[HN Gopher] Urbit Takeoff Is Here
___________________________________________________________________
Urbit Takeoff Is Here
Author : AngelusNovus
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-04-22 15:08 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hatryx-lastud.tlon.network)
(TXT) w3m dump (hatryx-lastud.tlon.network)
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I'm going to say it. Urbit is stupid. Hard to use, confusing to
| operate, and literally designed to be difficult to gatekeep.
|
| It was a neat idea 10 years ago or whatever.
| buf wrote:
| I remember seeing the ICO presale of urbit come across my inbox.
| I didn't understand it then and I don't understand it now. Good
| on them though.
| vyrotek wrote:
| I guess I'll be the first to ask. What is this?
| tern wrote:
| Urbit is an attempt to fix all of the major issues of networked
| computing in one single system.
|
| Security, spam, maintenance, up-time, software complexity,
| identity, network governance, etc.
|
| The system is now reasonably complete and achieves this goal in
| theory--all of these problems magically disappear. In order to
| truly succeed, they will next need to make it performant (it is
| very slow) and truly secure.
|
| Urbit is a better realization of "web3". It allows individuals
| to completely control their computing experience and makes it
| possible to build a web with rich social experiences, but that
| feels more like owning a car than like working at a multi-
| national corporation.
|
| People often wonder whether Urbit is an embodiment of Curtis'
| "radical right-wing" ideas. This is sort-of true. The structure
| built into Urbit's identity systems are designed to support a
| certain network governance scheme, which looks a bit like a
| republic. It allows for relative autonomy of groups and
| individuals and supports collective decision making at
| different scales. It's not direct democracy, like some web3
| projects aim for, but it strikes a balance between that and the
| way network governance works on the current web, which is a
| partly-corporate network of oligarchies. It's also, crucially,
| not a dogmatic design. There are some cryptographic decisions
| that suggest certain governance structures, but there's nothing
| stopping anyone from governing pieces of the network however
| they like.
|
| On the current web, large corporations like Google and Mozilla
| coordinate with de facto absolute powers like ICAAN, IETF, W3C,
| etc. to manage the highest layer, while corporations like
| Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft entirely dictate the
| applications layer for the most part. There are of course
| exceptions, such as this website, but they are responsible for
| less and less of the average user's experience. The barrier to
| entry to compete with established players is very high, or in
| the case of governing bodies, impossible.
|
| Since Urbit allows for secure communications, it shares the
| same implicit politics as other products of the cypherpunk
| ideology. Same as the ideology of the EFF, Signal or any web3
| project, Urbit can be seen to support uncensorable
| communication and coordination between people. This is a
| double-edged sword. It supports "free speech," makes political
| oppression infeasible, and hinders certain forms of lawn
| enforcement. This can advance the agendas of both the left and
| the right.
|
| So, fundamentally, this type of project takes aim at some of
| the points of control wielded by the nation state. It creates
| better conditions for individual sovereignty vs state
| sovereignty. This supports Curtis' vision, which is mainly
| about replacing the bureaucratic administration state with more
| functional and decentralized governance. It also supports other
| political agenda like libertarianism and anarcho-syndicalism.
|
| In my experience, people who work and live on Urbit are all
| over the political spectrum. It's an environment of tolerance.
|
| People often criticize Urbit over its overly poetic and,
| arguably, obfuscated programming languages (which are designed
| entirely from scratch). The system is built from abstractions
| that are similar to, but often meaningfully different from the
| structures found in other languages. Instead of naming them
| according to their closest relatives, they are named de novo.
| This was done out of two motivations as far as I can tell: (1)
| the system was designed via a thought experiment about what
| kind of system could last for 10,000 years. From this
| perspective, today's fashions are unimportant. Will an array be
| an "array" in 1,000 years? (2) We can limit our creativity by
| using familiar words, which encourage thinking in tropes.
| Urbit's naming forces you to re-learn and this reconsider every
| part of the system.
|
| I have seen many people learn Hoon. I don't believe it's any
| harder than learning C++, but it is a frustrating experience
| for someone who has learned C++ and needs to go through the
| hard parts of that experience again (memorization). This is a
| limitation and possibly an advantage of the system.
|
| Ultimately, one should understand Urbit as a very long-term
| project to build an operating system and network architecture
| to last 1,000 years. It's not easy to learn and it's not
| designed to work tomorrow, but it's surprisingly functional
| already and I find that pretty exciting.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Urbit is an attempt to fix all of the major issues of
| networked computing in one single system. > > Security, spam,
| maintenance, up-time, software complexity, identity, network
| governance, etc.
|
| And yet, from an article from just a year ago [1]: "Nothing
| in Urbit is encrypted at rest. No, seriously, all the chat
| logs, events, everything... is dumped into a journal on disk7
| in cleartext form. In other words, when hosting urbit at any
| 3rd party, you better be the only one with access to the
| underlying OS (and have it fully encrypted), lest you want
| your entire history worth of data readable by the company
| running the instance for you. Or anyone with access to the
| system."
|
| And: " if you want to stay up to date, you need to configure
| OTA. So you will be receiving updates to your Urbit instance
| from one of your neighbors. Sounds great, since this is 2021,
| and surely the updates are signed. Well, no. They are not."
