14 ms·

Urbit in 2017

141 points by alfredxing 10y ago

jff 10y ago
I remain unsure whether Urbit is a real thing or simply an incredibly long-running satire. Their missives do nothing to clarify this point.
- callahad 10y ago
  Well, you can run it and it does things, which effectively puts the question of "real" or "satire" into our hands. At this point, it is what we make of it.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - 5ilv3r 10y ago
    That was gloriously poetic.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    You can use an onion article as a force to motivate activism, unleashing a very real effect upon the world. But it remains satire. Your post is more about real vs. not real, while I think the question was supposed to be satire vs. not satire.
    - ncallaway 10y ago
      The parent post from jff was explicitly framed as "real vs satire" and not as "satire vs not satire".
      - Dylan16807 10y ago
        It used the word "real", but I'm pretty sure it was a synonym for "not satire", not the more philosophical meaning that callahad took. It's very common to use the word "real" that way, for something that isn't just extant to demonstrate an idea.
- Avshalom 10y ago
  I've said this before but one of the very cool things about programming is that it can easily be both.
- mbrock 10y ago
  That's how I feel about Unix, too.
- lhnz 10y ago
  I get the feeling that they are going to work on it come hell or high water until it lives up to their intentions. So while it might read like satire today, it probably won't in the future. But yeah, I don't have a non-costly use for it today despite reading the docs...
newsat13 10y ago
Someday I hope to understand what urbit actually is :-)
- DAddYE 10y ago
  You're not alone
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    Let's start with this... If you ran your own server, what sort of uses do you think you'd have for it?
    - flukus 10y ago
      Email, document sharing, custom web apps, etc, does urbit do this?
      - KeatonDunsford 10y ago
        Not well, yet. But that's the plan. All in the blog post.
        flukus 10y ago
        > All in the blog post. Email and file sharing aren't mentioned. What can it do now?
        ThrowAway123543 10y ago
        It has a webserver and networking and it can access the filesystem and it can send messages to other users securely. There's also an ntalk kind of app and a simple threaded discussion things but they're more like demo apps than things you'd use intrinsically. I think it's fair to say the only reason to run this is to develop for it right now, it's not something end users have a use for.
- 10y ago
crsmithdev 10y ago
An interesting idea confounded by inexplicably strange design choices, and the regressive, odious politics of its creator. Would love to see a similar idea done by a different team.
- defgeneric 10y ago
  Urbit will never be anything more than a crypto-fascist MMORPG.
  - Apocryphon 10y ago
    An MMORPG in the same way 0x10c was a game?
  - Torgo 10y ago
    Awesome.
- to3m 10y ago
  Poor old Urbit! Learning curve so steep that nobody has the time to figure out that it's bollocks on its own terms, and they are obliged to dismiss it purely on the grounds of who it was created by.
  - Apocryphon 10y ago
    What makes it bollocks on its own terms?
    - monodeldiablo 10y ago
      Urbit is totally new to me, but from what I understand, the hierarchical identity layout and restricted address space are instant red flags for any distributed system. Oh, and the founders assert ownership over a non-trivial block of addresses. Looking in from the outside, this looks like a fairly transparent attempt at bootstrapping a fiefdom: Create a type of digital "property", artificially restrict supply, reserve a huge chunk for yourself, and hope it becomes popular (making you "digital rich" and "digital powerful").
foota 10y ago
Why did they go with 32 bit addresses for planets? Seems short sighted given the woes of the ipv4 -> ipv6 transition.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- milcron 10y ago
  They address this is a way to cut down on spam. A crucial difference between Urbit and other networks is that planets are scarce. Even when the network is fully populated, there are only 4 billion. Early in Urbit's life, most stars and galaxies are not yet operating, so far fewer are available. No one will ever be able to get planets trivially and for free. Urbit is a friendly network: a network on which you can assume that a stranger is nice until proven nasty. Friendliness is a direct consequence of scarce, individually owned identities. We're not changing human nature, just creating the right economic incentives. Most forms of network abuse are "Sybil attacks": they rely on an infinite supply of fresh identities. Scarcity makes reputation work. Spam is a business; if the cost of a new planet exceeds the amount of money you can make by spamming from that planet until its reputation is trashed, there will be no spam. Shady stars and galaxies that sell blocks of planets to spammers will also develop reputations as "bad neighborhoods," damaging the value of the whole block. Abuse at any level is designed to be counterproductive and economically self-terminating. Urbit has no reputation system at all at the moment, simply because we're so small that friendliness is automatic. The clear and rigorous structure of the address space is not a reputation system; it is a platform on which any number of such systems can and should be built. But we can't build one until we need one.
- rspeer 10y ago
  Artificial scarcity helps them make sure that only the "correct" people get planets. EDIT: You think I'm making a random political dig at Urbit that isn't borne out by the actual system, don't you. No, I am making a political dig at Urbit about something that is actually designed into the system. The design is about ownership, and about how not everyone can have it.
foota 10y ago
Is the idea behind urbit that you have one place that stores all your data and then you can use different services to access and use that data in whatever way they want?
- danielvf 10y ago
  Correct-ish - you can run other people's applications against data you own to get things done.
pavlov 10y ago
I appreciate the design notes, but there is a strange dissonance in the concept. The text reads: "Urbit has to be just as usable as any widely used app in 2017. For a personal server, the usability bar can't be Unix." Just above this, there is a screenshot of a browser displaying the following: "OK, ~ravmel-ropdyl is coming online. Ping 734ms, DNS Waiting, :talk Waiting" ...which, well, looks exactly like '70s Unix usability. I also find it odd that Urbit wants to conquer the world, yet the design is so attached to entering ASCII sequences on a command line. This severely limits the platform's international usability. Their programming language's syntax page even proclaims "To make ASCII great again, we've mapped each punctuation glyph to a syllable": https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/syntax/#-glyphs-and-characters https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/syntax/#-glyphs-and-characters The problem with using all these ASCII punctuation marks is that many of them are hard or even impossible to type on various international keyboards. It doesn't seem like non-English users were ever considered when the decision was made to "make ASCII great again". On a more conceptual level, marrying a supposed futuristic redesign of the Internet to a 1960s character set just seems off. Today's computing increasingly happens on touchscreens, but Urbit's I/O model is happy to settle for the ancient paradigms of teletype terminal emulation and ASCII streams. The whole thing has a weird retro-futuristic vibe to it, like it's more of an art project about a computer system that the Mad Men would have used to update their websites in some alternate reality.
