And I think it’s all done on purpose. Because once you invest that
much time, it’s hard to rationalize to yourself that it was all just so
you can chat with people on a forum. There has to be a higher purpose to
all of it.
And I still can’t shake off a bit of a cult-ish vibe there.
Regardless whether on purpose, or purely accidental.
Good eye for cultish vibes. I wonder how common it is for cults to
invent their own jargon so that people who’ve put in the effort to learn
it feel like they’ve learned something valuable even if all they’ve done
is take on the random inventions of a fertile imagination.
I think you mean "quality snock". If you send me $101, I'll explain to you the first 1.01% of why saying "snock" instead of "sneer" will give you deeper insight into your own mind and transform your life.
> people who've put in the effort to learn it feel like they've learned something valuable even if all they've done is take on the random inventions of a fertile imagination.
low-decoupler thoughts. pure blue tribe. time to update your priors.
> I wonder how common it is for cults to invent their own jargon so that people who've put in the effort to learn it feel like they've learned something valuable
Just consider the popular religions and their unnecessarily cryptic jargon. It's all about cultural capital. Proper Nouns mean substance!
I wonder if it's also related to the fact that most actually-useful complicated things necessarily come with jargon, since they're describing things that aren't part of normal experience. There are a lot of tools and processes on a sailing ship and in a physics lab and in an embroidery workshop that don't exist anywhere else and thus need unique names. If you learn those names - that jargon - you can communicate effectively with people doing something useful that you want to learn.
An additional component of Urbit is its “distributed” identity
component, where your identity is uniquely tied to a 32-bit integer.
Assuming unsigned that is 4,294,967,295
So… this system has less possible identities than humans on the
planet? Have we learned nothing from IP adresses ;)
E: ah turns out this is only for the lord, civil fort. (Wtf is up
with these names, im reminded of the weird kkk naming schemes they used
internally for some reason).
You can simply rent out use of your identity component when you are not using it, such as during sleep, or while you take a relaxing week-long break in the scav zones. Come back to enough credits for an entire month's calorific and greywater baselines!
Well, not like it will ever get that much users, but it does show a very stupid mindset at the base of the whole project. (And if you want scarcity, isn't it just better to make the account rollout limited and under your control, like with clubhouse, creates fomo and scarcity. Guess he would have ideological reasons to not do that (It being the wrong kind of centralized)).
I wouldn't call it a stupid mindset. I think it's a *shitty* mindset, but it's not a stupid one. Technology has values. Moldbug is making an intentional choice to have his technology reflect his value of "there should be a limited and exclusive elite who are better than other people". If you don't understand the values of the technology you're creating, chances are those values conflict with your own.
He could have used 33 bits, doubled the available space, but it’d still be artificially scarce.
Or 32 bits and an additional flag bit marking as “upper house”/“lower house”, “Uber”/“lumpen”, or whatever.
> Wtf is up with these names, im reminded of the weird kkk naming schemes they used internally for some reason
Is the reason “yarvin is a raging racist who wants to bring back slavery” because then you’d be right on the money
kkk nomenklature but yarvin was probably more into traveller than d&d so there are fewer cyclopses and ettin magi and he was prepared to smoothly transition from dukes into space shit
Nah, the naming stuff is prob just a coincidence, I was just randomly reminded of the strange naming shit they did. ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_titles_and_vocabulary))
That's very much the point. The system is build on Monarchist ideals (no, I am not making that up), building in a limited elite class that can never include everyone is intentional.
[Wikipedia has a page on them titled 'Ku Klux Klan titles and vocabulary'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_titles_and_vocabulary) Apparently somebody got hold of the KKK handbook, called the Kloran. You can't make this shit up, well... you can, the KKK did but you get what I mean.
E: Random gems like:
> A system of "judiciary" organs was created in each prescript. In the first the judiciary was divided into a **Grand Council of Yahoos**, to try officers of the Klan, and a **Grand Council of Centaurs** to try regular **Ghouls**.
Random other thought, Varg Vikernes the neonazi murderer is also super into tolkien and dnd like roleplaying systems (he made his own).
I remember the first time I read about urbit years ago because, well,
moldbug and I remember that me, a computer literate but not computer
science-trained person, could not stop wondering if that’s all an
elaborate scam for the adress space money or something they really
talked themselves into.
I think a bit of an issue with "decentralized" schemes is that we associate certain issues (e.g. limited address spaces, poor scalability) with centralization, while bitcoin and assorted nonsense (urbit) actually implement or claim to implement said problems of centralization in a somewhat decentralized way.
edit: i.e. bitcoin in particular implements a number of problems that would exist if a <10% slice of a single raspberry pi in the world was to handle all monetary transactions, while preventing certain solutions (such as taking the fucking raspberry pi offline).
