App School Live
developers.urbit.org
developers.urbit.org
Jack Dorsey’s “web5”, Dan Romero’s Farcaster all touch on a lot of these concepts - people are starting to come around to the same conclusions (which is good!) - urbit had just taken a boil the ocean approach on a bet that we need to rethink the stack from first principles so we can control certain assumptions to reduce complexity and make some of the problems in modern computing easier to handle.
Finding it really felt like the first time I started playing with Linux for me. It revived a lot of the dreams of the 90s web and what it could be, people being able to run their own nodes in a way that could actually work.
To do that you have to solve the identity problem, you have to reduce the complexity of running the system, and you have to have the internet front and center when building the OS.
The dream of a truly decentralized web from the 90s failed and it failed for reasons that make sense given the constraints of the technology we use. I think urbit is a way out.
An old blog post (from 2010!) that really digs into the details: https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progr...
It's nice that it helped introduce you to linux though.
You make a few good points about usability, but I don't think the internet was designed to be a distributed network from the get-go. https://secushare.org/broken-internet
I was disappointed that Linux would never be able to solve the incentive problems that lead to centralized companies handling that complexity.
Urbit’s approach actually could.
The reasons those other attempts are basically DOA outside of a tiny technical niche is they don’t go deep enough into the stack, they don’t tackle the issue with identity which is a core problem when it comes to handling spam and moderation. They don’t tackle administrative complexity and dependencies which is a core issue in making the system simple to run.
To really fix these things you have to think about why they always fail and design something to fix those incentive issues. Those problems start earlier up the stack - Linux will never be able to do it (imo) even if you tack on the identity layer.
I think Linux's identity solution (if you consider it a solution) is GPG and PKI.
GPG is largely a failure imo, I think Moxie is right about this - complexity is high (even when people’s life depends on it they won’t use it) and the core issue is that it’s distinct from the system itself.
Urbit nodes cannot be separated from the ID - you can’t run it without an ID which is a pretty clean way to solve a lot of this stuff out of the box (also adds a lot of cool features/guarantees you can make about collaborating with users over the network, ability for pseudonyms to accrue reputation, easy ability to moderate, and make spam not economically possible, etc.
I’ve become convinced you can’t solve these things separately in parts on the Linux stack, maybe someone will - but there’s been 30yrs of failure so I’m not optimistic.
Why is the Urbit project completely unable to produce anything approachable, set any practical goals, or explain anything in terms of existing approaches?
It seems like an extreme level of hubris to think that Urbit is so far beyond the current level of technology that everything must be started from scratch. I've bounced off Urbit because of the tech and documentation a number of times now, and I would like to think I'm capable of understanding and appreciating the need for this sort of thing.
Feature not a bug. They day HN gives any positive feedback on it, I'll have to re-assess.
Here is a clue:
> We’re running a cohort class of App School to teach you how to terraform Mars.
No, you are not going to terraform Mars by writing apps. No one is going to terraform Mars. Terraforming Mars is a pipe dream. We humans can't even get our act together enough to stop ourselves from de-terraforming earth. [UPDATE: turns out they are not actually talking about teraforming Mars. But the invention of a private language to identify the in-group is one the hallmarks of a cult.]
Sorry if this is rant-y but I've been watching Urbit since its inception and I am absolutely dismayed at how many otherwise smart people are wasting their time on it.
Scientology is famous for this:
The founder of Urbit, Curtus Yarvin, is an extreme hard-core right-wing liberatarian. Go read up about him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
I'm not even sure that Curtis would object to my characterization of Urbit as a cult. He and I are not exactly on speaking terms any more, as you might imagine, but he is just enough of an iconoclast that he might actually agree with me on this.
Typically the test for a cult is:
1. Secret knowledge
2. Enforced isolation
3. Some kind of leader/living authority
Eg, Scientology has their secret books, they will attack you and sue you if you share that secret and they have church elders.
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.
Urbit's terminology, indeed its entire design, is chosen to be obfuscatory and exclusive. It is designed to conceal the fact that underlying the entire enterprise is an extreme right-wing ideology.
The mere existence of terms of art is not diagnostic of a cult. The design and motivation of those terms is.
Which "that"? OO or Urbit? For OO, no, I don't. It just seems obvious to me that OO terminology was not chosen to be deliberately obfuscatory. For Urbit, it's my opinion based on interactions with Curtis ten years ago. Many of those interactions were via email, so I could probably grovel through my archives and find what he said that led me to form those opinions. But again, it just seems obvious to me that Urbit's terminology is deliberately obfuscated.
> 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.
To people who disagree and think it’s useful: I’m willing to listen - in fact I came here looking for your comments.
Please post a link to a useful service of app that Urbit provides now, that’s what many of us are waiting to see.
With regard to “cult” - every new thing has jargon (tech is particularly bad at it: grep, sed, awk, grok etc etc) - Martian computing comes from an old blog post linked below about the idea that if you started from scratch with a modern understanding of computing what could you build. Basically if you found software from an ancient civilization on mars that still worked - how might it have been designed to guarantee that?
I often see people on HN lament the old web of irc and nerds talking in good faith, about interesting topics, building personal sites, getting to know each other etc. That culture is alive and well on urbit.
It's called "calm computing" for a reason - the technology serves your peace of mind, not some corporation's ad revenue.
In the case of Urbit, that cost is, at the very least, dealing with Nock and Hoon.
As regards programming cost, I'm speaking from experience when I say that if you know how to program, you already know how to write Hoon. It's that intuitive.
A sceptical followers perspective on Urbit would be interesting to read and probably something worth archiving.
My take is he has a personal history with the founder that’s influencing his judgement unfairly (it’s come up before in previous urbit threads iirc).
Often this kind of thing can actually be a signal because it’ll cause a smart person to dismiss something for bad reasons rather than on the merits.
There are genuine reasons to be skeptical of success - building something like this from the ground up is insanely hard, there are lots of ways it could fail, but the criticisms he lists here are weak imo.
It is true that I have a history with Curtis, and that my opinions are informed by the history. Whether that's "unfair" or not is unclear, even to me.
But my opinion is not informed only by my personal interactions with Curtis. It is also informed by my having taken a fairly deep dive into the technology, and my technical background (Ph.D. in CS among other qualifications).
> If he thought Martian computing was actually about terraforming the literal planet mars he hasn’t been following it in any depth.
Not recently, no. But the technical underpinnings of Urbit have not changed. It's still based on Nock and Hoon, and so it still has all that baggage. Urbit's technical underpinnings look weird, and that makes people wonder if there might be something interesting under all that weirdness. My real central message is: there isn't. It's all BS, designed specifically to make people think it is something new and interesting when in fact it is not. It is a fraud. A sham. Whether or not it technically qualifies as a "cult" is kind of beside the point.
[UPDATE]
I originally wrote, and then deleted: "I know this because Curtis told me so, though obviously he didn't use the words 'fraud' and 'sham'." I decided that if I was going to say something like that I'd better be able to back it up, so I went back through my correspondence with him, and found this (from 2012):
> Humans are very bad - surprisingly bad - at abstract math. They are surprisingly good at mechanical, rote calculations and rote memorization. (Think of all the people who've memorized the Koran.) I design languages for the species expected to use them. Perhaps somewhere in outer space there are beings for whom denotational semantics is trivial, and integer tree addressing is bizarrely counter-intuitive. But this is not our planet. Nock does not feel like an abstraction - it feels like a machine. Play with it and you'll see what I mean.
So Nock and Hoon were not designed to deceive (or, if they were, Curtis never said so to me). They were, however, specifically and explicitly designed to fit a mental model that Curtis likened to memorizing the Koran. IMHO that is a very counter-productive goal, irrespective of the words you choose to characterize it.
It's why haskell is hard for people.
In a lot of ways stuff in Urbit (while unfamiliar) is more usable than the older stuff, but it is different.
It's hard to put yourself back in the mindset of someone new to computers and all the jargon and complexity you get inundated with. I'd argue what you see as intentional obfuscation is just something new/unfamiliar.
I also suspect your dislike for his politics is making it hard to separate the tech from the person. I don't agree with the politics either, I don't agree with Peter Thiel's politics or Palmer Luckey's politics, but I can recognize the value of the companies and tech they help build independently of that. Similar arguments were made going all the way back to early computing and the web (protests against computing because it was used by defense agencies). IMO it's not a good framing for evaluating a technology.
I first encountered Nock and Hoon ten years ago, so these are neither new nor unfamiliar to me at this point.
> I also suspect your dislike for his politics is making it hard to separate the tech from the person.
Why should I separate them? My hypothesis is that the tech is a vehicle for advancing his politics.
> I can recognize the value of the companies and tech they help build independently of that.
So can I. The fact that I don't call Tesla or PayPal cults should led more credence to my position on Urbit.
I've read the Urbit literature and I've taken a pretty deep dive into the code and I've reached the conclusion that Urbit does not have any valid value proposition. I could be wrong, but that is my assessment, which will be of value mainly to people who know me and trust my judgement. If you're not such a person, well, my opinion comes with a money-back guarantee if you aren't satisfied.
Fortunately you've also posted substantive comments, so this should be easy to fix. If you'd stick to the latter and drop the former, we'd be grateful.