|
| [1] https://wejn.org/2021/02/urbit-good-bad-insane/
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It's intentionally obscure code and concepts to sell virtual
| "real estate" in a closed world.
|
| If that sounds like either "bad idea" or "scam", or both, well,
| I think that's probably an accurate assessment.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| The first time I encountered Urbit was here on HN. I visited
| their website and had a great time reading through the available
| marketing and documentation. The whole time I was completely
| convinced that Urbit was an elaborate, high-effort parody of
| crypto scams, pyramid schemes, new-age technobabble, and neo-
| feudalist ideology. Only when I was nearing the end of the docs
| did I begin to doubt this conclusion.
|
| Urbit, in my mind, remains an example of Poe's law. I still can't
| quite square that there are people who take it seriously.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Is anyone not completely cynical about Urbit able to provide a
| summarization of the aesthetic and technical choices of the
| platform? It is certainly on the high end of interesting projects
| in crypto, but is also quite complex and perhaps a bit flawed; it
| all adds to its mystique, however.
| jlehman wrote:
| Disclaimer: I work on Urbit full-time.
|
| There are some good write-ups on the technical decisions here:
|
| https://urbit.org/blog/precepts
| https://urbit.org/blog/precepts-discussion
|
| Funnily enough, most of the "mystique" isn't really
| intentional. It's that the inevitable "muh Curtis" arguments
| that always show up have discouraged many of the team from
| bothering to engage in explaining the project (here moreso than
| anywhere else) and instead focus on building the thing.
|
| Summarization: Urbit is a reaction to Unix-driven software
| complexity that dominates modern software development. The
| thesis is that cascading complexity cannot be solved without a
| complete rewrite of the computing stack, and that goes all the
| way back to the operating system. Here's an even better
| summarization:
| https://twitter.com/pcmonk/status/1201298411011629063
|
| Alternative summarization: the internet, being built on a
| hodgepodge stack of tooling that wasn't made for people to
| communicate the way that they actually do now, has major
| incidental flaws. Urbit is a completely rebuilt computing stack
| that better maps to what we want to do with networked
| computers. That involves things like, but not limited to baking
| a non-fungible, valuable identity into the networking layer.
|
| This is another good summarization, although the sections after
| "Urbit ID" are out of date: https://urbit.org/understanding-
| urbit
| tptacek wrote:
| When you write things like "muh Curtis", you engage in those
| arguments yourself. If you want to keep the conversation
| focused on the technology you're working on, do that; I
| agree, it's the more relevant thing for HN to talk about.
| People who have problems with the founder of this project are
| not crazy randos. Keeping HN conversations on-topic takes
| work, from everyone.
|
| Beyond that, your comment doesn't say much. Computing and
| networking as it exists today, you say, is bad. Urbit is a
| ground-up rethink of all of it. OK, but there are 10th
| graders with the same idea (just as there were when I was a
| 10th grader). What makes Urbit worth taking more seriously
| than those ideas?
| jlehman wrote:
| Ideas are cheap, and Urbit isn't just an idea any longer.
| It's a working system that's been built by dozens of people
| over the years, and it's only picking up steam.
|
| In Ron Garrett's words:
|
| > The mere fact that Urbit is still a thing, that it has
| not yet collapsed under the weight of its own intentionally
| induced baggage, is worrisome to me. Something is keeping
| that project alive, and it's not technical merit. I don't
| see a lot of viable options other than some kind of
| fanaticism.
|
| Looks like he and his ilk are just wrong and having a hard
| time believing that. It's alive because an increasing
| number of people want it to be, and no amount of theorizing
| can deny the reality of actual growth -- which, in case
| everyone forgot, is what the OP is showing.
| ineptech wrote:
| I agree that urbit has far outlasted all of the nay-
| sayers in a technical sense. People have been saying
| "this is some elaborate joke" for years, but the project
| has made steady progress and really is pretty usable now.
| It does what it says on the side of the tin, that's quite
| an achievement.
|
| But, whatever its technical merits, do you think it can
| ever get to a point where it reached enough users to be
| useful (in the "chicken and egg problem" sense that
| platforms need a critical mass of users to be useful
| platforms), given the millstone around its neck? Do
| threads like this (where detailed, technical explanations
| get downvoted to oblivion, and "I heard Yarvin is racist"
| is the top comment) make you want to throw in the towel?
| jlehman wrote:
| It has enough users to be useful now, which number in the
| thousands. It's also not a service that anyone maintains
| on behalf of others, so there's no one that needs to have
| a critical mass for it to be useful. Nearly everyone
| running Urbit is self-hosting locally or on some VPS
| somewhere, and they can do that indefinitely even if no
| more code was ever pushed.
|
| If this kind of stuff made anyone want to throw in the
| towel Urbit wouldn't be a thing anymore. There's only a
| millstone around its neck on HN, but HN is gradually
| becoming more and more irrelevant. To our base and the
| people finding us, "I don't think about you at all"
| reflects their sentiment for HN conversations and the
| tenor of conversation that happens here.
|
| I'm just here because someone told me (from within Urbit)
| that this post went up, it's Friday and I don't have as
| many meetings, and I couldn't resist myself. You seem
| fine though, so boot a comet and hit me up on the network
| if you want a planet or something to keep the
| conversation going.
