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Wow, before I read the HN comments, I felt really dumb for not understanding a word of what that page meant. I thought it was one of those strange things all the cool kids are into these days whose appeal I cannot understand or explain.
I'm reserving my judgement on the system. Just sharing a few videos which might help in understanding Urbit better. Start with this LamdaConf talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I94qbWBGsDs and pair with this demo video after: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp9aCEfA6ao
I'm very confused.
It's a very interesting idea at its core implemented by a man seemingly high on his own sense of intelligence that has some very reactionary views. I'd love to see another project like this that doesn't talk down to its user base and doesn't use a strange language or unreadable source code.
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Also, I doubt they could handle it, their scope is huge: new OS, new programming language, networking, encryption, time, compilation, virtualization etc. I don't believe group of 5 unknown people can handle it. Like, Urbit time: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/library/3c/ Where the hell are timezones, Leap seconds etc.? They just store constants!
Not only that, they are incorrect constants. The definition for :cet, for example, is only correct for non-leap centuries. 2000-2099 has an extra day compared to 1900-1999, or its partner :qad, which has the opposite problem and assumes any 4-year span has a leap year. Of course, the language has other problems too, like 'moar' being used as a serious part of the language's grammar, or worse, more nebulous verbs like…
> An Urbit identity, or "ship," .... is actually just a 32-bit number, like an IP address 32-bits huh? That's brave.
They are intentionally scarce.
The entire population of earth wouldn't be able to sign up. Just over half could. What happens in 50 years when all of those 4.2 billion people are dead? Does the entire infrastructure die along with those who were "lucky" enough to win the lottery?
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RationalWiki is biased trash that can't be trusted for anything.
Without actually reading what it says, you seem to be attacking the source rather than the content.
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They are intentionally scarce.
> By keeping addresses scarce, we make spam and abuse expensive The entire population of earth wouldn't be able to sign up. Just over half could. What happens in 50 years when all of those 4.2 billion people are dead? Does the entire infrastructure die along with those who were "lucky" enough to win the lottery?
They also have freely-available 128-bit identities, called 'submarines', that can be created on whim.
The 32-bit identities are 'destroyers', both being subsets of 'ships'.
Like everything else associated with Urbit, it's back-to-front. Real-world destroyers hugely out-number submarines.
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Heritability of traits can be measured by twin studies. Some people have spent quite a lot of time doing this for IQ. Others have even identified some of the genes that are correlated with high IQ, TOR1A being one of the more interesting ones. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this area of research. Regarding population genetics, I don't think it matters as much as people seem to think. Han Chinese are short…
>"Heritability of traits can be measured by twin studies." No, correlations between traits can be measured in twin studies, but they do not prove a causal link. In the realm of intelligence, it could be (and I would argue) that looking like a nerd generally proceeds becoming one. People become social outcasts, and then become intelligent as a defense mechanism. That is,once in that nerd social caste, a greater percen…
What evidence would falsify your position?
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Agree. Feels like it was written by someone with schizophasia. Like: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ What are they talking about? Dry/wet arms? Batteries? Metal cores? Bridges? Gates? Superpowers? For me it looks like they've just replaced common concepts with random "cool" words, deliberately obfuscated the syntax and try to sell it as an innovation.
If you know about Yarvins other beliefs, the fact that t seems obfuscated makes quite a bit of sense in my view. I think it's a superiority thing for him. At its core? I think it's kind of interesting. Would have been more useful if he had made it simpler to understand/develop in. In its current form, it seems like a vanity project to me.
Just at the hardware level, we are forever, it seems, stuck in the von Neumann architecture with some recent hops to vector processing on GPUs and FPGA/ASIC/GPU hybrids. We need software for these new platforms if they divorce from the von Neumann machine. I am not calling for reincarnating Lisp Machines, but maybe its time to build and test new (not the same old) hardware and software,to see how it competes with this path we're on. Why not? Experimentation is fruitful one way or the other; you learn from your mistakes too.
I am interested in Urbit, and I can separate myself from Yarvin's political writings, the same way I could still concede that 1 + 1 = 2, even if Hitler had written a paper saying so without any of his views contained therein.
Yarvin admits the obfuscation by using different terms, or swapping 1 and 0 from their current boolean understanding, 'may hold water' per the bootleg YouTube video of the talk he just gave. I personally think when you are trying to usher in something different, it is helpful to shed old terms. So much weight is carried by words, good and bad. It sometimes helps to freshen up the lingo with the new or slightly-altered concepts. After having read a little Wittgenstein and the late Umberto Eco's works on semiotics, I am convinced language or signs carry significant biases that are useful to put aside or rename if it helps you to think of an old concept in a new light.
What I don't understand, however, is the need to romanticize software. There's too much magic in this. I get the feel that this is something very important, but I don't understand what it is. Anyhow, best of luck to the team!