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Urbit is now in open developer beta
151–160 of 163 posts
Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#152I dunno. This thing is weird, but they put a lot of work into it, and you can download something that runs. What they want to build, from the user perspective, seems to be a federated social network. Like Diaspora, only with some of the problems solved. The two big user-level problems they claim to solve are 1) spam, and 2) being tied to a service provider. The solution to 1) is that you have to buy an identity from…
New terminology makes it easier to have new thoughts, even about old things, but especially about new things.
I like the weird.
Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think if people read Curtis's writing under Mencius Moldbug, nobody would touch urbit with a ten foot pole. He believes that white people are genetically endowed with a higher IQ than black people. Why are people giving him money? This is why we can't have nice things.
Do you use transistors? Then stop, because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley
I agreed with you at first but reading through Urbit's docs and the vox article linked in thread clarified the relationship between the system design and the author's political ideology.
Many of the design choices did not make sense to me until I understood that the author basically leads a thought current around a return to aristocracy.
With that, there does seem to be some reason to avoid the software simply because it may be designed to produce a particular political outcome.
https://urbit.org/posts/address-space/ http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11434098/alt-right-explained
Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#154Just a reminder, you can learn more about the folks behind Urbit, their objections to democracy, women's suffrage, and general agenda at http://thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis
> objections to democracy I'm afraid that doesn't say much. Are they striving for more centralized power (a dictator holding the power over everybody) or less centralized power (no one having the right to decide over other people)?
They did name the network leader Zod
Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#155Just a reminder, you can learn more about the folks behind Urbit, their objections to democracy, women's suffrage, and general agenda at http://thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis
So if you were around in the 50s, would you have argued against using transistors because Bill Shockley was a racist and eugenicist?
Transistors aren't a technology for eugenics. Urbit is a technology for neocameralism.
Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Discounting Yarvin feeling superior, or others perceiving that, I am in favor of the 'start from scratch' here. Worst-case scenario it fails, and only drags a few bleeding edgers with it. If it succeeds, we have a whole new way to proceed without necessarily abandoning the old. Just at the hardware level, we are forever, it seems, stuck in the von Neumann architecture with some recent hops to vector processing on GPU…
>After having read a little Wittgenstein and the late Umberto Eco's works on semiotics Do you have any suggestions on good starting points? I found Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to be a rough introduction to Wittgenstein. I'm also curious what Eco you'd recommend; I've only read his novels and essays.
Wittgenstein only really published two works: The Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations, in which he completely revises his approach. Read the latter.
Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Common Lisp conflates all types with Boolean Yes, I know. > (Of course, this situation quite good). I think that's debatable. Javascript, for example, does something similar but it takes all empty containers as false, along with zero and a few other things. (Not that I am necessarily holding up Javascript as an example of good language design. My point here is just that there is not a consensus on how (or whether -…
CL's conflation also means that can use NIL to indicate the absence of an object (in the usual situation in which NIL isn't a valid value). We can test for this absence glibly, using a conditional. This is at least as useful as the benefits in list recursion. The Javascript design means that we cannot test for the absence of an integer in this manner, because a negative result could mean that a zero is present. It co…
Sure, but if you want to make that argument then you have to deal with the fact that there is no false value which indicates the "absence of an object" in the case where the value being tested is a list. Having multiple false values really can be a feature. (They just shouldn't be integers!)
Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're making a good point overall. If a trait is heritable then it will vary by populations. People should understand the consequences of the position they're arguing. However, why do you believe that IQ is not heritable? It's hard to believe there is no genetic component that is heritable. Humans evolved over time from other species, and in the process of evolving into Homo sapiens sapiens , their intellige…
I understand your point, and I think I understand that of the original parent comment. I don't have much to add, except that believing intelligence is not heritable strikes me as a well thought-out and, in my opinion, largely constructive decision. Up until this very moment, I have always been interested in the reality of this idea; that is, what is true and what is false. Just now it has occurred to me that there is…
I would argue that it is dangerous to hold an idea just because it 'feels' right.
I'm on the not heritable side because I think that's what the science will show, given my understanding of how complex systems work.
It would be immoral not to understand intelligence heritability if it were true -- how could you help those who were disadvantaged if you were not aware of it?
Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand your point, and I think I understand that of the original parent comment. I don't have much to add, except that believing intelligence is not heritable strikes me as a well thought-out and, in my opinion, largely constructive decision. Up until this very moment, I have always been interested in the reality of this idea; that is, what is true and what is false. Just now it has occurred to me that there is…
I would argue that it is dangerous to hold an idea just because it 'feels' right. I'm on the not heritable side because I think that's what the science will show, given my understanding of how complex systems work. It would be immoral not to understand intelligence heritability if it were true -- how could you help those who were disadvantaged if you were not aware of it?
You make a good point. If we were to understand how intelligence works and if it were to be heritable, it may be possible to ensure that everyone had some baseline of intelligence. That may be beneficial.
Maybe I've lived in the United States for too long, but it seems inevitable to me that we'll end up with a tiered system. Perhaps there will be some baseline intelligence level everyone is entitled to, but the very wealthy will surely be able to pay for even more intelligence. Likewise, if intelligence was this well understood, a measure would be applied to everyone. Perhaps it would be like your credit rating and this could easily be used to discriminate in a wide variety of ways.
IMHO, some people like to box others off and say: these are lesser than me. Should science support this opinion, this will only encourage the behavior. To me, this is the basis of the argument we're seeing on this post. Some see intelligence as heritable and, inevitably, somehow favoring one or more ethnic backgrounds.
In terms of the "just feels right", I think that the science on this issue is less than clear. Some things point towards heritability, others do not. The idea that some ethnic backgrounds may engender more intelligence than others is to me an idea so poisonous that I simply reject it on moral grounds.
Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Referring to return codes, which are completely arbitrary in nature, as being intuitive and thus, 0 as true being intuitive, feels like a complete logic breakdown. Does the opposite approach make sense though? Generally, something being "true" means a program can happily move along. Something being "false" generally requires more introspection on why exactly it's false, i.e. error handling, exception handling, with…
It makes sense because it's de facto standard, and intuition is experience, and intuitive is what we're used to. I'm not sure how it can be explained more basically.
That's not an argument that scales well, as then we'd have a single programming language, anything else being un-intuitive. Every single non-obscure language that exists today had to go against the (previously acquired) intuition, introduce new concepts and then work its way up to the point where new concepts are the (newly acquired) intuition.