Landscape is an Urbit-native toolkit for staying connected with your friends | Hacker News Reader

Landscape is an Urbit-native toolkit for staying connected with your friends

tlon.io

45 pointslxm34 comments

If Tlon was serious about Urbit they would swap out Hoon with something more practical.

It's weird how some things were intentionally made different just to be that way, like the binary true/false is reversed. Yarvin said he did it to be different and because it was funny.

All cults operate in a similar way. It's important to have a very distinct in-group with codes only fully understood internally.

shaved-head earthtones guy with the cult eyes in their youtube videos does them no favors. First thing I said when watching one of their conference talks "oh shit did i just wander into a cult"

edit: this guy https://youtu.be/g1qroWiZF90

For what's it's worth, it's a little tongue-in-cheek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXSDaLkxA9o

Trying to do something new like this is hard.

> shaved-head earthtones guy with the cult eyes in their youtube videos does them no favors.

Doesn’t it? It’s the same as scams, selecting against people who recognise cults is a feature, it means you don’t have to weed those out. Means your recruitment process is that much more efficient.

There are plenty of things worth criticizing in Urbit, IMO mostly related to the recreation of real-world scarcity as a digital namespace. Nobody seems to mind this very much in POSIX:

    [Lammy#~] true && echo $?
    0

Yeah, I’ve always found this complaint weird. It’s like that in Unix and 0 being true (or default) while 1 is error also feels more intuitive to me.

urbit is strongly hierarchic... politically i would compare it to signal if signal wasnt just a messenger... but i did say politically so there we go: "we cannot allow federation, because the dictator says so"-signal is similar to "all your ships are belong to someone"-urbit

i doubt much has changed in the last 10years.

But from the purely technological angle: this is interesting and we should emulate this, but free and open.

It is open source, the hierarchy is the minimal necessary to solve the reasons federated systems fail and centralize (spam, public key lookup for p2p encryption, version updates across the system, difficulty of running a linux server).

I work at Tlon so I'm biased, but I joined because I think urbit is the best way to get ourselves out of the local max of computing we're trapped in.

Email is a failure as a federated system (people on a tiny amount of centralized providers), the promise of the web as a decentralized place for people to interact p2p failed (FB, Instagram, etc.).

We're serfs operating accounts that manipulate our attention so that we view more ads on massively centralized systems controlled by companies that have their own incentives. Urbit is an escape of that. You can't fix these issues without fixing the problems earlier up in the computing stack, federated systems on the existing stack are doomed to always be relegated to a tiny hyper-technical niche. Urbit's design means it's possible to get the UX such that everyone could use it (likely most by a provider running the urbit for them).

Federated systems don't even really solve these problems for most users unless you run your own server (an even smaller subset) - you're just trading one dictator for another (and likely it's worse given how subreddit mods behave - mastodon is a good example of this).

https://zalberico.com/essay/2022/09/28/tlon-urbit-computing-...

http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra...

im not sure how subreddit mods play into "federated systems". so thats that.

Except on grounds of "the hierarchy is the minimal necessary to solve the reasons federated systems fail and centralize", you and me seem completely aligned (at least concerning this reply)

But otherwise, i agree.

Though i would like to remark that "the web", actually "the whole computing world", started as a hyper-technical niche.

Yeah, I didn’t meant to imply subreddits are federated. I was using them as an example of how a little power like that is usually abused.

Federated systems like mastodon where most people are users on a random person’s server leads to similar dynamics. The server admin is akin to a capricious power hungry Reddit mod. For the user it ends up worse than the centralized systems, both in user experience and in things like privacy/fairness.

In urbit there isn’t a distinction between user and server, the ID and the computer are tied together which is one of the prerequisites for solving the problem of why federated systems fail.

The web started as a hyper technical niche, but most users don’t use the web at that layer - they use FB or Amazon. Urbit is currently a hyper technical niche, but if it wins and users use it then they’ll have more control without needing to understand why. Urbit’s design makes it possible to have a path to UX where that could happen (imo). I think that’s not true of any other system I’ve seen.

If the ID hierarchy bothers you, you can also disable over the air updates and manually manage them. Then you’d only use the hierarchy for routing encrypted traffic and looking up other ID keys. The ability to escape to other infra nodes (stars) provide incentives for those nodes not to abuse routing (similar to pressure against an ISP) or they’ll get a bad reputation.

yikes. first you give me the "all is good in urbit, you cannot get abused, you are a free spirit"-vibe and then:

"The ability to escape to other infra nodes (stars) provide incentives for those nodes not to abuse routing (similar to pressure against an ISP) or they’ll get a bad reputation."

you can move accounts on mastodon too... sure urbit is more like an os ontop everything else while mastodon is just an application amid everything else. but... it reads like cognitive dissonance right there.

On mastodon you’re just an account on someone else’s server (except for the extreme minority that run their own server).

On urbit every user is also their own ‘server’ - there’s no distinction between account and server. Infra nodes just do public key lookups and route encrypted traffic.

As far as abuse risk - you have to design the system to be resilient to it. People behave based on the incentives the design allows. That’s why the web and other federated systems centralize. Urbit is explicitly designed to fix these underlying issues.

