51–60 of 173 posts
I have a friend who is into Urbit. It seems like a social club at this point.
I also did a deep dive on Urbit a few months back (shameless plug: https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/urbit ), and I really agree with the author for the most part. Definitely the most concerning part of Urbit, for me at least, is the obscurantism of Hoon. Much like the author says, it's totally incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read through every bit of the (lacking imo) documentation. Even a domain-specific langu…
I feel the need to mention that Curtis Yarvin owns "a few thousand" Urbit stars [0]. If your goal is to make Urbit succeed, you'll end up making him very powerful and wealthy in the process. [0] https://urbit.org/blog/a-founders-farewell/
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv...
I don't know much at all about Urbit, but this doesn't seem like it was written in good faith tbh. The mention of security holes seems to be the only real serious critique. Hopefully some urbit people could address those, since claiming to be a secure personal VM and just exposing your data on disk to the cloud provider is crazy. Other than that, the author seems to be mostly making fun of urbit for being weird and a…
It may not have been. The author of Urbit is Moldbug, who is... controversial. On the other hand, I just read the article, and none of it seems particularly bad faith. I vaguely remember something about Urbit using planets and galaxies as some kind of ownership metaphor, so I expected the article to go on at length about how strange this seems. But it seems to be focusing on the technical aspects of Urbit, and is pre…
Honestly in this age of this Marxism takeover, his thoughts aren't that crazy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the contrary, I think the author spent a lot of effort to understand the underlying tech stack - honestly I can't understand why, but maybe they were exceptionally bored? This is the first time I learned that the underlying VM is single-threaded, for example.
Why would you think he spent a lot of effort? The second sentence literally says that he did not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel the need to mention that Curtis Yarvin owns "a few thousand" Urbit stars [0]. If your goal is to make Urbit succeed, you'll end up making him very powerful and wealthy in the process. [0] https://urbit.org/blog/a-founders-farewell/
I wonder why he left. Especially after saying that Urbit was more important to him than his writing [0] [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv...
The only good thing about Urbit are the Jorge Luis Borges references. Fun fact, the creator of Urbit, Curtis Yarvin, is a far-right blogger with some pretty crazy ideas: http://distributedweb.care/posts/who-owns-the-stars/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin > Curtis Guy Yarvin (born 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American far-right blogger. Yarvin and his ideas are often associated…
>Like money, but every bit of democratic control and negotiability is removed. My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be extremely democratic. More democratic than all previously existing currencies, even. (Whether those ideas are feasible or those goals are being achieved is another matter.) I'm not sure where Yarvin stands on cryptocurrencies. He's indeed very anti-democracy and pro-monarchy, but…
What I mean is, imagine 20 people come together in a little society. They use something like Bitcoin as their currency, and one of them has far more wealth than the others combined. They cannot decide by majority vote how to use the wealth democratically. If the one doesn't play along, they can only resort to violence to get his coin. (You could argue that this property of crypto serves to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority, but IRL minorites rarely have crypto riches. And usually the way you'd protect the minority would be by law or constitution.)
Because crypto is not "credit" in a book, but a proven mathematical algorithm, there is no room for negotiation, discussion, redistribution.
I wonder if you could make a cryptocurrency from the opposite principle - everything is up to negotiation, and you could have crypto councils or parliaments which can reallocate resources as neccessary?
> Also, no need to add "fun fact"; Yarvin's involvement is by far the most well-known thing about this odd project
I didn't know until very recently. This piece of information made everything else about Urbit fall into place and make sense for me. It wasn't mentioned here so I thought it was useful to bring up.
> What's potentially unethical about the core idea of IPFS or those general categories of ideas?
Unethical? I don't know. But I don't want to live in a world where we use crypography this way. People are getting into hot water due to stupid stuff they said 10 years ago on Twitter. Imagine how bad this will be when everything is stored immutably in a blockchain or journal. Social mores change, and society might become more error-friendly again. Or in a few years we might be back to Richelieu: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
Likewise, I just don't want to use a net ruled by Urbit "dukes" and "earls".
It just comes down to this: Certain uses of technology, especially from people with a libertarian or anarcho-capitalist agenda, give me the creeps. I hope I'm not alone with that fear. A quote from Terminator comes to mind:
> That Terminator is out there. It can't be reasoned with, it can't be bargained with. It doesn't feel pity of remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop. Ever.
The only good thing about Urbit are the Jorge Luis Borges references. Fun fact, the creator of Urbit, Curtis Yarvin, is a far-right blogger with some pretty crazy ideas: http://distributedweb.care/posts/who-owns-the-stars/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin > Curtis Guy Yarvin (born 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American far-right blogger. Yarvin and his ideas are often associated…
Can you truly be woke if a bigot designed your RAM?
I also did a deep dive on Urbit a few months back (shameless plug: https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/urbit ), and I really agree with the author for the most part. Definitely the most concerning part of Urbit, for me at least, is the obscurantism of Hoon. Much like the author says, it's totally incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read through every bit of the (lacking imo) documentation. Even a domain-specific langu…
It ends up feeling like a very compact /Forth/ fused with a Lisp. There's some ideas at its core that feel very cool once you understand them, but also lead you to have to jump through a bunch of hoops when implementing normal functionality. It's worth seeing where changed assumptions led its design, and it /is/ intriguing.
But make no buts about it: the obscurantism is 100% intentional and part of the design. From what I recall, it's obscure to prevent shallow novices from being able to jump in an wreck the ecosystem. You want to learn, you have to be dedicated. I get the impulse, I really do, but this is too far in the opposite extreme.
Speaking of Urbit, I had/have a relatively old "ship" I got long long ago, what can I even do with it? How do I get it up and running? I think they transitioned to Ethereum, but what does that mean? lol, it's so confusing!
Just reach out to support@urbit.org if you want to get this figured out. They're very helpful.
With respect to its utility, it's primarily a barebones chat app right now.