16 ms·

Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

158 points by zwtaylor 9y ago

StavrosK 9y ago
Is this meant to be understandable by people? Am I missing some context?
- to3m 9y ago
  You can get started, sort of, from the white paper: https://urbit.org/posts/ https://urbit.org/posts/ (TL;DR: "Urbit also invents a lot of alien technical jargon. We admit that this is annoying. Abstractly, it’s part of the clean-slate program: words smuggle in a lot of assumptions." - to which all I can say myself is: qupnux.)
  - jacques_chester 9y ago
    It reminds me of a previous techno-utopia. I guess I'd put it on a poster as: lyrics by blockchain; melody by Xanadu.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    I think you need to demonstrate some truly massive and revolutionary value before you ask people to learn your new language, otherwise you really just come off like a cult.
    - bitwize 9y ago
      You just haven't realized the truth: that Unix and the internet have failed us massively and need to be completely reinvented from scratch by wise and benevolent engineers who have our interest at heart. Curtis, in his eminent brilliance, was the first of us to realize this, and so became the first of these wise and benevolent engineers, forging a bright path for other open-minded people to follow. Now come, let's get you changed into this robe and learning these chants. :)
    - flatline 9y ago
      Exactly. One of the primary MOs of a cult is to hijack people's language and replace it with their own. It is a means of thought control, a method of creating a sense of belonging, and a way to make cult members feel superior about their "knowledge". Onecoin has become an outright prosperity cult in Asia. I see shades of the same everywhere in crypto.
  - natrius 9y ago
    I think the obfuscation is an elaborate hazing ritual that makes it optimal to cooperate with the existing community rather than defect and launch your own competing "land" registry.
    - bitwize 9y ago
      You mean like cults do?
- hossbeast 9y ago
  Yeah, I was waiting for the "you can use Urbit to do X". No idea what it's for. There was a bit about real estate transactions .. then alot about space.
  - AlexCoventry 9y ago
    I think this is the closest it gets: "Your Urbit instance is your personal server. Your urbit should eventually contain and manage your whole digital life. You may compute at home or in the cloud, based on your security/privacy tradeoff, but Urbit's formal semantics makes ships trivial to migrate. You'll never be locked in to one computing provider."
    - bitwize 9y ago
      Somebody put up cash on the barrelhead, a bounty for the Urbit developers and hypemen to develop an actual app -- a simple strip-poker game -- in Urbit. There were no takers. The question of "but what can you actually do with it?" went unanswered by Urbit's own promoters, even when they were incentivized with real cash money to come up with an answer.
      - chc4 9y ago
        I never heard of this. Like, never even in passing have I seen that bounty mentioned. One of the trivial apps that was demoed literally years ago was a simple tic-tac-toe app, and there is even a MUD written for Urbit, so saying it's impossible to write apps for it isn't true. The web server is hosted in Urbit, along with the developer chat room. And really, the problem isn't that apps are impossible to write but that they would be easier to write using a different platform, which is probably true (for strip poker at least), since you don't need anything more complex than a couple hundred lines of C.
        pcmonk 9y ago
        IIRC, that particular episode happened in, like, 2013, when Arvo (Urbit OS) was barely prototype-grade. Urbit developers decided to work on the OS rather than chase after a bounty of about $1000. There was also no meaningful documentation at the time, which is why nobody else could complete it.
- adiabatty 9y ago
  If I didn't know what galaxies, stars, and planets were, and that instances of those are ships, this wouldn't make any sense at all. The main audience of this post is people who're already into Urbit and understand some of the basic lingo around running a ship. If you don't have that terminology down, and don't know Ethereum either, this probably reads like Jabberwocky[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky
deleted 9y ago
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- deleted 9y ago
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azeirah 9y ago
I'm still very confused about urbit, but think it's quite interesting to follow. I found that this video explains it reasonably well. Watch it from 6:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md4boH1eZvc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md4boH1eZvc This snippet also helps: > Making the web programmable > The first thing your Urbit can do is act as a transparent layer to your existing services. We’d like urbit to be usable as a self-hosted IFTTT for geeks. Your urbit can hold your keys, store data, run programs and seamlessly connect to your existing services. Plus, with a global revision controlled filesystem it’s easy to share API connectors and keep them up to date. > With an Urbit running on your machine you can ls your Gmail from Unix. Write a short script to poll Twitter on a keyword and deliver the results to your email or into a Slack channel. Send an SMS when an HTTP request doesn’t resolve. These are just a few examples. Your Urbit is designed to make data trapped in your existing services feel like an extension of your local programming environment. https://urbit.org/posts/vision/ https://urbit.org/posts/vision/
- hossbeast 9y ago
  So identity, IoT, and literally everything in between.
fra 9y ago
It's not clear to me what this means for folks who bought urbit stars earlier.
- otoburb 9y ago
  It seems that if you bought a star earlier then Tlon will "[...] write [Ethereum smart-] contracts that help galaxies and stars distribute their stars and planets" such that the "[...] star owner configures the planet sale contract with two parameters: the price in ether of a planet, and the number of planets available." Basically, star owners will be handed a mechanism to run their own mini-ICO, where planets represent ICO tokens. Why would you want to buy a planet from star owner X? I presume the answer lies somewhere in the statement: "Galaxies and stars are network infrastructure. Regular users have planets."
