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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 discover

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?
  - olympus 9y ago
    My main claim was that Urbit isn't revolutionary. It is really just a Unix server and programming language. However, in an attempt to seem more sophisticated they invented new words so that nobody could figure out what it was. Urbit is purposely obtuse in their terminology, when they really could just use words that programmers already know and use. Here's some examples from the documentation you linked: "A value in Hoon is called a noun" - or you could just call it a value. "A gate is a Hoon function" - or you could just call it a function. "A core has no exact equivalent in conventional languages, but the closest equivalent is an object. An object has methods; a core has functionally computed attributes (arms). An arm that produces a gate is the Hoon equivalent of a conventional method;" - or you could just say that objects in Hoon (the language) can have methods and attributes, and you would never need to invent the core/arm/gate terminology. They try to give themselves an out by saying stuff like "Hoon has concepts like all these abstractions, but they remain false cognates." When you dig into it, the only unique things are the words. It's like children trying to come up with a code- "instead of door we'll say blorp and instead of close we'll say bleep. Now bleep the blorp before we continue inventing our code.
    - han-sel 9y ago
      "It is really just a Unix server and programming language." You should read https://urbit.org/posts/overview/ https://urbit.org/posts/overview/ The whole reason Urbit exists is that Unix + the internet is broken and needs a complete overhaul Re: the different names, there are slight differences between gates and functions, but I agree they're not important enough to merit the change in name. But hey, it takes a purist to spend 15 years rewriting the whole stack from scratch!
      - occultist_throw 9y ago
        Yep. Unix and Linux are broken. So instead, I should load up Urbit, locate on a planet, spin up a garglemitz on the spitzenspeil with the hoon japing over the nock. If you add Xenu, Body Thetans, e-meters, I think you might be on to something! -------------------- No seriously. There are wrong things with the monolothic kernel as well as microkernels. Theyre design tradeoffs. But none of the existing, well established methods throw away the language of computing of the last 60 years. Some tech stacks may add a new type, but they are able to describe why a new classification is needed, and how it fits iin the existing model. What Urbit is doing, is polluting the namespace by turning existing nomenclature into some sort of technofreakish cult. Up is now down. Down is now blarbbliboop. And anyone questioning the "Master" is berated and denigrated by means of 'lack of intelligence'. You all should be defending your way and means. Because in my eyes, you all are wrong until you can start integrating standard and normal nomenclature - because it's hiding something unsavory.
bitwize 9y ago
Others, including myself, have noticed this too and it reminds us of something else a little closer to home: namely, what happens to Scientologists and the like after they've been in the cult a while. Even the Scientologists who later leave still think in terms of engrams and body thetans. I think Curtis Yarvin is a master huckster and wordsmith, but near as I can tell what's good about Urbit isn't original and what's original isn't very good. The central concept is basically Java's "write once, run anywhere" concept from the 90s. Remember that? It wasn't just about applets; applets were only the beginning. With "mobile code" that could run on any device, Java was going to make existing operating systems obsolete and finally bury Microsoft. Sound familiar? Curtis adds sizzle to the steak by mixing in ideas Hackernews people will find appealing -- functional programming, blockchain, distributed computing -- and finally he plays the same semantic shellgame with his words he plays with his political essays, to convince you that the horrible political views he has aren't so horrible. Except this time it's to convince you that Urbit is more than a reimplementation of interesting ideas from the past, some of which failed massively. Why? Well, the fact that he is selling "virtual real estate" in his new internet that's totally going to change everything real soon now might be a clue.
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  >>finally he plays the same semantic shellgame with his words he plays with his political essays, to convince you that the horrible political views he has aren't so horrible. I suggest you leave your ideological biases out of your assessment of Urbit the technology. We all have our political beliefs - mine are hard libertarian, yours are hard feminist/leftist - but hopefully we can put those aside when assessing technology.
  - fusiongyro 9y ago
    It's interesting that you want them left out and then, as an aside, bring the parent's into it.
  - dogecoinbase 9y ago
    As tptacek pointed out upthread, his hateful ideology is deeply ingrained in the structure of the technology. In fact, no technology is free of its creator's ideology! The argument that one should "put [ideological biases] aside when assessing technology" is, in the most charitable case, naive attachment to the status quo.
chc4 9y ago
I'm one of those people that get it, so I'll try to explain it without going off the deep end and waxing poetically about planets or whatever. Urbit is a platform for building decentralized apps. To that end, it's a tightly integrated set of different features that play into that: an identity system so that all the apps can refer to the same people by the same handle, a typed RPC network for easy message sending, and an append-only log of all events that platform handles being the most important parts. Right now you can build decentralized apps like Mastodon, except they 1) take hours to setup a node, along with having to know arcane Linuz sysadmining 2) aren't actually decentralized, but federated. Urbit wants to make it easy to setup your own server, which runs as a node for all these decentralized apps (instant messaging, Twitter, etc.), along with be useful for server-y things like aggregate APIs (email, Facebook). There's not actually anything that amazing about Urbit once you figure it out. It just wants everyone to be able to run their own server, and make it easy to build decentralized apps that talk to other Urbit servers. The important part is that somehow, they saw how bad trying to do that currently is, said "let's rewrite everything", /and then did/. It's like reading about Oberon or Plan9/Inferno. Edit: This post is probably the worst introduction to Urbit imaginable. It basically is a technical spec for bootstrapping a PKI over Ethereum, and you should expect about as much as if you got linked something from BitTorrent about that. It assumes domain knowledge from both Urbit and Ethereum (both of which are terrible to explain), and /doesn't actually matter/ for most people interested in Urbit. Please don't use this as the benchmark for "babies first urbit intro".
- apo 9y ago
  Right now you can build decentralized apps like Mastodon, except they 1) take hours to setup a node, along with having to know arcane Linuz sysadmining 2) aren't actually decentralized, but federated. Urbit wants to make it easy to setup your own server, which runs as a node for all these decentralized apps (instant messaging, Twitter, etc.), along with be useful for server-y things like aggregate APIs (email, Facebook). This sounds vaguely intriguing. But the problem that most Ethereum projects have is that they put the solution and technology before the problem. Half the time I don't even know what I'm looking at or if it's worth looking further. Can you restate the problem that Urbit solves in the simplest terms you can think of?
dropit_sphere 9y ago
That is such a cool story. Thank you for mentioning it.
norswap 9y ago
It's a clean state reinvention of the computing environment (it's software component at least). That by itself might be a good idea, but if you're going to sell people on your project, you need to give some rationale / objective for your projects. And there, Urbit doesn't do well. There is some talk of decentralization, but it's not clear what the goals are. Like many people, I find the way it's being done slightly confusing (the names, etc), but it is being done. At this point, I would just lump it in the stack of intellectual curiosities, right next to TempleOS. It might turn into something yet, but I'm not holding my breath.
pcmoore 9y ago
Take a look at https://github.com/tibru/tibru https://github.com/tibru/tibru for an explanation of why the underlying technology is poorly chosen and how systems of this type don't need to be esoteric

