36 ms·

Urbit Precepts Discussion

73 points by dedalus 6y ago

trianglem 6y ago
Aren’t these the guys founded by Mencius Moldbug, the guy calling for a monarchy in the US?
- api 6y ago
  Yes but AFAIK he is no longer with them. In any case look at it for its technical merit not the politics of its founder. If you're going to eschew any tech founded by someone with... shall we say "interesting" views... then your tech stack will get pretty small. I think Urbit is interesting, but I find it too weird and rigid and idealistic and far from the metal to see wide adoption.
  - toiletfuneral 6y ago
    Personally I wouldn’t frame yarvin’s advocating for an ethnostate ‘interesting’ in the same way as say templeOS
  - x86ARMsRace 6y ago
    If I recall correctly, the entire point of Urbit's design philosophy was to demo the neo-cameralist ideology that Curtis Yarvin came up with. While the poster above is taking flack, I'd argue that, at this point, there's no way to split the ideology behind Yarvin, and the design of Urbit.
    - d_theorist 6y ago
      Why, specifically?
      - x86ARMsRace 6y ago
        There's a lot to be said for separating the art from the artist (Heidegger always comes to mind). That being said, if the art is an expression of the ideas that are considered reprehensible, then it becomes much harder. With the example of Heidegger, his core works, including Being and Time, did not expound upon his Nazi sympathies. Had Being and Time instead be a work which deeply integrated Nazi ideology, the dialog around the work would be significantly different. Instead, a clean line can be drawn between Heidegger the Nazi, and Heidegger's work. With Yarvin on the other hand, his work actually expounds upon the ideology he created. There's no clear way to draw a line between Yarvin's ideology, and Yarvin's software, since they're so deeply linked.
        dundarious 6y ago
        I think GP wants to know why specifically Urbit and Yarvin's ideology are inseparable.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        x86ARMsRace 6y ago
        Michael1999 does a far better job summarizing this than I did. They've replied to the parent comment to this thread.
        d_theorist 6y ago
        Yes, sure. But what I am asking is specifically why are Urbit and Yarvin’s ideology impossible to separate?
        x86ARMsRace 6y ago
        I misinterpreted what you were asking. That being said, Michael1999 does a much better job explaining that I can.
      - michael1999 6y ago
        Yarvin was quite explicit about creatively embedding neo-reaction in the design. The most obvious is the hierarchical finite namespace -- you receive your identity from an authority, and the authorities (read as "land") are already assigned by the founders (read as landlords). The early writings were very explicit with language like "planets", "moons", etc. https://urbit.org/blog/the-urbit-address-space/ https://urbit.org/blog/the-urbit-address-space/
        Garlef 6y ago
        Are there ETH transaction fees of a node and do they trickle up in the id hirarchy?
        joshuakelly 6y ago
        The address space is scarce (not dissimilarly to ipv4). Ethereum is used to map address space to owners and activities like transferring ownership. Urbit processes listen to an Ethereum gateway to learn about ownership changes and address lifecycle events ("breaches"), there aren't other "transactions"/fees involved in the protocol/implementation. This part of the project is called Azimuth - and can be used for other things: https://github.com/urbit/azimuth https://github.com/urbit/azimuth
        x86ARMsRace 6y ago
        Don't forget that in the initial source-code, Yarvin called the planets and moons, dukes and earls. To me, that's a pretty clear indicator that feudalism was on his mind at the time of developing the software.
        d_theorist 6y ago
        By this argument, it is also impossible to separate DNS from Yarvin’s ideology, since that has a practically identical hierarchical system.
        sbilstein 6y ago
        Except...Yarvin designed Urbit and he did not design DNS.
      - geofft 6y ago
        Here's a very concrete example: The address space in Urbit for self-controlled entities is 2^32, four billion. You can use Urbit if you don't have such an address, but you're a subsidiary of whoever is giving you access to the rest of the network and you're subject to censorship/control by them. You can't develop an independent identity that someone else can route traffic to. Now, it's true that the IPv4 internet also does this. But the IPv4 internet does this because they didn't expect to run into the limit (far fewer than 2^32 IPs were originally usable), and then they started working (halfheartedly, but whatever) on IPv6. Urbit has the limit because, as a philosophical position, they believe the limit is a good thing, because there should not be more than four billion people with full human rights. https://urbit.org/blog/common-objections-to-urbit/ https://urbit.org/blog/common-objections-to-urbit/ > 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. (Even most of today's independent adults don't complain enough about being Facebook's moons.) This was written by Yarvin in 2016, when there were over 5 billion people over the age of 18 in the world, so at least one billion adults then were unworthy of first-class citizenship in Urbit's "digital city," and even more today - not to mention the 8-year-old daughters or 12-year-old daughters or 16-year-old daughters who need conditions on their digital freedom.
        dpc_pw 6y ago
        Each address ownership has to be tracked in the PKI database, so there's a big pressure to limit their number. Users don't have to use a self-owned addresses (planets). They can use moons which are delegated by the planets that issued them. The only limitation is that they are not fully independent (can't be resold, can be "canceled" by their planet) - just like an account on the website (just being run independently). > not to mention the 8-year-old daughters or 12-year-old daughters or 16-year-old daughters who need conditions on their digital freedom. Nothing is really stopping them from using a moon issued by their school, university, a random website offering such an account, other family member or a friend etc. Right now most of the world is using identities issues by Facebook, Twitter, Github etc. and not many people seems to mind. Also most people have their devices behind a NAT and also don't mind. That's exactly what using a moon would mean. Having a planet is for more serious usage: where one wants to guarantee independence: proper identity that can't be canceled and so on. Akin to owning a root DNS name for your personal server. So 4 billion is probably even way more than we are going to need, even if world population grows x10.
  - viscoelastic 6y ago
    I don't think that my tech stack is really changing size if I decide to avoid software founded by far-right extremists and Nazi sympathizers with choice quotes like "If Americans want to change their government they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- greyswan 6y ago
