You might want to read the Wikipedia article to understand the controversial history of this project. From a technology standpoint, it’s difficult to evaluate, or at least was a few years ago when...
You might want to read the Wikipedia article to understand the controversial history of this project.
From a technology standpoint, it’s difficult to evaluate, or at least was a few years ago when I last looked at it. My expectation is that someone promoting a new platform would write a whitepaper clearly explaining how it’s different from related preceding projects and what the advantages are, in terms other computer programmers can understand.
Instead, it seemed willfully obscure, inventing its own languages and a lot of weird terminology for no apparent reason.
From a technological standpoint, not as of 6-ish months ago. It's still written in an obtuse keywordless language that exclusively uses nonsense variable names and compiles down to a painfully...
From a technological standpoint, not as of 6-ish months ago. It's still written in an obtuse keywordless language that exclusively uses nonsense variable names and compiles down to a painfully limited and hideously inefficient bytecode format. Still feels like you're having a major stroke trying to sift through the technology of it. Last I checked in there were some rumors of replacing the whole awful stack (or perhaps just parts of it) with Haskell. Swear it's like some sort of bizarre far-right nerd scientology.
Something that doesn't appear to have made it to the wikipedia page, that tilde logo of theirs? The tilde is something called a rune in urbit lingo. Hoon (their programming language) doesn't have any reserved keywords but it has symbols for everything, usually a combination of two symbols (or "runes") make up a keyword. And for some reason each "rune" has its own made up name. "+" in Urbit lingo is "lus," "*" is "tar," put them together and you get the "lustar" operator +*. Circling back around, the ~'s reborn Urbit name is "sig," which means they've made their logo a "sig rune."
And the symbol renaming is only the tip of the iceberg. When you get into Hoon code itself, it's even worse. Despite the lack of reserved keywords holding them back, variables are almost always a short random nonsense name that has nothing to do with what's actually being stored there. Worse, these terms often change from block to block. Hoon code, even if you learn the symbols, reads like bad sci-fi where you have to keep a finger in the glossary just to be able to follow along, with a separate glossary being needed for each page. I legitimately have no idea how it is actually functional or how it actually has a following but the people who are in it are in deep.
Sorry if I rambled a bit there or didn't make sense in parts, it's getting pretty late here.
Oh, that makes sense. You drop the first letter, to differentiate the operator from the character. Then you combine them, and hope something pronouncable comes along. LusTar -> PlusStar, yeah that...
"+" in Urbit lingo is "lus," "" is "tar," put them together and you get the "lustar" operator +.
Oh, that makes sense. You drop the first letter, to differentiate the operator from the character. Then you combine them, and hope something pronouncable comes along. LusTar -> PlusStar, yeah that works.
Circling back around, the ~'s reborn Urbit name is "sig,"
Oh no. Why is it not called Ilde?
which means they've made their logo a "sig rune."
Nazis who've got their Swastikas spinning the wrong way round? Sign me the fuck up! (/s)
Thanks for the analysis. Nevermind the potential nazis, I think I'll pass for technical reasons alone. I'll be around once we have an Open Source project with a open platform/protocol.
I'm not sure if the logo is a sig rune. Rune seems to be what the two symbol pairs are called, not the symbols themselves. That could be a retcon though.
I'm not sure if the logo is a sig rune. Rune seems to be what the two symbol pairs are called, not the symbols themselves. That could be a retcon though.
This was my first impression when reading up on it. To be honest, I thought it was just a weird Internet side project, similar to TempleOS (whose creator had his own slew of controversial ideas)....
it seemed willfully obscure, inventing its own languages and a lot of weird terminology for no apparent reason
This was my first impression when reading up on it. To be honest, I thought it was just a weird Internet side project, similar to TempleOS (whose creator had his own slew of controversial ideas). The incessant need to redefine everything in its own terminology seemed unsustainable, which is why I was more curious to see if it actually worked, let alone what it was supposed to be used for.
It appears that the obfuscation of the project's purpose succeeded by hoodwinking me (and I don't consider myself easily caught up in conspiracy theories and propaganda), so there's clearly a chance at it happening to others. Judging from the research I've done since then, it seems that it hasn't improved in more technological clarity but perhaps has gotten better at hiding its seedier associations.
@Deimos I would like to request this post be removed and the domain banned. It's a project of questionable technical value and despicable social goals, developed and primarily promulgated by white...
@Deimos I would like to request this post be removed and the domain banned. It's a project of questionable technical value and despicable social goals, developed and primarily promulgated by white supremacists and neo-nazis. Acceptance of Urbit-related content on lobste.rs arguably contributed to the site's nazi problem, which I have ranted about in the past and which drove me off the site. I do not want to see Urbit content on tild.es, and I do not want to interact with people who do want to see Urbit content on tild.es.