| ineptech wrote:
| Oh, I've had a planet since 2016 or so I think, I boot it
| up once a year or so and check out the updates. I agree
| that the platform is big enough to be self-supporting in
| a technical sense. By "chicken and egg problem" I meant
| what is discussed here:
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-
| letter-ii... I can use my planet to talk to the other
| weirdos who use urbit, but not a ton else yet - it won't
| really succeed as a platform until it has an ecosystem of
| developers making apps and users using them.
|
| Is there some progress there btw? Last I checked there
| was no way to discover apps other than hard work, and
| sharing them (installing an app someone else had written)
| was pretty arduous.
|
| edit: and I know HN isn't the whole world, but I suspect
| it is representative in this case. I just can't imagine
| _any_ person learning _anything_ about urbit from _any_
| source that doesn 't get the 2-3 worst things Yarvin has
| ever written appended to it within the first hour. It's
| hard to imagine how it ever gets really popular under
| those circumstances.
| jlehman wrote:
| We shipped a proper mechanism for software distribution
| last October. If you haven't booted up since then you
| might want to. Discovery still requires word of mouth
| (but not for long...), but sharing them is now as simple
| as sharing a link in chat or punching something like the
| following into the Dojo.
|
| |install ~dister-norsyr-torryn %canvas
|
| edit: yes, there's an ecosystem of developers shipping
| software now. Here's a screenshot of my homescreen, which
| I cleaned up a couple of days ago to remove some apps I
| don't use often: https://imgur.com/7keFr7Y
|
| Of the apps you can see, 13 were created by distinct
| developers. Some people are more prolific.
| hocwyn wrote:
| This is what my company is building on Urbit:
| https://uqbarnetwork.medium.com/introducing-uqbar-
| network-6b...
|
| Having a large audience of pre-existing users is nice
| (and ditto for dev ecosystem for tooling and libraries)
| but ultimately what makes Urbit a good idea is, as Josh
| says, that we want computers to primarily be doing one
| set of things and they were originally designed to do a
| different set of things (with the things they currently
| do added as a complicated afterthought). A blockchain
| protocol is in the end a p2p application. It benefits
| hugely from running on a natively p2p networked operating
| system with a built-in cryptographic identity
| infrastructure. If Urbit's technology works, people are
| going to build on top of it because they need it, and
| their customers will come to use what they've built
| because it works better. If the tech didn't work, it
| wouldn't matter how many people tried it.
|
| You're correct that there is no "Urbit Store" analogous
| to the Apple Store or the Android Store (this is a
| feature not a bug for many users, although I sympathize
| with both perspectives). I'm not sure what you mean about
| installing apps being arduous - currently you start
| typing the developer's name into the homepage search bar,
| it autocompletes, you are given a list of apps they've
| published, you click the one you're interested in,
| installation is a few seconds to a few minutes.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > I'm not sure what you mean about installing apps being
| arduous - currently you start typing the developer's name
| into the homepage search bar, it autocompletes, you are
| given a list of apps they've published, you click the one
| you're interested in, installation is a few seconds to a
| few minutes.
|
| First, you have to know the developer's name, and then
| find the apps that developer produced. This is literally
| the opposite of what most people do: search for an _app_
| (not for a developer) and install it (or search for an
| app category, and install an app)
| emptysongglass wrote:
| > People who have problems with the founder of this project
| are not crazy randos.
|
| The founder divested himself of the project yet the current
| top comment doesn't want to touch Urbit as if it is cursed
| by his ghost.
|
| It's these same sorts of comments that drag down all
| discourse because they prohibit any other state than
| negative. It's these same comments that pollute any healthy
| attempt at discourse around crypto here with the Evil Eye
| that just pushes any one with a different idea to the HN
| hivemind out.
|
| > What makes Urbit worth taking more seriously than those
| ideas?
|
| This is explained, in technical and philosophical depth in
| the links provided you.
| ineptech wrote:
| I'll try. First, what it is: Urbit is a virtual machine OS for
| server-side applications. If you imagine a future in which it
| is common for non-technical people to rent cloud server space
| on which to host server-side applications (say, a small blog, a
| mastodon node, a minecraft server, etc), Urbit aspires to be a
| good platform on which to host them.
|
| Second, why it's so weird: it aspires to be "done" someday, as
| in no new features to add, no bugs left, just stable forever
| (sometimes called Kelvin versioning). It's design makes no
| sense unless you understand this; the bespoke languages it's
| written in are designed to be too simple to have any unexpected
| behaviors (as opposed to being designed for ease of use or
| performance).
|
| Third, you can't understand it without being aware that the
| founder got #cancelled for his (unrelated to urbit) right-wing
| blogging, so most of the responses in this thread will be from
| people who really dislike that guy and dismiss urbit as a
| result.
| judofyr wrote:
| > It's design makes no sense unless you understand this; the
| bespoke languages it's written in are designed to be too
| simple to have any unexpected behaviors (as opposed to being
| designed for ease of use or performance)
|
| I don't buy this. Why does "no unexpected behavior" require
| the amount of obfuscation which they have in Urbit? I've been
| trying to pick it up a few times and I'm constantly
| struggling to understand how it behaves.