- bitwize 9y ago
  It means they're hosed. Urbit is on about the same level as the next Zoë Quinn game in terms of hype-to-actual-value-delivered ratio.
- state 9y ago
  Addresses can be committed to the contract in exchange for sparks. The contract then holds those addresses, until someone burns a spark in exchange for them. We're not sure exactly when or precisely how that market will get initialized — but you get the basic idea. Your star ownership will get mirrored in the contracts.
aeontech 9y ago
Every time I read something about Urbit I am reminded of the Lewis Padgett short sci-fi story, "Mimsy Were The Borogroves" [0], [1] describing children discovering alien future toys, and subsequently via use of those toys learning to manipulate reality in incomprehensible ways. I still have not been able to figure out if there's actually something that amazing about Urbit, or if behind the obfuscated terminology there's nothing, and I am reluctant to commit to the time required to find out for myself. It doesn't help that people who spend time in that land seem to all forget how to speak about it except in the terms of Urbit, unable to translate it for laypeople. I suppose that's true about any highly technical subject though. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves [1]: https://books.google.com/books?id=yPVbDv5DqkoC&lpg=PA181&dq=mimsy%20were%20the%20borogoves&pg=PA181#v=onepage&q=mimsy%20were%20the%20borogoves&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=yPVbDv5DqkoC&lpg=PA181&dq=...
- olympus 9y ago
  Urbit has been around for a few years and has done nothing to clear up the confusion around it. I think at this point it is safe to say that any claims of Urbit being a revolutionary form of computing are hogwash. This is probably similar to how Scientology got started. Nobody really believes in it, but are too afraid to strongly denounce it because they don't want to be the one who "doesn't get it." So they all just go along and get sucked further along down the rabbit hole. The difference between Scientology and Urbit is that Scientology managed to rope in a few celebrities and gained some sustaining mass. If Urbit wants to make it big, they should pay Zuckerberg and Musk to evangelize it, and then everyone will be falling all over themselves to be part of it.
  - rhencke 9y ago
    That's... a baffling claim. Urbit is well documented, in easy-to-understand terminology, from low level, to high level: https://urbit.org/docs/ https://urbit.org/docs/ https://urbit.org/docs/nock/definition/ https://urbit.org/docs/nock/definition/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/concepts/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/concepts/ The code is open source, under MIT license: https://github.com/urbit/urbit https://github.com/urbit/urbit Heck, urbit even shows up to Hacker News semi-regularly: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=urbit https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=urbit What backs your claim they have done nothing to clear up the confusion about it?
equalunique 9y ago
I think that the modified Etherium browser they propose will help a great deal towards visualizing / seeing the Urbit network "in action."
oh_sigh 9y ago
How does Urbit team feel about Richard from Silicon Valley(the show) seemingly getting his idea to "invent a new internet" from Urbit?
- Fang_ 9y ago
  Hi, member of the Urbit team here! There was definitely a feeling of "holy shit they're doing our thing!" going around, but we can't be entirely sure if they got the idea from Urbit specifically. More likely, they aggregated ideas from all decentralization projects going on right now. Definitely cool to see these kinds of ideas being represented in more mainstream media though!
gcb0 9y ago
To everyone either 1) comparing it to some sci-fi text or 2) saying it is unparsable: It is no accident. This is written like a religious text. I am not kidding. It might have came out like this by accident, but i could spend days mapping the semiotics of this to, say, scientology "books". The most blatant technique there is the slightly out of place technical terms and insertion of sci-fi elements. Here is a paper on christian texts and the use of metaphor on the willingness of the audience http://cogprints.org/4863/1/Cognitive_Semiotics_and_On-Line_Reading_of_Religious_Texts.pdf http://cogprints.org/4863/1/Cognitive_Semiotics_and_On-Line_...
noncoml 9y ago
Urbit likes like an awesome idea. Are they shipping a product? Or it’s just theory for the moment? If it’s the second, any idea when we can expect to see the first products?
- jdoliner 9y ago
  Urbit's test network has been up for a year, this post is about bringing online a more hardened version using Ethereum.
- ineptech 9y ago
  > Are they shipping? Yes and no; it's a completely functional OS for which there are AFAICT no useful applications yet. You can absolutely run it, but there's no reason to run it other than to hack on it.
natural219 9y ago
For those confused about Urbit's value proposition, I recommend Isaac Simpson's briefish explanation here. Funny enough, the original version was posted behind Medium's membership paywall, and the public link was just recently distributed: https://storage.googleapis.com/urbit-extra/etc/the%20not%20so%20dark%20future%20-%20isaac%20simpson.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/urbit-extra/etc/the%20not%20s... My own perspective regarding these new decentralized platforms is that we're at the very tail end of low-hanging fruit in regards how easy the next generation of software innovation will be to explain to "your average layperson". The problems that decentralization are trying to solve are uniquely understood by developers, particularly people well-versed in the metagame of content, advertising, identity, and privacy on the web, which is a vast field filled with thousands of great reasons to consider decentralization, but are unfortunately hard to distill down into a 30-second elevator soundbyte. Another problem is that having high-density conversations about software innovation is fundamentally absurd. Every software innovation is ultimately just "another way to write code", so you can boil down everything Urbit and IPFS and Ethereum are doing to "well, our current code for everything is this way, and it seems to suck, so we're going to try writing the code a completely new way". That's it. Every time someone asks "what can you even do with this thing?", the answer is "well, you can develop software on it". Edit: Apparently the original article has been un-paywalled. Perhaps you can access it here: https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/urbit-and-the-not-so-dark-future-of-the-internet-400c9b667e2 https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/urbit-and-the-not-so-dark-f...
- b1daly 9y ago
  I'm not sure about Urbit as a solution, but they have identified a very real problem around the issues of identity and information that is connected to identity. This essay sums it up nicely, so I won't repeat it. But I very much identify with, and am personally vexed by, the disorganized, Balkinized, online world we citizens of the "first world" are being forced to navigate. One idea I don't grasp is how an Urbit server might integrate with a service like Facebook. Let's say you could set up your Urbit server to integrate your social news feeds from different services. Would this violate the terms of service of a system like Facebook? One could hypothetically create an application that at least would handle submission of personal content to any social network. And it could thereby keep a local copy of the content. But it would have to scrape the site, or use the provided API, to present any response to posts. The linked article mentions that Facebook sued a company that tried to market an app that would present an integrated social news stream from FB and Twitter. I wonder how they would respond to an app that would let a user setup their own system to do the same thing? I find the increasing power of the big tech companies disturbing, though I do appreciate the services they provide.
mbrock 9y ago
People are very strongly repulsed by what they perceive as excessive novelty: Lisp parentheses, Haskell monads, Urbit jargon. Maybe because it comes off as antisocial. I somehow really enjoy all those things.
archagon 9y ago
Huh, apparently the creator[1] of Urbit is one of the original folks behind the very gross dark enlightenment school of thought, and also associated with Peter Thiel through his startup. Well, that saps my interest in the project rather quickly. I'm sure there will be alternatives from people whose principles I'd actually be happy to support. I strongly believe in voting with my attention and/or money against ideals that are abhorrent to me, so I thought I'd put it out there for others in the same boat. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  The idea that certain people are radioactive needs to die. Even if someone is a blatant racist, one way to deal with them is to take their good ideas and use them as your own. You can't do that if you're morally opposed to even understanding it.
  - archagon 9y ago
    I agree. Which is why I can under no circumstance support Urbit, but would be happy to see a parallel project without the toxic founder. I hope most people feel their hearts constrict when they read up about what Curtis and his ilk believe[1] and don't immediately reach for the "PC culture" bugbear with comments like mine. To me, it's clear that zero dollars should be going towards the sustenance of such ideas. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      I've spent the last 15 minutes reading everything I can find about the subject, and honestly nothing seems very inflammatory. Have you read this? https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lambdaconf-anyway-35ff8cd4fb9d https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lam... He seems like a reasonable, intelligent person, and people have gone out of their way to mischaracterize what he did say and to label him a racist. He was also writing under a pen name, and -- believe it or not -- roleplaying is common recreation. Just because Moldbug believed something doesn't mean Chris believed those things. All in all, I think this is just another example of the insular tribalism present in all of Silicon Valley. It's ironic that the place that prides itself on being the most tolerant and the most progressive is in fact so victorian and reductionist that their ideas can't withstand a simple debate. Easier to label and shun, eh? I'm not a fan. It's somewhat ridiculous that I have to add a disclaimer that I don't share any of their ideology, even in secret. I'm proud of my beliefs, and this has nothing to do with the politics at play. If you're going to be inclusive, then be inclusive. To shun someone so intelligent and to reduce their entire body of work to a few glib sentences isn't a productive strategy. From my perspective, it seems strange that anyone could read that Medium post and come away hating Chris. He's clearly here to talk tech, not politics. So what's the problem? When you join a Twitter mob and serve as a sort of informal government — by deciding, for instance, who can speak at a conference — you’re feeding your inner chimpanzee. It feels good. Your conscience may be convinced that it’s spiritually the right thing to do. But your limbic system is just plain high. Twitter is a drug cartel. The drug is power. Or at least, apparent power. Hear, hear. When you seek to suppress an idea, people like me get curious. Why are you so worried that Chris is the founder? It makes me want to dig in to their beliefs and decide for myself. Don't you see? Speaking out like this actively helps the very side you're trying to defeat. They come off looking reasonable, whereas your argument boils down to "He's toxic because reasons." One of the most persuasive things you could do in this situation would be to post a quote written by Chris. Posting a quote from Moldbug would be the second most persuasive thing. Failing either of those, are we supposed to just take your word for it that the dude should be excluded from society? This whole "label and exclude" thing is for the birds. Why not judge ideas instead of people?

