8 ms·
A Founder's Farewell
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoHistory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13594025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13594025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15300173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15300173
- aaronbrethorst 8y agoYarvin's wikipedia page is worth a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
- empath75 8y agoI was hoping I’d never have to read about him again, personally. A pompous, racist windbag who has contributed nothing of value.
- froasty 8y agoAnd yet here you are, voluntarily, in a thread about Curtis Yarvin. What exactly does that make you?
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoI'm not clear how "I wish this guy wasn't so influential" equates to "I should not talk about this guy." Ignoring problems does not make them go away.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- toufiqbarhamov 8y agoHuh, I didn’t realize he was backed by Thiel, but I guess that really shouldn’t surprise me. What a waste of sequestered resources. The actual idea behind Urbit sounded like a sociopolitical thesis as written by a child, and it’s hard to see a loss here. I’m skeptical in general of technology that follows politics rather than the other way around.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago> In Yarvin's view, inefficient, wasteful democratic governments should be replaced by sovereign joint-stock corporations whose shareholders, all property owners, elect an executive with plenary authority. The executive, unencumbered by liberal-democratic procedures, can rule efficiently. Huh. > He also disputes being an "outspoken advocate for slavery", but has argued that some races are more suited to slavery than others. (I followed up on the source for that, to see if he was misrepresented, and found the direct quote "We thus observe slavery not as a perversion, but as a natural relationship, like marriage.")
- YouAreGreat 8y ago> argued that some races are more suited to slavery than others > see if he was misrepresented Did you find out whether or not he was misrepresented?
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoYou don't think I might have mentioned it if he was? He says that people who are loyal, hardworking, and not too bright are best suited to being slaves, and it stands to reason that some races are more inclined towards those traits than others, and that probably includes Africans.
- zozbot123 8y agoOf course, this is a nice way of saying that slavery doesn't make rational sense - that it's a case of pure "might makes right", exactly as common sense would suggest. Think about it - if your slaves are "loyal and hardworking", do you even need to enslave them by coercion? Of course not - they'll work for you voluntarily as long as you treat them in a way that they accept as fair! (And oftentimes - perhaps even most of the time - they turn out to be a lot brighter than you gave them credit for while treating them as mere slaves.) And if this is the best case, what about everyone else? No, what the slaveowner really dreams of is that he's going to control his slaves purely by their fear. And Moldbug is saying: "nah, that's not going to work. Deal with it." Way to miss the actual argument he's making, dude. You were not even on the same wavelength.
- theparanoid 8y agoThis is the end of Urbit.
- lisper 8y agoGood riddance.
- insertcredit 8y agoI've known you (from your posts at comp.lang.lisp) to be eager to present the facts as you see them and thorough in your argumentation. What is it about Urbit/Yarvin that merits this sort of post?
- lisper 8y agoHave you ever looked at the Urbit code? [EDIT] BTW, that was not a rhetorical question. I need to know so I can frame my answer. And BTW2, thanks for the kind words.
- insertcredit 8y agoI've spent enough time (not much) with urbit to write a Nock interpreter/compiler. There are aspects of it that rub me the wrong way such as the needless custom terminology and general esoteric nature that sometimes reads like an occult grimoire but I also think that a lot of the criticism aimed at them, especially the politics, is misguided. Having watched Yarvin present on urbit a couple of times, I would say he is mostly driven by the intellectual atmosphere of the early Internet, before the masses moved in, thus his attempts to not "cast pearls before swine" by making things too accessible so to speak. I do not agree with this stance but I can certainly understand it without having to resort to conspiracies. Other than that, he most definitely reinvented Lisp, badly, but I am willing to give him a pass there too. There is nothing at all that attempts to make real the vision behind urbit around today and I do think it is an interesting vision. Finally, Alan Kay likes it.
- 8y ago
- saagarjha 8y agoFor those out of the loop as I am, what is Urbit?
- woodruffw 8y agoThe product? It's a "personal cloud computer," whatever that means. The company? It's a convenient way for Peter Thiel to subsidize a neoreactionary.
- zozbot123 8y agoA serverless framework with very interesting theoretical properties and a wide variety of plausible applications. The urbit.org site has a nice primer and video introduction.
- devmunchies 8y agowhy is this being downvoted? i have no idea what urbit was and this was the only helpful, non-political comment in this thread.
