[HN Gopher] Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane
___________________________________________________________________
Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane
Author : deegles
Score : 147 points
Date : 2021-05-24 19:09 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wejn.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (wejn.org)
| young_unixer wrote:
| Reminds me of this article:
| https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
| [deleted]
| analyte123 wrote:
| People at large don't want their entire digital life secured by
| 12 words in a sock drawer in the same way that they don't want
| their entire life's savings secured by 12 words in a sock drawer.
| Urbit can't achieve mass adoption in its envisioned form without
| there being highly reliable peer key backup and sharing on
| Ethereum.
| 627467 wrote:
| I don't know if what you describe is the actual deal breaker of
| urbit (or cryptocurrencies in general) but I agree with the
| seriousness of the problem. I feel like a system with built-in
| identity (urbit) actually let us be a step closer to peer
| recovery than alternatives.
| fvdessen wrote:
| While the Urbit tech stack is clearly insane (some say it's on
| purpose), The urbit identity layer is interesting and useful. You
| basically buy your username as a NFT, and that username is bound
| to signing keys, ip address and ethereum wallet. This makes it
| quite practical as an identity for chat / social network. This
| identity is on the eth blockchain and thus nobody can steal it /
| ban you, which is a unique value proposition.
|
| I hope one day saner apps will adopt similar concepts, or reuse
| the urbit identity layer for identity purposes
| crocodiletears wrote:
| I agree. I see so much potential in the identity and network
| layer, but have yet to be convinced that the rest of the
| platform will survive.
| bruiseralmighty wrote:
| This is also the most compelling aspect of it to me as well.
| Domains being essentially free allows for too much easy
| spamming of internet users. Raising the cost of an identity
| online really helps solve a lot of the bad actor problems.
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean if that's the only value. Facebook, but only for
| people who pay $100/yr, would be an easy way to create a high
| signal-noise social network and unfortunately it isn't.
| majewsky wrote:
| $100/yr does not seem to be stopping people from putting
| malicious apps on the iOS app store.
| geofft wrote:
| Have you never lost a private key? I definitely lost the
| private key to my original PGP key.
|
| And I wouldn't say "nobody can ban you" - quite the opposite,
| in fact: with Urbit every major network node gets to make its
| own choice about banning, and the system encourages that. And
| the obvious end state is for a setup like Mastodon (or,
| frankly, Twitter blocks) where nodes collaborate on identifying
| spammers, griefers, and other bad actors because nobody wants
| to do full-time moderation work for their own personal
| experience on the network. That means your permanent identity
| can easily be banned across large swaths of the network.
|
| (I think that's actually totally fine, I just don't think it's
| true to say that nobody can ban you.)
| fvdessen wrote:
| > And I wouldn't say "nobody can ban you" [...] And the
| obvious end state is for a setup like Mastodon
|
| It is indeed quite similar to mastodon in the sense that
| other instances can ban you. The difference is that in
| mastodon your identity is usually located on an instance, and
| if that instance bans you, you lose your identity. In Urbit
| every identity has its own instance so your personal contact
| list will still be able to reach you.
|
| Of course requiring everybody to run its own instance adds
| quite some friction for user onboarding, but that is an issue
| with the urbit network, not with the identity layer. You
| could imagine having your identity and linking it to a hosted
| instance, and later switch instance if the needs arise.
|
| This is what I like about the idea of having your identity as
| a NFT, but clearly the way urbit currently uses it does not
| exploit the full potential of the idea.
|
| As for losing your keys, if such a system would become
| widespread, most people would chose to have their keys hosted
| on a third party service, and only people who really care
| about maintaining full ownership would keep the keys to
| themselves.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > Have you never lost a private key? I definitely lost the
| private key to my original PGP key.
|
| For nearly twenty years now, PGP tutorials have often
| explained the importance of printing out a copy of your
| private key in a special OCR-readable font, and putting that
| in a safe place. Then you won't risk losing your private key
| even if all the devices it was stored on perish.
