[HN Gopher] Landscape is an Urbit-native toolkit for staying con...
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       Landscape is an Urbit-native toolkit for staying connected with
       your friends
        
       Author : lxm
       Score  : 38 points
       Date   : 2023-01-26 00:04 UTC (22 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tlon.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tlon.io)
        
       | freen wrote:
       | Yarvin and his work is forever tainted with his Mencius Moldbug
       | nrx/dark enlightenment nonsense.
       | 
       | Unless you are cool with absolute monarchism and the divine right
       | of kings, avoid giving him and his work any oxygen.
        
       | dmitriid wrote:
       | It amuses me to no end that all these "innovative collaborative
       | tools" are rigidly locked in to Slack's way of displaying
       | information.
        
         | api wrote:
         | Slack just copied IRC clients.
        
           | ElfinTrousers wrote:
           | As a co-worker of mine put it some years back, "I was not
           | expecting this year's big growth sector to be fancy IRC."
        
           | dmitriid wrote:
           | Slack had an "innovation" in the form of unusable threads
           | that every other client is now sheepishly copying.
        
             | api wrote:
             | The big innovation over IRC was persistent chat across
             | devices. That was huge and is pretty much a must have now.
        
               | aliqot wrote:
               | irccloud had that first, and before that znc, before that
               | we had these byzantine bitchx setups, but it's nothing
               | new from concept to implementation, I'd say
        
       | mursicale wrote:
       | Never ceases to amaze me that every time urbit comes up here all
       | you guys can come up with is "it's racist" and "hoon is weird".
       | There are valid criticisms to make, but these ain't it.
        
         | kerpotgh wrote:
         | It's racist or rather the group that's working on it is racist
         | and they're explicitly trying to inject that into the system is
         | a very valid point.
        
         | routerl wrote:
         | How's this one: I'm a competent, experienced, professional
         | software engineer, who is utterly and completely incapable of
         | grasping _what_ and _why_ urbit is, without seemingly investing
         | far more time and cognitive capital than I 'm willing to invest
         | on something so nebulous.
         | 
         | From my perspective, urbit is quicksand: crypto wasn't this
         | bad, NFT's weren't this bad; I was able to grasp the basics
         | quickly and invest time into solving my confusions to my own
         | satisfaction, without ever feeling like I was more drawn in
         | than necessary (i.e. didn't over-invest, got out early).
         | 
         | To me, urbit is nothing more than a sign, just beyond a
         | blackhole's event horizon, which says "come closer".
         | 
         | No thanks. I'm happy to stick to the fundamentals that have
         | served me so well in my life and career.
        
           | stolenmerch wrote:
           | Interesting. I consider myself an average developer who
           | picked up Urbit to play with in 2017 (when it was still
           | _very_ rough). I 've been happily using it almost everyday
           | for a couple of years now. I mean, it's just a peer-to-peer
           | network built from first principles. That's really kind of
           | it. I guess I don't really deep dive into the inner workings
           | of its address space, OS, or functional programming language,
           | but for an end user like me it works pretty great for
           | distributed communication. I'm not trying to sell anyone on
           | it by any means, but some of the most interesting things I've
           | read have been in Urbit groups.
        
             | [deleted]
        
           | gaze wrote:
           | I wonder what Yarvin thinks of NFTs. It's like the VHS vs
           | Betamax of cynical obfuscated decentralized scams.
        
         | freen wrote:
         | Next up, a social network called Ubermensch written in
         | brainfuck. </sarcasm>
        
         | Lewton wrote:
         | 'hoon is weird' is a valid criticism, especially because it's
         | weird on purpose, to increase the barrier to entry
        
       | jonstewart wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
         | ElfinTrousers wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | mlatu wrote:
       | urbit is strongly hierarchic... politically i would compare it to
       | signal if signal wasnt just a messenger... but i did say
       | politically so there we go: "we cannot allow federation, because
       | the dictator says so"-signal is similar to "all your ships are
       | belong to someone"-urbit
       | 
       | i doubt much has changed in the last 10years.
       | 
       | But from the purely technological angle: this is interesting and
       | we should emulate this, but free and open.
        
         | fossuser wrote:
         | It is open source, the hierarchy is the minimal necessary to
         | solve the reasons federated systems fail and centralize (spam,
         | public key lookup for p2p encryption, version updates across
         | the system, difficulty of running a linux server).
         | 
         | I work at Tlon so I'm biased, but I joined because I think
         | urbit is the best way to get ourselves out of the local max of
         | computing we're trapped in.
         | 
         | Email is a failure as a federated system (people on a tiny
         | amount of centralized providers), the promise of the web as a
         | decentralized place for people to interact p2p failed (FB,
         | Instagram, etc.).
         | 
         | We're serfs operating accounts that manipulate our attention so
         | that we view more ads on massively centralized systems
         | controlled by companies that have their own incentives. Urbit
         | is an escape of that. You can't fix these issues without fixing
         | the problems earlier up in the computing stack, federated
         | systems on the existing stack are doomed to always be relegated
         | to a tiny hyper-technical niche. Urbit's design means it's
         | possible to get the UX such that everyone could use it (likely
         | most by a provider running the urbit for them).
         | 
         | Federated systems don't even really solve these problems for
         | most users unless you run your own server (an _even_ smaller
         | subset) - you 're just trading one dictator for another (and
         | likely it's worse given how subreddit mods behave - mastodon is
         | a good example of this).
         | 
         | https://zalberico.com/essay/2022/09/28/tlon-urbit-computing-...
         | 
         | http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra...
        
       | rohan_ wrote:
       | If Tlon was serious about Urbit they would swap out Hoon with
       | something more practical.
        
         | aliqot wrote:
         | It's weird how some things were intentionally made different
         | just to be that way, like the binary true/false is reversed.
         | Yarvin said he did it to be different and because it was funny.
        
           | actionfromafar wrote:
           | All cults operate in a similar way. It's important to have a
           | very distinct _in-group_ with codes only fully understood
           | internally.
        
             | aliqot wrote:
             | shaved-head earthtones guy with the cult eyes in their
             | youtube videos does them no favors. First thing I said when
             | watching one of their conference talks "oh shit did i just
             | wander into a cult"
             | 
             | edit: this guy https://youtu.be/g1qroWiZF90
        
               | masklinn wrote:
               | > shaved-head earthtones guy with the cult eyes in their
               | youtube videos does them no favors.
               | 
               | Doesn't it? It's the same as scams, selecting against
               | people who recognise cults is a feature, it means you
               | don't have to weed those out. Means your recruitment
               | process is that much more efficient.
        
           | Lammy wrote:
           | There are plenty of things worth criticizing in Urbit, IMO
           | mostly related to the recreation of real-world scarcity as a
           | digital namespace. Nobody seems to mind this very much in
           | POSIX:                   [Lammy#~] true && echo $?         0
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-26 23:02 UTC)