I guess they want to be just as good as the US. Whistle blowers showed that NSA has access to most US tech/data companies (Google, Apple, MS, Dropbox).
As annoying and ill-formed as your takes usually are, the central point of this one seems correct to me. Using an in-group reference on a page designed to onboard new people is probably ineffective, so thanks. We've removed that.
You've given zero justification for this assertion. Pointing to the years-absent founder's background and your personal speaking relationship with him (?), whom none of the people that worked on the content in the OP have EVER worked with, sounds like a straw man. At the very least it's lame reasoning.
> You've given zero justification for this assertion.
No, that's not true. I have given some justification. You could fairly criticize my justification as inadequate, but not as entirely absent.
And you're right. I would not claim to have given adequate justification for my assertion. I can't prove that Urbit is a cult. It's just my personal opinion. If you don't like it you can return it for a full refund.
But I will say this: my opinion is informed by some pretty extensive knowledge of the technical parts of Urbit, especially its core design, and personal first-hand knowledge of the history and motivation behind its design. Again, I can't prove any of this. I could not publish it as a peer-reviewed paper. All I can do it wave the warning flag. How you choose to act on that is up to you.
Your central point is "A is a cult, because X is a characteristic of cults and A has X characteristic, therefore A is a cult." By that reasoning, all domains that have a need to use precise language to describe their concepts are cults. Like physics. Quark? Definitely a cult.
You've lost the plot. My central claim is not so much that Urbit is a cult as that it is a waste of time (in part because it's a cult, but that is really neither here nor there). Part of my initial argument turned out to be based on the mistaken assumption that the reference to "teraforming Mars" was literally a reference to teraforming Mars when in fact it was part of Urbit's secret lexicon. But this mistake doesn't weaken my argument because the argument never turned on this either way.
For someone who claims to mistake the objective of the Urbit project as literally “terraforming Mars”, your other comments on this post show a remarkable degree of outsider familiarity with the project. One suspects that this “mis”understanding shows less than a good-faith reading of the text.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I saw this text:
> We’re running a cohort class of App School to teach you how to terraform Mars.
and thought they were literally talking about terraforming Mars. I was (apparently) mistaken, but I don't see how you can accuse me of reading the text in bad faith if I took it at its literal word. There are people who seriously talk about terraforming Mars, and so it is not at all unreasonable to think that some Urbit users are among them.
For anyone out there that's not content outsourcing their views to a mob with a bone to pick:
Urbit is not intentionally obfuscated. It's intentionally different from the rest of the modern software stack, because that's the point. It makes sense that that would make it look obfuscated. There are claims out there that it was in fact intentionally obfuscated years ago in its early days as its founder's personal project. Maybe? Not sure. Regardless, things change and this project is over a decade old.
If you find the state of discourse here off-putting, malicious, and obviously ideological, like I do, and would rather see for yourself, I'm happy to onboard you to Urbit personally for free and show you what it's actually about.
Follow our Getting Started guide (https://urbit.org/getting-started), boot a comet for free, and send ~wolref-podlex a DM, and I'll get you a planet.
There's a long-running strain of arguments that Urbit isn't intentionally obfuscated; people involved in the project have been apologizing for its official descriptions since its inception. Ron Garrett isn't a "mob with a bone to pick" and he's been doing yeoman's work for years on HN debunking Urbit and pushing back on those apologies. To my eyes, he's got by far the better argument:
An especially admirable thing about the way Garrett has approached this mess is that he's managed, as far as I can tell, to reliably avoid taking the bait on the drama about the project's founder; he's just a Smug Lisp Weenie, in the best possible sense of the term, critiquing a language and computing platform.
> An especially admirable thing about the way Garrett has approached this mess is that he's managed, as far as I can tell, to reliably avoid taking the bait on the drama about the project's founder...
Well, your link shows that this statement is false:
> ...But Curtis is more than just a bad reinventor of things. He is also Mencius Moldbug, a prolific pseudo-intellectual influencer of the alt-right. His politics worry me much more than his coding style. And because of my personal dealings with him, I am not sanguine about his ability or that of his followers to separate the two.
It clearly colors his thinking, as he admits, to some degree.
I encourage people to actually read Garrett's comments, which include repeated admonitions to take Urbit seriously because Yarvin "isn't an idiot"; he believes it's bad on the merits, not by association to Yarvin. If you ask for a litigation of Curtis Yarvin on this thread, you'll get one, and it isn't going to help your project.
If you hadn't cut off the first part of the statement you quoted, it would explain that he's investing effort in criticizing this particular bad reinvention because of the impact Curtis Yarvin has been able to have elsewhere. He admits that it colors his prioritization, not his thinking.