  https://graymirror.substack.com/ https://graymirror.substack.com/ His new writing is interesting.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    "Interesting" in what way? (No, I'm not going to go look based on that one word.)
    - greyswan 6y ago
      His mapping of the structure of our current governmental system was eye opening to me. I liked the explanation of the prescriptive (planned/written) vs. the descriptive (actual/unwritten) constitution. I also liked the idea that organizations that aren't officially part of the government are effectively part of it without having any accountability. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/3-descriptive-constitution-of-the https://graymirror.substack.com/p/3-descriptive-constitution... He's certainly not for everyone, but the most common criticisms of him I see are usually pull quotes taken from Wikipedia.
      - Garlef 6y ago
        Well... Isn't this old news? You could read for example Foucault and have a similarly enlightening but more cohesive reading experience. But maybe immersing yourself in the rohrschach/barnum-effect nature of these texts is more fun.
        qppo 6y ago
        So old we use Latin terms to describe it, like de jure and de facto.
      - mempko 6y ago
        His imagination is limited. He is a statist and thinks if a persons opinion doesn't matter (subjects of the state) Then they have ultimate freedom. He equates having zero power as freedom.
praptak 6y ago
"Specifically, we say that the sort of simplicity that matters is the sort that makes it easy to reason about stuff." This comes from a project which uses loobeans, because booleans are too mainstream. "In short, use _() to turn a loobean into a boolean, __()to go the other way." Thank you for making it easier for me to reason about stuff.
- centimeter 6y ago
  While I’m not convinced Urbit is a good idea, its extreme arcanity actually has a pretty solid justification: keeping out entryist parasites. It’s extremely difficult to fake Urbit expertise to Urbit insiders, so you can’t pull the parasitic move of entering a tech community with little/no relevant experience and becoming a “developer evangelist” or “industry advocate” or whatever other bullshit positions people use to subvert tech communities with entryist politics, corporate control, etc. This was described in a pre-Urbit blog post by Yarvin. Something along the lines of “personal computing in 2020”.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    "I'm going to rename 5 to 4 and 4 to 5. If you can't keep that straight when dealing with this community, but not the rest of the world, it proves you're an incompetent dilettante and we can safely ignore you." Yes, very reasonable.
    - centimeter 6y ago
      A) It's not (only) about competency; it's about objective alignment. B) You have the logical entailment flipped. Know arcana => in-group. ¬ in-group => ¬ know arcana. It's designed to reject out-group members efficiently, even at the cost of a high false positive rate.
      - errantspark 6y ago
        Eternal September sucks, but Urbit has traded "ability to ever be relevant or gain significant momentum" for "no eternal September". It doesn't strike me as a pragmatic choice, then again Urbit is prehaps better viewed as an art project pursuing the ultimate navel-gazing extremes of NIH syndrome, and when viewed in that light the choices they make start to make a lot more sense to me.
rstarast 6y ago
I hoped to find a TLDR in the non-discussion version: https://urbit.org/blog/precepts/ https://urbit.org/blog/precepts/ But that's also too long and meandering. :/
zacharyvoase 6y ago
I'm not going to take advice on what is 'wrong' or 'correct' from a document that says "The halting problem says that it's impossible in general to even determine if a piece of code will finish without running it.", which is a gross misstatement of the halting problem.
- josephg 6y ago
  That seems to match my intuition of the halting problem too. Can someone explain why that’s a misstatement? What am I missing here?
  - gkop 6y ago
    The glaring part to me is "without running it", since you can run it and still may never learn if it will ever finish.
    - pwdisswordfish4 6y ago
      To believe that to be a problem, it would require someone to think that saying "impossible in general to x without y" is the same thing as saying "doing y is sufficient for x". The thing about that is that they're not the same, and that kind of person is certainly in no position to be (loudly) trying to point out others' logical mistakes.
    - emmelaich 6y ago
      My take was that if you did run and it stopped, well, then you know. Absent of any state change like input.
  - jdashg 6y ago
    The emphasis of "generally" is poorly placed, but more importantly they also imply that you can tell if something halts by running it, which is only true if you run it long enough for it to halt! (Which is the real crux of the halting problem)
    - 6y ago
bee_rider 6y ago
> For example, humans are much better at learning languages compared to even simple mathematics. Even those who are "good at math" are objectively much better at languages, in terms of how much complexity they can absorb. Is this actually the general consensus? I think this is wrong. I am mediocre at math, but I can write it, and then verify that it is correct, and then it is quite abstractable and transferrable. Conventional languages handle fuzzy input better, but they do that by allowing ambiguous parsing.. > A14: Deterministic beats heuristic. > Heuristics make it hard to give precise safety guarantees, so you should only use them when you don't guarantee much. I think this is overly broad. If you can run a heuristic and then validate the results in a way that provides a guarantee, that can often be just as good, right? You've still got the bound, you just had to wait until after the computation to get it. Sometimes you'll get a failure to validate instead, but that should be rare if the heuristic is good. Anyway, all our programs are relying on the heuristic "hardware usually works." I mean, nobody loves heuristics, but we keep coming up with them, so that must be a sign, right?
- jerf 6y ago
  "I am mediocre at math, but I can write it, and then verify that it is correct, and then it is quite abstractable and transferrable." Imagine you encountered a meaningful equation with as many symbols as you have in that sentence. Count characters, or even count words+punctuation if you like. Odds are, you are not going to apprehend that equation with anything like the fluidity or speed your wrote your sentence or I read it... yet if you really dig into it, such as by diagramming, your sentence is a quite non-trivial expression. That you are handling fuzzy parsing, and doing so so well, argues for you being better at language understanding than mathematics rather than against it. Trying to read fuzzily-serialized math is even worse. The average IQ-100 human being will on-the-fly both generate and comprehend in real time fairly complicated grammar structures, even with no formal training, while at the same time, it takes years of formal training to even begin to process very simple mathematical expressions. On the flip side, one can argue that there are other considerations. What we call "math" has a very different shape that the things we use language to describe... "sharper", all the details matter, etc. On the other hand, my day job, like most of us here, is slinging around many thousands of mathematical constructs fairly casually as well, more like a language than doing math. I'm using fairly mathematical tools, but I often have the impression that I'm spraying them around like some sort of quick-setting concrete coming out of a hose, rather than crafting magnificent cathedrals of precisely-chosen abstractions, and there's a lot of reasons to prefer the former to the latter. On the flip flip side, getting to the point that I can do this took me longer than it took to speak in English, and it doesn't appear to be something the average human can do very well.... Basically, the upshot of my point here is that language users casually manipulate hundreds of symbols spontaneously so easily that it barely even registers as effort to you, whereas math is generally not so easy. And even if the "shape" of language is somehow easier, it's not like it isn't precise. This sentance is incorrect, despite only a small error. This incorrect is sentence too. Math may be more precise than language, but it's not like it's a night-and-day contrast; if you look at language carefully enough you can see it's still fairly high on the precision scale overall.
renewiltord 6y ago
I genuinely made an effort to understand this platform, including going to their offices to write some code during one of their events, and I felt like a complete programming novice. Had to implement floating point using their primitives before I could do something and stalled on that. I think this is a thing that if it takes off like Bitcoin I won't be mad that I couldn't capitalize because I literally don't know how to. At this point I've given up on it.
- basilisks 6y ago
  I'm a non-programmer who is just skilled enough with computers to do some damage. Completely clueless about mathematical and information theory concepts, etc. Here's my measly two cents: I've been running my own Urbit for a few years that I've connected to broader communities, and have found it to be a really exciting and fun platform. It feels like when I first found Usenet and MUDs as a teen in the 90s, except people are nicer. What I understand about its essential purpose sounds great — a decentralized identity that I own and can make communities with. I am mostly a tech outsider, but I find it strange to see such a normally open-minded community (hackers) shut it down with such vehemence whenever it comes up
  - javert 6y ago
    > such a normally open-minded community (hackers) What community are you referring to? I'd like to go there.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - jlehman 6y ago
      You should try out Urbit. I hear they have a community like that in there.
      - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
        Hmm. Elsewhere in this thread, centimeter was talking about "extreme arcanity" to keep out "entryist parasites". I'm not sure I can reconcile your two viewpoints. ("Welcoming after you prove that you're not an entryist parasite" is the best I can come up with, but I'm not sure it's very believable...)
pgt 6y ago
looks up meaning of "precepts" Not trying to be snarky, but I'm obviously not smart enough to understand what the Urbit project is about.
- sundarurfriend 6y ago
  > Precept: A rule or principle prescribing a particular course of action or conduct. Just for the rest of us dummies.
  - pgt 6y ago
    So it could have been titled, "The Urbit Plan" or "Urbit Principles"?
mmastrac 6y ago
Urbit feels more like an ARG than a serious project. You need to buy into what feels like an entirely new language and religion. It has some real TempleOS vibes.
- seabird 6y ago
  I don't think that's fair to TempleOS. While portions of it reflect Davis' bouts of insanity, the core of it is a world that has passed us by, and all of the anger that goes along with losing something that you can never get back. For all of the shortcomings, it's hard to not look back at what computers were like in the time of the Commodore 64 and not have at least a little contempt for how everything panned out afterwards. Urbit is what happens when you have smoke blown up your ass for too long. It's everything that TempleOS didn't want to be; for all of its aspirations of being a Third Temple, the point was always that TempleOS was within your ability to understand. Urbit is postured in a way that implies it's never meant to be truly understood.
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    TempleOS was practically straightforward by comparison. The language it's written in is almost (but not quite) C, and it generally follows the design patterns of an older (perhaps early-90s?) software application. It's certainly got its weird aspects, but they exist at a higher level -- in its self-imposed design constraints and naming conventions, for example.
- sneak 6y ago
  And, just like TempleOS, its founder has published some racist ideological rants. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
  - rvense 6y ago
    I think Terry's outbursts are of a very different character in light of his general condition. Yarvin appears genuinely, intellectually committed to being a bigot.
dustingetz 6y ago
> F: Real Software. Not all software matters. Any software which wouldn't exist on Mars isn't real. Is it true that mars has neither lambda calculus nor category theory? From what I've read, Urbit is meant to be a boolean – it's either mathematically perfect and succeeds, or it's not and it fails. And it appears it's not perfect. Do I have it right?
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Except the idea is wrong. Software can be mathematically imperfect and succeed (hello, Microsoft Windows), and it almost certainly can be mathematically perfect and fail (by being mathematically perfect but not doing anything that anyone cares about).
draw_down 6y ago
I wonder do people ever get tired of talking about "simplicity" in this bland, abstract way? Obviously there is something missing in our conceptualization, because we've been talking about "keeping it simple" for I don't know how many years and it doesn't seem to have changed or helped much.
MaanuAir 6y ago
OK, I have to ask this time : could someone ELI5 what Urbit is / could be useful for?
- baudtack 6y ago
  https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/ https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/
- amackera 6y ago
  Re-write of a) the internet, b) the WWW, c) compiler, d) operating system, e) app runtime. Presumably these all need to be re-written from scratch for undisclosed reasons. It could be the next iteration of networked software that adds security, gives ownership back to the people, breaks the big tech monopolies, actually beyond that the Urbit docs are vague with respect to the benefits of the platform (not to mention how they plan to accomplish these goals and avoid the pitfalls of the existing tech). I have to say I'm skeptical! I get major vibes of NIH syndrome and delusions of grandeur from this project.
  - qppo 6y ago
    It's closer to Scientology than Unix, in my opinion.
- kingnight 6y ago
  An overly complex web service and web app :-) That's my takeaway from getting it up and running as an end user for a bit.
