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What Urbit is

urbit.org

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Re: What Urbit is

#231

Post by profeta »

urbit wrote: post #149
profeta wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so it is a place that will centralize all my credentials so it can fetch and parse my mail, IMs, stock trades, files, etc to then inter-process that to my liking and possible talk to a client on my phone or such? why a chain of specialized posix programs would fail for that?

Yes, Urbit is (or at least is designed to become) a personal server which solves this problem among others. One: a chain of specialized Posix programs would work for that. You would have to be someone who can manage a chain of specialized Posix programs, though. Two: serving as a general-purpose stateful HTTP client is a subset of what Urbit does, though an important subset. It's also a server on a public network. Th…

form the site, i get the feeling that to use urbit i have to be a programmer and a theoretical mathematician... but i confess i did not waste much time on it yet.

Re: What Urbit is

#232

Post by kaid »

zardgiv wrote: post #227
kaid wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an individualist perspective, I agree with you, shunning won't cause society to collapse. But when people advocating it to an aggressive level-extensively campaigning the rejection of a certain person at social scale, this is dangerous and smells like politics, and was exactly the way how hitler shunned the jews.

I think you're having difficulty distinguishing the concepts of "shunning" and "genocide."

Seems you are so inclined to acknowledge what nazi had done before the 'genocide', or you simply don't know what had really happened.

Re: What Urbit is

#233

Post by SwellJoe »

yarvin9 wrote: post #183
SwellJoe wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm not racist, but..."

"I'm not a communist, but..."

I mean, it is possible that hundreds, possibly thousands, of people have misinterpreted your writing on colonialism, human biodiversity, etc. However, you seem to be smart and a better than average writer (if florid, at times). It seems like someone of your intelligence and writing ability would be able to make a point effectively, without so many misunderstandings.

But, I hope that I have misunderstood your writing on those subjects.

Re: What Urbit is

#234

Post by kaid »

zardgiv wrote: post #227
kaid wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an individualist perspective, I agree with you, shunning won't cause society to collapse. But when people advocating it to an aggressive level-extensively campaigning the rejection of a certain person at social scale, this is dangerous and smells like politics, and was exactly the way how hitler shunned the jews.

I think you're having difficulty distinguishing the concepts of "shunning" and "genocide."

that should be 'declined' in my last comment, my apologies

Re: What Urbit is

#235

Post by tripzilch »

Gaelan wrote: post #173
urbit wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the way Urbit works. (It's sincerely hard to tell from your post whether you've read the documentation, or you just had the same simple idea yourself.) Anyone can create a 128-bit comet. But once the comet system starts being abused by assholes and bots, signs will go up all over Urbit. These signs will say "humans only" and deny admission to comets -- essentially blocking anyone who has not invested…

There are eight billion people in the world. There are 4 billion possible planets. What is your plan for when urbit takes off and reaches internet-scale? BTW, ~bitret-worwyd here. ;)

> There are eight billion people in the world. There are 4 billion possible planets. What is your plan for when urbit takes off and reaches internet-scale?

Don't worry! There aren't 4 billion people on this world that can spare $10 on a piece of virtual property. Just don't accidentally solve world poverty and it'll be fine.

Re: What Urbit is

#236

Post by tripzilch »

yarvin9 wrote: post #180
Gaelan wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are eight billion people in the world. There are 4 billion possible planets. What is your plan for when urbit takes off and reaches internet-scale? BTW, ~bitret-worwyd here. ;)

~bitret, I remember you from a while back! A planet is like a car -- it's not a toy, it's a tool for a responsible grownup. There are about 4 billion adults in the world. And not all of them are even Internet users. Of course, the population keeps growing. Eventually either people have to learn to share, or the price will go up, or humanity will learn how to stop expanding exponentially. Think of a planet as a unit o…

Do these things also get released if the person holding them dies?

(the reasonable assumption being that only a tiny fraction people will bother or care to actually make arrangements for this)

Or even without death, the idea being urbit "property" is all cryptographically locked tight, correct? So can a planet get lost? If someone loses all their keys or a server park gets droned and the dog ate their backups or something?