Before crypto there was pretty much nothing that was extremely centralized "from the inside", while being physically replicated and (in theory, if not in practice) not centralized to one location in the physical world.
Hmm I wouldn't necessarily associate limited adress space with centralization but then again I'm not a computer scientist, however I've read way too much about blockchain stuff.
Well, a limited address space normally implies an address-assigning authority; a non centralized scheme would normally do something like using random 128 or 256 bit numbers.
So in their case, instead of being centralized to an organization, it is centralized to ethereum.
Likewise in case of bitcoin, while addresses do not require a central authority, the extremely low number of transactions per second is something typical of having a very under powered central authority.
Edit: heres a good analogy. Suppose I made myself a dictator. Thats very centralized. Suppose there was mind uploading, and it was a bunch of redundant servers spread across the globe running exactly the same dictator’s mind in exactly the same state, no longer physically centralized and yet simultaneously a worse dictatorship, and just as logically centralized.
> Suppose there was mind uploading, and it was a bunch of redundant servers spread across the globe
That’s basically part of the plot of the Ancillary series.
Humble request if a computer scientist is listening: what is the
point of Urbit? I mean, ok, I get it, whatever it wanted to do, it
failed. But what exactly it wanted to do? In case it worked just as
Moldbug intended, how would it look like? What advantage would it have
with respect to our current architecture?
to implement literal feudalism, in code. The stars and comets stuff was ships before that, and [in 2010](https://github.com/mbrubeck/urbit/blob/1bc9086a3fd62594e8bd631744cb9bf804f6a43b/Spec/urbit/3-intro.txt#L84-L94) it was:
If you are a normal user of Urbit, you are a 'lord.' The
identity of a lord is an arbitrary 32-bit atom.
...
Lords are only one class of fort. A fort is always an atom.
It is classified by the size of that atom:
>= 2^64, < 2^128 : wolf (wild fort)
>= 2^32, < 2^64 : pawn (civil fort)
>= 2^16, < 2^32 : lord (civil fort)
>= 2^8, < 2^16 : earl (civil fort)
>= 1, < 256 : duke (civil fort)
== 0 : pope (trivial fort)
...
All the other forts are *civil*. The trick to digital feudalism:
since low-numbered forts are easier to remember, they are more
desirable. But since they are desirable, there is contention for
these identities. These short identities must be allocated by
some *civilized* process.
Ah yes an artificial classificition system where some rare positions are marked as better by the creator. That always works, everybody respects verified users on twitter for example.
a fighting man may, upon reaching 9th level, seek to construct or rebuild a fortification in a wilderness hex. after clearing the surrounding hexes of threats, monsters, and lairs,
So, one of those creepy chatrooms that would give your computer any kind of virus in early 2000? Like, it was all about that? Why should anybody pay gas for it if you can just install TOR, obscure your IP, and go to one of those chatrooms totally anonimously anyway?
And all the "reinventing OS", what was it about? I think that's what I'm missing. Ok, his reinvention of computer science is baroque and superfluous. But what is it exactly?
> Why should anybody pay gas for it if you can just install TOR, obscure your IP, and go to one of those chatrooms totally anonimously anyway?
>
>
SCARCITY didn't you read their website
> And all the "reinventing OS", what was it about?
Basically, Urbit is supposed to run a virtual server on your computer that takes care of server-side work for Urbit apps. It makes sense for this virtual server to work like an independent computer, so it is actually a virtual OS running on your base("host") OS. As to why this virtual OS needs to be a new kind of OS, instead of something common, like a virtual Unix instance... well, this usually means that the designers wanted to constrain what kind of operations the OS handles, to make it look "simpler" from the point of view of someone administrating it.
This is very old, but nobody gave you an actual answer: The Urbit pitch begins with the current internet and the contention that it is 'hosed', that what was once an empowering and uplifting force has become a near-totally centralized forest of clunky systems making AWS API calls, and our computers are kiosks for interfacing with them. The digital equivalent to the World Economic Forum's stated goal of people owning nothing and being happy. You may or may not find this distasteful, but if you do then the only viable solution is something that looks more or less like Urbit.
Right now, as in, a year after you made this comment: Urbit makes it astoundingly easy to build P2P apps. Whether this is enough to kickstart it into a network that allows some significant divestment from the internet is hard to say. Probably not in the next 5 years. But after that, who knows?