- yebyen 8y agoThese (handful of) Urbit threads are the only place I see this happen on HN. People here just hate him. The last time I was in one of these threads, it was "no platform for fascists." Now that he's leaving, I wonder what the angle is supposed to be? And... it's flagged off the front page!
- spamizbad 8y agoWas Tlon a real thing or just a way for his patrons to basically “launder” him money as a tax write-off?
- legionof7 8y agoI met this guy at a social event once, did not realize who he was and I just read his Wikipedia page. It makes a lot more sense now. He was extremely arrogant and rude. Basically a worse version of the /r/iamverysmart archetype. I sat next to him and he basically challenged me and another person for an hour on Andrew Jackson trivia and the exact wording of his biography. Then he ranted about democracy for a while so I left to go debate about 3D printed guns and play cards. Was an interesting event.
- thanatropism 8y agoThink what you will of his politics, but his Moldbug blog displayed erudition, scholarship and analytical ability well beyond trivia -- unless of course Moldbug was a collective and not just Curtis Yarvin. (E: I refuse to say "not that I agree with his politics". Whether I do or not should be immaterial here.)
- sebastos 8y agoBut believing that would make me feel uncomfortable and threatened, like maybe I don't understand the world as perfectly as I thought I did. Can't we find someone with high credentials to tell us that it's all bunk so that we don't have to actually read his ideas? I saw somebody else saying that Peter Thiel was funding Tlon. That's a good start - Peter Thiel is bad, so maybe Curtis Yarvin is also bad? It feels true.
- geofft 8y ago> But believing that would make me feel uncomfortable and threatened, like maybe I don't understand the world as perfectly as I thought I did. Can't we find someone with high credentials to tell us that it's all bunk so that we don't have to actually read his ideas? Do you really believe that no people exist who have read his ideas, thought deeply about it, and still rejected it? I remember clearly thinking through his point about the American Revolution, thinking through things his way, realizing there were things I didn't know and that he knew, and considering the situation. I still came to the conclusion that he was wrong.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mrlatinos 8y agoWho? Leaves where? Making what?
- lisper 8y agoTrust me, you're much better off not knowing.
- platz 8y ago'Dependencies' section sounds a lot like what https://github.com/unisonweb/unison https://github.com/unisonweb/unison is doing
- Ericson2314 8y agoIn general, Urbit is the neoreactionary's Unison.
- geofft 8y ago> Urbit's distribution and sponsorship hierarchy of galaxies, stars and planets is not designed as a political structure, or even a social structure. The actual social layer is in userspace -- one layer up. Socially and politically, Urbit is a flat network of planets. Galaxies and stars are plumbing. Here are some statements about how the plumbing is done, from Urbit's own website, that I suppose must be non-political: "...most theories of property agree that anyone whoever creates or discovers new property starts out by owning it. Because galaxies are premined, Urbit starts as a centralized system. But it has two strong motivations to decentralize. One, the more decentralized Urbit is, the more Urbit is worth. Two, the only way for Urbit to fund its own development is to homestead its own real estate." From a page on "Common objections to Urbit," under "Urbit doesn't have enough planets for every human being.": "A 32-bit planet is a tool, not a toy. Like a car, it's a device for a responsible and independent adult. There aren't 4 billion cars in the world, nor 4 billion independent adults. If you aren't an independent adult, and you don't need or even shouldn't have unconditional digital freedom (no one's 8-year-old daughter needs unconditional digital freedom), a moon from someone else's planet is fine." (They redid their website apparently but the posts are archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20181214175456/https://urbit.org/posts/address-space/ http://web.archive.org/web/20181214175456/https://urbit.org/... and http://web.archive.org/web/20181214190532/https://urbit.org/posts/objections/ http://web.archive.org/web/20181214190532/https://urbit.org/... respectively.) Moldbug thinks he's being non-political. I don't think we should trust him to even know what that means. This might be a good chance to recover whatever interesting ideas are in Urbit (if there were any; it's not clear to me that there are any) for the common good, but there are almost certainly deep-seated assumptions that weren't even publicly stated in the FAQs about who gets to control what and who doesn't. ... edited to add: > When you live in Manhattan, you simply don't worry about who owns it or why; and nor does it matter. Are they Jews? Muslims? Christians? Communists? Italians? You don't care and you don't have to. That's hardly my experience, but, sure.