- thebooktocome 10y ago
  Moldbug is the philosophical father of the alt-right, so of course he doesn't care about non-English users.
- 5ilv3r 10y ago
  I read the point as being to move on from that interface style.
- akhilcacharya 10y ago
  > It doesn't seem like non-English users were ever considered when the decision was made to "make ASCII great again". That turn of phrase sure is pretty revealing in this case.
trashtoss 10y ago
It's a wonderful luxury to craft such a sufficiently vast work of nonsense that no one possessed of sufficient reason to craft an informed critique will ever feel it worthwhile to invest the time to do so...one can putter away indefinitely in such a self-crafted safe space
- Karrot_Kream 10y ago
  Must all creation be judged? Subject to code review? Criticized and torn apart? Next, let us ban the child's doodle, for it is a self-crafted safe space, free of criticism and the harshness of reality.
  - nnq 10y ago
    The child's doodle is something one ca see and understand. You can even try to psychoanalize it or whatever. What I'm afraid is that there are some really powerful and valuable ideas in Urbit but they will evaporate away from humanity's gasp because there's no way to practically connect them to anything. Also a child's doodle is something you can ignore or throw away and nothing will be lost... while this has some value in it... (Edited because I saw they actually have an understandable mathematical formalism for all of it. Sorry for guessing otherwise.)
  - kognate 10y ago
    Yes. Yes. Yes. And Exalted, Loved, and Adored. Critique is not the same as banning. The Child's doodle is always critiqued, which is why we say "Good Job!" to the child who shows us the doodle. The doodle is not created in a self-crafted safe space by any measure. Creative works are not delicate embers that need to be protected from the elements. They are divine sparks, each one illuminating the darkness. That light is meaningless without eyes to see it.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - scotchmi_st 10y ago
    The creator of this project published a website, took on volunteers to help build it, and held meet-ups to discuss it. In other words, they went well out of their way to publicise it. So yeah, at that point anyone has the right to say anything they like about it. If the author didn't want that to happen, they could have just kept it a private project, never to see the light of day.
overcast 10y ago
Reading urbit, I feel like I've stumbled upon some ancient alien artifact, that no one has any idea what its purpose is.
- zaphar 10y ago
  Much of the communication has in the past been meant to convey exactly that feeling. It's not uncommon for people on the urbit network to refer to themselves as martians :-)
  - Melchizedek 10y ago
    Personally, I would describe the feeling as somewhere in between reading SICP and reading Momo. That's a great feeling, and it's kind of the opposite of the feeling you get from the mess that much of computing is today.
    - haliax 10y ago
      What's Momo?
- nyolfen 10y ago
  the 'alien artifact' characterization is one used by popehat in his explanation of urbit from a few years ago, which i recommend to those curious as to what exactly urbit is: https://www.popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vulcans-why-urbit-matters/ https://www.popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vul...
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    That's ClarkHat, not PopeHat.
    - nyolfen 10y ago
      aha! apologies
- 10y ago
ThrowAway123543 10y ago
A couple thoughts from an early backer who really, really wants Urbit to succeed (and fears it won't): 1. What is Urbit? I'm not involved with it and don't speak for the devs, but this always comes up, so I'll just explain in plain terms what I think Urbit is, or what I hope it will grow up to be. Urbit is the server-app-container thing that would make my non-techy Mom want to pay $5/mo for a hosted server instance. Imagine if every man, woman and child had their own server. Nothing fancy, just a cheap ECC instance or DigitalOcean droplet or something. What would they do with them? Well, host a webserver I suppose, maybe a mail server, maybe a Minecraft server, stuff like that, right? But, these would have to be accessible to non-sysadmin types, so all of these server applications would have to be easy-as-an-iphone to set up and administer. Right now, such apps don't exist, because there's no market for them. But if the market were there, millions of people with hosted servers just sitting around, you can imagine how quickly they'd get made. What about a social media? At a high level, every social media app is essentially the same app - they let you upload a file to the cloud and they let your friends access it and they show you ads. The differences between Twitter and FB and Instagram and Snapchat are nothing more than differences in how those three features are implemented. So why do they all use the cloud? Because there aren't a million people with server space just sitting around on which to host their IG pictures and FB arguments and Twitter profundities. But if there were, a good self-hosted social media app would make a lot of sense to build. Urbit is intended to shortcut this chicken-and-egg problem by making a container in which it is easy to build those things. My Mom can afford a hosted server, but she has nothing to run there. If there were great things to run there, like a Facebook with no ads and a webserver with no hassles, she might rent one. Urbit is intended to be the thing in which those great apps are easy to build. 