| ineptech wrote:
| > I don't buy this.
|
| I'm not selling it, just explaining it. More info here:
| https://urbit.org/blog/toward-a-frozen-operating-system
| hocwyn wrote:
| sanderjd wrote:
| He is very broadly shunned not for "right-wing blogging", but
| for being a white supremacist. This is how society is
| supposed to work; people get to choose who they associate
| with, and no good person chooses to associate with white
| supremacists.
| troutwine wrote:
| > This, you can't understand it without being aware that the
| founder got #cancelled for his (unrelated to urbit) right-
| wing blogging, so most of the responses in this thread will
| be from people who really dislike that guy and dismiss urbit
| as a result.
|
| I think you can, although I admit a lot of the discussion
| here is likely to focus on Yarvin himself. That is, there is
| a good argument that Urbit reflects Yarvin's politics in
| itself and as these politics are, clearly, broadly
| distasteful it's entirely reasonably that someone opposed to
| Right Libertarianism and ignorant of Yarvin would find Urbit
| undesirable on its own merits.
| ineptech wrote:
| _shrug_ there are giant for-profit corporations relying on
| software written by Richard Stallman. I don 't think the
| intentions of the founder matter much.
|
| I don't like Yarvin either, but I do want a product that
| meets this use case. At this point I wish someone would
| clone urbit, since the hatred for the founder seems to mean
| it'll never get traction no matter what it does or how it
| works.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yep, a fresh start with no association to the founder,
| and ditching the obfuscations that are not useful while
| keeping the best ideas, would be interesting.
| themikesanto wrote:
| I've been following Urbit for years, and honestly I still
| don't see the use case. It seems like its intended use
| case is to be a network where you can't disseminate your
| data across the network unless the "lord" that issued you
| your address space allows you to do so.
| ineptech wrote:
| The use case is that you can host your blog on it and
| store your bitcoins in it and it won't crash, can't get
| hacked, and is easy to move from one VM host to another.
| The network architecture is an implementation detail to
| get messaging to work reliably, not some kind of
| ideological statement.
| tern wrote:
| The same is true of Facebook, Google, Twitter and your
| ISP. The difference with Urbit is you can switch
| providers if you're censored, or reciprocally if you want
| a censored experience, you can virtually move to
| somewhere with a blocklist.
| troutwine wrote:
| > shrug there are giant for-profit corporations relying
| on software written by Richard Stallman. I don't think
| the intentions of the founder matter much.
|
| I mean, the left politics of Stallman _very much_
| influence how Free Software ends up being used and
| incorporated. Consider how the GPL encodes the norm of
| working in common with one another, dragging profit
| seeking corporations into that as well, or into defending
| against it. It's like a whole thing.
|
| > At this point I wish someone would clone urbit, since
| the hatred for the founder seems to mean it'll never get
| traction no matter what it does or how it works.
|
| Right, what I'm saying is, even cloned, Urbit's going to
| be a non-starter for a lot of people. Rigidly
| hierarchical, rent-seeking obscurantism isn't, uh,
| popular. I _do_ think Kelvin versioning is compelling
| though. TeX comes to mind there as an excellent example.
| tern wrote:
| > Rigidly hierarchical, rent-seeking obscurantism isn't,
| uh, popular.
|
| What is the current state of the web?
|
| _Rigidly hierarchical_
|
| All internet governing bodies wield absolute power. Most
| of the computing experience is completely controlled by a
| handful of global corporations that are more powerful
| than many nation states.
|
| You don't control or have any influence over most of
| this.
|
| _Rent seeking_
|
| AWS, domain names, social networks? The web is rent-
| seeking at every level.
|
| _Obscurantism_
|
| Most of the code we use is worse than obscure, it's
| literally proprietary.
|
| I would say these qualities are _very_ popular today.
| troutwine wrote:
| > What is the current state of the web?
|
| Sure. I think the important difference here is the web
| has _become_ this way; the things you point out are
| problems to be solved. Whereas, Urbit encodes these norms
| as a social good.
| dmitriid wrote:
| The VM and language for it are designed in an intentionally
| obscure ways so that "normies wouldn't get in", apparently :)
| https://twitter.com/MorlockP/status/1502278405391331332
| jlehman wrote:
| The views of an employee who left the company years ago and
| has been completely uninvolved since should hardly be
| treated as canon.
| weakfish wrote:
| Writing "right wing blogging" leaves out the key part of
| being "unapologetically racist"
| ohCh6zos wrote:
| As someone who didn't get in early I don't think I have any
| reason to use Urbit.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Here's a long Twitter thread on how weird Urbit, Urbit VM etc.
| is: https://twitter.com/MorlockP/status/1502278405391331332 (or
| for easier reading,
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1502278405391331332.html)
|
| Apparently it is intentionally obscure and confusing.
| stolenmerch wrote:
| I've been using Urbit for a few years now and honestly find a lot
| of value in it. Loads of interesting people and conversations to
| be had in various groups. It's really confusing at first but
| isn't hard to get up to speed by just diving in and using the
| software. Regarding Curtis Yarvin being the founder - I just
| don't care. I use products by people I politically agree with and
| disagree with ALL the time. I personally don't see any monarchism
| or NRx stuff "baked into the system". I understand Urbit is not
| for everyone though and that is perfectly fine too. As with
| everything, I think people should make an effort to try it before
| coming down hard with reasons why it should be avoided.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > It's really confusing at first but isn't hard to get up to
| speed by just diving in and using the software.