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?
- olympus 9y ago
  My main claim was that Urbit isn't revolutionary. It is really just a Unix server and programming language. However, in an attempt to seem more sophisticated they invented new words so that nobody could figure out what it was. Urbit is purposely obtuse in their terminology, when they really could just use words that programmers already know and use. Here's some examples from the documentation you linked: "A value in Hoon is called a noun" - or you could just call it a value. "A gate is a Hoon function" - or you could just call it a function. "A core has no exact equivalent in conventional languages, but the closest equivalent is an object. An object has methods; a core has functionally computed attributes (arms). An arm that produces a gate is the Hoon equivalent of a conventional method;" - or you could just say that objects in Hoon (the language) can have methods and attributes, and you would never need to invent the core/arm/gate terminology. They try to give themselves an out by saying stuff like "Hoon has concepts like all these abstractions, but they remain false cognates." When you dig into it, the only unique things are the words. It's like children trying to come up with a code- "instead of door we'll say blorp and instead of close we'll say bleep. Now bleep the blorp before we continue inventing our code.
  - han-sel 9y ago
    "It is really just a Unix server and programming language." You should read https://urbit.org/posts/overview/ https://urbit.org/posts/overview/ The whole reason Urbit exists is that Unix + the internet is broken and needs a complete overhaul Re: the different names, there are slight differences between gates and functions, but I agree they're not important enough to merit the change in name. But hey, it takes a purist to spend 15 years rewriting the whole stack from scratch!
    - occultist_throw 9y ago
      Yep. Unix and Linux are broken. So instead, I should load up Urbit, locate on a planet, spin up a garglemitz on the spitzenspeil with the hoon japing over the nock. If you add Xenu, Body Thetans, e-meters, I think you might be on to something! -------------------- No seriously. There are wrong things with the monolothic kernel as well as microkernels. Theyre design tradeoffs. But none of the existing, well established methods throw away the language of computing of the last 60 years. Some tech stacks may add a new type, but they are able to describe why a new classification is needed, and how it fits iin the existing model. What Urbit is doing, is polluting the namespace by turning existing nomenclature into some sort of technofreakish cult. Up is now down. Down is now blarbbliboop. And anyone questioning the "Master" is berated and denigrated by means of 'lack of intelligence'. You all should be defending your way and means. Because in my eyes, you all are wrong until you can start integrating standard and normal nomenclature - because it's hiding something unsavory.