2. Why I want it Those are all abstract reasons why something like urbit might succeed. As we all know, the mark of a good startup is not whether you can explain why it might succeed, it's whether there are users who want to use it right now. Well, I do want to use it, but it's hard to explain why. I'll take a stab at it. If you're over 40, you may remember getting your first shell account. Wasn't that the shit? You want to host some files for colleagues? Just make a directory, chmod it to world-readable. You want to run a web server? Go ahead, and don't worry about security, the only people that can see this are inside your college/company. Want to see what Bill Smith is up to? finger bsmith. Want to argue about politics? talk.politics. God, how simple things were! Playing with Urbit feels like those days to me. It makes a handful of things, like identifying users and sharing files between them, trivial. You could probably write a Twitter clone in less than 1K LOC. Or at least you could, if Urbit does everything it says it does. That's a big if. Which brings me to... 3. Isn't it really weird and fucked up? Yes. Oh yes. It is incredibly eclectic, the fevered result of an insane genius toiling away in obscurity on his dream project when he wasn't busy writing interminable political screeds. It is an attempt to combine a bunch of things (a ground-up OS, two new languages, and a novel networking architecture) that might be too much for such a small team. The Hoon language is weirder than you've heard. Some people swear it's great once you get used to it, but the docs are sparse and I haven't invested the effort. And if you do invest the effort, it could well be that it has non-obvious architectural flaws that will doom it to be a buggy mess for all eternity. And on top of that, the founder is primarily known for political rantings that are... well, not racist per se, but close enough to get Urbit boycotted by the sorts of people who boycott obscure open source projects due to things in the founder's blog. But if it fails, I really hope someone builds something less weird that accomplishes the same thing, because at the end of the day, I want it. I want a cheapo server with a cheapo self-hosted Twitter clone and a cheapo self-hosted FB clone, and I want to share pictures of my kids with my Mom without running them through some enormous corporation's billion-dollar machine-learning advertising algorithm, and I want to host my own website and server apps without taking on "sysadmin" as a night job. And it seems like, right now, Urbit is the fastest way from here to there.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
How is this different from many other approaches like Sandstorm, or any other effort to "decentralize the web" by giving people their own servers? I'm asking in terms of actual benefit it provides, not the technical part. I think at this point it's pretty clear that these efforts have failed due to lack of traction in that department (not enough people care about "owning their own server" or "controlling their own destiny")
- chc4 10y ago
  It provides an application framework and reinvention of the world to have decentralized apps work, instead of just providing packaging apps like Sandstorm. Urbit has an identity system with limited space to prevent Sybil attacks. The network pretends to expose exactly-once networking that Just Werks so that apps don't have to worry about it. All apps are purely functional state machines to make it easier to handle them and transparently upgrade them from code updates. Sending RPC messages so your own apps I exactly the same as sending them to remote hosts, the same with reading files, with peer discovery happening for you by the kernel.
  - kentonv 10y ago
    Sandstorm does a whole lot more than "just packaging apps", and compared to most other things in the space is ridiculously ambitious... but Urbit does indeed go far further.
  - cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
    This doesn't answer my question. In fact, it's the opposite of what i asked. I said: > I'm asking in terms of actual benefit it provides, not the technical part. I think at this point it's pretty clear that these efforts have failed due to lack of traction in that department (not enough people care about "owning their own server" or "controlling their own destiny")
    - chc4 10y ago
      I'm not really sure what else to say, then. Can any project with similar ideas answer anything other than "no, nothing different"? The idea for all the different projects is to make self-hosting sufficiently easy and usable, just different ways to come about it. You could ask the same thing about IPFS or even Bitcoin, and the disregard it when you don't get a yes.
PeterReid 10y ago
For a toy project of mine, I needed a way to encode small programs to send around. I originally wrote a interpreter for the MIPS instruction set, but then I encountered Urbit's functional machine language, "nock", and switched right over to that. It ended up being a much much simpler interpreter with more compact program encodings and a lot fewer arbitrary-feeling decisions involved. Nock also turns out to be a really straightforward compile target for lisp-like languages. Nock is confusing to approach, but it is really very clever. I would recommend learning it if you are in the mood for a puzzle! Nock: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/1-nock.markdown https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/1-noc... My project's nock VM: https://github.com/PeterReid/hoplight/tree/master/vm https://github.com/PeterReid/hoplight/tree/master/vm
- chc4 10y ago
  Neat! Are you compiling Hoon for the programs, or did you make your own language that targets it? How are you handling infinite loops or calling potentially unsandboxed jets? Reading over your code, it looks like you expanded Nock a bit with opcodes for e.g. hashing. instead of having a base stdlib context you are calling against with a jetted gate for it. Any reason? The problem with Nock as an embedded language is that you need a certain critical mass of jets before it's usable, unfortunately. How has that worked out for you? I thought that Nock would be a cool language for this type of stuff, or replacing Bitcoins/Etherums embedded stack languages due to the purely functional, its-just-reduction aspect.
  - samatman 10y ago
    This is one of the reasons I included all arithmetic operations in ax: https://github.com/mnemnion/ax/blob/master/ax%20spec.md https://github.com/mnemnion/ax/blob/master/ax%20spec.md Also because once you say 'natural number', the arithmetic operations are already in scope, so to speak.
    - chc4 10y ago
      I get that Nock is half philosophical perfection, so it makes sense to me. All those operations can be trivially defined without any cost, but they muck up the spec (Does your language gzip to 340 bytes? Can I wear it on a t-shirt?). Not that there's anything wrong with defining a language that is usable out of the box, but at the same time muh intellectual purity.
pcmoore 10y ago
For those using Nock and seeking an alternative take on Urbit check out this open source project https://github.com/tibru/tibru https://github.com/tibru/tibru A few willing devs could take this forward with open libertarian ideals. There is nothing special about Nock and Urbit technically or mathematically.
nnq 10y ago
...still no "Urbit for mere mortals guide" or something like this? Or even a "how to do X with Urbit" where X could be anything. Sorry, but no matter how great the ideas, until they can show an explanation anyone can understand it's all worthless. If you try hard enough you can explain block-chain and bitcoin and ethereum to a poet or painter or politician. Won't be easy, but you'll get somewhere. Whereas their: > If Bitcoin is money and Ethereum is law, Urbit is land. ...makes absolutely no sense whatsover to anyone, despite the plain words used. What's the correspondence, analogy, what abstracts what, what does what?! No place for your mind to even start chewing this. With this you can't even explain Urbit to a mathematician or to a philosopher... let alone to Joe Average or Frank Underwood.
- bbctol 10y ago