| wmf wrote:
| Or you could buy a domain.
| Spivak wrote:
| I'm sure someone will talk about your registrar potentially
| banning you but since your identity is tied to your public IP
| address that could already happen.
| fvdessen wrote:
| Indeed the direct link to an IP address is currently a weak
| point in terms of privacy, but it could potentially link to
| an onion address instead to solve that issue. The point is
| that your identity is on a globally available and immutable
| blockchain instead of someone's db you must trust
| ianbicking wrote:
| I actually think some of the underlying ideas Urbit is trying to
| pursue are interesting and have real potential:
|
| 1. Deterministic computing seems really interesting. It gives you
| something that is reliable and portable and replicable. It means
| you have to be very clear about everything that isn't
| deterministic, mostly I/O, and that's worth being clear about. I
| find determinism the more interesting part of pure functional
| programming, but I don't think you need a functional language to
| have deterministic computation.
|
| 2. Portable identity and communication are also interesting, they
| are necessary formal concepts if you are going to treat
| computation abstractly.
|
| 3. It's not crazy that you access this abstract concept of an OS
| using HTTP APIs and out-of-OS web frontends. It feels a little
| like smoke-and-mirrors since so much of what it "does" is
| actually the browser and JavaScript, but eh.
|
| That said, Urbit is a terrible expression of these ideas. The
| expression of computation (Nock) is absurd. Jets seem a little
| clever, but it's really an fragile extension of the idea of JITs,
| but based on idioms to make up for Nock being unable to express
| basic computational concepts (like negative numbers). As a result
| the Jets are essentially the Real Bytecodes. I guess it's a
| little like the evolution of CPU microcode, but entirely
| unnecessary as Nock as no legacy or advantages that need to be
| preserved.
|
| The language Hoon is the worst obscurantism I've ever seen.
| People will claim it's productive once you learn it, but I don't
| believe them one bit, the programs are long-winded, full of weird
| boilerplate, and just bad. They cover this up by making it seem
| that the programs _do_ something notable, but they don't. Most of
| the programs would be 100 lines in Node.js, they are just moving
| a little data around to rich (browser/JavaScript) clients.
|
| There's no decent abstractions for an OS. The whole concept of
| the Urbit machine is that it's one big opaque bundle of bytes.
| There's no documents. There's no applications. There's no
| separation of concerns. There's no consideration that a usable
| system requires lots of different parties (OS makers, application
| developers, API developers, cloud services, etc) coming together,
| and there's no sense that managing the complexity of that
| intersection is something an OS should do.
|
| There's no security. There's no permission model. There's no
| capability model. There's no firewalls between anything. It's
| like if you ran Python on bare metal and called it an OS.
|
| That said, I bet someone could do something really cool in this
| general area using WASM, contained in something that acted like
| an OS but wasn't much more complicated than an execution
| container.
| gryn wrote:
| last I saw urbit a long time ago, the only thing I could think of
| is that it was a social experiment to see how much vague nonsense
| people a willing to take and how long it would take for people to
| reach that consensus.
|
| a more elaborate version of:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTHg-tGvlJ8
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| If it's so bad, why is it so comfy?
|
| Maybe it's just because it's so much effort to get into it that
| it acts as a filter (like the old web) and the UI design is
| great.
| wiz21c wrote:
| TempleOS looked saner
| nix23 wrote:
| Well actually it is really sane...lets talk about windows (the
| not NT versions)
| gameswithgo wrote:
| The OS was very sane. The creator had some trouble.
| jlehman wrote:
| Reminds me of this essay: http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html
| api wrote:
| There's a lot of survivorship bias in that kind of thinking.
| They called Galileo mad, but they also called simultaneous five
| dimensional time cube guy mad.
| wejn wrote:
| Interesting. I thought that I was tearing down the fact they
| took the brilliant new idea, and bastardized it beyond
| recognition, and in multiple ways.