It amuses me to no end that all these "innovative collaborative tools" are rigidly locked in to Slack's way of displaying information.

Slack just copied IRC clients.

As a co-worker of mine put it some years back, "I was not expecting this year's big growth sector to be fancy IRC."

Slack had an "innovation" in the form of unusable threads that every other client is now sheepishly copying.

The big innovation over IRC was persistent chat across devices. That was huge and is pretty much a must have now.

I personally think that Slack was a huge improvement over IRC UX-wise. Especially for "normal" people: persistent chat across devices, search, inline previews of images, videos, urls etc.

On the UI side however it looks like we're stuck again, with everyone just copy-pasting whatever the leader of tge pack does.

irccloud had that first, and before that znc, before that we had these byzantine bitchx setups, but it's nothing new from concept to implementation, I'd say

I didn’t say it was new, just that it delivered that in a simple way. I can get someone on Slack in 5 minutes or less.

Never ceases to amaze me that every time urbit comes up here all you guys can come up with is "it's racist" and "hoon is weird". There are valid criticisms to make, but these ain't it.

How's this one: I'm a competent, experienced, professional software engineer, who is utterly and completely incapable of grasping what and why urbit is, without seemingly investing far more time and cognitive capital than I'm willing to invest on something so nebulous.

From my perspective, urbit is quicksand: crypto wasn't this bad, NFT's weren't this bad; I was able to grasp the basics quickly and invest time into solving my confusions to my own satisfaction, without ever feeling like I was more drawn in than necessary (i.e. didn't over-invest, got out early).

To me, urbit is nothing more than a sign, just beyond a blackhole's event horizon, which says "come closer".

No thanks. I'm happy to stick to the fundamentals that have served me so well in my life and career.

Interesting. I consider myself an average developer who picked up Urbit to play with in 2017 (when it was still very rough). I've been happily using it almost everyday for a couple of years now. I mean, it's just a peer-to-peer network built from first principles. That's really kind of it. I guess I don't really deep dive into the inner workings of its address space, OS, or functional programming language, but for an end user like me it works pretty great for distributed communication. I'm not trying to sell anyone on it by any means, but some of the most interesting things I've read have been in Urbit groups.

ChatGPT made a nice summary.

  > Provide me information on Urbit.

  Urbit is a decentralized, functional operating system and network, which
  aims to provide a secure and private computing environment for users. It
  is designed to be a platform for a new decentralized internet, and it
  uses a unique architecture that combines elements of functional
  programming, peer-to-peer networking, and blockchain technology.

  Urbit is still in development and not widely adopted yet, but it's a
  project with a new approach to computing and network, that aims to
  provide a more secure, private, and decentralized environment for
  users. The goal of Urbit is to provide an alternative to centralized
  systems, where users have more control over their data and devices, and
  where the network is more resilient to censorship, surveillance, and
  data breaches.

Answers, albeit very generic, the what and why.

As usual, ChatGPT is summarizing and regurgitating the (m|d)isinformation that's already out there.

It doesn't matter how many Tlon employees and Urbit fans protest otherwise, that what is inaccurate. Urbit is not an "operating system".

Here's the download page, where you can download Urbit for Linux, Urbit for MacOS, Urbit for Windows etc:

https://urbit.org/getting-started/cli

It's an application. It's not an "operating system". You need an operating system to run it.

It's also not a "personal server operating function" or "new kind of computer" as described elsewhere in the literature. It's a freaking web app.

I love that the CLI installation instructions describe themselves as "Installation instructions for power users". On the home page "All the smart people I know disappear into Urbit."

This is toy software, backed by a 100% transparent ponzi scheme, appealing to the most gullible out there who desperately want to be accepted by a "smart" minority group.

The network is more resilient to censorship, surveillance, and data breaches? Puhlease. The CLI example page shows you how to set up a basic Urbit instance which is accessed via ... unencrypted HTTP.

>Urbit is not an "operating system".

Agree, term is wrongly used. Here it is used in the literal meaning of it. A software stack upon which you can execute other apps. The original concept iirc was to run both natively and overlayed but seems they've settled down to just the later.

>It's a freaking web app.

You can use Urbit without ever touching the web app and the neworking protocol is independent of http.

We want to get to native, but you don’t replace the hardware in a day. It doesn’t make sense to build a custom nock cpu until it’s necessary.

For a new system to succeed it has to run on the hardware people have. That’s why there’s a runtime. It is an OS, but there’s an interpreter for the machines of today. If urbit succeeds then running it directly would be the ultimate goal.

I wonder what Yarvin thinks of NFTs. It’s like the VHS vs Betamax of cynical obfuscated decentralized scams.

'hoon is weird' is a valid criticism, especially because it's weird on purpose, to increase the barrier to entry

Next up, a social network called Ubermensch written in brainfuck. </sarcasm>

It’s racist or rather the group that’s working on it is racist and they’re explicitly trying to inject that into the system is a very valid point.

Yarvin and his work is forever tainted with his Mencius Moldbug nrx/dark enlightenment nonsense.

Unless you are cool with absolute monarchism and the divine right of kings, avoid giving him and his work any oxygen.

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