  Urbit's not meant for mere mortals, it's meant for the philosopher-kings of a bizarre neoreactionary future.
- setr 10y ago
  Bitcoin is digitally manages money, ethereum digitally manages laws (in the form of autonomous contracts, in the form of code is law) and urbit digitally manages real estate (in the form of hierarchical address space). My understanding of Urbit is that its trying to solve the problem of identity management, while maintaining that all data begins with you, while using ie we give our information to facebook, and facebook is free to use that information as it wishes (including modifying it, or deleting it). Facebook thus becomes the source if truth. Ideally, the control structure should be inverted; our machine is the source of truth, and facebook gets to read from us when we let it. And since we're the source of truth, there's no issue with sharing that data to anyone else (ie google). This is of course what we have when dealing with desktop applications reading from our personal files; vim and sublime can be used interchangeably because our files are ours, and we always have access to it. Use google apps, and you get access to your text file only when google chooses to let you have it. If they refuse to give it back to you in a format recognizable by anyone else, then, well, you're fucked. But if we choose the format, and google must follow.. The idea, as they express it, that using a cloud service a n:1 deal; many users on a single app. Urbit tries to provide the inverse, 1:n. Many apps working solely for you. After that is a bunch of interesting implementation details; a purely functional os, language; the pretense that multiple servers are one unified machine, the pronouncable base-256 encoding, the astronomy-naming system for address space, the political governance of Urbit as a network, etc.
zekevermillion 10y ago
Needs a GUI to be useful for any non-enthusiast users. Does urbit need any non-enthusiast users at this point, though?
- fche 10y ago
  There is a well-integrated web api/interface to the shell-based services.
chriswarbo 10y ago
I find Urbit very confusing. It uses a bespoke virtual machine for a bespoke programming language, uses a bespoke approach to optimisation, uses another bespoke programming language which compiles down to the first, has a bespoke OS written in that second language, connects these OSes into a bespoke p2p network, all in order to.... what? Their go-to example seems to be social networking with an interface to Twitter?? I absolutely get the 'own your data/compute' idea. I think a bespoke OS is a decent approach, as it removes a lot of legacy complexity and allows a few carefully-chosen, simple, unified approaches to things like I/O and addressing. I like the use of a functional language, as it's an extreme form of isolation/sandboxing/reproducibility which makes sense in an untrusted online world. I don't see why a new language was invented though, when something like a subset of Scheme, Joy, plain lambda calculus, etc. would suffice. I have absolutely no idea why they've invented a custom p2p network/addressing system. I chalk this up to huris, along with their spiel about ASCII punctuation, etc. I have absolutely no idea how this has anything to do with social media. I assume it's just for buzzword value. I don't use social media, but I imagine programming language theory isn't its main appeal? Even if we assume that all of Urbit's ideas pan out: interacting with Twitter seems to completely undermine all of it! - Twitter is centralised, whilst the point of Urbit's network is decentralisation. - No matter how much elaborate language machinery you build, there's very little you can actually do with Twitter, since they keep their database secret. - Despite all of the sandboxing, reproducibility, etc. Twitter will not execute any code that you try to send them. The only operations which can be performed are chosen by them, and exposed as API endpoints. - Doing anything with Twitter throws purity out of the window, since they only interact via I/O requests. - No amount of fanciness in OS interfaces or language semantics can do anything to prevent Twitter modifying/deleting/overwriting/etc. any of their data at any time, without any notification to anyone; hence there are very few guarantees that the OS or language can actually provide about such values (e.g. there's no referential transparency, no way to know if a cache is invalid, no way to know if someone else will receive the same data you did, etc.). - Whatever the resulting API looks like, it will be a constant source of incompatibility and churn, since Twitter are free to modify their API at any time. If some operation gets dropped, any applications which rely on it may break irreparably. I get that the Twitter example seems to be along the lines of a minimum viable product, but it seems like a bad choice considering that it can't really make use of any of Urbit's features. It could be implemented as a big string of Javascript, with Urbit only being used to get it into the browser; the result would be about as integrated as any other approach. A more relevant example might be a multiplayer game with a shared leaderboard, player chat and non-critical use of external APIs (e.g. gravatar for player pics), e.g. a clone of Words With Friends or maybe something with more animation. The game itself would be a decent test of the programming languages, rather than just shuttling strings in/out of Twitter. The interactivity and chat would test the latency. The leaderboard would test shared access to data. Using external APIs would test the data-shuttling, in a way that doesn't much affect the application if the provider shuts down the API.
pushcx 10y ago
Yarvin's having a laugh at all of you. Early in the article: > What is an app, anyway? It's shared computing. Everyone's data is one data structure, in one program, on one server, owned by one corporation. This is a callout to the Nazi slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrer#Ein_Volk.2C_ein_Reich.2C_ein_F.C3.BChrer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrer#Ein_Volk.2C_ein_Re... And then the only other time "shared computing" appears in the document: > To paraphrase Walter Sobchak: say what you want about the tenets of shared computing, but at least it's an ethos. In the movie The Big Lebowski, the protagonists are harassed by by nihilists that the sort-of militantly Jewish Walter initially assumes are Nazis. When it finally gets through to him, he says, stunned, "Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it's an ethos." Yarvin is a deliberate, meticulous writer who prides himself on his references. This is not a coincidence, this is a white supremacist laughing at programmers not recognizing that he's calling competing software Nazis. Well, I happen to be reading up on Yavin's buddies[0] and I understood that reference[1]. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928 https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/022... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIp-0V6YKfQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIp-0V6YKfQ He's laughing at you because he knows the technical and political are inseparable, and the longer you think so the longer he gets to use you.

