to realize the author's neofeudalist/monarchist political ideas through technology. I don't think he succeeded but I have to say I'm not entirely clear on why the people who maintain it and use it are still interested in doing so, because that association seems pretty hard to shake.

As far as I know, the author's ultimate goal was libertarianism, but believed democracy was sub-optimal for achieving it. I suspect be saw in Urbit a non-political technological means of realizing his ultimate end, which was libertarianism, and not dictatorship.

On the subject of his views, my opinion is that the only way to really secure liberty is to inform the whole public of its value, and have those ideas of liberty receive a democratic sanction.

That leads to a genuinely libertarian society, that if fragmented, would lead to the emergence of new libertarian micro-states, instead of collections of serfs, who without their master, immediately revert to tyranny.

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#117

Post by [deleted] »

wejn wrote: post #16
jlehman wrote: post #13

Reminds me of this essay: http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html

Interesting. I thought that I was tearing down the fact they took the brilliant new idea, and bastardized it beyond recognition, and in multiple ways. I loved the promise of Urbit, and was disappointed by the execution.

[deleted]

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#118

Post by dwb »

lisper wrote: post #84
vzcx wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want the world to become Tlon, don't you need an Orbis Tertius? As someone who has never met Curtis but has been initiated into both the cult of urbit and the cult of lisp, I've sometimes wondered how familiar he was the works of the latter, as you can often see some familiar things when you squint, but it's covered up with strange materials, quite possibly of alien origins.

Curtis definitely was aware of Lisp. I pointed out to him that he seemed to be reinventing Lisp, but very badly. He actually acknowledged this, or at least acknowledged that this was a possibility. He specifically said that this was part of the Grand Plan (my description, not his): making Urbit radically different from anything that had gone before was an explicit design goal. That is one of the reasons I came to the…

He strikes me as enough of a self-important dork to say (and mean) something like this, and what I’ve seen of his politics are extremely bad to me, but let’s not lose perspective: we’re talking about an open-source VM here. There’s no lock-in. If I got into it and then found out that it was worse than I’m seeing right now then I would shrug my shoulders and move on.

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#119

Post by wejn »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #95
wejn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Just a couple of hours. On the other hand... is walltime the only criterion worth considering?

Well, would you consider someone who'd only spent a couple of hours of wall time on Unix to be an expert whose opinion was worthy of serious consideration? Not that I'm flogging Urbit -- or not flogging it, for that matter. I looked at it a while back and decided that I didn't understand it, and wouldn't understand it without spending far more time than I had available. However, that just renders my opinion on the to…

Hmm, that's an interesting point.

I would encourage them [= someone who only spent a couple of hours on Unix] to dig further... broader. Mostly by demonstrating that there are real world problems for which Unix is better suited than competition.

IMO in Urbit -- there was not much more to explore after the few hours. Short of digging even further into the guts of it... and that was very unappealing.

Other people here in the comments mentioned that there's no killer app for Urbit. So my intuition was probably correct [to stop digging].

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#120

Post by smuemd »

golemotron wrote: post #92
api wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of survivorship bias in that kind of thinking. They called Galileo mad, but they also called simultaneous five dimensional time cube guy mad.

His name is Gene Ray.. His name is Gene Ray.. His name is Gene Ray..

Awesome: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube
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