>I just chose the first name that popped up, since all of the listed names were the same price at 0.025 ETH ($33). The actual purchase was a little annoying because the store insists on transacting via a browser extension called Metamask. I'm a noob when it comes to actually buying things via crypto so I'm not sure if this is just the standard (this was actually my first transaction with ETH) but I already own a hardware wallet that I'm happy with and would rather use for all my transactions. After shuffling around some funds (and having to foot the transaction fees) I purchased my name and set to work on claiming it.
$33 + transaction fees
>I wanted my Urbit tied to my hardware wallet, so I decided to transfer the point yet again to my hardware wallet's ETH address. After some more transaction fees, I was now the proud owner of my own Urbit planet.
additional fees
>Now that I was back to square one, I decided to just wait it out and see if I eventually connected, which I did. This discovery only cost me about $50 in ETH of transaction fees. Go figure.
$50 more in transaction fees, and this isn't part of the previous bit, they misread something and transferred their spaceship keys out of their hardware wallet and had to put it back or something
Edit: from the other article,
>Given the Ethereum insanity with gas prices past several months… an Urbit identity will set you back some $200. $20-$40 for the identity itself, the rest on the gas fees (transaction costs).
So this muppet spent maybe $300 or more doing this.
I think that maybe death to capitalism?
You can use your hardware wallet through Metamask. 0.025 ETH plus one tx fee is all it should have been. Note that even with the recent dip, Eth is about twice the price it was in January.
Still too much for a fancy private key. Better to let users generate one themselves instead of (in a roundabout way) paying for compute.
My what? I don't have a bird bath, much less a hardware wallet.
I assume both writers were doing something wrong and expensive in different ways, then. Aside from trying Urbit or using Ethereum in the first place.
Cryptocurrency as a technology is, after ten years, still at the wires-on-a-lab-bench stage, and [fucking unusable by humans](https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/05/18/cryptocurrency-in-2021-still-dysfunctional-nonsense-unusable-by-normal-humans/). So a good fit for Urbit, then.
A hardware wallet is a secure device that holds your private keys and signs transaction requests sent from your computer. So you have to press a physical button; should be invulnerable to viruses and such. Metamask is an interface for Eth stuff which can either run a software wallet or pass transaction requests to your hardware wallet to be signed.
Snelson had a hardware wallet and was confused.
Hmm the post link says that all of the network stack / etc code is in C anyway, so I guess this guy got somewhat hoodwinked by the nonsense and bought into the notion that someone actually wrote something.
That article is still way too generous to urbit's goals.
Planets are just shitty domain names/ipv4s. Galaxies and Stars are just shitty dns.
It's not decentralized at all, it's recentralized. Then you still need to host it.
It's nothing more than a bad self-hosted vps with a bad even-less-democratic reimplementation of DNS which you'd still have to host on traditional internet infrastructure for the forseeable future. It offers more centralized dictator rent-seekers, not fewer.
End user usability: who wants to learn what scry means?
Scry X: Look at the top X cards of your library, and rearrange them
in any order. You may place any number of them on the bottom of your
library.
Seems pretty basic to me. 😁
And this is Moldbug’s shit? Jeez, you’d think if anyone would
understand why shit like this consistently failed it’d be someone so
in-tune with the rationalists who talked about all these obvious failure
modes ages ago. Oh well.
Good eye for cultish vibes. I wonder how common it is for cults to invent their own jargon so that people who’ve put in the effort to learn it feel like they’ve learned something valuable even if all they’ve done is take on the random inventions of a fertile imagination.
Assuming unsigned that is 4,294,967,295
So… this system has less possible identities than humans on the planet? Have we learned nothing from IP adresses ;)
E: ah turns out this is only for the lord, civil fort. (Wtf is up with these names, im reminded of the weird kkk naming schemes they used internally for some reason).
I remember the first time I read about urbit years ago because, well, moldbug and I remember that me, a computer literate but not computer science-trained person, could not stop wondering if that’s all an elaborate scam for the adress space money or something they really talked themselves into.
I guess it’s both? Gotta be both.
Humble request if a computer scientist is listening: what is the point of Urbit? I mean, ok, I get it, whatever it wanted to do, it failed. But what exactly it wanted to do? In case it worked just as Moldbug intended, how would it look like? What advantage would it have with respect to our current architecture?
another: “The primary ingredient in Hoon is schizophrenia. It makes Terry Davis look like Brian Kernighan.” https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/urbit
Scry X: Look at the top X cards of your library, and rearrange them in any order. You may place any number of them on the bottom of your library.
Seems pretty basic to me. 😁
And this is Moldbug’s shit? Jeez, you’d think if anyone would understand why shit like this consistently failed it’d be someone so in-tune with the rationalists who talked about all these obvious failure modes ages ago. Oh well.