Tell us about your experience and urbit thoughts.
I like a lot of the ideas, both on the merit of being weird and fun and genuinely being better. The view of having an operating system that has: * a built-in identity system and PKI * a typed and versioned file system * a typed command line * all apps being state machines (both being able to be upgrades over the air and operating based entirely on RPC primitives) * having the entire thing be a function on an atomically updated event log that is crash-proof, upgradable without a restart, and replayable
is just great, even if it's not really usable yet. I'm not sure how feasible the entire project is, because holy hell is it ambitious, but I really hope they do well.
Playing around with Hoon is actually pretty nice. Reading it as a beginner is scary as hell due to all the weird runes, but learning it is nowhere as hard as it looks. It's vaguely lisp-like, pure and side-effect free, strongly typed, and easy to use. I've been doing codegolf challenges in it for fun on my free time.
It's just like it's like reading the Lord of the Rings or the Bible. There is this book. It is really important to its fandom. It's affected everything else. It has massive scale and scope. