5 ms·

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 an

by 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.
- lisper 6y ago
  Why Hoon rather than Brainfuck? Or Cobol? Or APL? Or Dylan? The world is chock-full of obscure programming languages. The only difference I see is that Urbit is wrapped in this air of intrigue and mystery which IMHO is wholly undeserved. But if you like that sort of thing and are going into it with your eyes open, by all means, be my guest. Just don't try to represent it as something that it's not. But if you just want to explore the programming language design space I think you're much better off designing your own language than trying to wrap your brain around Nock and Hoon. And even before you do that, there's Haskell and Rust and Webasm and Clojure and Prolog, which I think give you a lot more bang for the learning curve buck.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - maehwasu 6y ago
    Nock has a small surface area and is very straightforward. I suppose if your brain has trouble mapping the numbers 1-12 to function names, it could be challenging.
    - zbentley 6y ago
      Can you stop criticising people's intelligence when replying to them? You've done that a couple of times in these comments (hypothetically or not). "If you can't understand/don't agree, maybe you're just stupid" is rude and a bad look.
- munificent 6y ago
  > After learning some number of programming languages it's hard to find something new, where you feel like you are exploring something. Like the Cenobites of Hellraiser who after running out of territories of pleasure to explore are forced to venture into pain just to find new experience.
defen 6y ago
> 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. How is paying $20, once, for an Urbit planet different than paying $20/month to play an online game? How else would you propose to have at least some minimal level of protection against spammers / bad actors? My take is that they went with all their bizarre design decisions in order to keep normies and entryists out for as long as possible.
- lisper 6y ago
  The original parcels of Urbit address space went for a lot more than $20.
  - tripledunit 6y ago
    You have no idea what you're talking about. The original parcels of urbit address space were given away for free or as contest prizes. Then there were two crowdsales in 2016 and 2017 which both priced address space at less than one cent! There were a few early seed investors as well. I'm not sure what their terms were, but I highly doubt they were massively worse than the crowdsales which occurred later in the project
    - lisper 6y ago
      I have some idea what I'm talking about. I was pitched on Urbit by Curtis himself on April 20, 2012, long before it launched, and before it was even called Urbit. He tried to sell me a block of Urbit address space at the time. I don't remember the asking price, but it was substantial, many thousands of dollars. I declined. Yes, the crowdsales priced individual addresses at less than one cent, but it's a 64-bit address space, so even at one cent that puts the gross valuation of Urbit at many orders magnitude greater than the gross planetary product since the dawn of human history. I'd say that's overvalued. Also, the addresses are not sold individually but in large blocks, with part of the pitch being that people who get in early can turn around and sell parts of their holdings to greater fools. If memory serves, the first crowdsale raised $500k. So even at 1 cent per, someone ended up writing some pretty big checks.
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by lisper 6y ago

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.

lisper 6y ago
Why Hoon rather than Brainfuck? Or Cobol? Or APL? Or Dylan? The world is chock-full of obscure programming languages. The only difference I see is that Urbit is wrapped in this air of intrigue and mystery which IMHO is wholly undeserved. But if you like that sort of thing and are going into it with your eyes open, by all means, be my guest. Just don't try to represent it as something that it's not. But if you just want to explore the programming language design space I think you're much better off designing your own language than trying to wrap your brain around Nock and Hoon. And even before you do that, there's Haskell and Rust and Webasm and Clojure and Prolog, which I think give you a lot more bang for the learning curve buck.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- maehwasu 6y ago
  Nock has a small surface area and is very straightforward. I suppose if your brain has trouble mapping the numbers 1-12 to function names, it could be challenging.
  - zbentley 6y ago
    Can you stop criticising people's intelligence when replying to them? You've done that a couple of times in these comments (hypothetically or not). "If you can't understand/don't agree, maybe you're just stupid" is rude and a bad look.
munificent 6y ago
> After learning some number of programming languages it's hard to find something new, where you feel like you are exploring something. Like the Cenobites of Hellraiser who after running out of territories of pleasure to explore are forced to venture into pain just to find new experience.

defen 6y ago

> 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. How is paying $20, once, for an Urbit planet different than paying $20/month to play an online game? How else would you propose to have at least some minimal level of protection against spammers / bad actors? My take is that they went with all their bizarre design decisions in order to keep normies and entryists out for as long as possible.

lisper 6y ago
The original parcels of Urbit address space went for a lot more than $20.
- tripledunit 6y ago
  You have no idea what you're talking about. The original parcels of urbit address space were given away for free or as contest prizes. Then there were two crowdsales in 2016 and 2017 which both priced address space at less than one cent! There were a few early seed investors as well. I'm not sure what their terms were, but I highly doubt they were massively worse than the crowdsales which occurred later in the project
  - lisper 6y ago
    I have some idea what I'm talking about. I was pitched on Urbit by Curtis himself on April 20, 2012, long before it launched, and before it was even called Urbit. He tried to sell me a block of Urbit address space at the time. I don't remember the asking price, but it was substantial, many thousands of dollars. I declined. Yes, the crowdsales priced individual addresses at less than one cent, but it's a 64-bit address space, so even at one cent that puts the gross valuation of Urbit at many orders magnitude greater than the gross planetary product since the dawn of human history. I'd say that's overvalued. Also, the addresses are not sold individually but in large blocks, with part of the pitch being that people who get in early can turn around and sell parts of their holdings to greater fools. If memory serves, the first crowdsale raised $500k. So even at 1 cent per, someone ended up writing some pretty big checks.

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