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Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

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Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#31

Post by olympus »

rhencke wrote: post #25
olympus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urbit has been around for a few years and has done nothing to clear up the confusion around it. I think at this point it is safe to say that any claims of Urbit being a revolutionary form of computing are hogwash. This is probably similar to how Scientology got started. Nobody really believes in it, but are too afraid to strongly denounce it because they don't want to be the one who "doesn't get it." So they all just…

That's... a baffling claim. Urbit is well documented, in easy-to-understand terminology, from low level, to high level: https://urbit.org/docs/ https://urbit.org/docs/nock/definition/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/concepts/ The code is open source, under MIT license: https://github.com/urbit/urbit Heck, urbit even shows up to Hacker News semi-regularly: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=urbit What backs your clai…

My main claim was that Urbit isn't revolutionary. It is really just a Unix server and programming language. However, in an attempt to seem more sophisticated they invented new words so that nobody could figure out what it was. Urbit is purposely obtuse in their terminology, when they really could just use words that programmers already know and use. Here's some examples from the documentation you linked:

"A value in Hoon is called a noun" - or you could just call it a value.

"A gate is a Hoon function" - or you could just call it a function.

"A core has no exact equivalent in conventional languages, but the closest equivalent is an object. An object has methods; a core has functionally computed attributes (arms). An arm that produces a gate is the Hoon equivalent of a conventional method;" - or you could just say that objects in Hoon (the language) can have methods and attributes, and you would never need to invent the core/arm/gate terminology.

They try to give themselves an out by saying stuff like "Hoon has concepts like all these abstractions, but they remain false cognates." When you dig into it, the only unique things are the words. It's like children trying to come up with a code- "instead of door we'll say blorp and instead of close we'll say bleep. Now bleep the blorp before we continue inventing our code.

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#32

Post by adiabatty »

StavrosK wrote: post #2

Is this meant to be understandable by people? Am I missing some context?

If I didn't know what galaxies, stars, and planets were, and that instances of those are ships, this wouldn't make any sense at all.

The main audience of this post is people who're already into Urbit and understand some of the basic lingo around running a ship. If you don't have that terminology down, and don't know Ethereum either, this probably reads like Jabberwocky[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#33

Post by pcmonk »

chc4 wrote: post #30
bitwize wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody put up cash on the barrelhead, a bounty for the Urbit developers and hypemen to develop an actual app -- a simple strip-poker game -- in Urbit. There were no takers. The question of "but what can you actually do with it?" went unanswered by Urbit's own promoters, even when they were incentivized with real cash money to come up with an answer.

I never heard of this. Like, never even in passing have I seen that bounty mentioned. One of the trivial apps that was demoed literally years ago was a simple tic-tac-toe app, and there is even a MUD written for Urbit, so saying it's impossible to write apps for it isn't true. The web server is hosted in Urbit, along with the developer chat room. And really, the problem isn't that apps are impossible to write but tha…

IIRC, that particular episode happened in, like, 2013, when Arvo (Urbit OS) was barely prototype-grade. Urbit developers decided to work on the OS rather than chase after a bounty of about $1000.

There was also no meaningful documentation at the time, which is why nobody else could complete it.

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#34

Post by occultist_throw »

rhencke wrote: post #25
olympus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urbit has been around for a few years and has done nothing to clear up the confusion around it. I think at this point it is safe to say that any claims of Urbit being a revolutionary form of computing are hogwash. This is probably similar to how Scientology got started. Nobody really believes in it, but are too afraid to strongly denounce it because they don't want to be the one who "doesn't get it." So they all just…

That's... a baffling claim. Urbit is well documented, in easy-to-understand terminology, from low level, to high level: https://urbit.org/docs/ https://urbit.org/docs/nock/definition/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/concepts/ The code is open source, under MIT license: https://github.com/urbit/urbit Heck, urbit even shows up to Hacker News semi-regularly: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=urbit What backs your clai…

Please identify one concrete computing action that I cannot do with Linux/Windows/Mac that Urbit enables.

In other words, what is Urbit's "Killer Feature"? Cause I'm not seeing one.

And a runner up question: Is Urbit still heavily dependent on unreleased root node code? In other words, is this distributed computing just a load of hype covering over a overly complicated star topology?

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#35

Post by han-sel »

olympus wrote: post #31
rhencke wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... a baffling claim. Urbit is well documented, in easy-to-understand terminology, from low level, to high level: https://urbit.org/docs/ https://urbit.org/docs/nock/definition/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/concepts/ The code is open source, under MIT license: https://github.com/urbit/urbit Heck, urbit even shows up to Hacker News semi-regularly: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=urbit What backs your clai…

My main claim was that Urbit isn't revolutionary. It is really just a Unix server and programming language. However, in an attempt to seem more sophisticated they invented new words so that nobody could figure out what it was. Urbit is purposely obtuse in their terminology, when they really could just use words that programmers already know and use. Here's some examples from the documentation you linked: "A value in…

"It is really just a Unix server and programming language."

You should read https://urbit.org/posts/overview/

The whole reason Urbit exists is that Unix + the internet is broken and needs a complete overhaul

Re: the different names, there are slight differences between gates and functions, but I agree they're not important enough to merit the change in name. But hey, it takes a purist to spend 15 years rewriting the whole stack from scratch!