|
| I loved the promise of Urbit, and was disappointed by the
| execution.
| jlehman wrote:
| You mean "after spending just a few hours poking around it"?
| It's a big, ambitious project that's been worked on now for
| nearly two decades.
|
| It seems more likely that you're disappointed by your
| understanding of the execution, which can be nothing but
| extremely limited.
| majewsky wrote:
| If you cannot adequately explain the appeal of a new
| technology to your peers after having worked on it for a
| week, that's nothing to worry about. After 20 years though?
| That's very worrying.
| tern wrote:
| If you're interested in an articulation of what's exciting about
| Urbit from one of the core devs, this recent launch event hosted
| a great conversation: https://youtu.be/_aRnfacZPto?t=3224 (run-
| time 1hr and a good deal of it is about Urbit+Bitcoin
| specifically).
|
| One thing I've enjoyed and learned a lot from while participating
| in blockchain and Urbit communities is the sheer difference in
| valance of conversations, from "this is entirely useless to the
| point of being a joke or fraud" to "the rest of the world is
| insane and finally something makes sense." There is irrational
| exuberance on both sides, but also deep, grounded takes
| diametrically opposed in their conclusions.
|
| To be human!
| codezero wrote:
| 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!
| jlehman wrote:
| Just reach out to support@urbit.org if you want to get this
| figured out. They're very helpful.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| I'll second that. They also have a discord server. I had some
| issues getting started, but they were very helpful in helping
| me work through it.
|
| With respect to its utility, it's primarily a barebones chat
| app right now.
| [deleted]
| severak_cz wrote:
| It reminds me LuaOS[1] - an distributed operating system written
| in lua communicating with users via XMPP.
|
| I wrote for it an "unix-like shell simulator"[2] (see [3] for
| example session log) and earned honorary title "early adopter".
| :D
|
| It was not really usable, mostly fantasy console running in
| another fantasy console, but I learned coroutines while working
| on it.
|
| [1]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120503001002/http://luaos.net/...
|
| [2]: https://gist.github.com/severak/3927004
|
| [3]: https://gist.github.com/severak/3927054
| tombert wrote:
| My manager at a previous job a few years ago told me about Urbit,
| I found the website, and I was extremely confused to what it
| actually _was_.
|
| Re-reading it now, I'm still a little confused.
| dwb wrote:
| I find the incredulousness around urbit's differences and
| ambition very tiresome. I have an urbit ship, I bought the
| identity when it was not so expensive. I've hardly used it; I'm
| not a pioneer sort of person and I've not found the time to get
| into Hoon. I'm not at all a true believer (to extend the cult
| comparison, which strikes me as unfair too); I think there are a
| few concerns you could raise (I agree on OTA updates and address
| space, and would add governance and power relations). But I for
| one welcome an ambitious re-thinking of (a subset of) computing
| and I wish them the best. I mean, run it in a VM or something and
| probably don't use it for anything sensitive right now. I want to
| live in a world where people have a go at unconventional things.
| mjfl wrote:
| Urbit is a prank that has somehow lasted for a long time. If you
| look at their version of machine code, Hoon or whatever its
| called, it's purposefully obfuscated so that, just to add two
| numbers together requires I think 4 different instructions. I did
| my OS class final project on it 6 years ago...
| lisper wrote:
| > Urbit is a prank
|
| I had Curtis pitch urbit to me in the very early days and I can
| assure you that he did not intend it to be a prank. He was
| deadly serious about it. I think his true motives were much
| darker. I think he wanted to start a cult following the model
| of L. Ron Hubbard. And I think he succeeded.
| dwb wrote:
| You could choose to not read it as a prank, then it might be
| more interesting. I don't doubt there is an amount of
| purposeful obfuscation in the naming at least, and there
| clearly is a desire to be different. But looking beyond the
| surface, there is a coherent system there that I think deserves
| being judged as such, if you're going to judge it at all.