158 points by zwtaylor 9y ago

StavrosK 9y ago

Is this meant to be understandable by people? Am I missing some context?

to3m 9y ago
You can get started, sort of, from the white paper: https://urbit.org/posts/ https://urbit.org/posts/ (TL;DR: "Urbit also invents a lot of alien technical jargon. We admit that this is annoying. Abstractly, it’s part of the clean-slate program: words smuggle in a lot of assumptions." - to which all I can say myself is: qupnux.)
- jacques_chester 9y ago
  It reminds me of a previous techno-utopia. I guess I'd put it on a poster as: lyrics by blockchain; melody by Xanadu.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  I think you need to demonstrate some truly massive and revolutionary value before you ask people to learn your new language, otherwise you really just come off like a cult.
  - bitwize 9y ago
    You just haven't realized the truth: that Unix and the internet have failed us massively and need to be completely reinvented from scratch by wise and benevolent engineers who have our interest at heart. Curtis, in his eminent brilliance, was the first of us to realize this, and so became the first of these wise and benevolent engineers, forging a bright path for other open-minded people to follow. Now come, let's get you changed into this robe and learning these chants. :)
  - flatline 9y ago
    Exactly. One of the primary MOs of a cult is to hijack people's language and replace it with their own. It is a means of thought control, a method of creating a sense of belonging, and a way to make cult members feel superior about their "knowledge". Onecoin has become an outright prosperity cult in Asia. I see shades of the same everywhere in crypto.
- natrius 9y ago
  I think the obfuscation is an elaborate hazing ritual that makes it optimal to cooperate with the existing community rather than defect and launch your own competing "land" registry.
  - bitwize 9y ago
    You mean like cults do?
hossbeast 9y ago
Yeah, I was waiting for the "you can use Urbit to do X". No idea what it's for. There was a bit about real estate transactions .. then alot about space.
- AlexCoventry 9y ago
  I think this is the closest it gets: "Your Urbit instance is your personal server. Your urbit should eventually contain and manage your whole digital life. You may compute at home or in the cloud, based on your security/privacy tradeoff, but Urbit's formal semantics makes ships trivial to migrate. You'll never be locked in to one computing provider."
  - bitwize 9y ago
    Somebody put up cash on the barrelhead, a bounty for the Urbit developers and hypemen to develop an actual app -- a simple strip-poker game -- in Urbit. There were no takers. The question of "but what can you actually do with it?" went unanswered by Urbit's own promoters, even when they were incentivized with real cash money to come up with an answer.
    - chc4 9y ago
      I never heard of this. Like, never even in passing have I seen that bounty mentioned. One of the trivial apps that was demoed literally years ago was a simple tic-tac-toe app, and there is even a MUD written for Urbit, so saying it's impossible to write apps for it isn't true. The web server is hosted in Urbit, along with the developer chat room. And really, the problem isn't that apps are impossible to write but that they would be easier to write using a different platform, which is probably true (for strip poker at least), since you don't need anything more complex than a couple hundred lines of C.
      - pcmonk 9y ago
        IIRC, that particular episode happened in, like, 2013, when Arvo (Urbit OS) was barely prototype-grade. Urbit developers decided to work on the OS rather than chase after a bounty of about $1000. There was also no meaningful documentation at the time, which is why nobody else could complete it.
adiabatty 9y ago
If I didn't know what galaxies, stars, and planets were, and that instances of those are ships, this wouldn't make any sense at all. The main audience of this post is people who're already into Urbit and understand some of the basic lingo around running a ship. If you don't have that terminology down, and don't know Ethereum either, this probably reads like Jabberwocky[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky

deleted 9y ago

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deleted 9y ago
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azeirah 9y ago

I'm still very confused about urbit, but think it's quite interesting to follow. I found that this video explains it reasonably well. Watch it from 6:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md4boH1eZvc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md4boH1eZvc This snippet also helps: > Making the web programmable > The first thing your Urbit can do is act as a transparent layer to your existing services. We’d like urbit to be usable as a self-hosted IFTTT for geeks. Your urbit can hold your keys, store data, run programs and seamlessly connect to your existing services. Plus, with a global revision controlled filesystem it’s easy to share API connectors and keep them up to date. > With an Urbit running on your machine you can ls your Gmail from Unix. Write a short script to poll Twitter on a keyword and deliver the results to your email or into a Slack channel. Send an SMS when an HTTP request doesn’t resolve. These are just a few examples. Your Urbit is designed to make data trapped in your existing services feel like an extension of your local programming environment. https://urbit.org/posts/vision/ https://urbit.org/posts/vision/

hossbeast 9y ago
So identity, IoT, and literally everything in between.

fra 9y ago

It's not clear to me what this means for folks who bought urbit stars earlier.

otoburb 9y ago
It seems that if you bought a star earlier then Tlon will "[...] write [Ethereum smart-] contracts that help galaxies and stars distribute their stars and planets" such that the "[...] star owner configures the planet sale contract with two parameters: the price in ether of a planet, and the number of planets available." Basically, star owners will be handed a mechanism to run their own mini-ICO, where planets represent ICO tokens. Why would you want to buy a planet from star owner X? I presume the answer lies somewhere in the statement: "Galaxies and stars are network infrastructure. Regular users have planets."
bitwize 9y ago
It means they're hosed. Urbit is on about the same level as the next Zoë Quinn game in terms of hype-to-actual-value-delivered ratio.
state 9y ago
Addresses can be committed to the contract in exchange for sparks. The contract then holds those addresses, until someone burns a spark in exchange for them. We're not sure exactly when or precisely how that market will get initialized — but you get the basic idea. Your star ownership will get mirrored in the contracts.

aeontech 9y ago

Every time I read something about Urbit I am reminded of the Lewis Padgett short sci-fi story, "Mimsy Were The Borogroves" [0], [1] describing children discovering alien future toys, and subsequently via use of those toys learning to manipulate reality in incomprehensible ways. I still have not been able to figure out if there's actually something that amazing about Urbit, or if behind the obfuscated terminology there's nothing, and I am reluctant to commit to the time required to find out for myself. It doesn't help that people who spend time in that land seem to all forget how to speak about it except in the terms of Urbit, unable to translate it for laypeople. I suppose that's true about any highly technical subject though. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves [1]: https://books.google.com/books?id=yPVbDv5DqkoC&lpg=PA181&dq=mimsy%20were%20the%20borogoves&pg=PA181#v=onepage&q=mimsy%20were%20the%20borogoves&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=yPVbDv5DqkoC&lpg=PA181&dq=...