bitwize 9y ago

Others, including myself, have noticed this too and it reminds us of something else a little closer to home: namely, what happens to Scientologists and the like after they've been in the cult a while. Even the Scientologists who later leave still think in terms of engrams and body thetans. I think Curtis Yarvin is a master huckster and wordsmith, but near as I can tell what's good about Urbit isn't original and what's original isn't very good. The central concept is basically Java's "write once, run anywhere" concept from the 90s. Remember that? It wasn't just about applets; applets were only the beginning. With "mobile code" that could run on any device, Java was going to make existing operating systems obsolete and finally bury Microsoft. Sound familiar? Curtis adds sizzle to the steak by mixing in ideas Hackernews people will find appealing -- functional programming, blockchain, distributed computing -- and finally he plays the same semantic shellgame with his words he plays with his political essays, to convince you that the horrible political views he has aren't so horrible. Except this time it's to convince you that Urbit is more than a reimplementation of interesting ideas from the past, some of which failed massively. Why? Well, the fact that he is selling "virtual real estate" in his new internet that's totally going to change everything real soon now might be a clue.

CryptoPunk 9y ago
>>finally he plays the same semantic shellgame with his words he plays with his political essays, to convince you that the horrible political views he has aren't so horrible. I suggest you leave your ideological biases out of your assessment of Urbit the technology. We all have our political beliefs - mine are hard libertarian, yours are hard feminist/leftist - but hopefully we can put those aside when assessing technology.
- fusiongyro 9y ago
  It's interesting that you want them left out and then, as an aside, bring the parent's into it.
- dogecoinbase 9y ago
  As tptacek pointed out upthread, his hateful ideology is deeply ingrained in the structure of the technology. In fact, no technology is free of its creator's ideology! The argument that one should "put [ideological biases] aside when assessing technology" is, in the most charitable case, naive attachment to the status quo.

chc4 9y ago

I'm one of those people that get it, so I'll try to explain it without going off the deep end and waxing poetically about planets or whatever. Urbit is a platform for building decentralized apps. To that end, it's a tightly integrated set of different features that play into that: an identity system so that all the apps can refer to the same people by the same handle, a typed RPC network for easy message sending, and an append-only log of all events that platform handles being the most important parts. Right now you can build decentralized apps like Mastodon, except they 1) take hours to setup a node, along with having to know arcane Linuz sysadmining 2) aren't actually decentralized, but federated. Urbit wants to make it easy to setup your own server, which runs as a node for all these decentralized apps (instant messaging, Twitter, etc.), along with be useful for server-y things like aggregate APIs (email, Facebook). There's not actually anything that amazing about Urbit once you figure it out. It just wants everyone to be able to run their own server, and make it easy to build decentralized apps that talk to other Urbit servers. The important part is that somehow, they saw how bad trying to do that currently is, said "let's rewrite everything", /and then did/. It's like reading about Oberon or Plan9/Inferno. Edit: This post is probably the worst introduction to Urbit imaginable. It basically is a technical spec for bootstrapping a PKI over Ethereum, and you should expect about as much as if you got linked something from BitTorrent about that. It assumes domain knowledge from both Urbit and Ethereum (both of which are terrible to explain), and /doesn't actually matter/ for most people interested in Urbit. Please don't use this as the benchmark for "babies first urbit intro".

apo 9y ago
Right now you can build decentralized apps like Mastodon, except they 1) take hours to setup a node, along with having to know arcane Linuz sysadmining 2) aren't actually decentralized, but federated. Urbit wants to make it easy to setup your own server, which runs as a node for all these decentralized apps (instant messaging, Twitter, etc.), along with be useful for server-y things like aggregate APIs (email, Facebook). This sounds vaguely intriguing. But the problem that most Ethereum projects have is that they put the solution and technology before the problem. Half the time I don't even know what I'm looking at or if it's worth looking further. Can you restate the problem that Urbit solves in the simplest terms you can think of?

dropit_sphere 9y ago

That is such a cool story. Thank you for mentioning it.

norswap 9y ago

It's a clean state reinvention of the computing environment (it's software component at least). That by itself might be a good idea, but if you're going to sell people on your project, you need to give some rationale / objective for your projects. And there, Urbit doesn't do well. There is some talk of decentralization, but it's not clear what the goals are. Like many people, I find the way it's being done slightly confusing (the names, etc), but it is being done. At this point, I would just lump it in the stack of intellectual curiosities, right next to TempleOS. It might turn into something yet, but I'm not holding my breath.

pcmoore 9y ago

Take a look at https://github.com/tibru/tibru https://github.com/tibru/tibru for an explanation of why the underlying technology is poorly chosen and how systems of this type don't need to be esoteric