| tomphoolery wrote:
| my first reaction was "is this language descended from
| brainfuck??"
| captainmuon wrote:
| 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 with the alt-right. From 2007 to 2014,
| he authored a blog called "Unqualified Reservations", which
| argued that American democracy is a failed experiment, and that
| it should be replaced by monarchy or corporate governance. He is
| known, along with fellow neo-reactionary Nick Land, for
| developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind
| the Dark Enlightenment.
|
| I find there are tendencies among some people in tech to bring
| upon what I would consider the crypto dystopia. Cryptocurrency is
| one such idea. Like money, but every bit of democratic control
| and negotiability is removed. It enshrines a kind of cutthroat
| capitalism with the ruthlessness of an algorithm. (When it works
| as indended. Currently it's mostly used as a ponzi scheme or to
| buy drugs, but that's a different story.)
|
| An immutable publication record and undeniable cryptographic
| identity is another idea which is dystopic to me. In more benign
| form you find it in IPFS etc., but the culmination of this idea
| is certainly Urbit.
| meowface wrote:
| >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 that's exactly
| why I think the attempted connection doesn't work. I don't
| think it's fair or accurate to tie him or his ideology to the
| general concept of cryptocurrencies or their advocates.
|
| I'd wager the vast majority of advocates probably strongly
| disagree with him on most things. I think they would largely
| consider themselves democracy maximalists, even.
|
| Also, no need to add "fun fact"; Yarvin's involvement is by far
| the most well-known thing about this odd project. If you ask
| anyone what Urbit is, their answer is very likely either going
| to be "what?" or "that inscrutable thing that neo-reactionary
| blogger made". It usually takes up about 95%+ of any Urbit
| discussion anywhere online.
|
| >An immutable publication record and undeniable cryptographic
| identity is another idea which is dystopic to me.
|
| Why? Also, there are some cryptocurrencies that don't have
| either of those things. And for the ones that do,
| "cryptographic identity" just means "a public key", like a PGP
| key; not necessarily your real personal information.
|
| >In more benign form you find it in IPFS etc.
|
| Why the need for the equivocative qualifier? What's potentially
| unethical about the core idea of IPFS or those general
| categories of ideas? (Perhaps beyond the sorts of illicit
| activities any sort of decentralized technology, like Tor, can
| enable.)
|
| I'm not a big cryptocurrency supporter and recognize ~99.9% of
| it is Ponzi schemes and other varying degrees of hot air - and
| there are certainly a lot of highly pessimistic ideas I
| disagree with that are common among the community (e.g. that
| central banks are malevolent or that the US dollar is likely to
| collapse in the not-too-distant future) - but it's unfortunate
| how these things seem to always reduce to two radical poles
| that are pretty much equivalently ideologically closed-minded.
|
| (I'm certainly pulling a https://xkcd.com/774/, with zero
| qualms. I 100% agree with the character on the left, in this
| context.)
| wpietri wrote:
| > My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be
| extremely democratic.
|
| Do they? They don't seem to be succeeding very well. Bitcoin
| mining is certainly very concentrated. And a lot the nominal
| cryptowhatever projects are effectively more centralized than
| that. Which of them do you see as democratic?
| captainmuon wrote:
| > My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be
| extremely democratic. More democratic than all previously
| existing currencies, even.
|
| 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.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| What were the political views of the people who wrote my
| current OS? My current browser? The channels on my chip that
| the electrons flow? The drive of the server that stores this
| comment?
|
| Can you truly be woke if a bigot designed your RAM?
| disconcision wrote:
| i feel like there's a spectrum here. i can't and don't pursue
| absolute ideological purity, but in a dense ecosystem of
| competing ideas, i feel pretty okay opting not to play
| baronet in some wannabe despot's homesteading fantasy
| captainmuon wrote:
| For a second, don't distinguish between _political_ and other
| views. The ideals of the developers certainly shape the
| product.
