newuser88273

The whole setup is also about transaction cost; basically a legal cartel to standardize routine consumer transactions, reducing cost (of evaluating and constantly re-evaluating complex contracts for routine business) and risk for all parties.

So T-shirt spec is like the written law of Urbit; strangers can read it, we can't help that. But of course there are the unwritten laws and rules of polite speech, here in Urbit just as everywhere else. There are special occasions (you just know!) where you must use exactly the right phrases (you just know!)

Ahh, but she slips, uses the wrong phrase. Now everybody knows: she's a pervert! Rolling her own decrement, the little... Quick, freeze her out of the conversation. She shall speak no more.

But look, isn't she hot? Really, it could be nice... but alas, there's just no way around Urbit gov's cryptographic chastity belt locks...

A given Nock implementation is intimately coupled to a matched Hoon compiler.

Attempts to write anything just to T-shirt spec and run on a given Nock-based platform are almost certain to fail. The real spec you'd be required to write to is implied by the platform implementation. Marketing problem: That real spec is not very elegant and it doesn't zip down to a handful of bytes. It doesn't fit on a T-shirt. It's not a stable specification. It doesn't describe an open platform. Yet Urbit marketing copy wants me to believe all those things.

This goes even deeper. Let's just go on and assume that Urbit's spec-bearing T-shirt includes everything you need for IO. Now consider this promise from Mr Yarvin, found in the older Urbit thread someone linked to: "And actually, if you don't like Hoon [Urbit's strange, obfuscated high level programming language] you can build your own language on this platform. So long as it compiles to Nock [purportedly documented on that T-shirt]"

So you hook up your new Nock back end to your favorite compiler, painstakingly hand-crafted to generate Nock code perfectly conforming to the T-shirt spec. You compile a few programs. You run them. Heat radiates from the CPU... and nothing else happens. You wait, patiently at first, then way beyond patience, yet nothing (except heat). Don't you feel cheated, just a little?

The project is based on a fundamental insincerity, which makes me suspicious. All material about Urbit makes a big point of their minimal spec, again so in the linked piece: "The spec fits on a T-shirt and gzips to 340 bytes."

What do people expect when they read a thing like that? I don't know about you, bit I'd expect that I could ignore the obfuscated strangeness of their higher level languages etc and just implement stuff to that minimal spec.

So you expect you can do that. But you can't. That minimal spec might as well not exist; you can't just read it and go on to implement, say, a programming language on top of Urbit.

"But you can!" you might object. Try it. Read nothing but that spec and implement, say, a tiny BASIC on top of it. Compile some simple programs. Run them. Now, what happens? Nothing, for now. But look, my processor core is heating up. Something must be happening! Just wait. Wait. Wait. No, still nothing. Wait some more. Just a few years, maybe? No, still nothing (except heat). Etc.

So no, that elegant spec doesn't give you anything but a way to heat your computing cabinet.

Realizing this, I put Urbit in the "suspicious, may be a con" bin. Hasn't escaped from there, yet.

Lemmesee. Catch Ebola... or have to read three interweb comments seriously lacking in sensitivity? Tough choice.

Good luck, Ebola-Chan.

Do you trust Google to remain just an adware company forever?

Or will they (a) sit on your children's data for all of their life and (b) within a decade or two break out of the adware niche with Google Services for Health and Life Insurance, Google Services for Banking and Credit, Google Services for Human Ressources, and Google Services for Law Enforcement?

Except for Google, who will (eventually) actively mine all of it, likely by way of some plausible universal search feature.