olympus 9y ago
Urbit has been around for a few years and has done nothing to clear up the confusion around it. I think at this point it is safe to say that any claims of Urbit being a revolutionary form of computing are hogwash. This is probably similar to how Scientology got started. Nobody really believes in it, but are too afraid to strongly denounce it because they don't want to be the one who "doesn't get it." So they all just go along and get sucked further along down the rabbit hole. The difference between Scientology and Urbit is that Scientology managed to rope in a few celebrities and gained some sustaining mass. If Urbit wants to make it big, they should pay Zuckerberg and Musk to evangelize it, and then everyone will be falling all over themselves to be part of it.
- rhencke 9y ago
  That's... a baffling claim. Urbit is well documented, in easy-to-understand terminology, from low level, to high level: https://urbit.org/docs/ https://urbit.org/docs/ https://urbit.org/docs/nock/definition/ https://urbit.org/docs/nock/definition/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/concepts/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/concepts/ The code is open source, under MIT license: https://github.com/urbit/urbit https://github.com/urbit/urbit Heck, urbit even shows up to Hacker News semi-regularly: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=urbit https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=urbit What backs your claim they have done nothing to clear up the confusion about it?

equalunique 9y ago

I think that the modified Etherium browser they propose will help a great deal towards visualizing / seeing the Urbit network "in action."

oh_sigh 9y ago

How does Urbit team feel about Richard from Silicon Valley(the show) seemingly getting his idea to "invent a new internet" from Urbit?

Fang_ 9y ago
Hi, member of the Urbit team here! There was definitely a feeling of "holy shit they're doing our thing!" going around, but we can't be entirely sure if they got the idea from Urbit specifically. More likely, they aggregated ideas from all decentralization projects going on right now. Definitely cool to see these kinds of ideas being represented in more mainstream media though!

gcb0 9y ago

To everyone either 1) comparing it to some sci-fi text or 2) saying it is unparsable: It is no accident. This is written like a religious text. I am not kidding. It might have came out like this by accident, but i could spend days mapping the semiotics of this to, say, scientology "books". The most blatant technique there is the slightly out of place technical terms and insertion of sci-fi elements. Here is a paper on christian texts and the use of metaphor on the willingness of the audience http://cogprints.org/4863/1/Cognitive_Semiotics_and_On-Line_Reading_of_Religious_Texts.pdf http://cogprints.org/4863/1/Cognitive_Semiotics_and_On-Line_...

noncoml 9y ago

Urbit likes like an awesome idea. Are they shipping a product? Or it’s just theory for the moment? If it’s the second, any idea when we can expect to see the first products?

jdoliner 9y ago
Urbit's test network has been up for a year, this post is about bringing online a more hardened version using Ethereum.
ineptech 9y ago
> Are they shipping? Yes and no; it's a completely functional OS for which there are AFAICT no useful applications yet. You can absolutely run it, but there's no reason to run it other than to hack on it.

natural219 9y ago

For those confused about Urbit's value proposition, I recommend Isaac Simpson's briefish explanation here. Funny enough, the original version was posted behind Medium's membership paywall, and the public link was just recently distributed: https://storage.googleapis.com/urbit-extra/etc/the%20not%20so%20dark%20future%20-%20isaac%20simpson.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/urbit-extra/etc/the%20not%20s... My own perspective regarding these new decentralized platforms is that we're at the very tail end of low-hanging fruit in regards how easy the next generation of software innovation will be to explain to "your average layperson". The problems that decentralization are trying to solve are uniquely understood by developers, particularly people well-versed in the metagame of content, advertising, identity, and privacy on the web, which is a vast field filled with thousands of great reasons to consider decentralization, but are unfortunately hard to distill down into a 30-second elevator soundbyte. Another problem is that having high-density conversations about software innovation is fundamentally absurd. Every software innovation is ultimately just "another way to write code", so you can boil down everything Urbit and IPFS and Ethereum are doing to "well, our current code for everything is this way, and it seems to suck, so we're going to try writing the code a completely new way". That's it. Every time someone asks "what can you even do with this thing?", the answer is "well, you can develop software on it". Edit: Apparently the original article has been un-paywalled. Perhaps you can access it here: https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/urbit-and-the-not-so-dark-future-of-the-internet-400c9b667e2 https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/urbit-and-the-not-so-dark-f...