|
| - Apple: Elegant, powerful, not much user choice but
| generally well-thought-out. And every bit is designed such
| that Apple keeps control of the platform.
|
| - Unix hackers: Powerful command line interface, do one thing
| and do it well, KISS, adherence to tradtion (manpages etc.)
|
| - Moxie Marlinspike: Concerned about user's privacy, thinks
| usability is paramount for adoption -> creates Signal
|
| etc.
|
| Now imagine an OS written by the Chinese communist party. Or
| a file-sharing program written by an anticapitalist group. Or
| a P2P marketplace by a drug cartel. Or a genealogy service
| created by white supremacists.
|
| The (political) views of a creator are _very_ relevant, if
| you believe the creation is used to further their goals!
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >The (political) views of a creator are very relevant
|
| Agree completely because it shapes the actual intent of the
| creation.
|
| More just hinting if you could truly do an audit I'm not
| sure you'd be happy with what you found. For example, an
| operating system that requires all financial transactions
| that go through it has to take 30% to go into the wallet of
| the creators doesn't really seem particularly left
| leaning...
| aaroninsf wrote:
| If anything the author is too generous. In particular, in leaving
| room that the cultishness (call it a clique, or, a droll derive
| through the hyperspaces of language fetishization) is less than
| intentional.
|
| Yes, it's a cult; no, there is no sekret killer app.
|
| People like to play, like to be exclusive, like to feel holier
| than though, doubly so when it's dressed up as droll and all in
| good fun. Or as "locker-room talk."
|
| This is what happens when Robert Anton Wilson fails fast.
| slakrems wrote:
| To me Urbit is a non starter because it was founded by Moldbug
| who is an incredible racist and they don't hire people of color.
| voldacar wrote:
| 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 alien, which is strange because its
| goal basically seems to be weird and alien. This is actually
| quite excellent. Computing needs fewer javascript frameworks and
| more truly weird and alien shit, with a healthy dose of NIH.
| wejn wrote:
| And there I was, thinking that the first four paragraphs pretty
| much summed up the frame of mind with which it was written.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| 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 pretty
| clinically detached.
| throwaway292893 wrote:
| Of course he's controversial, he thinks differently and he
| wrote his thoughts down. How dare he.
|
| Honestly in this age of this Marxism takeover, his thoughts
| aren't that crazy.
| robmccoll wrote:
| The guy appears to be sympathetic to white nationalist
| views, harbors racist ideas, and advocates for
| authoritarianism. That's a little far to write off as
| "thinks differently". Given that your account is
| "throwaway", I'm guessing you sense that there is something
| to be ashamed of or at least lost in social capital by
| defending him publicly?
| NackerHughes wrote:
| Of course he senses that, he thinks differently and he
| wrote his thoughts down. How dare he.
| wmf wrote:
| I'm not aware of any self-hosted apps that perform encryption
| at rest. Maybe Urbit should be held to a higher standard
| because it's an "OS" but then again it's not really.
| yongjik wrote:
| 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.
| jlehman wrote:
| Why would you think he spent a lot of effort? The second
| sentence literally says that he did not.
| wejn wrote:
| True. Just a couple of hours.
|
| On the other hand... is walltime the only criterion worth
| considering?
| [deleted]
| iudqnolq wrote:
| > Computing needs fewer javascript frameworks and more truly
| weird and alien shit,
|
| Which is why I found the point that they've implemented their
| UI in javascript interesting
| voldacar wrote:
| Agreed. That does seem strange. I guess if you want a UI that
| just works and is flexible, most people will turn to a web
| browser
| _peeley wrote:
| 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 language
| with a familiar syntax would be better, since at least a first-
| timer could grok basic logic/structure at first glance. This only
| compounds the security concerns, since reviewing any Hoon code
| requires being a domain expert - I doubt any security/crypto
| researchers will want to take a few weeks to learn Hoon just to
| audit something as obscure as Urbit. Hoon even has a kind of
| Lisp-y feel to it and Lisp lends itself well to the purely
| functional goals of Hoon/Nock, so I don't see why they couldn't
| have just made Hoon a Lisp.