- tripledunit 6y ago
  I'll try for an elevator pitch: * The original vision for the internet was decentralized: if I want to send you a message or do some computing work together, I would have my computer talk directly to your computer * This vision actually failed and today virtually all computing on the internet has become centralized in big corporate servers. Instead of my computer talking to yours, my computer logs into Facebook's server and we communicate through Facebook controlled accounts. These big corporations control our accounts and identities and often our data too. They can censor us at their whims, serve us ads, and data mine us * The decentralized vision failed because decentralized software is much harder to build than centralized software and servers are much harder for everyday people to operate than regular client operating systems * It seems unlikely that these problems can be solved from within the current ageing technology stack, so what if we built a new tech stack - designed from scratch to make decentralized networked computing easier - where running your own server is no harder than running your own web browser or smartphone * That's urbit
lisper 6y ago
If you're wondering whether there is something of value hiding underneath all of the obscurity and if it might be worth your time to do a deep dive, IMHO the answer is a resounding no. There is nothing hiding in Urbit other than a deliberately obfuscated computing model, of the same stripe as brainfuck, but with (again IMHO) very different motives. Brainfuck is obscure purely for the sake of being obscure, in the spirit of a puzzle or other intellectual challenge. Urbit has more sinister motives, not least of which is to separate fools from their money by selling them "real estate" in the Urbit cyberworld. The obscurity is there to conceal the fact that there is no there there, to entice people into investing time and effort into it, and then keep them sucked in by leveraging the sunk cost fallacy. It is a tactic taken directly from the playbook of con men and cult leaders through the ages. What is worthwhile (IMHO) is to read some of Curtis Yarvin's (the founder and designer of Urbit) writings and compare them to the writings of L. Ron Hubbard, particularly bootlegged copies of the "secret" teachings of the "church" of Scientology, not for content, but for structure. To my eye, there are deeply disturbing similarities. [1] https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/ https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/ [2] https://www.xenu.net/archive/ot/ https://www.xenu.net/archive/ot/
- comboy 6y ago
  I disagree. I haven't touched urbit in a long time but learning the language (hoon) and trying to do something with it was a delightful experience. After learning some number of programming languages it's hard to find something new, where you feel like you are exploring something. Most of them are just a simple mapping of concepts that you already know (yes, ultimately it's a mapping too but it seems to have more layers). I don't know what secret of the universe do you expect to find there. If it would be highly practical technology or pareto optimal to anything else that's popular, it wouldn't be obscure. If you did a deep dive and regret spending time, for things like these I suggest not going deep if you are not enjoying the dive. Life's too short for things you don't enjoy when you have your basic needs covered. Also, while I enjoyed talking with Curtis I think it's important to be able to separate great things that people create from those people themselves. You don't want to throw out most of physics, math and computer science.
  - 6y ago
sergiomattei 6y ago
I, for the millionth time, tried to go into the documentation to understand how Hoon works. My TLDR: there’s streaks of absolute brilliance, particularly in the OS level. But it’s all so intentionally obfuscated with a dash of elitism thrown on top. I think the most frustrating part was reading the Hoon tutorial (Hoon is their high-level programming language) and not understanding a single word. They use completely new terms, strange syntax & then throw in the casual “See? It’s that easy!”. Not even a comparison anywhere to traditional languages for reference (not that it’d help at all anyways) Never again.
- basilisks 6y ago
  As a beginner programmer I did not have any more trouble understanding the Hoon tutorial than I do C, Go, or Haskell tutorials, for example.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    "A gate is core with one arm named $." "A core is a cell of a battery and a payload." "A battery is a collection of Hoon expressions and the head of a core." This is what GP is talking about. Reading through the tutorial, it made some sense. I could probably code in this language with a bit more reading and practice. But the choice of deliberately obfuscating terminology makes it read like a joke or an esoteric language (languages not meant for real use but as puzzles, challenges, maybe for code golfing). I mean, half the time they explain these things with analogies. A gate is a function, they say it nearly every time the term comes up. So why call it a gate? EDIT: When I was at GA Tech (now many years ago) we had access to a set of servers, "acme" (acmex, acmey, and acmez if I recall correctly). Each semester we had a limited amount of access to computational resources on these servers, measured in "bananas". We had plenty to do things like access mail, newsgroups, maybe do basic programming assignments. But anything resource intensive or really long running ate up your bananas and you'd have to request more (no cost, it was a limit to keep people from abusing shared resources). This was absolutely fine, and a bit humorous. "I can't run that, I don't have enough bananas." But if I were rolling out a product to universities across the country to manage access to their systems I would not use "bananas" as a term. Within the GT community it had a shared meaning, but outside it made us sound like asylum escapees (perhaps an accurate description of us). "bananas" communicates nothing to users on its own, just like "gate" and "battery" communicate nothing to anyone familiar with other programming languages.
dpc_pw 6y ago
If you have troubles getting into Hoon, the Hoon for Regular Programmers https://hackmd.io/IYd4RkpBQVqQTehmJeoxRw https://hackmd.io/IYd4RkpBQVqQTehmJeoxRw I made might be a good start to break the initial novelty barrier. Yes, some aspects of Urbit are obscure, and the post is more aspirational than stating the current state of Urbit's codebase. But it is real, it works, it keeps getting better and is fun to use.
natural219 6y ago
I don't have much to add, although it's kind of funny that every Urbit-related discussion on Hacker News revolves entirely around some quirky social object from 5 years ago, a general statement of bewilderment, or some rehashed judgment on MM. I don't see any comments related to any of the system theory in this rather long and well-thought-out post.
crb002 6y ago
For urbit to be relevant it needs a libc and coreutils. Even Rust doesn't have a solid coreutils yet.
neomindryan 6y ago
“[I]n many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.” -- Curtis Yarvin