|
| I "dove in" and used the software:
|
| - Installed "Port"
|
| - Started a new "comet"
|
| It started an empty something with three tiles "groups, <cant
| remember what>, bitcoin". Clicking each brought up a new empty
| window.
|
| - There's no help in software except "you can search apps by
| developer name". Great.
|
| - Joined "sponsor" (~samozd or somesuch), there's nothing
| there, you need invites for everything.
|
| At this point I completed my dive and deleted Port.
| hn_urbit_thr123 wrote:
| FWIW here's an explainer I wrote up a year ago for a friend who
| asked. I'm not affiliated with urbit, except that I want a
| product that does what it does (which at this point means I'm
| hoping someone reinvents it, because it seems fatally doomed by
| how hated the founder is).
|
| What is Urbit?
|
| Urbit is a virtual machine OS for server-side applications. If
| you imagine a future in which it is common for non-technical
| people to rent cloud server space on which to host server-side
| applications (say, a small blog, a mastodon node, a minecraft
| server, etc), Urbit aspires to be a good platform on which to
| host them.
|
| Urbit features:
|
| 1. All input events (http request to an urbit-based api, signed
| message from another urbit, keystroke from console, etc) are
| transactions which change the OS state (or don't, if they fail).
| As a result, it should be impossible for a transaction to fail
| halfway through and leave the urbit instance hosed.
|
| 2. Exactly-once messaging between nodes. This is possible because
| nodes have persistent connections; disconnection is
| indistinguishable from long latency. This may sound minor, but it
| is a huge part of what makes urbit novel and (theoretically)
| stable and secure.
|
| 3. Built-in identity and auth. An urbit instance can't boot
| without an identity, which serves as username, network-routing
| address, and also as the public key with which all outgoing
| messages are encrypted. In practical terms, this means no urbit
| app or service needs to deal with logins or passwords or crypto.
|
| 4. There are only 2^32 first-class identities, which makes urbit
| a de facto reputation network. This is to minimize malicious
| behavior; if an identity costs $5, and you can only make $2 from
| spamming before that identity is blacklisted, no one will spam.
|
| 5. The urbit network is hierachically federated, and hence
| resistant to censorship. (Of course, this is a misfeature if you
| want to be able to censor people off of the networks you
| participate in)
|
| 6. It's not there yet, but the urbit kernel aspires to be so
| small and simple and formally-provably-correct that at some point
| it's done. As in, done done - no features to add, no bugs to fix,
| done. A lot of the design decisions (some of which are wildly
| unperformant) make no sense unless you take this goal in to
| account. More on that here: https://urbit.org/blog/toward-a-
| frozen-operating-system
|
| Main Criticisms:
|
| 1. The founder has objectionable politics/beliefs. For its first
| decade, urbit was the solo project of one Curtis Yarvin, who
| moonlighted as an alt-right-ish blogger, and flamed out of polite
| society as a result. I've read a tiny bit, it was pretty dumb.
| The tl;dr is that he wants to get rid of democracy and bring back
| feudal monarchies. He also said some pretty racist stuff from
| time to time and that's the main reason everyone hates him. He
| left the project several years ago, which accomplished absolutely
| nothing in terms of anyone hating it any less.
|
| 2. The language is very strange and possibly bad. By "language",
| I mean both the programming language (hoon, the native language
| you write urbit apps in) and urbit's terms for core concepts,
| almost all of which have new, made-up names. More info here:
| https://hooniversity.org/urbit-and-hoon-glossary/
|
| 3. A lot of people think it's a shitcoin of some kind. AFAICT
| this is objectively not true. There's no way anyone will make any
| amount of money speculating on urbit unless it _works_ in the
| sense that it 's a good OS that millions of people want to use.
| Besides, if it were some kind of scam, it would've fallen apart
| when the founder left under a black cloud. That didn't happen; it
| is still chugging along. There are competent programmers who
| understand it and have worked on it for a year or two and still
| think it's genuinely good technology and continue to work on it
| for that reason.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > nodes have persistent connections; disconnection is
| indistinguishable from long latency
|
| > An urbit instance can't boot without an identity
|
| Does this mean that urbit requires an always-on connection at
| all times?
|
| > this means no urbit app or service needs to deal with logins
| or passwords or crypto.
|
| This also means that all apps have full access to all your
| money, private info, bank accounts etc.?
| hocwyn wrote:
| No, Urbit doesn't require an always-on connection. It does
| work better with an always-on connection, since its peers
| will send it a lot of events to process as soon it reappears
| after a long absence.
|
| > This also means that all apps have full access to all your
| money, private info, bank accounts etc.?
|
| If you wanted to write or install an app that had access to a
| hot wallet stored on your Urbit ship, for example, you could.
| It doesn't have access to secrets you haven't intentionally
| stored on your Urbit. When you say "all apps have full
| access" - what do you mean? For example you could write an
| app that is both a display case for POAPs and also spies on
| your private messages, but the actual app that is a display
| case for POAPs is written to have no way to access your
| messages: is this the question you were asking?