|
| On the whole however, I'm hesitantly optimistic about the
| project. Most other works aiming to address Internet
| centralization just seem like band-aids (federated social
| networks still have problems with moderation/deplatforming, self-
| hosting just means running it in someone else's data center,
| etc.), and Urbit seems to be one of the few things willing to
| deal with the fundamental problems from the ground up.
|
| Also, I'm kind of glad the author didn't mention Urbit's original
| author despite most other posts on the topic feeling the need to
| mention it. He's long since left the project but it seems as
| though it'll never be rid of his influence. At this point I just
| feel bad for the maintainers/users that will constantly be
| associated with the guy from now on.
| NationalPark wrote:
| Doesn't Yarvin still have a personal interest in the address
| space?
|
| I think if they insist on not rebranding, they need to make it
| clearer that they disavow his political stuff, since the
| project sort of started as a vanity implementation of his ideas
| about monarchy or whatever.
| juancampa wrote:
| I'd like to see a list of Galaxy owners. Shouldn't that be
| public info? who's routing my data? who am I giving my money
| to?
| oneearedrabbit wrote:
| This partially answers your question [0]:
|
| > Urbit started back in 2002 as Curtis Yarvin's personal
| project. Curtis developed the original prototype for Urbit
| and, separately, wrote a blog on history and politics under
| the pen name 'Mencius Moldbug'.
|
| > In early 2019, Curtis left the Urbit project and gave all
| of his voting interest (both as address space and voting
| shares in the company) back to Tlon. He retains a non-voting,
| minority interest in both the address space and the company
| -- but is not involved in the day-to-day development or
| operations.
|
| > Curtis laid the foundation for Urbit by delivering its
| first prototype but, since 2013, it has been refined and
| almost entirely rewritten by a community of developers. No
| one working on Urbit today had anything to do with Curtis's
| writing. For the most part, we couldn't be less interested in
| it.
|
| > The community of people who build Urbit have widely varied
| ways of thinking and looking at the world, but they all share
| two things: the desire to build neutral infrastructure for
| all people and to think from first principles about hard
| problems. We welcome spirited debate and disagreement as a
| primary tool for refining our work. Successful
| infrastructure, we think, serves all people -- no matter
| their background, culture, or worldview.
|
| [0] https://urbit.org/faq/
| gowld wrote:
| > He's long since left the project but it seems as though it'll
| never be rid of his influence.
|
| The major design concersns raised by the above comment and the
| OP are inseparable from the original author, because he chose
| an extremely idiosyncratic language and system design that
| eschews all known standards and practices.
|
| If people want to make the idea work, they should port it to a
| reputable language.
| etcet wrote:
| 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/
| juancampa wrote:
| 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_y
| arv...
| crocodiletears wrote:
| His affiliation with the project was an albatross around
| its neck. For it to succeed, he understood that he couldn't
| have a place in it.
| Fellshard wrote:
| The obscurantism is both part of what makes it intriguing, and
| what makes it utterly useless. It's intentionally anti-
| intuitive at many turns - for every clever name, there's dozens
| of arbitrary ones. 'Casks' with 'Marks' for a descriptive
| wrapper around a value? Clever! Doors for generators with cores
| and batteries? A disaster!
|
| 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.
| lxe wrote:
| Finally, a human-readable explanation of Urbit!
| peanut_worm wrote:
| I have a friend who is into Urbit. It seems like a social club at
| this point.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I once got far enough into Urbit to reach something like a chat
| room. I think I may own a star, or planet, (a medium sized
| entity - not a large or huge one) if I can find where I put the
| key. I have been meaning to explore more. Glad to see it is
| still around.
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