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
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
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.
>Summarization: Urbit is a reaction to Unix-driven software complexity that dominates modern software development.
I keep reading explanations about Urbit along these lines but what's perplexing about this explanation is Urbit does nothing to achieve this goal. Regardless of the fact that Urbit is referred to as an operation system it still isn't one. It relies on a conventional OS, often UNIX family OS's like Linux to run. Urbit just layers a new even more complicated software and networking stack on top of the 'Unix-driven software complexity' that still underpins Urbit. Urbit does nothing to address these problems, it just makes them worse. Urbit's underlying software stack (Nock, Hoon, etc.) is just bizarre and non-nonsensical. For example, this gem from the docs:
"A loobean is a Nock boolean - Nock, for mysterious reasons, uses 0 as true (always say "yes") and 1 as false (always say "no")."
Wat? Why?!? And it doesn't end there. Urbit is littered with these WTF design choices and terminology. No one in their right mind is going to build professional software solutions on a platform like this. You might as well just be developing software in something like Brainfuck.
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?
> 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.
Ideas are cheap, and Urbit isn't just an idea any longer. It's a working system that's been built by dozens of people over the years, and it's only picking up steam.
In Ron Garrett's words:
> The mere fact that Urbit is still a thing, that it has not yet collapsed under the weight of its own intentionally induced baggage, is worrisome to me. Something is keeping that project alive, and it's not technical merit. I don't see a lot of viable options other than some kind of fanaticism.
Looks like he and his ilk are just wrong and having a hard time believing that. It's alive because an increasing number of people want it to be, and no amount of theorizing can deny the reality of actual growth — which, in case everyone forgot, is what the OP is showing.
I agree that urbit has far outlasted all of the nay-sayers in a technical sense. People have been saying "this is some elaborate joke" for years, but the project has made steady progress and really is pretty usable now. It does what it says on the side of the tin, that's quite an achievement.
But, whatever its technical merits, do you think it can ever get to a point where it reached enough users to be useful (in the "chicken and egg problem" sense that platforms need a critical mass of users to be useful platforms), given the millstone around its neck? Do threads like this (where detailed, technical explanations get downvoted to oblivion, and "I heard Yarvin is racist" is the top comment) make you want to throw in the towel?
It has enough users to be useful now, which number in the thousands. It's also not a service that anyone maintains on behalf of others, so there's no one that needs to have a critical mass for it to be useful. Nearly everyone running Urbit is self-hosting locally or on some VPS somewhere, and they can do that indefinitely even if no more code was ever pushed.
If this kind of stuff made anyone want to throw in the towel Urbit wouldn't be a thing anymore. There's only a millstone around its neck on HN, but HN is gradually becoming more and more irrelevant. To our base and the people finding us, "I don't think about you at all" reflects their sentiment for HN conversations and the tenor of conversation that happens here.
I'm just here because someone told me (from within Urbit) that this post went up, it's Friday and I don't have as many meetings, and I couldn't resist myself. You seem fine though, so boot a comet and hit me up on the network if you want a planet or something to keep the conversation going.
Oh, I've had a planet since 2016 or so I think, I boot it up once a year or so and check out the updates. I agree that the platform is big enough to be self-supporting in a technical sense. By "chicken and egg problem" I meant what is discussed here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii... I can use my planet to talk to the other weirdos who use urbit, but not a ton else yet - it won't really succeed as a platform until it has an ecosystem of developers making apps and users using them.
Is there some progress there btw? Last I checked there was no way to discover apps other than hard work, and sharing them (installing an app someone else had written) was pretty arduous.
edit: and I know HN isn't the whole world, but I suspect it is representative in this case. I just can't imagine any person learning anything about urbit from any source that doesn't get the 2-3 worst things Yarvin has ever written appended to it within the first hour. It's hard to imagine how it ever gets really popular under those circumstances.
Having a large audience of pre-existing users is nice (and ditto for dev ecosystem for tooling and libraries) but ultimately what makes Urbit a good idea is, as Josh says, that we want computers to primarily be doing one set of things and they were originally designed to do a different set of things (with the things they currently do added as a complicated afterthought). A blockchain protocol is in the end a p2p application. It benefits hugely from running on a natively p2p networked operating system with a built-in cryptographic identity infrastructure. If Urbit's technology works, people are going to build on top of it because they need it, and their customers will come to use what they've built because it works better. If the tech didn't work, it wouldn't matter how many people tried it.