| dmitriid wrote:
| > When you say "all apps have full access" - what do you
| mean?
|
| I mean this: "this means no urbit app or service needs to
| deal with logins or passwords or crypto.". If apps don't
| need to deal with that, they have access to your info,
| doesn't it?
| wmf wrote:
| _The urbit network is hierachically federated, and hence
| resistant to censorship._
|
| Why isn't flat federation even more censorship-resistant? I
| don't understand the benefit of hierarchy.
| compressedgas wrote:
| My criticism of Urbit is about its lack of within a node
| parallelism and lack of between node transactionality.
| hocwyn wrote:
| olah_1 wrote:
| >5. The urbit network is hierachically federated, and hence
| resistant to censorship.
|
| This is not true. Urbit is essentially a proof-of-stake network
| where the Galaxies and Stars have the authority to ban anyone
| off the network that they want.
|
| After Planets are already routed to some of their friends, they
| can keep those connections, but if a Planet is refused service
| by Stars, it will be limited in reach and capabilities.
|
| The whole point is that there _is_ accountability in the system
| and there does need to be a kind of Byzantine (literally it is
| set up like an empire) consensus.
|
| If you're banned by one Star, you can still be served by
| another Star, but it does affect the reputation (not hard-
| coded, but actual) of the Star that serves unsavory Planets.
|
| It's not far off from the Fediverse in this regard.
| hn_urbit_thr123 wrote:
| I agree, I was being terse; it'd be more accurate to say you
| can be banned off of the urbit network entirely if everyone
| hates you, but if only _most_ people hate you, you can still
| use it (but may only be able to talk to the other outcasts
| that most people hate).
| mmastrac wrote:
| Isn't this exactly the state of the internet today?
| hocwyn wrote:
| wmf wrote:
| Another opportunity to discover the difference between
| exponential and logistic growth.
| tmcw wrote:
| Decentralized web project that became a crypto-oriented
| decentralized web project. Very sprawling with its own
| programming language and fancy speak. Founded by Curtis Yarvin,
| who you should look up on Wikipedia. He's no longer affiliated,
| but still, look him up on Wikipedia.
| imtringued wrote:
| I don't think I have to care about software that doesn't want me
| to adopt it.
| jlehman wrote:
| For anyone out there that's not content outsourcing their views
| to a mob with a bone to pick:
|
| Urbit is not intentionally obfuscated. It's intentionally
| different from the rest of the modern software stack, because
| that's the point. It makes sense that that would make it look
| obfuscated. There are claims out there that it was in fact
| intentionally obfuscated years ago in its early days as its
| founder's personal project. Maybe? Not sure. Regardless, things
| change and this project is over a decade old.
|
| If you find the state of discourse here off-putting, malicious,
| and obviously ideological, like I do, and would rather see for
| yourself, I'm happy to onboard you to Urbit personally for free
| and show you what it's actually about.
|
| Follow our Getting Started guide (https://urbit.org/getting-
| started), boot a comet for free, and send ~wolref-podlex a DM,
| and I'll get you a planet.
| tptacek wrote:
| There's a long-running strain of arguments that Urbit isn't
| intentionally obfuscated; people involved in the project have
| been apologizing for its official descriptions since its
| inception. Ron Garrett isn't a "mob with a bone to pick" and
| he's been doing yeoman's work for years on HN debunking Urbit
| and pushing back on those apologies. To my eyes, he's got by
| far the better argument:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
|
| An especially admirable thing about the way Garrett has
| approached this mess is that he's managed, as far as I can
| tell, to reliably avoid taking the bait on the drama about the
| project's founder; he's just a Smug Lisp Weenie, in the best
| possible sense of the term, critiquing a language and computing
| platform.
| jlehman wrote:
| > An especially admirable thing about the way Garrett has
| approached this mess is that he's managed, as far as I can
| tell, to reliably avoid taking the bait on the drama about
| the project's founder...
|
| Well, your link shows that this statement is false:
|
| > ...But Curtis is more than just a bad reinventor of things.
| He is also Mencius Moldbug, a prolific pseudo-intellectual
| influencer of the alt-right. His politics worry me much more
| than his coding style. And because of my personal dealings
| with him, I am not sanguine about his ability or that of his
| followers to separate the two.
|
| It clearly colors his thinking, as he admits, to some degree.
| dastbe wrote:
| If you hadn't cut off the first part of the statement you
| quoted, it would explain that he's investing effort in
| criticizing this particular bad reinvention because of the
| impact Curtis Yarvin has been able to have elsewhere. He
| admits that it colors his prioritization, not his thinking.
| tptacek wrote:
| I encourage people to actually read Garrett's comments,
| which include repeated admonitions to take Urbit seriously
| because Yarvin "isn't an idiot"; he believes it's bad on
| the merits, not by association to Yarvin. If you ask for a
| litigation of Curtis Yarvin on this thread, you'll get one,
| and it isn't going to help your project.
| jlehman wrote:
| Which part of my response do you read as asking for a
| litigation?