Urbit in 2017

141 points by alfredxing 10y ago

jff 10y ago

I remain unsure whether Urbit is a real thing or simply an incredibly long-running satire. Their missives do nothing to clarify this point.

callahad 10y ago
Well, you can run it and it does things, which effectively puts the question of "real" or "satire" into our hands. At this point, it is what we make of it.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- 5ilv3r 10y ago
  That was gloriously poetic.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  You can use an onion article as a force to motivate activism, unleashing a very real effect upon the world. But it remains satire. Your post is more about real vs. not real, while I think the question was supposed to be satire vs. not satire.
  - ncallaway 10y ago
    The parent post from jff was explicitly framed as "real vs satire" and not as "satire vs not satire".
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      It used the word "real", but I'm pretty sure it was a synonym for "not satire", not the more philosophical meaning that callahad took. It's very common to use the word "real" that way, for something that isn't just extant to demonstrate an idea.
Avshalom 10y ago
I've said this before but one of the very cool things about programming is that it can easily be both.
mbrock 10y ago
That's how I feel about Unix, too.
lhnz 10y ago
I get the feeling that they are going to work on it come hell or high water until it lives up to their intentions. So while it might read like satire today, it probably won't in the future. But yeah, I don't have a non-costly use for it today despite reading the docs...

newsat13 10y ago

Someday I hope to understand what urbit actually is :-)

DAddYE 10y ago
You're not alone
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  Let's start with this... If you ran your own server, what sort of uses do you think you'd have for it?
  - flukus 10y ago
    Email, document sharing, custom web apps, etc, does urbit do this?
    - KeatonDunsford 10y ago
      Not well, yet. But that's the plan. All in the blog post.
      - flukus 10y ago
        > All in the blog post. Email and file sharing aren't mentioned. What can it do now?
        ThrowAway123543 10y ago
        It has a webserver and networking and it can access the filesystem and it can send messages to other users securely. There's also an ntalk kind of app and a simple threaded discussion things but they're more like demo apps than things you'd use intrinsically. I think it's fair to say the only reason to run this is to develop for it right now, it's not something end users have a use for.
10y ago

crsmithdev 10y ago

An interesting idea confounded by inexplicably strange design choices, and the regressive, odious politics of its creator. Would love to see a similar idea done by a different team.

defgeneric 10y ago
Urbit will never be anything more than a crypto-fascist MMORPG.
- Apocryphon 10y ago
  An MMORPG in the same way 0x10c was a game?
- Torgo 10y ago
  Awesome.
to3m 10y ago
Poor old Urbit! Learning curve so steep that nobody has the time to figure out that it's bollocks on its own terms, and they are obliged to dismiss it purely on the grounds of who it was created by.
- Apocryphon 10y ago
  What makes it bollocks on its own terms?
  - monodeldiablo 10y ago
    Urbit is totally new to me, but from what I understand, the hierarchical identity layout and restricted address space are instant red flags for any distributed system. Oh, and the founders assert ownership over a non-trivial block of addresses. Looking in from the outside, this looks like a fairly transparent attempt at bootstrapping a fiefdom: Create a type of digital "property", artificially restrict supply, reserve a huge chunk for yourself, and hope it becomes popular (making you "digital rich" and "digital powerful").

foota 10y ago

Why did they go with 32 bit addresses for planets? Seems short sighted given the woes of the ipv4 -> ipv6 transition.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
milcron 10y ago
They address this is a way to cut down on spam. A crucial difference between Urbit and other networks is that planets are scarce. Even when the network is fully populated, there are only 4 billion. Early in Urbit's life, most stars and galaxies are not yet operating, so far fewer are available. No one will ever be able to get planets trivially and for free. Urbit is a friendly network: a network on which you can assume that a stranger is nice until proven nasty. Friendliness is a direct consequence of scarce, individually owned identities. We're not changing human nature, just creating the right economic incentives. Most forms of network abuse are "Sybil attacks": they rely on an infinite supply of fresh identities. Scarcity makes reputation work. Spam is a business; if the cost of a new planet exceeds the amount of money you can make by spamming from that planet until its reputation is trashed, there will be no spam. Shady stars and galaxies that sell blocks of planets to spammers will also develop reputations as "bad neighborhoods," damaging the value of the whole block. Abuse at any level is designed to be counterproductive and economically self-terminating. Urbit has no reputation system at all at the moment, simply because we're so small that friendliness is automatic. The clear and rigorous structure of the address space is not a reputation system; it is a platform on which any number of such systems can and should be built. But we can't build one until we need one.
rspeer 10y ago
Artificial scarcity helps them make sure that only the "correct" people get planets. EDIT: You think I'm making a random political dig at Urbit that isn't borne out by the actual system, don't you. No, I am making a political dig at Urbit about something that is actually designed into the system. The design is about ownership, and about how not everyone can have it.

foota 10y ago

Is the idea behind urbit that you have one place that stores all your data and then you can use different services to access and use that data in whatever way they want?

danielvf 10y ago
Correct-ish - you can run other people's applications against data you own to get things done.

pavlov 10y ago

I appreciate the design notes, but there is a strange dissonance in the concept. The text reads: "Urbit has to be just as usable as any widely used app in 2017. For a personal server, the usability bar can't be Unix." Just above this, there is a screenshot of a browser displaying the following: "OK, ~ravmel-ropdyl is coming online. Ping 734ms, DNS Waiting, :talk Waiting" ...which, well, looks exactly like '70s Unix usability. I also find it odd that Urbit wants to conquer the world, yet the design is so attached to entering ASCII sequences on a command line. This severely limits the platform's international usability. Their programming language's syntax page even proclaims "To make ASCII great again, we've mapped each punctuation glyph to a syllable": https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/syntax/#-glyphs-and-characters https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/syntax/#-glyphs-and-characters The problem with using all these ASCII punctuation marks is that many of them are hard or even impossible to type on various international keyboards. It doesn't seem like non-English users were ever considered when the decision was made to "make ASCII great again". On a more conceptual level, marrying a supposed futuristic redesign of the Internet to a 1960s character set just seems off. Today's computing increasingly happens on touchscreens, but Urbit's I/O model is happy to settle for the ancient paradigms of teletype terminal emulation and ASCII streams. The whole thing has a weird retro-futuristic vibe to it, like it's more of an art project about a computer system that the Mad Men would have used to update their websites in some alternate reality.