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#36

Post by CryptoPunk »

bitwize wrote: post #26
aeontech wrote: post #14

Every time I read something about Urbit I am reminded of the Lewis Padgett short sci-fi story, "Mimsy Were The Borogroves" [0], [1] describing children discovering alien future toys, and subsequently via use of those toys learning to manipulate reality in incomprehensible ways. I still have not been able to figure out if there's actually something that amazing about Urbit, or if behind the obfuscated terminology ther…

Others, including myself, have noticed this too and it reminds us of something else a little closer to home: namely, what happens to Scientologists and the like after they've been in the cult a while. Even the Scientologists who later leave still think in terms of engrams and body thetans. I think Curtis Yarvin is a master huckster and wordsmith, but near as I can tell what's good about Urbit isn't original and what'…

>>finally he plays the same semantic shellgame with his words he plays with his political essays, to convince you that the horrible political views he has aren't so horrible.

I suggest you leave your ideological biases out of your assessment of Urbit the technology. We all have our political beliefs - mine are hard libertarian, yours are hard feminist/leftist - but hopefully we can put those aside when assessing technology.

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#37

Post by apo »

chc4 wrote: post #28
aeontech wrote: post #14

Every time I read something about Urbit I am reminded of the Lewis Padgett short sci-fi story, "Mimsy Were The Borogroves" [0], [1] describing children discovering alien future toys, and subsequently via use of those toys learning to manipulate reality in incomprehensible ways. I still have not been able to figure out if there's actually something that amazing about Urbit, or if behind the obfuscated terminology ther…

I'm one of those people that get it, so I'll try to explain it without going off the deep end and waxing poetically about planets or whatever. Urbit is a platform for building decentralized apps. To that end, it's a tightly integrated set of different features that play into that: an identity system so that all the apps can refer to the same people by the same handle, a typed RPC network for easy message sending, and…

Right now you can build decentralized apps like Mastodon, except they 1) take hours to setup a node, along with having to know arcane Linuz sysadmining 2) aren't actually decentralized, but federated. Urbit wants to make it easy to setup your own server, which runs as a node for all these decentralized apps (instant messaging, Twitter, etc.), along with be useful for server-y things like aggregate APIs (email, Facebook).

This sounds vaguely intriguing. But the problem that most Ethereum projects have is that they put the solution and technology before the problem. Half the time I don't even know what I'm looking at or if it's worth looking further.

Can you restate the problem that Urbit solves in the simplest terms you can think of?

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#38

Post by occultist_throw »

bitwize wrote: post #26
aeontech wrote: post #14

Every time I read something about Urbit I am reminded of the Lewis Padgett short sci-fi story, "Mimsy Were The Borogroves" [0], [1] describing children discovering alien future toys, and subsequently via use of those toys learning to manipulate reality in incomprehensible ways. I still have not been able to figure out if there's actually something that amazing about Urbit, or if behind the obfuscated terminology ther…

Others, including myself, have noticed this too and it reminds us of something else a little closer to home: namely, what happens to Scientologists and the like after they've been in the cult a while. Even the Scientologists who later leave still think in terms of engrams and body thetans. I think Curtis Yarvin is a master huckster and wordsmith, but near as I can tell what's good about Urbit isn't original and what'…

-- and finally he plays the same semantic shellgame with his words he plays with his political essays, to convince you that the horrible political views he has aren't so horrible.

I mean.. what's not to like about Nazism and eugenics?

(I wish I could attribute a sarcasm tag, but Go look up Mencius Moldbug and read for yourself.)

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#39

Post by Avshalom »

chc4 wrote: post #28
aeontech wrote: post #14

Every time I read something about Urbit I am reminded of the Lewis Padgett short sci-fi story, "Mimsy Were The Borogroves" [0], [1] describing children discovering alien future toys, and subsequently via use of those toys learning to manipulate reality in incomprehensible ways. I still have not been able to figure out if there's actually something that amazing about Urbit, or if behind the obfuscated terminology ther…

I'm one of those people that get it, so I'll try to explain it without going off the deep end and waxing poetically about planets or whatever. Urbit is a platform for building decentralized apps. To that end, it's a tightly integrated set of different features that play into that: an identity system so that all the apps can refer to the same people by the same handle, a typed RPC network for easy message sending, and…

>wants to

haven't "actually succeeded", haven't "shown any real movement towards", but "wants to".

And that's the problem. Years ago it was funny: "look at our ludicrous documentation isn't it funny that we claim this is a real thing", now it's just more assholes boiling the seas.

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#40

Post by rhencke »

occultist_throw wrote: post #34
rhencke wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... a baffling claim. Urbit is well documented, in easy-to-understand terminology, from low level, to high level: https://urbit.org/docs/ https://urbit.org/docs/nock/definition/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/concepts/ The code is open source, under MIT license: https://github.com/urbit/urbit Heck, urbit even shows up to Hacker News semi-regularly: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=urbit What backs your clai…

Please identify one concrete computing action that I cannot do with Linux/Windows/Mac that Urbit enables. In other words, what is Urbit's "Killer Feature"? Cause I'm not seeing one. And a runner up question: Is Urbit still heavily dependent on unreleased root node code? In other words, is this distributed computing just a load of hype covering over a overly complicated star topology?

(You might have hit reply on the wrong post? This is all stuff orthogonal to my point.)
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