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Urbit

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Re: Urbit

#271

Post by shpx »

belisarius222 wrote: post #37
SrslyJosh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The project is exclusionary by design--instead of using an existing programming language or even keywords/terminology from an existing human language, the creator decided to make everything up, right down to new names for existing symbols. F'r example: gar > hax # hep - kel { sel [ ser ] sig ~ soq ' Have to agree about the screenshots--if there's something useful here, why not show it off?

Canonical pronunciation for each character is a wonderful thing, and I use it all the time to discuss code. If there's one thing other projects should steal from Urbit, it's this. Spoken programming languages FTW. The pronunciations are no more exclusionary than learning Cyrillic, and the effort pays off.

You can find the rest of the ASCII symbol names (there's 34 in total) here:

https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/hoon/hoon-syntax/

Re: Urbit

#272

Post by cryptozeus »

matildepark wrote: post #243
chippy wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most can't even understand it That is the point, they want it like that! The crazy idea is that only those who have devoted significant time can understand it and should use it (and I suspect that it plays into some kind of non egalitarian idea about how society should be structured with only elite brainy people on top).

It's not deliberate, just a bit of an ongoing challenge. We've historically been very engineering-focused while honing the system; poking our heads out into the world, we now have to describe it. The problem, I think, is that there's a lot of inference gaps to clear in terms of how people understand computers and how they understand the internet that we simply dispose of. A lot of the project is an attempt to re-arch…

Instead of us doing the work of going through Wikipedia links and your docs, you can explain this by one simple diagram or video. Unless your goal is to be mysterious, I cannot understand how can a company go through all this trouble of creating something, building a website and can’t get the message across even to the HN community.

Re: Urbit

#273

Post by eoxenford »

blotter_paper wrote: post #207
basilisks wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you back up this claim?

Here is the ending of the second-to-last entry in Unqualified Reservations by Curtis Yarvin (AKA Mencius Moldbug)[0]: > Anyway. UR will reemerge, of course. But not here, and not soon—and probably not even in this form. I’ll also try to do something non-lame with the archives. Thanks for reading! If the name alone isn't enough, I feel like this context makes it pretty obvious that he named Urbit after his racist blog…

No, Urbit is named after urbs, urbis, the Latin word for “city,” together with the computer term bit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9677378

Re: Urbit

#274

Post by lisper »

retreatguru wrote: post #270
lisper wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obscurity and inaccessibility are classic cult tactics. The obscurity and inaccessibility and weird terminology is not there to provide functionality, it's there solely to mislead, to make it appear that there's something deep and mysterious going on that only the elect and enlightened can access. (They even admit as much: "Hoon, for the most part, is weird by design...") If you actually dig into the technical de…

Thanks. I did a deep dive. Fascinating how brilliant people like Yarvin can miss the boat on basics like compassion and empathy for other beings.

> Thanks.

You bet.

> I did a deep dive.

That was fast.

> brilliant people like Yarvin

I don't think he's all that brilliant. He does have one extraordinary skill, and that is to make himself appear brilliant by being prolific and obscure and using other psychological tactics. This is a very useful skill (Donald Trump used it to become president) but I think it is very important to distinguish it from actual brilliance. To my knowledge, Curtis has never done anything that is actually brilliant.

Re: Urbit

#275

Post by SamReidHughes »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #32
ShamelessC wrote: post #24

I found the descriptions to be far too abstract and mysterious. I guess it gives the project a sort of cool hacker vibe, but I really just want a few screenshots of the interface of the actual OS. As it stands, I have no clue whether it's an actual operating system like Windows/Linux/MacOS or if it just vaguely fits the definition of an OS. I've seen in other comments here that it's both an "Overlay OS" and a VM that…

The project is exclusionary by design--instead of using an existing programming language or even keywords/terminology from an existing human language, the creator decided to make everything up, right down to new names for existing symbols. F'r example: gar > hax # hep - kel { sel [ ser ] sig ~ soq ' Have to agree about the screenshots--if there's something useful here, why not show it off?

For what it's worth, some people apparently read code differently than other people -- some subvocalize these symbols -- and reprogramming your brain to use short names for symbols might be very useful. I'd guess some other people have compressed mathematical symbols to an unvocalizable mental representation.