| buddha420 wrote:
| I'd like to point out that Urbit ID and Urbit OS are two separate
| products. Many HN commenters object to the ID system for one
| reason or another, rather than the OS itself (which may just be
| because it requires substantial time investment to get to the
| point where one could criticize the OS).
|
| Urbit OS uses Urbit ID primarily for packet routing and peer
| discovery. If you already know the IP of whoever it is you want
| to talk to, packets are direct. If you don't know the IP, you ask
| their sponsors. In NAT'd situations, sponsors end up routing the
| packets as well, but this is a limitation of IPv4 rather than
| Urbit.
|
| It is a simple mathematical fact that hierarchical peer discovery
| and routing is faster than a purely flat network topology. UX is
| king for adoption, and an "alternative internet" that is slower
| than the existing one would never gain mass adoption.
|
| So if you care about actual adoption, you're pretty much forced
| into using hierarchical routing and peer discovery. At least
| initially.
|
| Ultimately, your ship has final say over what you think the PKI
| looks like. You download the state of the PKI from the
| blockchain, but you have final say over how you interpret it. The
| default software run on every node, from comet to galaxy, is
| identical. It is probably quite easy to change a few lines of
| code and use whoever you want for peer discovery and packet
| routing. Treat a planet as a galaxy if you want. In that sense,
| galaxies and stars are just default suggested infrastructure
| nodes, and are in theory totally optional.
|
| There's nothing preventing anyone from building a completely
| alternate routing infrastructure using Urbit OS that is entirely
| detached from Urbit ID. As long as the message protocols remain
| sufficiently similar, such networks could also communicate with
| one another. The PKI can trivially be forked, the rules
| completely changed, and you can set up your own network. You can
| also build virtual networks atop the existing one. If you want a
| flat network topology at the expense of latency, you could e.g.
| use some form of DHT routing.
|
| Thus far, the network is too small for anybody to bother building
| such a thing. But it is easy to imagine many networks, with their
| own home-grown routing protocols, and their own ID systems, in a
| future where P2P computing of the sort exemplified by Urbit takes
| off.
|
| Thus, I see the hierarchical peer discovery and routing mechanism
| as a almost-necessary bootstrap and growth hack for adoption, but
| it is in fact voluntary to participate in, and the field is open
| for many alternatives to emerge in the future.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Oddly enough launches the day after a Vanity Fair article on the
| founder made the rounds. Went down an Urbit rabbit hole yesterday
| for the first time.
| gwern wrote:
| A spurt from making registrations cheap isn't activity or use.
| pabl8k wrote:
| Worth noting that urbit is, as one poster on hacker news put it,
| "purposefully obfuscated"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11852141
|
| and its parent company was named after a short story by Borges
| where a fictional encyclopedia starts to affect reality in the
| world it is released in.
|
| The founder, who left in 2019, is a super-far-right figure. Even
| though he has distanced himself from the project, I can't help
| but think about the intentional obfuscation and the choice in
| naming as perhaps related to trying to build the kind of world he
| wrote about (authoritarian, non-egalitarian, non-apologetically
| racist). It makes me not want to associate with it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
| discreteevent wrote:
| He has a substack now: "Give Russia a free hand on the
| continent" https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-new-foreign-
| policy-for-e...
| neilk wrote:
| renewiltord wrote:
| I read the piece (despite finding him rather dreary to read,
| honestly) and that quoted section is theorycrafting what an
| ideal Trump figure would do to achieve its Trumpy goals.
|
| I think the whole Curtis Yarvin is a Crazy Person stuff is a
| bit overdone, honestly. Had a couple of drinks with the
| fellow at the old Urbit place in SOMA ages ago and he seemed
| fairly normal. He's got these kooky reactionary ideas in his
| writing, for sure, but he's not this Hitler figure people
| make him out to be.
|
| Anyway, not for me to defend him, just trying to insert some
| lived experience. I tried to like Urbit and Hoon and Nock but
| it wasn't for me. Perhaps for a better man.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't think this thread is an appropriate place to
| litigate Curtis Yarvin.
|
| If you use the "search" feature at the bottom of the page,
| with "author:lisper", you'll find what I think are several
| trenchant critiques of the technical ideas behind Urbit.
| renewiltord wrote:
| > _I don 't think this thread is an appropriate place to
| litigate Curtis Yarvin._
|
| In general, I'm pretty good about separating art from
| artist, but this thread root did launch that explicit
| discussion so perhaps your comment is better placed near
| the root than here.
|
| I made a good faith attempt to build on Urbit (still have
| my ship from then somewhere) and failed so you don't need
| to convince me.
|
| But fine, I'm not playing defence attorney since I don't
| even like this Dark Enlightenment crap. If you want to
| construct shadowy fanged figures and then decide it is
| inappropriate to question if they're fanged or really all
| that shadowy, then fine.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm not singling you out so much as I started writing a
| response to "I sat down for drinks with this person and
| they seemed nice" and realized I was getting sucked into
| the same drama. We can just not talk about the guy at
| all; that's an option we have. Let's do it that way.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I am happily content to do so.