- Barrin92 8y ago>This might be a good chance to recover whatever interesting ideas are in Urbit I haven't really looked much into this space, but Tim Berners Lee's Solid tries to tackle essentially the same problem without all the reactionary politics, no? Yarvin's controversial personality aside, I just don't see the use case for this. Handing everyone a server / pod/ starship and then trying to share this across machines with some common protocol reminds me of the semantic web which already attempted this a long time ago.
- sn41 8y agoMany of these kind of personalities unthinkingly identify themselves on the "winning" side of an ideal corporate utopia. It seems that they do not envision the misery they will have to face when they are (likely) on the disenfranchised side. Human rights and democracy do have a reason for their existence. (Of course, I've no idea what Urbit means. I've tried many times to get it, thought I was stupid, but it seems no one else really understands it either.)
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoI don't think there's anything "unthinking" about it, in this case.
- antidesitter 8y agoWhat does this have to do with Urbit?
- hprotagonist 8y agoI read the entire thing (and watched the 2013 demo) and still have not the first clue what Urbit _is_. Too many neologisms, not enough ELI5. Claiming that you don't use "the lambda calculus" to do dependency resolution, of all things, seems weird to me. Even from my 30k foot understanding, that seems like a non-sequitur at best.
- thanatropism 8y agoThat's a misrepresentation. I took the trouble to find the offending paragraphs on my phone and paste them: ---- Dependencies 20th-century languages are all at least vaguely based on a formalism from the ‘30s called the “lambda calculus.” The fundamental operation in lambda calculus is variable reduction from name to value. So lambda languages all have a symbol table or environment which binds names to values. Modern build systems assemble large programs out of small files by reusing this symbol table for global function names, a process called “linking.” Unfortunately, linking causes a problem known as “dependency hell,” involving baffling, unpredictable upgrade failures. The fundamental problem is the “diamond dependency” — when a build requires two different versions of one symbol.
- empath75 8y ago‘From the 30’s’ sounds like it’s ancient technology. Most programming languages include arithmetic, a formalism from 3000 years ago.
- thanatropism 8y agoHe does make a number of references to "20th century's computer science" that imply he's got the new stuff. He also says "functional programming without abstract math", which reads a lot like "Austrian economics" (which Moldbug and Land swear for). I'm saying this in a thread about his politics, but my basic evaluation holds: he's probably not discovered a new system of government and a new computer science. But he's careful and scholarly with his arguments, and worth knowing.
- 8y ago
- wiggler00m 8y agoDid this guy spend 17 years building a decentralized platform, then launch it on Ethereum (which is centralized), and quit?
- JeremyBanks 8y agoThe identity system is now on Ethereum. It has always been the least innovative or sophisticated part of the project, but the one requiring the most trust, so parking its root on Ethereum (at least for now) is a pragmatic choice without many drawbacks. As far as I understand (not too far), individual Urbit nodes can still function independent of the Ethereum blockchain. Their parents can feed them the subset of the Ethereum/Urbit PKI graph that they need to validate any signature. The blockchain is only required if the node wants to personally verify that an asset hasn't been double-transfered to multiple parties in different forks, and don't trust their parents to have ensure that. This is a strict improvement over the older Urbit model, where you had to rely on your parents to relay that information. The actual network and computing layers are still distinct from Ethereum, and have no knowledge of it outside of the identity system. It's a neat project. I'm glad I won't need to make disclaimers about Curtis the next time I introduce it to someone.
- kimawah 8y agoHe's just saying that he left to avoid attacks from the press when they launch.
- KiDD 8y agoUrbit sounds cool. Lets make sure no-one has access to it. great plan
- antepodius 8y agoMake sure no-one has access to it? I've not looked deeply into it to the point of setting it up myself, but as far as I know anyone can self-host a 'comet' (an identifier type with 128-bit address depth). If you wanted to interact with people through the system, you don't have to own a planet, or even get a moon (subset of a planet) as far as I know. Comet users would probably be second-class citizens when it comes to spam filters and the like, though. I'm interested to see where this whole thing goes, if it goes anywhere. There's something appealing about insane, deliberately esoteric-seeming systems.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jdhopeunique 8y agoWhat bothered me about the urbit system was that updates were "evergreen" and distributed top down from the heiarchy of galaxies and stars. Any person in the chain could make modifications and you were at the mercy of the parent not to send a malicious update to your planet. Also, orthogonal persistance meant data was never really deleted. This didn't seem to me like a personal server much less something I'd want to store my entire digital life on.