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Is anyone not completely cynical about Urbit able to provide a summarization of the aesthetic and technical choices of the platform? It is certainly on the high

Is anyone not completely cynical about Urbit able to provide a summarization of the aesthetic and technical choices of the platform? It is certainly on the high end of interesting projects in crypto, but is also quite complex and perhaps a bit flawed; it all adds to its mystique, however.

ineptech 5y ago
I'll try. First, what it is: Urbit is a virtual machine OS for server-side applications. If you imagine a future in which it is common for non-technical people to rent cloud server space on which to host server-side applications (say, a small blog, a mastodon node, a minecraft server, etc), Urbit aspires to be a good platform on which to host them. Second, why it's so weird: it aspires to be "done" someday, as in no new features to add, no bugs left, just stable forever (sometimes called Kelvin versioning). It's design makes no sense unless you understand this; the bespoke languages it's written in are designed to be too simple to have any unexpected behaviors (as opposed to being designed for ease of use or performance). Third, you can't understand it without being aware that the founder got #cancelled for his (unrelated to urbit) right-wing blogging, so most of the responses in this thread will be from people who really dislike that guy and dismiss urbit as a result.
- weakfish 5y ago
  Writing “right wing blogging” leaves out the key part of being “unapologetically racist”
- judofyr 5y ago
  > It's design makes no sense unless you understand this; the bespoke languages it's written in are designed to be too simple to have any unexpected behaviors (as opposed to being designed for ease of use or performance) I don’t buy this. Why does “no unexpected behavior” require the amount of obfuscation which they have in Urbit? I’ve been trying to pick it up a few times and I’m constantly struggling to understand how it behaves.
  - ineptech 5y ago
    > I don’t buy this. I'm not selling it, just explaining it. More info here: https://urbit.org/blog/toward-a-frozen-operating-system https://urbit.org/blog/toward-a-frozen-operating-system
  - hocwyn 5y ago
    What exactly do you see as obfuscated?
- troutwine 5y ago
  > This, you can't understand it without being aware that the founder got #cancelled for his (unrelated to urbit) right-wing blogging, so most of the responses in this thread will be from people who really dislike that guy and dismiss urbit as a result. I think you can, although I admit a lot of the discussion here is likely to focus on Yarvin himself. That is, there is a good argument that Urbit reflects Yarvin's politics in itself and as these politics are, clearly, broadly distasteful it's entirely reasonably that someone opposed to Right Libertarianism and ignorant of Yarvin would find Urbit undesirable on its own merits.
  - ineptech 5y ago
    shrug there are giant for-profit corporations relying on software written by Richard Stallman. I don't think the intentions of the founder matter much. I don't like Yarvin either, but I do want a product that meets this use case. At this point I wish someone would clone urbit, since the hatred for the founder seems to mean it'll never get traction no matter what it does or how it works.
    - sanderjd 5y ago
      Yep, a fresh start with no association to the founder, and ditching the obfuscations that are not useful while keeping the best ideas, would be interesting.
    - themikesanto 5y ago
      I've been following Urbit for years, and honestly I still don't see the use case. It seems like its intended use case is to be a network where you can't disseminate your data across the network unless the "lord" that issued you your address space allows you to do so.
      - tern 5y ago
        The same is true of Facebook, Google, Twitter and your ISP. The difference with Urbit is you can switch providers if you're censored, or reciprocally if you want a censored experience, you can virtually move to somewhere with a blocklist.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  The VM and language for it are designed in an intentionally obscure ways so that "normies wouldn't get in", apparently :) https://twitter.com/MorlockP/status/1502278405391331332 https://twitter.com/MorlockP/status/1502278405391331332
  - jlehman 5y ago
    The views of an employee who left the company years ago and has been completely uninvolved since should hardly be treated as canon.
    - em-bee 5y ago