thebooktocome 10y ago
Moldbug is the philosophical father of the alt-right, so of course he doesn't care about non-English users.
5ilv3r 10y ago
I read the point as being to move on from that interface style.
akhilcacharya 10y ago
> It doesn't seem like non-English users were ever considered when the decision was made to "make ASCII great again". That turn of phrase sure is pretty revealing in this case.

trashtoss 10y ago

It's a wonderful luxury to craft such a sufficiently vast work of nonsense that no one possessed of sufficient reason to craft an informed critique will ever feel it worthwhile to invest the time to do so...one can putter away indefinitely in such a self-crafted safe space

Karrot_Kream 10y ago
Must all creation be judged? Subject to code review? Criticized and torn apart? Next, let us ban the child's doodle, for it is a self-crafted safe space, free of criticism and the harshness of reality.
- nnq 10y ago
  The child's doodle is something one ca see and understand. You can even try to psychoanalize it or whatever. What I'm afraid is that there are some really powerful and valuable ideas in Urbit but they will evaporate away from humanity's gasp because there's no way to practically connect them to anything. Also a child's doodle is something you can ignore or throw away and nothing will be lost... while this has some value in it... (Edited because I saw they actually have an understandable mathematical formalism for all of it. Sorry for guessing otherwise.)
- kognate 10y ago
  Yes. Yes. Yes. And Exalted, Loved, and Adored. Critique is not the same as banning. The Child's doodle is always critiqued, which is why we say "Good Job!" to the child who shows us the doodle. The doodle is not created in a self-crafted safe space by any measure. Creative works are not delicate embers that need to be protected from the elements. They are divine sparks, each one illuminating the darkness. That light is meaningless without eyes to see it.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- scotchmi_st 10y ago
  The creator of this project published a website, took on volunteers to help build it, and held meet-ups to discuss it. In other words, they went well out of their way to publicise it. So yeah, at that point anyone has the right to say anything they like about it. If the author didn't want that to happen, they could have just kept it a private project, never to see the light of day.

overcast 10y ago

Reading urbit, I feel like I've stumbled upon some ancient alien artifact, that no one has any idea what its purpose is.

zaphar 10y ago
Much of the communication has in the past been meant to convey exactly that feeling. It's not uncommon for people on the urbit network to refer to themselves as martians :-)
- Melchizedek 10y ago
  Personally, I would describe the feeling as somewhere in between reading SICP and reading Momo. That's a great feeling, and it's kind of the opposite of the feeling you get from the mess that much of computing is today.
  - haliax 10y ago
    What's Momo?
nyolfen 10y ago
the 'alien artifact' characterization is one used by popehat in his explanation of urbit from a few years ago, which i recommend to those curious as to what exactly urbit is: https://www.popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vulcans-why-urbit-matters/ https://www.popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vul...
- davidgerard 10y ago
  That's ClarkHat, not PopeHat.
  - nyolfen 10y ago
    aha! apologies
10y ago

ThrowAway123543 10y ago

A couple thoughts from an early backer who really, really wants Urbit to succeed (and fears it won't): 1. What is Urbit? I'm not involved with it and don't speak for the devs, but this always comes up, so I'll just explain in plain terms what I think Urbit is, or what I hope it will grow up to be. Urbit is the server-app-container thing that would make my non-techy Mom want to pay $5/mo for a hosted server instance. Imagine if every man, woman and child had their own server. Nothing fancy, just a cheap ECC instance or DigitalOcean droplet or something. What would they do with them? Well, host a webserver I suppose, maybe a mail server, maybe a Minecraft server, stuff like that, right? But, these would have to be accessible to non-sysadmin types, so all of these server applications would have to be easy-as-an-iphone to set up and administer. Right now, such apps don't exist, because there's no market for them. But if the market were there, millions of people with hosted servers just sitting around, you can imagine how quickly they'd get made. What about a social media? At a high level, every social media app is essentially the same app - they let you upload a file to the cloud and they let your friends access it and they show you ads. The differences between Twitter and FB and Instagram and Snapchat are nothing more than differences in how those three features are implemented. So why do they all use the cloud? Because there aren't a million people with server space just sitting around on which to host their IG pictures and FB arguments and Twitter profundities. But if there were, a good self-hosted social media app would make a lot of sense to build. Urbit is intended to shortcut this chicken-and-egg problem by making a container in which it is easy to build those things. My Mom can afford a hosted server, but she has nothing to run there. If there were great things to run there, like a Facebook with no ads and a webserver with no hassles, she might rent one. Urbit is intended to be the thing in which those great apps are easy to build. 2. Why I want it Those are all abstract reasons why something like urbit might succeed. As we all know, the mark of a good startup is not whether you can explain why it might succeed, it's whether there are users who want to use it right now. Well, I do want to use it, but it's hard to explain why. I'll take a stab at it. If you're over 40, you may remember getting your first shell account. Wasn't that the shit? You want to host some files for colleagues? Just make a directory, chmod it to world-readable. You want to run a web server? Go ahead, and don't worry about security, the only people that can see this are inside your college/company. Want to see what Bill Smith is up to? finger bsmith. Want to argue about politics? talk.politics. God, how simple things were! Playing with Urbit feels like those days to me. It makes a handful of things, like identifying users and sharing files between them, trivial. You could probably write a Twitter clone in less than 1K LOC. Or at least you could, if Urbit does everything it says it does. That's a big if. Which brings me to... 3. Isn't it really weird and fucked up? Yes. Oh yes. It is incredibly eclectic, the fevered result of an insane genius toiling away in obscurity on his dream project when he wasn't busy writing interminable political screeds. It is an attempt to combine a bunch of things (a ground-up OS, two new languages, and a novel networking architecture) that might be too much for such a small team. The Hoon language is weirder than you've heard. Some people swear it's great once you get used to it, but the docs are sparse and I haven't invested the effort. And if you do invest the effort, it could well be that it has non-obvious architectural flaws that will doom it to be a buggy mess for all eternity. And on top of that, the founder is primarily known for political rantings that are... well, not racist per se, but close enough to get Urbit boycotted by the sorts of people who boycott obscure open source projects due to things in the founder's blog. But if it fails, I really hope someone builds something less weird that accomplishes the same thing, because at the end of the day, I want it. I want a cheapo server with a cheapo self-hosted Twitter clone and a cheapo self-hosted FB clone, and I want to share pictures of my kids with my Mom without running them through some enormous corporation's billion-dollar machine-learning advertising algorithm, and I want to host my own website and server apps without taking on "sysadmin" as a night job. And it seems like, right now, Urbit is the fastest way from here to there.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