(To be clear, nothing against the submitter here; Urbit's proponents are quite adept at concealing their motives and backgrounds behind dog whistles and invented jargon.)
I think that seems like an extreme preemptive reaction. We definitely wouldn't want the cult setting up shop here, but it doesn't necessarily cause enough issues immediately so it needs to be...
I think that seems like an extreme preemptive reaction. We definitely wouldn't want the cult setting up shop here, but it doesn't necessarily cause enough issues immediately so it needs to be fully banned. For example, I didn't know about all these bizarre aspects of it myself, so it's been useful to learn about that.
I understand the concern though, so I'll definitely keep an eye out for it now that I know more about it.
To be honest, I had not even been aware of any relations to white supremacy when I had submitted this topic (although, of course, there will always be some adjacency with "free speech platforms")....
To be honest, I had not even been aware of any relations to white supremacy when I had submitted this topic (although, of course, there will always be some adjacency with "free speech platforms"). I had actually encountered it being referenced in respect to localism (an attempt at a social movement to move away from the perils of centralization under capitalism), which itself is a nascent concept (and I'm wary of all online social movements these days...).
Admittedly, I did do some due diligence before posting and saw no posts on Tildes and the majority of posts on HackerNews were more confused as to what it was. I should have dived deeper into the politics of the creator, but it was late at night and I had only just got it up and running to see what it was firsthand.
That being said, I had not seen any sign of alt-right behavior when I did my initial perusal. Just some self-referential tech help and light internet chatter akin to what I would expect on a technical IRC channel.
This post has been quite an edification for me on the dangers of Urbit. I knew something felt fishy when it was so purposefully obtuse with its own description, but now I have found enough resources to form a much stronger opinion on it. Because of that, I don't know how I feel about removing this post: on one hand, I am very much against entertaining any toxic ideologies as they can spread to those with naive interest; on the other hand, I wouldn't have so readily found rationale for why Urbit may be detrimental to society without this Tildes post. I'll leave it up to @Deimos to decide the best course of action as he has a proven track record for addressing free-speech quandaries.
This feels a little heavy handed to me. I wasn't very involved in lobste.rs but I think it's difficult to show that posts about a single project are responsible for the problem of tolerance of...
This feels a little heavy handed to me. I wasn't very involved in lobste.rs but I think it's difficult to show that posts about a single project are responsible for the problem of tolerance of white supremacy there, rather I think that lobste.rs' problem arises from the tolerated presence of highly-active members who either align with those views or tolerate them, and I don't think we have that problem on Tildes -- people tolerating or siding with Nazi rhetoric would get banned very quickly. As we can see on this post so far, there has been a mix of criticising the author of Urbit and the technology itself, both of which I think are valuable, and some people trying it out and seeing what it's all about, which I think is also good (it's fair to assess a work on its own terms -- death of the author -- as well as in the wider context of the philosophy of its creator -- which is revealed by the other comments).
That said, how do you feel about content from other authors which discusses Urbit? For example, this post which I do not believe is affiliated with the original Urbit creator and which discusses purely the technical side of the project: https://wejn.org/2021/02/urbit-good-bad-insane/
Wasn't Urbit that one project that tried to rebuild feudalism on crypto? Pass. No matter how interesting the underlying tech might be - in this case, I'm not even sure if it's particularly...
Wasn't Urbit that one project that tried to rebuild feudalism on crypto? Pass. No matter how interesting the underlying tech might be - in this case, I'm not even sure if it's particularly exciting - I'd rather see it used in some other project that doesn't bake hierarchy right in their ecosystem.
At this point, while I once was a crypto-enthusiast, I have increasing feelings that much of cryptocurrencies are net-negative for society, and any association with them puts a bad taste in my...
At this point, while I once was a crypto-enthusiast, I have increasing feelings that much of cryptocurrencies are net-negative for society, and any association with them puts a bad taste in my mouth. Even on the basis of electricity usage alone, cryptocurencies pose an unchecked threat to humanity.
When I saw that Urbit was planning on creating bitcoin wallets associated with usernames, I thought to myself "is this really what the platform needs right now? A corrupting influence of money?". Seeing what the creator's initial intentions were, yes, it seems like a dystopian nightmare veiled in ideals of decentralization and privacy.
It's a bit difficult to describe what Urbit is in succinct terms, so I linked the information page. In my own words: Urbit is like a docker container for your digital identity. It comes along with...
It's a bit difficult to describe what Urbit is in succinct terms, so I linked the information page.
In my own words: Urbit is like a docker container for your digital identity. It comes along with some mastodon-esque social networking capabilities, as well as a soon to be released bitcoin wallet managed through your Urbit ID / username.