      is the same true for true for gates on microsoft or jobs on apple? in some parts of the world germans still get a negative reaction because of their countries history. it's unfair, but unfortunately showing that those influences in urbit are gone or were not even there in the first place, is going to be a long and hard battle. it's similar to the problem blockchain has today. for no fault of the technology on its own, blockchain is tainted by the massive amount of scams in the space. and as urbit also uses a blockchain too it now actually has two problems. i appreciate you joining this discussion, but think about what you end up doing here. you spend energy defending the project against arguments that have nothing to do with its technology. energy that you probably would rather spend elsewhere. but the reality is that you are likely going to have these arguments for the foreseeable future with many that might otherwise join the project. and if you hide those issues you will be accused of doing that instead. germany is doing a lot of selfcriticism in order to atone for its history and it's making an effort to welcome immigrants, and yet there are people who don't believe their intentions as well as there are some germans who still reject immigrants. it is going to take a few more generations for germany to overcome this, as it is going to take a few decades for the blockchain to overcome its reputation as a scam. likewise urbit will require some effort to get rid of this ball and chains. i do wish you success, and i sincerely hope that these non technical problems won't be an achilles heel that bring the project down
- sanderjd 5y ago
  He is very broadly shunned not for "right-wing blogging", but for being a white supremacist. This is how society is supposed to work; people get to choose who they associate with, and no good person chooses to associate with white supremacists.
jlehman 5y ago
Disclaimer: I work on Urbit full-time. There are some good write-ups on the technical decisions here: https://urbit.org/blog/precepts https://urbit.org/blog/precepts https://urbit.org/blog/precepts-discussion https://urbit.org/blog/precepts-discussion Funnily enough, most of the "mystique" isn't really intentional. It's that the inevitable "muh Curtis" arguments that always show up have discouraged many of the team from bothering to engage in explaining the project (here moreso than anywhere else) and instead focus on building the thing. Summarization: Urbit is a reaction to Unix-driven software complexity that dominates modern software development. The thesis is that cascading complexity cannot be solved without a complete rewrite of the computing stack, and that goes all the way back to the operating system. Here's an even better summarization: https://twitter.com/pcmonk/status/1201298411011629063 https://twitter.com/pcmonk/status/1201298411011629063 Alternative summarization: the internet, being built on a hodgepodge stack of tooling that wasn't made for people to communicate the way that they actually do now, has major incidental flaws. Urbit is a completely rebuilt computing stack that better maps to what we want to do with networked computers. That involves things like, but not limited to baking a non-fungible, valuable identity into the networking layer. This is another good summarization, although the sections after "Urbit ID" are out of date: https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit
- tptacek 5y ago
  When you write things like "muh Curtis", you engage in those arguments yourself. If you want to keep the conversation focused on the technology you're working on, do that; I agree, it's the more relevant thing for HN to talk about. People who have problems with the founder of this project are not crazy randos. Keeping HN conversations on-topic takes work, from everyone. Beyond that, your comment doesn't say much. Computing and networking as it exists today, you say, is bad. Urbit is a ground-up rethink of all of it. OK, but there are 10th graders with the same idea (just as there were when I was a 10th grader). What makes Urbit worth taking more seriously than those ideas?
  - emptysongglass 5y ago
    > People who have problems with the founder of this project are not crazy randos. The founder divested himself of the project yet the current top comment doesn't want to touch Urbit as if it is cursed by his ghost. It's these same sorts of comments that drag down all discourse because they prohibit any other state than negative. It's these same comments that pollute any healthy attempt at discourse around crypto here with the Evil Eye that just pushes any one with a different idea to the HN hivemind out. > What makes Urbit worth taking more seriously than those ideas? This is explained, in technical and philosophical depth in the links provided you.