How is this different from many other approaches like Sandstorm, or any other effort to "decentralize the web" by giving people their own servers? I'm asking in terms of actual benefit it provides, not the technical part. I think at this point it's pretty clear that these efforts have failed due to lack of traction in that department (not enough people care about "owning their own server" or "controlling their own destiny")

chc4 10y ago
It provides an application framework and reinvention of the world to have decentralized apps work, instead of just providing packaging apps like Sandstorm. Urbit has an identity system with limited space to prevent Sybil attacks. The network pretends to expose exactly-once networking that Just Werks so that apps don't have to worry about it. All apps are purely functional state machines to make it easier to handle them and transparently upgrade them from code updates. Sending RPC messages so your own apps I exactly the same as sending them to remote hosts, the same with reading files, with peer discovery happening for you by the kernel.
- kentonv 10y ago
  Sandstorm does a whole lot more than "just packaging apps", and compared to most other things in the space is ridiculously ambitious... but Urbit does indeed go far further.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  This doesn't answer my question. In fact, it's the opposite of what i asked. I said: > I'm asking in terms of actual benefit it provides, not the technical part. I think at this point it's pretty clear that these efforts have failed due to lack of traction in that department (not enough people care about "owning their own server" or "controlling their own destiny")
  - chc4 10y ago
    I'm not really sure what else to say, then. Can any project with similar ideas answer anything other than "no, nothing different"? The idea for all the different projects is to make self-hosting sufficiently easy and usable, just different ways to come about it. You could ask the same thing about IPFS or even Bitcoin, and the disregard it when you don't get a yes.

PeterReid 10y ago

For a toy project of mine, I needed a way to encode small programs to send around. I originally wrote a interpreter for the MIPS instruction set, but then I encountered Urbit's functional machine language, "nock", and switched right over to that. It ended up being a much much simpler interpreter with more compact program encodings and a lot fewer arbitrary-feeling decisions involved. Nock also turns out to be a really straightforward compile target for lisp-like languages. Nock is confusing to approach, but it is really very clever. I would recommend learning it if you are in the mood for a puzzle! Nock: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/1-nock.markdown https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/1-noc... My project's nock VM: https://github.com/PeterReid/hoplight/tree/master/vm https://github.com/PeterReid/hoplight/tree/master/vm

chc4 10y ago
Neat! Are you compiling Hoon for the programs, or did you make your own language that targets it? How are you handling infinite loops or calling potentially unsandboxed jets? Reading over your code, it looks like you expanded Nock a bit with opcodes for e.g. hashing. instead of having a base stdlib context you are calling against with a jetted gate for it. Any reason? The problem with Nock as an embedded language is that you need a certain critical mass of jets before it's usable, unfortunately. How has that worked out for you? I thought that Nock would be a cool language for this type of stuff, or replacing Bitcoins/Etherums embedded stack languages due to the purely functional, its-just-reduction aspect.
- samatman 10y ago
  This is one of the reasons I included all arithmetic operations in ax: https://github.com/mnemnion/ax/blob/master/ax%20spec.md https://github.com/mnemnion/ax/blob/master/ax%20spec.md Also because once you say 'natural number', the arithmetic operations are already in scope, so to speak.
  - chc4 10y ago
    I get that Nock is half philosophical perfection, so it makes sense to me. All those operations can be trivially defined without any cost, but they muck up the spec (Does your language gzip to 340 bytes? Can I wear it on a t-shirt?). Not that there's anything wrong with defining a language that is usable out of the box, but at the same time muh intellectual purity.

pcmoore 10y ago

For those using Nock and seeking an alternative take on Urbit check out this open source project https://github.com/tibru/tibru https://github.com/tibru/tibru A few willing devs could take this forward with open libertarian ideals. There is nothing special about Nock and Urbit technically or mathematically.

nnq 10y ago

...still no "Urbit for mere mortals guide" or something like this? Or even a "how to do X with Urbit" where X could be anything. Sorry, but no matter how great the ideas, until they can show an explanation anyone can understand it's all worthless. If you try hard enough you can explain block-chain and bitcoin and ethereum to a poet or painter or politician. Won't be easy, but you'll get somewhere. Whereas their: > If Bitcoin is money and Ethereum is law, Urbit is land. ...makes absolutely no sense whatsover to anyone, despite the plain words used. What's the correspondence, analogy, what abstracts what, what does what?! No place for your mind to even start chewing this. With this you can't even explain Urbit to a mathematician or to a philosopher... let alone to Joe Average or Frank Underwood.

bbctol 10y ago
Urbit's not meant for mere mortals, it's meant for the philosopher-kings of a bizarre neoreactionary future.
setr 10y ago
Bitcoin is digitally manages money, ethereum digitally manages laws (in the form of autonomous contracts, in the form of code is law) and urbit digitally manages real estate (in the form of hierarchical address space). My understanding of Urbit is that its trying to solve the problem of identity management, while maintaining that all data begins with you, while using ie we give our information to facebook, and facebook is free to use that information as it wishes (including modifying it, or deleting it). Facebook thus becomes the source if truth. Ideally, the control structure should be inverted; our machine is the source of truth, and facebook gets to read from us when we let it. And since we're the source of truth, there's no issue with sharing that data to anyone else (ie google). This is of course what we have when dealing with desktop applications reading from our personal files; vim and sublime can be used interchangeably because our files are ours, and we always have access to it. Use google apps, and you get access to your text file only when google chooses to let you have it. If they refuse to give it back to you in a format recognizable by anyone else, then, well, you're fucked. But if we choose the format, and google must follow.. The idea, as they express it, that using a cloud service a n:1 deal; many users on a single app. Urbit tries to provide the inverse, 1:n. Many apps working solely for you. After that is a bunch of interesting implementation details; a purely functional os, language; the pretense that multiple servers are one unified machine, the pronouncable base-256 encoding, the astronomy-naming system for address space, the political governance of Urbit as a network, etc.

zekevermillion 10y ago

Needs a GUI to be useful for any non-enthusiast users. Does urbit need any non-enthusiast users at this point, though?

fche 10y ago
There is a well-integrated web api/interface to the shell-based services.

chriswarbo 10y ago

I find Urbit very confusing. It uses a bespoke virtual machine for a bespoke programming language, uses a bespoke approach to optimisation, uses another bespoke programming language which compiles down to the first, has a bespoke OS written in that second language, connects these OSes into a bespoke p2p network, all in order to.... what? Their go-to example seems to be social networking with an interface to Twitter?? I absolutely get the 'own your data/compute' idea. I think a bespoke OS is a decent approach, as it removes a lot of legacy complexity and allows a few carefully-chosen, simple, unified approaches to things like I/O and addressing. I like the use of a functional language, as it's an extreme form of isolation/sandboxing/reproducibility which makes sense in an untrusted online world. I don't see why a new language was invented though, when something like a subset of Scheme, Joy, plain lambda calculus, etc. would suffice. I have absolutely no idea why they've invented a custom p2p network/addressing system. I chalk this up to huris, along with their spiel about ASCII punctuation, etc. I have absolutely no idea how this has anything to do with social media. I assume it's just for buzzword value. I don't use social media, but I imagine programming language theory isn't its main appeal? Even if we assume that all of Urbit's ideas pan out: interacting with Twitter seems to completely undermine all of it! - Twitter is centralised, whilst the point of Urbit's network is decentralisation. - No matter how much elaborate language machinery you build, there's very little you can actually do with Twitter, since they keep their database secret. - Despite all of the sandboxing, reproducibility, etc. Twitter will not execute any code that you try to send them. The only operations which can be performed are chosen by them, and exposed as API endpoints. - Doing anything with Twitter throws purity out of the window, since they only interact via I/O requests. - No amount of fanciness in OS interfaces or language semantics can do anything to prevent Twitter modifying/deleting/overwriting/etc. any of their data at any time, without any notification to anyone; hence there are very few guarantees that the OS or language can actually provide about such values (e.g. there's no referential transparency, no way to know if a cache is invalid, no way to know if someone else will receive the same data you did, etc.). - Whatever the resulting API looks like, it will be a constant source of incompatibility and churn, since Twitter are free to modify their API at any time. If some operation gets dropped, any applications which rely on it may break irreparably. I get that the Twitter example seems to be along the lines of a minimum viable product, but it seems like a bad choice considering that it can't really make use of any of Urbit's features. It could be implemented as a big string of Javascript, with Urbit only being used to get it into the browser; the result would be about as integrated as any other approach. A more relevant example might be a multiplayer game with a shared leaderboard, player chat and non-critical use of external APIs (e.g. gravatar for player pics), e.g. a clone of Words With Friends or maybe something with more animation. The game itself would be a decent test of the programming languages, rather than just shuttling strings in/out of Twitter. The interactivity and chat would test the latency. The leaderboard would test shared access to data. Using external APIs would test the data-shuttling, in a way that doesn't much affect the application if the provider shuts down the API.

pushcx 10y ago

Yarvin's having a laugh at all of you. Early in the article: > What is an app, anyway? It's shared computing. Everyone's data is one data structure, in one program, on one server, owned by one corporation. This is a callout to the Nazi slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrer#Ein_Volk.2C_ein_Reich.2C_ein_F.C3.BChrer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrer#Ein_Volk.2C_ein_Re... And then the only other time "shared computing" appears in the document: > To paraphrase Walter Sobchak: say what you want about the tenets of shared computing, but at least it's an ethos. In the movie The Big Lebowski, the protagonists are harassed by by nihilists that the sort-of militantly Jewish Walter initially assumes are Nazis. When it finally gets through to him, he says, stunned, "Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it's an ethos." Yarvin is a deliberate, meticulous writer who prides himself on his references. This is not a coincidence, this is a white supremacist laughing at programmers not recognizing that he's calling competing software Nazis. Well, I happen to be reading up on Yavin's buddies[0] and I understood that reference[1]. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928 https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/022... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIp-0V6YKfQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIp-0V6YKfQ He's laughing at you because he knows the technical and political are inseparable, and the longer you think so the longer he gets to use you.