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Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

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Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#2

Post by bigbubba »

I don't think I'm alone in not understanding what the fuck urbit even is supposed to be. I suspect Yarvin is lost so far up his own ass he's lost the ability to clearly communicate. Whatever urbit is meant to be, it's doubtlessly dead on arrival due to virtually nobody knowing what it's meant to be.

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#3

Post by ohazi »

Look, I think Yarvin is a psychopath as much as the next reasonable human, but let's be clear - Urbit is garbage on technical grounds.

The terminology is a shell game of confusion and deliberate obfuscation. They pretend that it's a network, and a server, and a virtual machine, and an operating system, but it isn't any of these things -- you still need to provide all of them yourself.

It's just a program that sits on top of all your "real" infrastructure, that then emulates its own shittier "make believe" infrastructure, where you're expected to pay for shitty fake IPv4, shitty fake DNS, and are expected to write UDP applications in an esoteric programming language.

That's it.

There is absolutely nothing redeemable here. Please just let this tire fire of a project die the lonely, obscure death it deserves already.

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#5

Post by stale2002 »

bigbubba wrote: post #2

I don't think I'm alone in not understanding what the fuck urbit even is supposed to be. I suspect Yarvin is lost so far up his own ass he's lost the ability to clearly communicate. Whatever urbit is meant to be, it's doubtlessly dead on arrival due to virtually nobody knowing what it's meant to be.

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 is as follows:

It is something related to crypto and also some new programming language, and also there are solar systems, and planets, and somehow that has something to do with people controlling their own code.

And also, there is something about Monarchy, or kings? No idea what that monarchy thing is about.

Pro tip for fellow people who are running community based projects or advertising your product through meetups:

You should tailor your pitches and tech talks to be understandable by a software engineer who is a couple drinks in, and only half paying attention to the talk. Because guess what, that's what the majority of your audience is going to be!

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#6

Post by colechristensen »

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 your stuff get a decent internet connection and install apache and wordpress.

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#10

Post by lalaland1125 »

randallsquared wrote: post #9

Yarvin isn't even associated with urbit any longer, is he? Last I heard he'd retired.

The article in question deals with this quite a bit. Even though he has retired, he still has a large amount of control over the project in terms of the virtual property that he owns.
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