73 points by dedalus 6y ago

trianglem 6y ago

Aren’t these the guys founded by Mencius Moldbug, the guy calling for a monarchy in the US?

api 6y ago
Yes but AFAIK he is no longer with them. In any case look at it for its technical merit not the politics of its founder. If you're going to eschew any tech founded by someone with... shall we say "interesting" views... then your tech stack will get pretty small. I think Urbit is interesting, but I find it too weird and rigid and idealistic and far from the metal to see wide adoption.
- toiletfuneral 6y ago
  Personally I wouldn’t frame yarvin’s advocating for an ethnostate ‘interesting’ in the same way as say templeOS
- x86ARMsRace 6y ago
  If I recall correctly, the entire point of Urbit's design philosophy was to demo the neo-cameralist ideology that Curtis Yarvin came up with. While the poster above is taking flack, I'd argue that, at this point, there's no way to split the ideology behind Yarvin, and the design of Urbit.
  - d_theorist 6y ago
    Why, specifically?
    - x86ARMsRace 6y ago
      There's a lot to be said for separating the art from the artist (Heidegger always comes to mind). That being said, if the art is an expression of the ideas that are considered reprehensible, then it becomes much harder. With the example of Heidegger, his core works, including Being and Time, did not expound upon his Nazi sympathies. Had Being and Time instead be a work which deeply integrated Nazi ideology, the dialog around the work would be significantly different. Instead, a clean line can be drawn between Heidegger the Nazi, and Heidegger's work. With Yarvin on the other hand, his work actually expounds upon the ideology he created. There's no clear way to draw a line between Yarvin's ideology, and Yarvin's software, since they're so deeply linked.
      - dundarious 6y ago
        I think GP wants to know why specifically Urbit and Yarvin's ideology are inseparable.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        x86ARMsRace 6y ago
        Michael1999 does a far better job summarizing this than I did. They've replied to the parent comment to this thread.
      - d_theorist 6y ago
        Yes, sure. But what I am asking is specifically why are Urbit and Yarvin’s ideology impossible to separate?
        x86ARMsRace 6y ago
        I misinterpreted what you were asking. That being said, Michael1999 does a much better job explaining that I can.
    - michael1999 6y ago
      Yarvin was quite explicit about creatively embedding neo-reaction in the design. The most obvious is the hierarchical finite namespace -- you receive your identity from an authority, and the authorities (read as "land") are already assigned by the founders (read as landlords). The early writings were very explicit with language like "planets", "moons", etc. https://urbit.org/blog/the-urbit-address-space/ https://urbit.org/blog/the-urbit-address-space/
      - Garlef 6y ago
        Are there ETH transaction fees of a node and do they trickle up in the id hirarchy?
        joshuakelly 6y ago
        The address space is scarce (not dissimilarly to ipv4). Ethereum is used to map address space to owners and activities like transferring ownership. Urbit processes listen to an Ethereum gateway to learn about ownership changes and address lifecycle events ("breaches"), there aren't other "transactions"/fees involved in the protocol/implementation. This part of the project is called Azimuth - and can be used for other things: https://github.com/urbit/azimuth https://github.com/urbit/azimuth
      - x86ARMsRace 6y ago
        Don't forget that in the initial source-code, Yarvin called the planets and moons, dukes and earls. To me, that's a pretty clear indicator that feudalism was on his mind at the time of developing the software.
      - d_theorist 6y ago
        By this argument, it is also impossible to separate DNS from Yarvin’s ideology, since that has a practically identical hierarchical system.
        sbilstein 6y ago
        Except...Yarvin designed Urbit and he did not design DNS.
    - geofft 6y ago
      Here's a very concrete example: The address space in Urbit for self-controlled entities is 2^32, four billion. You can use Urbit if you don't have such an address, but you're a subsidiary of whoever is giving you access to the rest of the network and you're subject to censorship/control by them. You can't develop an independent identity that someone else can route traffic to. Now, it's true that the IPv4 internet also does this. But the IPv4 internet does this because they didn't expect to run into the limit (far fewer than 2^32 IPs were originally usable), and then they started working (halfheartedly, but whatever) on IPv6. Urbit has the limit because, as a philosophical position, they believe the limit is a good thing, because there should not be more than four billion people with full human rights. https://urbit.org/blog/common-objections-to-urbit/ https://urbit.org/blog/common-objections-to-urbit/ > 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. (Even most of today's independent adults don't complain enough about being Facebook's moons.) This was written by Yarvin in 2016, when there were over 5 billion people over the age of 18 in the world, so at least one billion adults then were unworthy of first-class citizenship in Urbit's "digital city," and even more today - not to mention the 8-year-old daughters or 12-year-old daughters or 16-year-old daughters who need conditions on their digital freedom.
      - dpc_pw 6y ago
        Each address ownership has to be tracked in the PKI database, so there's a big pressure to limit their number. Users don't have to use a self-owned addresses (planets). They can use moons which are delegated by the planets that issued them. The only limitation is that they are not fully independent (can't be resold, can be "canceled" by their planet) - just like an account on the website (just being run independently). > not to mention the 8-year-old daughters or 12-year-old daughters or 16-year-old daughters who need conditions on their digital freedom. Nothing is really stopping them from using a moon issued by their school, university, a random website offering such an account, other family member or a friend etc. Right now most of the world is using identities issues by Facebook, Twitter, Github etc. and not many people seems to mind. Also most people have their devices behind a NAT and also don't mind. That's exactly what using a moon would mean. Having a planet is for more serious usage: where one wants to guarantee independence: proper identity that can't be canceled and so on. Akin to owning a root DNS name for your personal server. So 4 billion is probably even way more than we are going to need, even if world population grows x10.
- viscoelastic 6y ago
  I don't think that my tech stack is really changing size if I decide to avoid software founded by far-right extremists and Nazi sympathizers with choice quotes like "If Americans want to change their government they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
deleted 6y ago
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greyswan 6y ago
https://graymirror.substack.com/ https://graymirror.substack.com/ His new writing is interesting.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  "Interesting" in what way? (No, I'm not going to go look based on that one word.)
  - greyswan 6y ago
    His mapping of the structure of our current governmental system was eye opening to me. I liked the explanation of the prescriptive (planned/written) vs. the descriptive (actual/unwritten) constitution. I also liked the idea that organizations that aren't officially part of the government are effectively part of it without having any accountability. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/3-descriptive-constitution-of-the https://graymirror.substack.com/p/3-descriptive-constitution... He's certainly not for everyone, but the most common criticisms of him I see are usually pull quotes taken from Wikipedia.
    - Garlef 6y ago
      Well... Isn't this old news? You could read for example Foucault and have a similarly enlightening but more cohesive reading experience. But maybe immersing yourself in the rohrschach/barnum-effect nature of these texts is more fun.
      - qppo 6y ago
        So old we use Latin terms to describe it, like de jure and de facto.
    - mempko 6y ago
      His imagination is limited. He is a statist and thinks if a persons opinion doesn't matter (subjects of the state) Then they have ultimate freedom. He equates having zero power as freedom.