Re: Urbit

#276

Post by blotter_paper »

yebyen wrote: post #228
iudqnolq wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not making an argument from math. I'm not making an argument from first principles. First the names were feudal. Then the names were changed to not be feudal. This strongly suggests the design was feudal. Yarvin's other writing make it clear it's plausible he'd design a feudally inspired system, as he writes they are superior to democracy. I'm arguing based on Yarvin's demonstrated intent. (Citations not repeated…

The original Urbit system also included a scheme of political "banners" so that you could avoid speech which was unpalatable to you, in order to allow conscious self-organizing into groups of like-mindedness, and as I recall also wrote about the idea that political speech being shared across these boundaries was necessarily violent (and as such clearly undesirable, as all violence.) edit: this system was removed, I s…

> Some of Yarvin's writings are at best eccentric, but as he has not been a part of the project for some time already, I think it's fair for today's contributors to the project to ask you to set aside his intent, or your impressions of it.

"Some time" is pretty vague. He left the project earlier this year, and the project is still named after his fascist blog. I asked one of the Tlon employees in this comment section why the project is still named after Unqualified Reservations (UR), and so far haven't gotten a response. I think it's fair to expect a project with this history to address it head on and actually denounce the views of Yarvin/Moldbug if they are trying to be viewed as non-fascist. A project can be apolitical, but a project with a political past doesn't get to act like it's apolitical just because the founder steps away on good terms and nobody else is blogging a racist and anti-democratic ideology. If the current contributors don't agree with Yarvin/Moldbug's intent, it seems fair to expect them to actually make that clear.

Re: Urbit

#277

Post by drngdds »

theamk wrote: post #25
ALittleLight wrote: post #15

I have seen Urbit a couple times but never really understood it. From the "Understanding Urbit" page - >Imagine that you can login from anywhere with one name and password. >And when you do, your entire OS appears. >Inside is your whole digital life. All of your communities, conversations, and connections. All of your biometric data and devices. Your entire personal archive in one place that’s secure, private, and de…

Urbit “planet” is like a VM, but running an OS developed completely independently from existing computing words. There is a custom language, a custom network layer, a custom cryptography and custom identity system. There are even custom words for common terms. This has no GUI, but it does has a web interface that you can connect to. From the practical standpoint, you have a linux process running from a data directory…

>There are even custom words for common terms.

I think this is like half the problem

Re: Urbit

#278

Post by davidy123 »

I think people would be better off tracking Solid. It's not moving super fast, but has good momentum, and is based on web and decentralized standards including Linked Data.

Re: Urbit

#279

Post by blotter_paper »

eoxenford wrote: post #273
blotter_paper wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the ending of the second-to-last entry in Unqualified Reservations by Curtis Yarvin (AKA Mencius Moldbug)[0]: > Anyway. UR will reemerge, of course. But not here, and not soon—and probably not even in this form. I’ll also try to do something non-lame with the archives. Thanks for reading! If the name alone isn't enough, I feel like this context makes it pretty obvious that he named Urbit after his racist blog…

No, Urbit is named after urbs, urbis , the Latin word for “city,” together with the computer term bit . https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9677378

He claims to have been working on Urbit since 2002, and the first UR post was from 2007. It's entirely believable to me that the name Urbit came first (albeit not publicly), but the names are very obviously related and the quote I pulled above shows that he considers some post-2014 project a continuation of UR. I can believe the specific claims of the comment you linked, but I think it dances around the fact that these two projects are purposefully tied together by nomenclature. Whether UR or Urbit was named first in Yarvin's head isn't really the point.

Re: Urbit

#280

Post by yebyen »

blotter_paper wrote: post #276
yebyen wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original Urbit system also included a scheme of political "banners" so that you could avoid speech which was unpalatable to you, in order to allow conscious self-organizing into groups of like-mindedness, and as I recall also wrote about the idea that political speech being shared across these boundaries was necessarily violent (and as such clearly undesirable, as all violence.) edit: this system was removed, I s…

> Some of Yarvin's writings are at best eccentric, but as he has not been a part of the project for some time already, I think it's fair for today's contributors to the project to ask you to set aside his intent, or your impressions of it. "Some time" is pretty vague. He left the project earlier this year, and the project is still named after his fascist blog. I asked one of the Tlon employees in this comment section…

When I was made aware of Urbit, there was someone prominent related person, a friend project of Nock or something, who had developed another competitive functional OS of his own, some kind or other, if memory serves, who had also parted ways with the community over some controversy which nobody wanted to talk about, and at the same time nobody else on the outside of it evidently wanted to ask about.

I don't want to mis-attribute anything, because I am light on details, I won't try to recall his name, or what it was over, being from the outside myself, but I distinctly remember some part of the controversy being about someone or other "refusing to put up [some kind or other] sign in their window," (I inferred that it was metaphorically speaking.)

It was a metaphor for something I didn't know, but I distinctly remember coming away with the feeling that I also didn't want to end up displaying that sign in my own window.

To restate what I'm dancing around, in no uncertain terms, it seems to me that you're asking for a sign in the window. "No Moldbugs Allowed."

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