Re: What Urbit is

#237

Post by tripzilch »

bitwize wrote: post #26

I think Jay Maynard said it best: Urbit is "INTERCAL as OS". Alternatively, it's a New Kind of Computing (by analogy with Wolfram's New Kind of Science). This paper didn't really tell me anything about Urbit that I didn't already know. But it's good to see them have a nice clean readable rationale.

INTERCAL is a whole other level of crazy hard opaqueness though. I admit I never tried to write anything in one of these two funny urbit languages, but from what I've seen in the docs, they don't intend to go out of their way to be impenetrable.

I read INTERCAL documentation twice. First time for fun & crazy and I had some good laughs. Then a while later I came across a challenge to write X in INTERCAL (I forgot what X was), so I got the documentation again, this time reading it with intention to write code, ... I gave up halfway, in horror.

INTERCAL was designed to be "most unlike any other programming language" and didn't stop for any feature if it could be twisted into being more unlike any other language. And it shows, it's hilariously hard to program in, and gets in your way on purpose.

Ubrit also seems so far to be very much unlike many or most systems, ever. But it's more about trying something new, with an idea, it uses its weirdness to support the idea, but it doesn't stop at nothing to keep pushing the weirdness over the top. There's another goal in mind. But the goal is not very funny so that's an extra barrier it has over INTERCAL.

Re: What Urbit is

#238

Post by JeremyBanks »

ineptech wrote: post #216
JeremyBanks wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would benefit from this. I don't doubt that Curtis's views are probably offensive, but I haven't seen a clear description of them to conclude that for myself. I tried reading some of his writing, but it seemed so abstract and obfuscated that I gave up before understanding what he was trying to get across. I've seen one-sentence descriptions of his beliefs and they sound horrible, but I've also seen enough tweet-len…

The closest thing I know of is Scott Alexander's Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell [1]. It's more of an essay/argument than an impartial overview, but (besides being a good read by one of the smartest and most interesting bloggers on earth) I think it's the most even-handed, neutral and informative thing you're likely to read about Yarvin's beliefs. (NB - the article refers to Yarvin as "Me…

Great! I love Scott Alexander's writing, so I'll definitely check this out. Thanks for the pointer.

Re: What Urbit is

#239

Post by gjm11 »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #230
gjm11 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say anything about racism. I said that that blog post seems like sufficient grounds to call the author an "outspoken advocate of slavery" even if when that becomes inconvenient for him he says he isn't one. And yes, he frames what he says as an exploration of Carlyle's ideas, but he's not just saying "Carlyle said this; isn't that interesting"; he's presenting his own opinions too. As for whether believing t…

> "he's not just saying "Carlyle said this; isn't that interesting"" From what I saw, that's exactly what I think he's saying, perhaps I missed something you saw, perhaps I didn't. It seems the conversation has pretty much run its course now, so shall we agree to disagree?

Fine with me.

Re: What Urbit is

#240

Post by loqi »

Rusky wrote: post #213
mixedCase wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They see Yarvin, and he definitely is not one to hide his worldview. While talking to Urbit contributors about Urbit?

By definition no, of course. But I have never done a non-trivial amount of open source-style work (coding or otherwise) with someone who shares their political views online, without learning about them somehow. And in fact, every Urbit contributor in this thread who's mentioned this has also heard about Yarvin's political views, and not from this thread. It appears to me there's already a kind of self-selection proce…

Well, if you define "comfortable tolerating his garbage" as "contributes to Urbit despite it being Yarvin's project", then tautological assertion is tautological.

There is certainly some self-selection for people who don't throw tech babies out with political bathwater. I count myself as one such person. I mean, I continued using Javascript and Firefox even after hearing about Brendan Eich's political contribution! Feel free to draw incorrect inferences regarding my opinion of gay marriage.

I have also toyed around with Urbit, and have (in a sense) made minor contributions. Feel free to draw incorrect inferences regarding my opinion of Yarvin's political writing.

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