You're correct that there is no "Urbit Store" analogous to the Apple Store or the Android Store (this is a feature not a bug for many users, although I sympathize with both perspectives). I'm not sure what you mean about installing apps being arduous - currently you start typing the developer's name into the homepage search bar, it autocompletes, you are given a list of apps they've published, you click the one you're interested in, installation is a few seconds to a few minutes.
> I'm not sure what you mean about installing apps being arduous - currently you start typing the developer's name into the homepage search bar, it autocompletes, you are given a list of apps they've published, you click the one you're interested in, installation is a few seconds to a few minutes.
First, you have to know the developer's name, and then find the apps that developer produced. This is literally the opposite of what most people do: search for an app (not for a developer) and install it (or search for an app category, and install an app)
If this were really a huge part of most people's experience of Urbit (that they want to search apps by name rather than by developer) then it would be important to know. My company would be happy to curate a list of All The Apps, if someone convinced me this was the case. Browsing big tech App Stores is a huge pain and most people just follow a link from the developer's web page in practice, but since there are so many fewer Urbit apps browsing a complete list could potentially be high-impact.
My worry would be that "and I wasn't able to find the name of anyone who develops apps!" is complaint #10 on a list of complaints where ##1-9 mean these kinds of people are never going to use Urbit much anyway. In which case we'd have to put a certain amount of work into vetting all these apps and their updates and real users would still find apps the same way - clicking on links to apps their friends are recommending.
> If this were really a huge part of most people's experience of Urbit (that they want to search apps by name rather than by developer) then it would be important to know.
This is people's experience, period, not limited to Urbit.
> most people just follow a link from the developer's web page in practice
Or, rather from widely available lists of "10 best apps for X right now".
How do you expect anyone to find any apps in Urbit if there no sites to speak of and no lists of apps to speak of? Here was my experience trying Urbit out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31124587
> is complaint #10 on a list of complaints where ##1-9 mean these kinds of people are never going to use Urbit much anyway.
Yes, it's possible number #10 on a list of complaints, but they are not in 1-2-3-...-10 order. It's all of them together.
Put yourself into the shoes of a person starting with Urbit. Download Port. And then tell me what exactly the new user is to do? Suddenly "it's not a huge part of people's experience on Urbit" becomes "the biggest part and the biggest part #1" because there's literally nothing there.
We shipped a proper mechanism for software distribution last October. If you haven't booted up since then you might want to. Discovery still requires word of mouth (but not for long...), but sharing them is now as simple as sharing a link in chat or punching something like the following into the Dojo.
|install ~dister-norsyr-torryn %canvas
edit: yes, there's an ecosystem of developers shipping software now. Here's a screenshot of my homescreen, which I cleaned up a couple of days ago to remove some apps I don't use often: https://imgur.com/7keFr7Y
Of the apps you can see, 13 were created by distinct developers. Some people are more prolific.
I haven't seen Urbit advocates contest the things he's saying (and he's not the only one that's said them). They'll say "it's a work in progress" or "that's not what were trying to accomplish" or other deflections.
A cogent retort would advance the conversation, but it won't happen because what he says is largely correct.
I think the people working on Urbit have learned that it is not productive to engage with the HN community. If you view the previous discussions (going back years now) it rarely goes beyond "hoon is intentionally obscure" and usually devolves in to CY politics bashing (e.g. see current thread). It is safe to say that Urbit is the most hated project on HN.
It is unfortunate because we need more weird projects out there, and less articles on javascript framework updates. Given the state of the web and social media today, I think we would do well to encourage projects like this and others like them. Or we can just all download MS Teams, live with FB and uBlock Origin, and say it's all good.
Well, would you consider someone who'd only spent a couple of hours of wall time on Unix to be an expert whose opinion was worthy of serious consideration?
Not that I'm flogging Urbit -- or not flogging it, for that matter. I looked at it a while back and decided that I didn't understand it, and wouldn't understand it without spending far more time than I had available. However, that just renders my opinion on the topic useless.
I would encourage them [= someone who only spent a couple of hours on Unix] to dig further... broader. Mostly by demonstrating that there are real world problems for which Unix is better suited than competition.
IMO in Urbit -- there was not much more to explore after the few hours. Short of digging even further into the guts of it... and that was very unappealing.
Other people here in the comments mentioned that there's no killer app for Urbit. So my intuition was probably correct [to stop digging].
If you cannot adequately explain the appeal of a new technology to your peers after having worked on it for a week, that's nothing to worry about. After 20 years though? That's very worrying.
There's a lot of survivorship bias in that kind of thinking. They called Galileo mad, but they also called simultaneous five dimensional time cube guy mad.
"The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
