Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit • Hacker News Board

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#51

Post by callahad » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

curtainsforus wrote: post #42

danielheath wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

How does email do this? If someone's email address is jim@website.com, isn't their identity tied to that domain name?

I suspect parent is referring to how actual service backing an email address can transparently change from Gmail to Hey to Fastmail and so on. The hosting is separate from the identity.

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#52

Post by BlueTemplar » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

detaro wrote: post #50

BlueTemplar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?!

Because its originally error codes. 0 is "all went well", != 0 is an error code telling you why it failed. I'd guess which then got things added like "programA && programB" as "A went well, so do B and check if B goes well", which kinda gives the logic value true to 0.

Right, should have remembered that from that time I got into C...

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#53

Post by stareatgoats » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 3:12 PM UTC

BlueTemplar wrote: post #46

stareatgoats wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> used as one of the essential thinkers in the legal teaching It is ironic that you link to an article that defines Schmitt as one of the main architects behind Nazi political theory. Then again, irony seems to be in vogue these days. The article admittedly goes on to find some "prescience" in Schmitts thinking but the purpose of the piece is above all to reveal and attach a brown aspect to the Brexit movement, nothi…

Yes, but you haven't answered my question. Is he or not considered as an essential thinker in the political/legal domains (in the sense that he is mandatory teaching in some professions)?

In the case he be "an essential thinker" you can rest assured that he is so mainly for his role in justifying the leader-cult of Nazi-Germany, just as Hitler might be mentioned as an "essential leader" in history.

But since "essential" as a standalone adjective has positive connotations it is misleading to say the least to leave out the "Nazi" adverb when describing either gentleman, i.e. they are both primarily essential Nazi thinkers/leaders.

He is a topic in academia in all essence since he is an academic and an essential Nazi, and has produced literature (even pre-1933, with clear autocratic leanings) and has drawn conclusions that is of interest in a "survey of the landscape" type of inquiry [0].

Finally he continues to be of seeming essentiality because he continues to be propped up by Nazis and their ilk (like this Yarvin figure).

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schmitt/

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#54

Post by kelsolaar » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 6:12 PM UTC

Thanks for the disambiguation, always been hard to read through their terminology without allocating a significant amount of time. I have always been curious about Urbit but now no need to waste time anymore. Moving on!

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#55

Post by cocktailpeanuts » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

weare138 wrote: post #14

stale2002 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep! This strikes extremely true for me as well. I've been casually following urbit for 3 years now. And by "casually following" I mean "every now any then, they have some crypto meetup in San Francisco with free drinks, a tech talk, and stuff and sometimes I accidentally end up there". And of the half dozen or so meetups that I've stumbled upon, for the free drinks and to meet people for fun, what I know about Urbit…

I don't think any amount of sobriety is going to help anyone better understand Urbit, in fact I think the opposite is true. You'd have to be shit-faced drunk for Urbit to seem like a good idea.

I don't think any amount of alcohol would help. You need acid. At this point it's almost like scientology. It uses "tech" as a front to attract gullible people to pay up.

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#56

Post by cocktailpeanuts » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 6:27 PM UTC

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…

> The migration part is because Twitter is a centralized network, which has been ever more draconian with its APIs. Federated and decentralized networks shouldn't have logistic issues with exiting. Again, see Mastodon.

I think you missed the whole point of the paragraph. The reason "exit" is not easy even on "decentralized networks" like Mastodon is because of the economics of doing so. Even though it's technically more feasible than closed sourced social graphs like Facebook or Twitter, people rarely have enough incentive to fork off with their own network.

For this migration to work correctly, it should be effortless and without much cost for every user. That's not the case as the article explains clearly. No matter how federated Mastodon instances are, they are equivalent to running a city. Most people don't want to run a city just because they are sick of some policies. They have other better things to do in their real lives. OP explains that in these federated approaches or Urbit like approaches, technically you're free to fork off, but most people will choose to live a shitty life because it's too much hassle.

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#57

Post by cocktailpeanuts » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 6:39 PM UTC

627467 wrote: post #38

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 think part of urbits argument against installing apache and wordpress is: it's hard to maintain by non-sysAdmins and not very portable (in case people want to exit). In theory, urbit can be updated seamlessly through the chain of sponsorship (galaxy > stars > planets) and if a start or planet don't like their sponsor (lord?) they can pack their bags and look for another sponsor (urbit is contained inside a single f…

These ideas are already being obsoleted as we speak by various edge computing approaches like Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, etc. It's not there yet and these are just the low level building blocks but I'm sure we are getting there, but in a different way.

Whereas aforementioned companies are working hard to actually solve people's problems without a pyramid scheme cult, Urbit has been mostly focused on engineering a cult following, so I won't miss them when all of what they are saying they will achieve will be completely obsoleted by a combination of multiple emerging technology trends that are actually useful.

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#58

Post by cocktailpeanuts » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

yurielt wrote: post #11

Honestly it is quite obvious that the writer of the article has issues with fringe politics and people of differing opinion not only that but they don’t even explain Urbit but instead waste the readers time on yelling “muh nathzees” look I disagree and dislike some of his ideas and don’t care about the rest of them and he has only said a couple good things from what I know but being dishonest about a tech project he…

ok yarvin

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#59

Post by mundo » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 7:22 PM UTC

Watching Urbit through the lens of HN comments over the last few years has been utterly fascinating. The hatred it attracts is unmatched - no topic has reached the front page only to be brigade-downvoted off of it again so regularly.

And yet, for all the indignant posts about how it's performance art, a scam, or the ravings of a madman, it just kind of keeps on keeping on. It gets a little more stable and adds a few more features every year, like a regular old open source project.

My position on it has remained unchanged for 5+ years: I hope it succeeds because it aspires to solve a use case that I genuinely want to use, I don't care about the (ex-)founder's politics or his old blog, but seeing as the existence of the latter seems to have destroyed any chance of the former coming to fruition so I'm kind of hoping Jeff Bezos decides to build a clone (presumably, one that has much lower ambitions and elides most of the weird stuff).

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#60

Post by greendream17 » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 7:59 PM UTC

BlueTemplar wrote: post #22

How does Urbit compares with Tim Berners-Lee's Solid ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22395358

Love this comment, sure Urbit is shit in that way Solid is shit but somehow Solid is not canceled for being communist while Urbit is fascist. The Cathedral at work for you.

The prescriptive part of neoRX has always been retarded but the descriptive part is on the money.