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Comment by _6hmp | Hacker News Reader

Worth noting that urbit is, as one poster on hacker news put it, "purposefully obfuscated"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11852141

and its parent company was named after a short story by Borges where a fictional encyclopedia starts to affect reality in the world it is released in.

The founder, who left in 2019, is a super-far-right figure. Even though he has distanced himself from the project, I can't help but think about the intentional obfuscation and the choice in naming as perhaps related to trying to build the kind of world he wrote about (authoritarian, non-egalitarian, non-apologetically racist). It makes me not want to associate with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

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Yeah, it's hard for me to believe his views are completely separate from the project. Note how the Urbit universe is organized is highly hierarchical, likely because he believes this is how things must be.

When I wrote Firestr (http://firestr.com) back in 2013, which is similar to Urbit in many ways like being P2P and being able to download and share apps, It's clear to anyone who knows me my beliefs drove the technological decisions. For example, I am anti-hierarchy. So your Identity on Firestr is completely decentralized. There is no sub-ownership. There isn't even a central repository of identities. Identities are shared in a peer-to-peer way. Also, it doesn't attach itself to some bigger system like Ethereum and running it is free.

I can easily see Borges's ideas in Urbit and it's a shame as we need more decentralized software.

Thanks for sharing your project as a counter example. To be clear I'm not damning Borges here, just suggesting that naming the company after that particular story gives some weight to the idea that we should consider the author's values and goals when evaluating it.

Firestr looks great! It looks like a cross between Nostr and Gun.

Regarding the architecture, where does the data live? On the clients?

How are you achieving a multi-writer functionality? Meaning, how can two people edit the same chat data structure?

Thanks! Unfortunately I haven't done much with it in a while, just enough to keep it running on modern linux systems, but it still works nicely. (code is here: https://github.com/mempko/firestr)

Data lives on the clients. How multi-writer is handled is up to the app you write but I have built in support for vector clocks. So for example, the built-in app editor uses vector clocks and a merge algorithm.

I thought about adding CRDTs for making syncing data structures easier. Maybe there is someone out there that is motivated...

He has a substack now: "Give Russia a free hand on the continent" https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-new-foreign-policy-for-e...

I read the piece (despite finding him rather dreary to read, honestly) and that quoted section is theorycrafting what an ideal Trump figure would do to achieve its Trumpy goals.

I think the whole Curtis Yarvin is a Crazy Person stuff is a bit overdone, honestly. Had a couple of drinks with the fellow at the old Urbit place in SOMA ages ago and he seemed fairly normal. He's got these kooky reactionary ideas in his writing, for sure, but he's not this Hitler figure people make him out to be.

Anyway, not for me to defend him, just trying to insert some lived experience. I tried to like Urbit and Hoon and Nock but it wasn't for me. Perhaps for a better man.

I don't think this thread is an appropriate place to litigate Curtis Yarvin.

If you use the "search" feature at the bottom of the page, with "author:lisper", you'll find what I think are several trenchant critiques of the technical ideas behind Urbit.

> I don't think this thread is an appropriate place to litigate Curtis Yarvin.

In general, I'm pretty good about separating art from artist, but this thread root did launch that explicit discussion so perhaps your comment is better placed near the root than here.

I made a good faith attempt to build on Urbit (still have my ship from then somewhere) and failed so you don't need to convince me.

But fine, I'm not playing defence attorney since I don't even like this Dark Enlightenment crap. If you want to construct shadowy fanged figures and then decide it is inappropriate to question if they're fanged or really all that shadowy, then fine.

I'm not singling you out so much as I started writing a response to "I sat down for drinks with this person and they seemed nice" and realized I was getting sucked into the same drama. We can just not talk about the guy at all; that's an option we have. Let's do it that way.

I am happily content to do so.

For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure Hitler came across as fairly normal over drinks too.

Amusingly, your comment did make me feel some amount of embarrassment because I suspect you are right. That's probably a bad mode of evaluation of someone. I just don't think we should go all the way to Godwin, but who can tell, maybe that's exactly how it goes. After all, from Leonard Cohen:

All There is to Know About Adolph Eichmann

EYES:……………………………………Medium

HAIR:……………………………………Medium

WEIGHT:………………………………Medium

HEIGHT:………………………………Medium

DISTINGUISHING FEATURES…None

NUMBER OF FINGERS:………..Ten

NUMBER OF TOES………………Ten

INTELLIGENCE…………………….Medium

What did you expect?

Talons?

Oversize incisors?

Green saliva?

Madness?

I could manage ~2 paragraphs. The writing is atrocious. It read like plain gibberish, not even obfuscated.

Is he important/relevant outside of HN fancies in the US?

"Since this is an essay about the theory of foreign policy, rather than some kind of Moscow-sponsored tongue bath, let us imagine an abstract, ideal Putin." Now that's an interesting argument. It shows how far from "ideal" the real world is, and how even the most supposedly "realist" foreign policy thinking is in fact driven by the exact same "abstract, ideal" model.

Distancing himself from the project does jack squat when it's quite literally modelled after his feudalist beliefs:

> The source code and design sketches for the project alluded to some of Yarvin's views, including initially classifying users as "lords," "dukes," and "earls".

(from the wiki page on urbit.)

> when it's quite literally modelled after his feudalist beliefs

Okay, but aren't most P2P networks modelled like this? You have client-servers, relays, and super-relays.

The only difference is the amount of buy-in required to run a relay or super-relay. But the amount of buy-in can also be compared to the cost to run an Eth2 node. It's a proof-of-stake network, essentially.

Yes. It's modeled after a republic, in contrast to today's dominant models, which are, in fact, either feudal or corporate (monarchical).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_governance

The problem with Urbit used to be that each node was permanently bound to a single parent and "lords" had too much control over their "subjects", including things like kicking them out of the Urbitverse. That was changed so AFAIK it's no longer a concern. Most P2P systems are completely different because nodes can use any relay and relaying is separate from identity.

> Most P2P systems are completely different because nodes can use any relay and relaying is separate from identity.

A planet has just one Star that sponsors them in Urbit, but as a planet, you can choose to leave your Star and move to a different Star.

So you can also choose a different relay in Urbit. And yes, your Planet address is spawned by a Star, but you do fully own your address. It is separate in the sense that you can move it elsewhere.

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