When I first read up on it, Urbit seemed like ambitious vaporware, but after installing it and giving it a try I was pleasantly surprised to see that it does indeed work and even has a small community on it.
I have my reservations on whether it would truly be something casual users would use, but I'm curious to see where the project goes and I figured Tildes might be interested to see another small online community that's jumping ship from big tech social media.
I'm trying this out now. I was surprised by how slick it all seems considering I'd never heard of it. The jaded part of me is thinking "oh great, another single entity with which to manage my...
I'm trying this out now. I was surprised by how slick it all seems considering I'd never heard of it. The jaded part of me is thinking "oh great, another single entity with which to manage my entities - I'll put it with the others". But it looks great!
I've set up a comet but the documentation hints at an invite system for planets. How do I connect with other Tildes Urbiters(?)?
Yeah I was impressed at how complete the UI was when it gave next to zero screenshots of it on its own website. Planets are merely permanent usernames that you can buy or be gifted with from those...
Yeah I was impressed at how complete the UI was when it gave next to zero screenshots of it on its own website.
Planets are merely permanent usernames that you can buy or be gifted with from those with extras to spare.
I’m still trying to figure out how fleshed out the space is, and notably how to find other groups to join. If you haven’t already added it, a good starting point is ~bitbet-bolbel/urbit-community
You might want to read the Wikipedia article to understand the controversial history of this project.
From a technology standpoint, it’s difficult to evaluate, or at least was a few years ago when I last looked at it. My expectation is that someone promoting a new platform would write a whitepaper clearly explaining how it’s different from related preceding projects and what the advantages are, in terms other computer programmers can understand.
Instead, it seemed willfully obscure, inventing its own languages and a lot of weird terminology for no apparent reason.
Maybe it’s improved since then?
From a technological standpoint, not as of 6-ish months ago. It's still written in an obtuse keywordless language that exclusively uses nonsense variable names and compiles down to a painfully limited and hideously inefficient bytecode format. Still feels like you're having a major stroke trying to sift through the technology of it. Last I checked in there were some rumors of replacing the whole awful stack (or perhaps just parts of it) with Haskell. Swear it's like some sort of bizarre far-right nerd scientology.
Something that doesn't appear to have made it to the wikipedia page, that tilde logo of theirs? The tilde is something called a rune in urbit lingo. Hoon (their programming language) doesn't have any reserved keywords but it has symbols for everything, usually a combination of two symbols (or "runes") make up a keyword. And for some reason each "rune" has its own made up name. "+" in Urbit lingo is "lus," "*" is "tar," put them together and you get the "lustar" operator +*. Circling back around, the ~'s reborn Urbit name is "sig," which means they've made their logo a "sig rune."
And the symbol renaming is only the tip of the iceberg. When you get into Hoon code itself, it's even worse. Despite the lack of reserved keywords holding them back, variables are almost always a short random nonsense name that has nothing to do with what's actually being stored there. Worse, these terms often change from block to block. Hoon code, even if you learn the symbols, reads like bad sci-fi where you have to keep a finger in the glossary just to be able to follow along, with a separate glossary being needed for each page. I legitimately have no idea how it is actually functional or how it actually has a following but the people who are in it are in deep.
Sorry if I rambled a bit there or didn't make sense in parts, it's getting pretty late here.
Oh, that makes sense. You drop the first letter, to differentiate the operator from the character. Then you combine them, and hope something pronouncable comes along. LusTar -> PlusStar, yeah that works.
Oh no. Why is it not called Ilde?
Nazis who've got their Swastikas spinning the wrong way round? Sign me the fuck up! (/s)
Thanks for the analysis. Nevermind the potential nazis, I think I'll pass for technical reasons alone. I'll be around once we have an Open Source project with a open platform/protocol.
I'm not sure if the logo is a sig rune. Rune seems to be what the two symbol pairs are called, not the symbols themselves. That could be a retcon though.
This was my first impression when reading up on it. To be honest, I thought it was just a weird Internet side project, similar to TempleOS (whose creator had his own slew of controversial ideas). The incessant need to redefine everything in its own terminology seemed unsustainable, which is why I was more curious to see if it actually worked, let alone what it was supposed to be used for.
It appears that the obfuscation of the project's purpose succeeded by hoodwinking me (and I don't consider myself easily caught up in conspiracy theories and propaganda), so there's clearly a chance at it happening to others. Judging from the research I've done since then, it seems that it hasn't improved in more technological clarity but perhaps has gotten better at hiding its seedier associations.
@Deimos I would like to request this post be removed and the domain banned. It's a project of questionable technical value and despicable social goals, developed and primarily promulgated by white supremacists and neo-nazis. Acceptance of Urbit-related content on lobste.rs arguably contributed to the site's nazi problem, which I have ranted about in the past and which drove me off the site. I do not want to see Urbit content on tild.es, and I do not want to interact with people who do want to see Urbit content on tild.es.