praptak 6y ago

"Specifically, we say that the sort of simplicity that matters is the sort that makes it easy to reason about stuff." This comes from a project which uses loobeans, because booleans are too mainstream. "In short, use _() to turn a loobean into a boolean, __()to go the other way." Thank you for making it easier for me to reason about stuff.

centimeter 6y ago
While I’m not convinced Urbit is a good idea, its extreme arcanity actually has a pretty solid justification: keeping out entryist parasites. It’s extremely difficult to fake Urbit expertise to Urbit insiders, so you can’t pull the parasitic move of entering a tech community with little/no relevant experience and becoming a “developer evangelist” or “industry advocate” or whatever other bullshit positions people use to subvert tech communities with entryist politics, corporate control, etc. This was described in a pre-Urbit blog post by Yarvin. Something along the lines of “personal computing in 2020”.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  "I'm going to rename 5 to 4 and 4 to 5. If you can't keep that straight when dealing with this community, but not the rest of the world, it proves you're an incompetent dilettante and we can safely ignore you." Yes, very reasonable.
  - centimeter 6y ago
    A) It's not (only) about competency; it's about objective alignment. B) You have the logical entailment flipped. Know arcana => in-group. ¬ in-group => ¬ know arcana. It's designed to reject out-group members efficiently, even at the cost of a high false positive rate.
    - errantspark 6y ago
      Eternal September sucks, but Urbit has traded "ability to ever be relevant or gain significant momentum" for "no eternal September". It doesn't strike me as a pragmatic choice, then again Urbit is prehaps better viewed as an art project pursuing the ultimate navel-gazing extremes of NIH syndrome, and when viewed in that light the choices they make start to make a lot more sense to me.

rstarast 6y ago

I hoped to find a TLDR in the non-discussion version: https://urbit.org/blog/precepts/ https://urbit.org/blog/precepts/ But that's also too long and meandering. :/

zacharyvoase 6y ago

I'm not going to take advice on what is 'wrong' or 'correct' from a document that says "The halting problem says that it's impossible in general to even determine if a piece of code will finish without running it.", which is a gross misstatement of the halting problem.

josephg 6y ago
That seems to match my intuition of the halting problem too. Can someone explain why that’s a misstatement? What am I missing here?
- gkop 6y ago
  The glaring part to me is "without running it", since you can run it and still may never learn if it will ever finish.
  - pwdisswordfish4 6y ago
    To believe that to be a problem, it would require someone to think that saying "impossible in general to x without y" is the same thing as saying "doing y is sufficient for x". The thing about that is that they're not the same, and that kind of person is certainly in no position to be (loudly) trying to point out others' logical mistakes.
  - emmelaich 6y ago
    My take was that if you did run and it stopped, well, then you know. Absent of any state change like input.
- jdashg 6y ago
  The emphasis of "generally" is poorly placed, but more importantly they also imply that you can tell if something halts by running it, which is only true if you run it long enough for it to halt! (Which is the real crux of the halting problem)
  - 6y ago

bee_rider 6y ago

> For example, humans are much better at learning languages compared to even simple mathematics. Even those who are "good at math" are objectively much better at languages, in terms of how much complexity they can absorb. Is this actually the general consensus? I think this is wrong. I am mediocre at math, but I can write it, and then verify that it is correct, and then it is quite abstractable and transferrable. Conventional languages handle fuzzy input better, but they do that by allowing ambiguous parsing.. > A14: Deterministic beats heuristic. > Heuristics make it hard to give precise safety guarantees, so you should only use them when you don't guarantee much. I think this is overly broad. If you can run a heuristic and then validate the results in a way that provides a guarantee, that can often be just as good, right? You've still got the bound, you just had to wait until after the computation to get it. Sometimes you'll get a failure to validate instead, but that should be rare if the heuristic is good. Anyway, all our programs are relying on the heuristic "hardware usually works." I mean, nobody loves heuristics, but we keep coming up with them, so that must be a sign, right?

