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Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

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Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#21

Post by BlueTemplar »

https://urbit.org/blog/common-objections-to-urbit/#planet

> Urbit doesn't have enough planets for every human

> A 32-bit planet is a tool, not a toy. Like a car, it's a device for a responsible and independent adult. There aren't 4 billion cars in the world, nor 4 billion independent adults.

> If you aren't an independent adult, and you don't need or even shouldn't have unconditional digital freedom (no one's 8-year-old daughter needs unconditional digital freedom), a moon from someone else's planet is fine.

WTF!? What is their definition of "independent adult" !? (Is it car ownership ?!?) This is IPv4 all over again...

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#23

Post by curtainsforus »

colechristensen wrote: post #6

I’m really confused about what any of this is. It seems people are getting caught up in accepting the premise of fringe elements and arguing against them on their own turf. What is urbit? Some strange projections of vague societal goals on to unnecessary technology abstractions. Like if somebody took the idea of a cryptofascist webring circa 1997 to a quite... imaginative conclusion. If you want control of publishing…

I read some urbit.com post that said ~"We want people to be able have control of their data without having to be linux sysadmins".

There's a societal cost to everyone having all their data sit one facebook's servers, and I can get behind the stated goal of building an easy-to-use alternative. I'm skeptical about Urbit being that, of course.

(The 'fringe elements' thing just seems like great marketing, especially for a potentially pseudonymous system. A: No such thing as bad publicity, B: There's a broad swathe of people newly few up with the last decade's trend of calling everything fascist.)

If this all leads to a working system and change towards people owning their data, yarvin will have earned every pompous essay he's ever written. I'm still 50/50 on it being a pyramid scheme, though.

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#24

Post by pjc50 »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #21

https://urbit.org/blog/common-objections-to-urbit/#planet > Urbit doesn't have enough planets for every human > A 32-bit planet is a tool, not a toy. Like a car, it's a device for a responsible and independent adult. There aren't 4 billion cars in the world, nor 4 billion independent adults. > If you aren't an independent adult, and you don't need or even shouldn't have unconditional digital freedom (no one's 8-year-…

Fairly sure there's more than 4bn legal adults in the world, so this is some weird supremacist thing where """inferior""" people are deliberately excluded.

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#25

Post by danielheath »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #20

> We might ask then, is Gab a platform for free speech, or is it a platform for hate speech? Who’s speech does Gab prioritize? It quickly becomes clear that the concept of “free speech” that Gab deploys is not quite the same as what others see it to mean. Gab's example seems to undermine the author's previous arguments, as Gab is now running on Mastodon, whose founders profess values fundamentally opposed to Gab. > O…

Except they frequently do, because you don't own the domain your mastodon identity is tied to.

There's promising work in this area, but as yet none of the major implementations support separating 'hosting' from 'identity' the way (eg) email has for at least 20 years (probably longer, I wasn't there).

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#27

Post by curtainsforus »

ohazi wrote: post #3

Look, I think Yarvin is a psychopath as much as the next reasonable human, but let's be clear - Urbit is garbage on technical grounds. The terminology is a shell game of confusion and deliberate obfuscation. They pretend that it's a network, and a server, and a virtual machine, and an operating system, but it isn't any of these things -- you still need to provide all of them yourself. It's just a program that sits on…

It'll live at least as long as there's money in complaining about Yarvin...

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#28

Post by andkenneth »

scotchmi_st wrote: post #17

A lot of people always complain about how hard it is to figure out what Urbit is, but I'm pretty sure the obfuscation is part of the plan. I've been following Urbit for a while now (maybe 6-7 years?), and over that time, it has gotten clearer about its goals and motives, I believe because initially they wanted to speak to a very small group of weirdos who saw what was on it and were intrigued to learn more. Starting…

Just from what I can pick up from this thread it seems like this project is only a few steps more sane than TempleOS and it's creator.

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#29

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #20

> We might ask then, is Gab a platform for free speech, or is it a platform for hate speech? Who’s speech does Gab prioritize? It quickly becomes clear that the concept of “free speech” that Gab deploys is not quite the same as what others see it to mean. Gab's example seems to undermine the author's previous arguments, as Gab is now running on Mastodon, whose founders profess values fundamentally opposed to Gab. > O…

> Gab is now running on Mastodon, whose founders profess values fundamentally opposed to Gab.

Just because Gab and other Mastodon servers run the same technology, means little without federation between them. Signal and Whatsapp share key technology, but they are worlds apart regardless because they will never federate with one another.

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#30

Post by varjag »

scotchmi_st wrote: post #17

A lot of people always complain about how hard it is to figure out what Urbit is, but I'm pretty sure the obfuscation is part of the plan. I've been following Urbit for a while now (maybe 6-7 years?), and over that time, it has gotten clearer about its goals and motives, I believe because initially they wanted to speak to a very small group of weirdos who saw what was on it and were intrigued to learn more. Starting…

It sounds like Scientology but backwards.
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