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Urbit is a reinvention of the Old Internet with a lot of the principles from ancient computer lore thrown in. (eg. Lisp Machines) It reintroduces the social co

Urbit is a reinvention of the Old Internet with a lot of the principles from ancient computer lore thrown in. (eg. Lisp Machines) It reintroduces the social computing environment, emphasis on the word computing. The Old Internet and timesharing systems like ITS and Unix were based around this model: https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-... So you have a standard identity layer, instead of a million little fiefdoms of identity competing for sign ups. You have proper one-to-one connections between individual users on the system, with modern cryptography inbetween. You have a functional, very very small kernel out of which the rest of the system is built. This kernel and core concept is a sort of distillation of the ACID concept from database systems, so that your computer has transactions and forgives mistakes. It bakes the social layer and the community layer of the Internet into the protocol. Urbit tries to be community-aware and politics-aware and handle this gracefully. This sort of formal acknowledgement of necessary human factors in technology is certainly in line with Curtis Yarvin's previously expressed views on social organization. (And is mostly what people are talking about when they say he 'baked neoreaction' into Urbit. This accusation strikes me as intellectually dishonest on multiple levels, but I'd rather not digress on it.) If nothing else it's a very interesting piece of new research in computer science, you should be excited about it. EDIT: Curtis I know you're lurking, can I get an invite?

yarvin9 11y ago
Thanks! The appropriate authorities have been contacted :-)
wyager 11y ago
Why do you think it is a good idea to make things "social" at the OS level? That seems like a very strange abstraction policy. And how is this system "politics-aware"? I'm not even sure what that would entail from what basically seems to amount to a collection of esolangs.
- unimpressive 11y ago
  >Why do you think it is a good idea to make things "social" at the OS level? That seems like a very strange abstraction policy. Social means a bit more than just Facebook. It also means primitives for things like collaborative editors and coworking spaces, video conferencing, etc. IMO the ideal social system would look a lot like a mix between the old timesharing systems, the early Internet and Douglas Engelbarts "Mother of All Demos": https://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCntAugHumanIntellect https://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCn... >And how is this system "politics-aware"? I'm not even sure what that would entail from what basically seems to amount to a collection of esolangs. Well it comes with the community. The way Urbit is structured your personal cloud/ship/etc is intended to be linked up to a community of other users. Politics are part of being social and part of communities. If you don't have a structured way of handling it it'll happen regardless and can be made less ugly with official support. "The part that is stable we are going to predict, and the part that is unstable we are going to control." - John Von Neumann, 1948

yarvin9 11y ago

Thanks! The appropriate authorities have been contacted :-)

wyager 11y ago

Why do you think it is a good idea to make things "social" at the OS level? That seems like a very strange abstraction policy. And how is this system "politics-aware"? I'm not even sure what that would entail from what basically seems to amount to a collection of esolangs.

unimpressive 11y ago
>Why do you think it is a good idea to make things "social" at the OS level? That seems like a very strange abstraction policy. Social means a bit more than just Facebook. It also means primitives for things like collaborative editors and coworking spaces, video conferencing, etc. IMO the ideal social system would look a lot like a mix between the old timesharing systems, the early Internet and Douglas Engelbarts "Mother of All Demos": https://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCntAugHumanIntellect https://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCn... >And how is this system "politics-aware"? I'm not even sure what that would entail from what basically seems to amount to a collection of esolangs. Well it comes with the community. The way Urbit is structured your personal cloud/ship/etc is intended to be linked up to a community of other users. Politics are part of being social and part of communities. If you don't have a structured way of handling it it'll happen regardless and can be made less ugly with official support. "The part that is stable we are going to predict, and the part that is unstable we are going to control." - John Von Neumann, 1948