jerf 6y ago
"I am mediocre at math, but I can write it, and then verify that it is correct, and then it is quite abstractable and transferrable." Imagine you encountered a meaningful equation with as many symbols as you have in that sentence. Count characters, or even count words+punctuation if you like. Odds are, you are not going to apprehend that equation with anything like the fluidity or speed your wrote your sentence or I read it... yet if you really dig into it, such as by diagramming, your sentence is a quite non-trivial expression. That you are handling fuzzy parsing, and doing so so well, argues for you being better at language understanding than mathematics rather than against it. Trying to read fuzzily-serialized math is even worse. The average IQ-100 human being will on-the-fly both generate and comprehend in real time fairly complicated grammar structures, even with no formal training, while at the same time, it takes years of formal training to even begin to process very simple mathematical expressions. On the flip side, one can argue that there are other considerations. What we call "math" has a very different shape that the things we use language to describe... "sharper", all the details matter, etc. On the other hand, my day job, like most of us here, is slinging around many thousands of mathematical constructs fairly casually as well, more like a language than doing math. I'm using fairly mathematical tools, but I often have the impression that I'm spraying them around like some sort of quick-setting concrete coming out of a hose, rather than crafting magnificent cathedrals of precisely-chosen abstractions, and there's a lot of reasons to prefer the former to the latter. On the flip flip side, getting to the point that I can do this took me longer than it took to speak in English, and it doesn't appear to be something the average human can do very well.... Basically, the upshot of my point here is that language users casually manipulate hundreds of symbols spontaneously so easily that it barely even registers as effort to you, whereas math is generally not so easy. And even if the "shape" of language is somehow easier, it's not like it isn't precise. This sentance is incorrect, despite only a small error. This incorrect is sentence too. Math may be more precise than language, but it's not like it's a night-and-day contrast; if you look at language carefully enough you can see it's still fairly high on the precision scale overall.

renewiltord 6y ago

I genuinely made an effort to understand this platform, including going to their offices to write some code during one of their events, and I felt like a complete programming novice. Had to implement floating point using their primitives before I could do something and stalled on that. I think this is a thing that if it takes off like Bitcoin I won't be mad that I couldn't capitalize because I literally don't know how to. At this point I've given up on it.

basilisks 6y ago
I'm a non-programmer who is just skilled enough with computers to do some damage. Completely clueless about mathematical and information theory concepts, etc. Here's my measly two cents: I've been running my own Urbit for a few years that I've connected to broader communities, and have found it to be a really exciting and fun platform. It feels like when I first found Usenet and MUDs as a teen in the 90s, except people are nicer. What I understand about its essential purpose sounds great — a decentralized identity that I own and can make communities with. I am mostly a tech outsider, but I find it strange to see such a normally open-minded community (hackers) shut it down with such vehemence whenever it comes up
- javert 6y ago
  > such a normally open-minded community (hackers) What community are you referring to? I'd like to go there.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jlehman 6y ago
    You should try out Urbit. I hear they have a community like that in there.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      Hmm. Elsewhere in this thread, centimeter was talking about "extreme arcanity" to keep out "entryist parasites". I'm not sure I can reconcile your two viewpoints. ("Welcoming after you prove that you're not an entryist parasite" is the best I can come up with, but I'm not sure it's very believable...)

pgt 6y ago

looks up meaning of "precepts" Not trying to be snarky, but I'm obviously not smart enough to understand what the Urbit project is about.

sundarurfriend 6y ago
> Precept: A rule or principle prescribing a particular course of action or conduct. Just for the rest of us dummies.
- pgt 6y ago
  So it could have been titled, "The Urbit Plan" or "Urbit Principles"?

mmastrac 6y ago

Urbit feels more like an ARG than a serious project. You need to buy into what feels like an entirely new language and religion. It has some real TempleOS vibes.

seabird 6y ago
I don't think that's fair to TempleOS. While portions of it reflect Davis' bouts of insanity, the core of it is a world that has passed us by, and all of the anger that goes along with losing something that you can never get back. For all of the shortcomings, it's hard to not look back at what computers were like in the time of the Commodore 64 and not have at least a little contempt for how everything panned out afterwards. Urbit is what happens when you have smoke blown up your ass for too long. It's everything that TempleOS didn't want to be; for all of its aspirations of being a Third Temple, the point was always that TempleOS was within your ability to understand. Urbit is postured in a way that implies it's never meant to be truly understood.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  TempleOS was practically straightforward by comparison. The language it's written in is almost (but not quite) C, and it generally follows the design patterns of an older (perhaps early-90s?) software application. It's certainly got its weird aspects, but they exist at a higher level -- in its self-imposed design constraints and naming conventions, for example.
sneak 6y ago
And, just like TempleOS, its founder has published some racist ideological rants. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
- rvense 6y ago
  I think Terry's outbursts are of a very different character in light of his general condition. Yarvin appears genuinely, intellectually committed to being a bigot.

dustingetz 6y ago

> F: Real Software. Not all software matters. Any software which wouldn't exist on Mars isn't real. Is it true that mars has neither lambda calculus nor category theory? From what I've read, Urbit is meant to be a boolean – it's either mathematically perfect and succeeds, or it's not and it fails. And it appears it's not perfect. Do I have it right?

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Except the idea is wrong. Software can be mathematically imperfect and succeed (hello, Microsoft Windows), and it almost certainly can be mathematically perfect and fail (by being mathematically perfect but not doing anything that anyone cares about).

draw_down 6y ago

I wonder do people ever get tired of talking about "simplicity" in this bland, abstract way? Obviously there is something missing in our conceptualization, because we've been talking about "keeping it simple" for I don't know how many years and it doesn't seem to have changed or helped much.