(To be clear, nothing against the submitter here; Urbit's proponents are quite adept at concealing their motives and backgrounds behind dog whistles and invented jargon.)
I think that seems like an extreme preemptive reaction. We definitely wouldn't want the cult setting up shop here, but it doesn't necessarily cause enough issues immediately so it needs to be fully banned. For example, I didn't know about all these bizarre aspects of it myself, so it's been useful to learn about that.
I understand the concern though, so I'll definitely keep an eye out for it now that I know more about it.
To be honest, I had not even been aware of any relations to white supremacy when I had submitted this topic (although, of course, there will always be some adjacency with "free speech platforms"). I had actually encountered it being referenced in respect to localism (an attempt at a social movement to move away from the perils of centralization under capitalism), which itself is a nascent concept (and I'm wary of all online social movements these days...).
Admittedly, I did do some due diligence before posting and saw no posts on Tildes and the majority of posts on HackerNews were more confused as to what it was. I should have dived deeper into the politics of the creator, but it was late at night and I had only just got it up and running to see what it was firsthand.
That being said, I had not seen any sign of alt-right behavior when I did my initial perusal. Just some self-referential tech help and light internet chatter akin to what I would expect on a technical IRC channel.
This post has been quite an edification for me on the dangers of Urbit. I knew something felt fishy when it was so purposefully obtuse with its own description, but now I have found enough resources to form a much stronger opinion on it. Because of that, I don't know how I feel about removing this post: on one hand, I am very much against entertaining any toxic ideologies as they can spread to those with naive interest; on the other hand, I wouldn't have so readily found rationale for why Urbit may be detrimental to society without this Tildes post. I'll leave it up to @Deimos to decide the best course of action as he has a proven track record for addressing free-speech quandaries.
This feels a little heavy handed to me. I wasn't very involved in lobste.rs but I think it's difficult to show that posts about a single project are responsible for the problem of tolerance of white supremacy there, rather I think that lobste.rs' problem arises from the tolerated presence of highly-active members who either align with those views or tolerate them, and I don't think we have that problem on Tildes -- people tolerating or siding with Nazi rhetoric would get banned very quickly. As we can see on this post so far, there has been a mix of criticising the author of Urbit and the technology itself, both of which I think are valuable, and some people trying it out and seeing what it's all about, which I think is also good (it's fair to assess a work on its own terms -- death of the author -- as well as in the wider context of the philosophy of its creator -- which is revealed by the other comments).
That said, how do you feel about content from other authors which discusses Urbit? For example, this post which I do not believe is affiliated with the original Urbit creator and which discusses purely the technical side of the project: https://wejn.org/2021/02/urbit-good-bad-insane/
Wasn't Urbit that one project that tried to rebuild feudalism on crypto? Pass. No matter how interesting the underlying tech might be - in this case, I'm not even sure if it's particularly exciting - I'd rather see it used in some other project that doesn't bake hierarchy right in their ecosystem.
At this point, while I once was a crypto-enthusiast, I have increasing feelings that much of cryptocurrencies are net-negative for society, and any association with them puts a bad taste in my mouth. Even on the basis of electricity usage alone, cryptocurencies pose an unchecked threat to humanity.
When I saw that Urbit was planning on creating bitcoin wallets associated with usernames, I thought to myself "is this really what the platform needs right now? A corrupting influence of money?". Seeing what the creator's initial intentions were, yes, it seems like a dystopian nightmare veiled in ideals of decentralization and privacy.
It's a bit difficult to describe what Urbit is in succinct terms, so I linked the information page.
In my own words: Urbit is like a docker container for your digital identity. It comes along with some mastodon-esque social networking capabilities, as well as a soon to be released bitcoin wallet managed through your Urbit ID / username.
When I first read up on it, Urbit seemed like ambitious vaporware, but after installing it and giving it a try I was pleasantly surprised to see that it does indeed work and even has a small community on it.
I have my reservations on whether it would truly be something casual users would use, but I'm curious to see where the project goes and I figured Tildes might be interested to see another small online community that's jumping ship from big tech social media.
I'm trying this out now. I was surprised by how slick it all seems considering I'd never heard of it. The jaded part of me is thinking "oh great, another single entity with which to manage my entities - I'll put it with the others". But it looks great!
I've set up a comet but the documentation hints at an invite system for planets. How do I connect with other Tildes Urbiters(?)?
Yeah I was impressed at how complete the UI was when it gave next to zero screenshots of it on its own website.
Planets are merely permanent usernames that you can buy or be gifted with from those with extras to spare.
I’m still trying to figure out how fleshed out the space is, and notably how to find other groups to join. If you haven’t already added it, a good starting point is
~bitbet-bolbel/urbit-community