b1daly 9y ago
I'm not sure about Urbit as a solution, but they have identified a very real problem around the issues of identity and information that is connected to identity. This essay sums it up nicely, so I won't repeat it. But I very much identify with, and am personally vexed by, the disorganized, Balkinized, online world we citizens of the "first world" are being forced to navigate. One idea I don't grasp is how an Urbit server might integrate with a service like Facebook. Let's say you could set up your Urbit server to integrate your social news feeds from different services. Would this violate the terms of service of a system like Facebook? One could hypothetically create an application that at least would handle submission of personal content to any social network. And it could thereby keep a local copy of the content. But it would have to scrape the site, or use the provided API, to present any response to posts. The linked article mentions that Facebook sued a company that tried to market an app that would present an integrated social news stream from FB and Twitter. I wonder how they would respond to an app that would let a user setup their own system to do the same thing? I find the increasing power of the big tech companies disturbing, though I do appreciate the services they provide.

mbrock 9y ago

People are very strongly repulsed by what they perceive as excessive novelty: Lisp parentheses, Haskell monads, Urbit jargon. Maybe because it comes off as antisocial. I somehow really enjoy all those things.

archagon 9y ago

Huh, apparently the creator[1] of Urbit is one of the original folks behind the very gross dark enlightenment school of thought, and also associated with Peter Thiel through his startup. Well, that saps my interest in the project rather quickly. I'm sure there will be alternatives from people whose principles I'd actually be happy to support. I strongly believe in voting with my attention and/or money against ideals that are abhorrent to me, so I thought I'd put it out there for others in the same boat. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

sillysaurus3 9y ago
The idea that certain people are radioactive needs to die. Even if someone is a blatant racist, one way to deal with them is to take their good ideas and use them as your own. You can't do that if you're morally opposed to even understanding it.
- archagon 9y ago
  I agree. Which is why I can under no circumstance support Urbit, but would be happy to see a parallel project without the toxic founder. I hope most people feel their hearts constrict when they read up about what Curtis and his ilk believe[1] and don't immediately reach for the "PC culture" bugbear with comments like mine. To me, it's clear that zero dollars should be going towards the sustenance of such ideas. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    I've spent the last 15 minutes reading everything I can find about the subject, and honestly nothing seems very inflammatory. Have you read this? https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lambdaconf-anyway-35ff8cd4fb9d https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lam... He seems like a reasonable, intelligent person, and people have gone out of their way to mischaracterize what he did say and to label him a racist. He was also writing under a pen name, and -- believe it or not -- roleplaying is common recreation. Just because Moldbug believed something doesn't mean Chris believed those things. All in all, I think this is just another example of the insular tribalism present in all of Silicon Valley. It's ironic that the place that prides itself on being the most tolerant and the most progressive is in fact so victorian and reductionist that their ideas can't withstand a simple debate. Easier to label and shun, eh? I'm not a fan. It's somewhat ridiculous that I have to add a disclaimer that I don't share any of their ideology, even in secret. I'm proud of my beliefs, and this has nothing to do with the politics at play. If you're going to be inclusive, then be inclusive. To shun someone so intelligent and to reduce their entire body of work to a few glib sentences isn't a productive strategy. From my perspective, it seems strange that anyone could read that Medium post and come away hating Chris. He's clearly here to talk tech, not politics. So what's the problem? When you join a Twitter mob and serve as a sort of informal government — by deciding, for instance, who can speak at a conference — you’re feeding your inner chimpanzee. It feels good. Your conscience may be convinced that it’s spiritually the right thing to do. But your limbic system is just plain high. Twitter is a drug cartel. The drug is power. Or at least, apparent power. Hear, hear. When you seek to suppress an idea, people like me get curious. Why are you so worried that Chris is the founder? It makes me want to dig in to their beliefs and decide for myself. Don't you see? Speaking out like this actively helps the very side you're trying to defeat. They come off looking reasonable, whereas your argument boils down to "He's toxic because reasons." One of the most persuasive things you could do in this situation would be to post a quote written by Chris. Posting a quote from Moldbug would be the second most persuasive thing. Failing either of those, are we supposed to just take your word for it that the dude should be excluded from society? This whole "label and exclude" thing is for the birds. Why not judge ideas instead of people?