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1. I'm really not sure how that happened to you. I'm interested in Urbit and play around with it (and actually own a galaxy), but am not an employee, and I've b
by chc4 10y ago
1. I'm really not sure how that happened to you. I'm interested in Urbit and play around with it (and actually own a galaxy), but am not an employee, and I've been more than happy answering questions from people via :talk who are starting out or wanting to learn more. I've never seen anyone mocked, publicly nor privately, and I really hope that it isn't still happening if it was.
2. The author had an alt-right blog under a pseudonym. Some people think that makes him literally a Nazi. I don't agree with, er, basically any of his views, but I do enjoy reading his posts simply because they are fun to read. They aren't racist, except in the non-PC way, and has been nothing but nice when interacting with his online. None of those views bleed into Urbit, so I really don't care what political views Yarvin holds on his own.
3. Saying "only dedicated people would learn it" is just being mean. Hoon is unique from Lisp, and isn't even intentionally hard to learn - it's just different from nearly all other languages, because it compiles down to Nock, and builds primitives that make sense in the context of running on that VM. It's strongly typed, unlike Lisp, along with being pure. It's analogous to Lisp that you write code that is turned directly into an AST, but quite different. The part that is "completely foreign" is the weird syntax, which looks much harder to learn than it is, which they've recently admitted is too hardcore for newbs: They added keyword style in the last Hoon revision, so that you can code in nearly normal looking syntax, if you want. `:if(a b c)` instead of `?:(a b c)`.
Nock is kinda a Lisp variant, but there is a good reason behind having a small, perfect VM that never changes with some nice features, which are iterated in the docs and LambdaConf slides.
4. Urbit is open-source. https://github.com/urbit/urbit https://github.com/urbit/urbit. If you read the website, they pledged a lot of the galaxies and Urbit namespace to what will become a non-profit spinoff. Not only that, but you can fork the entire network if Tlon turns out to be Evil Company Inc., by changing the hard-coded galaxy keys. I'll admit that there is a big difference between "open source" and actually being developed in the open, and hopefully they will open up about where they want to go with Urbit more, but it's by no means behind a company firewall.
- zardgiv 10y agoClaiming that some ethnic groups are genetically good slaves is "not racist except in the non-PC way?"
- chc4 10y agoHe defends what he posted under Mencius Moldbug in a Medium blogpost here[0], which is nominally level-headed. There are in fact genetic differences across ethnic groups (sickle cell anemia comes to mind immediately), and it would be silly to think that the only possible generic changes are changed skin color and a specific blood disorder. You can say that since men have a statistically higher muscle density, they are genetically better slaves than women are. That does not mean that I'm advocating we enslave all men, or that slavery is anything other than abhorrent. 0: https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lambdaconf-anyway-35ff8cd4fb9d https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lam...
- zardgiv 10y agoOddly enough, he never made that claim re:men and women. I wonder why he focuses on certain ethnic groups. There's a lot of rationalization going on here for people that usually are quite capable of critical thinking.
- mordocai 10y agoThis is a hugely fallacious argument. Everyone focuses on something, if you want to extend your argument he should have also focused on diet, type of exercise, type of housing slaves are kept in, etc. Focusing on every single factor that could possibly effect slavery would be an endeavor probably greater than the average lifetime. Saying that some group of people or another would likely make better slaves than others is no different than saying that a certain group is more likely to be poor than another or be in jail than another. It may be considered in bad taste to discuss, but it isn't morally wrong to discuss. It is simply remarking on what is, not what should be.
- zardgiv 10y agoDo you think there's an ethnic group genetically more likely to be poor or in jail?
- internaut 10y ago> I'm interested in Urbit and play around with it (and actually own a galaxy Tell us about your experience and urbit thoughts.
- chc4 10y agoSure! I like a lot of the ideas, both on the merit of being weird and fun and genuinely being better. The view of having an operating system that has: * a built-in identity system and PKI * a typed and versioned file system * a typed command line * all apps being state machines (both being able to be upgrades over the air and operating based entirely on RPC primitives) * having the entire thing be a function on an atomically updated event log that is crash-proof, upgradable without a restart, and replayable is just great, even if it's not really usable yet. I'm not sure how feasible the entire project is, because holy hell is it ambitious, but I really hope they do well. Playing around with Hoon is actually pretty nice. Reading it as a beginner is scary as hell due to all the weird runes, but learning it is nowhere as hard as it looks. It's vaguely lisp-like, pure and side-effect free, strongly typed, and easy to use. I've been doing codegolf challenges in it for fun on my free time.
- internaut 10y agoI want to get into Urbit like you have, everything you've said is appealing to me. It's just like it's like reading the Lord of the Rings or the Bible. There is this book. It is really important to its fandom. It's affected everything else. It has massive scale and scope. Your feeling is that it's not going to be a light read. So far I'm intimidated into skulking around the edges but hopefully not for long. Bravo explorer! You know even if we only got an PKI going that would be revolutionary. The 'modern' world hasn't a hope in hell of achieving that any time this century.
- mundo 10y agoAny resources you found helpful? A google search on "hoon tutorial" seems to produce mainly urbit.org broken links. Does one need a galaxy/invite/whatever to be able to build it and play with it?