MaanuAir 6y ago

OK, I have to ask this time : could someone ELI5 what Urbit is / could be useful for?

baudtack 6y ago
https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/ https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/
amackera 6y ago
Re-write of a) the internet, b) the WWW, c) compiler, d) operating system, e) app runtime. Presumably these all need to be re-written from scratch for undisclosed reasons. It could be the next iteration of networked software that adds security, gives ownership back to the people, breaks the big tech monopolies, actually beyond that the Urbit docs are vague with respect to the benefits of the platform (not to mention how they plan to accomplish these goals and avoid the pitfalls of the existing tech). I have to say I'm skeptical! I get major vibes of NIH syndrome and delusions of grandeur from this project.
- qppo 6y ago
  It's closer to Scientology than Unix, in my opinion.
kingnight 6y ago
An overly complex web service and web app :-) That's my takeaway from getting it up and running as an end user for a bit.
tripledunit 6y ago
I'll try for an elevator pitch: * The original vision for the internet was decentralized: if I want to send you a message or do some computing work together, I would have my computer talk directly to your computer * This vision actually failed and today virtually all computing on the internet has become centralized in big corporate servers. Instead of my computer talking to yours, my computer logs into Facebook's server and we communicate through Facebook controlled accounts. These big corporations control our accounts and identities and often our data too. They can censor us at their whims, serve us ads, and data mine us * The decentralized vision failed because decentralized software is much harder to build than centralized software and servers are much harder for everyday people to operate than regular client operating systems * It seems unlikely that these problems can be solved from within the current ageing technology stack, so what if we built a new tech stack - designed from scratch to make decentralized networked computing easier - where running your own server is no harder than running your own web browser or smartphone * That's urbit

lisper 6y ago

If you're wondering whether there is something of value hiding underneath all of the obscurity and if it might be worth your time to do a deep dive, IMHO the answer is a resounding no. There is nothing hiding in Urbit other than a deliberately obfuscated computing model, of the same stripe as brainfuck, but with (again IMHO) very different motives. Brainfuck is obscure purely for the sake of being obscure, in the spirit of a puzzle or other intellectual challenge. Urbit has more sinister motives, not least of which is to separate fools from their money by selling them "real estate" in the Urbit cyberworld. The obscurity is there to conceal the fact that there is no there there, to entice people into investing time and effort into it, and then keep them sucked in by leveraging the sunk cost fallacy. It is a tactic taken directly from the playbook of con men and cult leaders through the ages. What is worthwhile (IMHO) is to read some of Curtis Yarvin's (the founder and designer of Urbit) writings and compare them to the writings of L. Ron Hubbard, particularly bootlegged copies of the "secret" teachings of the "church" of Scientology, not for content, but for structure. To my eye, there are deeply disturbing similarities. [1] https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/ https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/ [2] https://www.xenu.net/archive/ot/ https://www.xenu.net/archive/ot/

comboy 6y ago
I disagree. I haven't touched urbit in a long time but learning the language (hoon) and trying to do something with it was a delightful experience. After learning some number of programming languages it's hard to find something new, where you feel like you are exploring something. Most of them are just a simple mapping of concepts that you already know (yes, ultimately it's a mapping too but it seems to have more layers). I don't know what secret of the universe do you expect to find there. If it would be highly practical technology or pareto optimal to anything else that's popular, it wouldn't be obscure. If you did a deep dive and regret spending time, for things like these I suggest not going deep if you are not enjoying the dive. Life's too short for things you don't enjoy when you have your basic needs covered. Also, while I enjoyed talking with Curtis I think it's important to be able to separate great things that people create from those people themselves. You don't want to throw out most of physics, math and computer science.
- 6y ago

sergiomattei 6y ago

I, for the millionth time, tried to go into the documentation to understand how Hoon works. My TLDR: there’s streaks of absolute brilliance, particularly in the OS level. But it’s all so intentionally obfuscated with a dash of elitism thrown on top. I think the most frustrating part was reading the Hoon tutorial (Hoon is their high-level programming language) and not understanding a single word. They use completely new terms, strange syntax & then throw in the casual “See? It’s that easy!”. Not even a comparison anywhere to traditional languages for reference (not that it’d help at all anyways) Never again.

basilisks 6y ago
As a beginner programmer I did not have any more trouble understanding the Hoon tutorial than I do C, Go, or Haskell tutorials, for example.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  "A gate is core with one arm named $." "A core is a cell of a battery and a payload." "A battery is a collection of Hoon expressions and the head of a core." This is what GP is talking about. Reading through the tutorial, it made some sense. I could probably code in this language with a bit more reading and practice. But the choice of deliberately obfuscating terminology makes it read like a joke or an esoteric language (languages not meant for real use but as puzzles, challenges, maybe for code golfing). I mean, half the time they explain these things with analogies. A gate is a function, they say it nearly every time the term comes up. So why call it a gate? EDIT: When I was at GA Tech (now many years ago) we had access to a set of servers, "acme" (acmex, acmey, and acmez if I recall correctly). Each semester we had a limited amount of access to computational resources on these servers, measured in "bananas". We had plenty to do things like access mail, newsgroups, maybe do basic programming assignments. But anything resource intensive or really long running ate up your bananas and you'd have to request more (no cost, it was a limit to keep people from abusing shared resources). This was absolutely fine, and a bit humorous. "I can't run that, I don't have enough bananas." But if I were rolling out a product to universities across the country to manage access to their systems I would not use "bananas" as a term. Within the GT community it had a shared meaning, but outside it made us sound like asylum escapees (perhaps an accurate description of us). "bananas" communicates nothing to users on its own, just like "gate" and "battery" communicate nothing to anyone familiar with other programming languages.

dpc_pw 6y ago

If you have troubles getting into Hoon, the Hoon for Regular Programmers https://hackmd.io/IYd4RkpBQVqQTehmJeoxRw https://hackmd.io/IYd4RkpBQVqQTehmJeoxRw I made might be a good start to break the initial novelty barrier. Yes, some aspects of Urbit are obscure, and the post is more aspirational than stating the current state of Urbit's codebase. But it is real, it works, it keeps getting better and is fun to use.

natural219 6y ago

I don't have much to add, although it's kind of funny that every Urbit-related discussion on Hacker News revolves entirely around some quirky social object from 5 years ago, a general statement of bewilderment, or some rehashed judgment on MM. I don't see any comments related to any of the system theory in this rather long and well-thought-out post.

crb002 6y ago

For urbit to be relevant it needs a libc and coreutils. Even Rust doesn't have a solid coreutils yet.

neomindryan 6y ago

“[I]n many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.” -- Curtis Yarvin