| dTal wrote:
| For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure Hitler came across as
| fairly normal over drinks too.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Amusingly, your comment did make me feel some amount of
| embarrassment because I suspect you are right. That's
| probably a bad mode of evaluation of someone. I just
| don't think we should go all the way to Godwin, but who
| can tell, maybe that's exactly how it goes. After all,
| from Leonard Cohen:
|
| All There is to Know About Adolph Eichmann
|
| EYES:..........................................Medium
|
| HAIR:..........................................Medium
|
| WEIGHT:....................................Medium
|
| HEIGHT:....................................Medium
|
| DISTINGUISHING FEATURES...None
|
| NUMBER OF FINGERS:...........Ten
|
| NUMBER OF TOES..................Ten
|
| INTELLIGENCE.........................Medium
|
| What did you expect?
|
| Talons?
|
| Oversize incisors?
|
| Green saliva?
|
| Madness?
| d3nj4l wrote:
| Distancing himself from the project does jack squat when it's
| quite literally modelled after his feudalist beliefs:
|
| > The source code and design sketches for the project alluded
| to some of Yarvin's views, including initially classifying
| users as "lords," "dukes," and "earls".
|
| (from the wiki page on urbit.)
| olah_1 wrote:
| > when it's quite literally modelled after his feudalist
| beliefs
|
| Okay, but aren't _most_ P2P networks modelled like this? You
| have client-servers, relays, and super-relays.
|
| The only difference is the amount of buy-in required to run a
| relay or super-relay. But the amount of buy-in can also be
| compared to the cost to run an Eth2 node. It's a proof-of-
| stake network, essentially.
| tern wrote:
| Yes. It's modeled after a republic, in contrast to today's
| dominant models, which are, in fact, either feudal or
| corporate (monarchical).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_governance
| wmf wrote:
| The problem with Urbit used to be that each node was
| permanently bound to a single parent and "lords" had too
| much control over their "subjects", including things like
| kicking them out of the Urbitverse. That was changed so
| AFAIK it's no longer a concern. Most P2P systems are
| completely different because nodes can use any relay and
| relaying is separate from identity.
| olah_1 wrote:
| > Most P2P systems are completely different because nodes
| can use any relay and relaying is separate from identity.
|
| A planet has just one Star that sponsors them in Urbit,
| but as a planet, you can choose to leave your Star and
| move to a different Star.
|
| So you can also choose a different relay in Urbit. And
| yes, your Planet address is spawned by a Star, but you do
| fully own your address. It is separate in the sense that
| you can move it elsewhere.
| mempko wrote:
| Yeah, it's hard for me to believe his views are completely
| separate from the project. Note how the Urbit universe is
| organized is highly hierarchical, likely because he believes
| this is how things must be.
|
| When I wrote Firestr (http://firestr.com) back in 2013, which
| is similar to Urbit in many ways like being P2P and being able
| to download and share apps, It's clear to anyone who knows me
| my beliefs drove the technological decisions. For example, I am
| anti-hierarchy. So your Identity on Firestr is completely
| decentralized. There is no sub-ownership. There isn't even a
| central repository of identities. Identities are shared in a
| peer-to-peer way. Also, it doesn't attach itself to some bigger
| system like Ethereum and running it is free.
|
| I can easily see Borges's ideas in Urbit and it's a shame as we
| need more decentralized software.
| olah_1 wrote:
| Firestr looks great! It looks like a cross between Nostr and
| Gun.
|
| Regarding the architecture, where does the data live? On the
| clients?
|
| How are you achieving a multi-writer functionality? Meaning,
| how can two people edit the same chat data structure?
| mempko wrote:
| Thanks! Unfortunately I haven't done much with it in a
| while, just enough to keep it running on modern linux
| systems, but it still works nicely. (code is here:
| https://github.com/mempko/firestr)
|
| Data lives on the clients. How multi-writer is handled is
| up to the app you write but I have built in support for
| vector clocks. So for example, the built-in app editor uses
| vector clocks and a merge algorithm.
|
| I thought about adding CRDTs for making syncing data
| structures easier. Maybe there is someone out there that is
| motivated...
| pabl8k wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your project as a counter example. To be
| clear I'm not damning Borges here, just suggesting that
| naming the company after that particular story gives some
| weight to the idea that we should consider the author's
| values and goals when evaluating it.
| themikesanto wrote:
| Urbit is digital feudalism masquerading as a privacy solution.
| The original founder is a neoreactionary authoriarian, and the
| system is designed with his ideal vision of the future in mind.
| olah_1 wrote:
| > masquerading as a privacy solution
|
| Urbit has almost zero privacy features and it never claimed to
| have any.
|
| > The original founder is a neoreactionary authoriarian, and
| the system is designed with his ideal vision of the future in
| mind.
|
| Every P2P network that I have seen has a hierarchical topology.
| At the very least there are clients and relay servers (2
| tiers). If you can make a completely 1-tier, anarchy p2p
| topology, you should go for it and show that Urbit is way off-
| base here.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| The real feudalism that exists is on large platforms like
| YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and the like.
|
| It is there that people work YouTube's land in exchange for
| advertising crumbs.
|
| It's on Facebook where you trade away your privacy for the
| ability to talk with your own friends and have all of your work
| pulled down at any moment.
|
| It's on Twitter where you are hustle to build up twitter's
| value and get tossed out for saying the wrong things without
| any rights.
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