ineptech 5y ago

I'll try. First, what it is: Urbit is a virtual machine OS for server-side applications. If you imagine a future in which it is common for non-technical people to rent cloud server space on which to host server-side applications (say, a small blog, a mastodon node, a minecraft server, etc), Urbit aspires to be a good platform on which to host them. Second, why it's so weird: it aspires to be "done" someday, as in no new features to add, no bugs left, just stable forever (sometimes called Kelvin versioning). It's design makes no sense unless you understand this; the bespoke languages it's written in are designed to be too simple to have any unexpected behaviors (as opposed to being designed for ease of use or performance). Third, you can't understand it without being aware that the founder got #cancelled for his (unrelated to urbit) right-wing blogging, so most of the responses in this thread will be from people who really dislike that guy and dismiss urbit as a result.

weakfish 5y ago
Writing “right wing blogging” leaves out the key part of being “unapologetically racist”
judofyr 5y ago
> It's design makes no sense unless you understand this; the bespoke languages it's written in are designed to be too simple to have any unexpected behaviors (as opposed to being designed for ease of use or performance) I don’t buy this. Why does “no unexpected behavior” require the amount of obfuscation which they have in Urbit? I’ve been trying to pick it up a few times and I’m constantly struggling to understand how it behaves.
- ineptech 5y ago
  > I don’t buy this. I'm not selling it, just explaining it. More info here: https://urbit.org/blog/toward-a-frozen-operating-system https://urbit.org/blog/toward-a-frozen-operating-system
- hocwyn 5y ago
  What exactly do you see as obfuscated?
troutwine 5y ago
> This, you can't understand it without being aware that the founder got #cancelled for his (unrelated to urbit) right-wing blogging, so most of the responses in this thread will be from people who really dislike that guy and dismiss urbit as a result. I think you can, although I admit a lot of the discussion here is likely to focus on Yarvin himself. That is, there is a good argument that Urbit reflects Yarvin's politics in itself and as these politics are, clearly, broadly distasteful it's entirely reasonably that someone opposed to Right Libertarianism and ignorant of Yarvin would find Urbit undesirable on its own merits.
- ineptech 5y ago
  shrug there are giant for-profit corporations relying on software written by Richard Stallman. I don't think the intentions of the founder matter much. I don't like Yarvin either, but I do want a product that meets this use case. At this point I wish someone would clone urbit, since the hatred for the founder seems to mean it'll never get traction no matter what it does or how it works.
  - sanderjd 5y ago
    Yep, a fresh start with no association to the founder, and ditching the obfuscations that are not useful while keeping the best ideas, would be interesting.
  - themikesanto 5y ago
    I've been following Urbit for years, and honestly I still don't see the use case. It seems like its intended use case is to be a network where you can't disseminate your data across the network unless the "lord" that issued you your address space allows you to do so.
    - tern 5y ago
      The same is true of Facebook, Google, Twitter and your ISP. The difference with Urbit is you can switch providers if you're censored, or reciprocally if you want a censored experience, you can virtually move to somewhere with a blocklist.
dmitriid 5y ago
The VM and language for it are designed in an intentionally obscure ways so that "normies wouldn't get in", apparently :) https://twitter.com/MorlockP/status/1502278405391331332 https://twitter.com/MorlockP/status/1502278405391331332
- jlehman 5y ago
  The views of an employee who left the company years ago and has been completely uninvolved since should hardly be treated as canon.
  - em-bee 5y ago
    is the same true for true for gates on microsoft or jobs on apple? in some parts of the world germans still get a negative reaction because of their countries history. it's unfair, but unfortunately showing that those influences in urbit are gone or were not even there in the first place, is going to be a long and hard battle. it's similar to the problem blockchain has today. for no fault of the technology on its own, blockchain is tainted by the massive amount of scams in the space. and as urbit also uses a blockchain too it now actually has two problems. i appreciate you joining this discussion, but think about what you end up doing here. you spend energy defending the project against arguments that have nothing to do with its technology. energy that you probably would rather spend elsewhere. but the reality is that you are likely going to have these arguments for the foreseeable future with many that might otherwise join the project. and if you hide those issues you will be accused of doing that instead. germany is doing a lot of selfcriticism in order to atone for its history and it's making an effort to welcome immigrants, and yet there are people who don't believe their intentions as well as there are some germans who still reject immigrants. it is going to take a few more generations for germany to overcome this, as it is going to take a few decades for the blockchain to overcome its reputation as a scam. likewise urbit will require some effort to get rid of this ball and chains. i do wish you success, and i sincerely hope that these non technical problems won't be an achilles heel that bring the project down
sanderjd 5y ago
He is very broadly shunned not for "right-wing blogging", but for being a white supremacist. This is how society is supposed to work; people get to choose who they associate with, and no good person chooses to associate with white supremacists.

jlehman 5y ago

Disclaimer: I work on Urbit full-time. There are some good write-ups on the technical decisions here: https://urbit.org/blog/precepts https://urbit.org/blog/precepts https://urbit.org/blog/precepts-discussion https://urbit.org/blog/precepts-discussion Funnily enough, most of the "mystique" isn't really intentional. It's that the inevitable "muh Curtis" arguments that always show up have discouraged many of the team from bothering to engage in explaining the project (here moreso than anywhere else) and instead focus on building the thing. Summarization: Urbit is a reaction to Unix-driven software complexity that dominates modern software development. The thesis is that cascading complexity cannot be solved without a complete rewrite of the computing stack, and that goes all the way back to the operating system. Here's an even better summarization: https://twitter.com/pcmonk/status/1201298411011629063 https://twitter.com/pcmonk/status/1201298411011629063 Alternative summarization: the internet, being built on a hodgepodge stack of tooling that wasn't made for people to communicate the way that they actually do now, has major incidental flaws. Urbit is a completely rebuilt computing stack that better maps to what we want to do with networked computers. That involves things like, but not limited to baking a non-fungible, valuable identity into the networking layer. This is another good summarization, although the sections after "Urbit ID" are out of date: https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit

tptacek 5y ago
When you write things like "muh Curtis", you engage in those arguments yourself. If you want to keep the conversation focused on the technology you're working on, do that; I agree, it's the more relevant thing for HN to talk about. People who have problems with the founder of this project are not crazy randos. Keeping HN conversations on-topic takes work, from everyone. Beyond that, your comment doesn't say much. Computing and networking as it exists today, you say, is bad. Urbit is a ground-up rethink of all of it. OK, but there are 10th graders with the same idea (just as there were when I was a 10th grader). What makes Urbit worth taking more seriously than those ideas?
- emptysongglass 5y ago
  > People who have problems with the founder of this project are not crazy randos. The founder divested himself of the project yet the current top comment doesn't want to touch Urbit as if it is cursed by his ghost. It's these same sorts of comments that drag down all discourse because they prohibit any other state than negative. It's these same comments that pollute any healthy attempt at discourse around crypto here with the Evil Eye that just pushes any one with a different idea to the HN hivemind out. > What makes Urbit worth taking more seriously than those ideas? This is explained, in technical and philosophical depth in the links provided you.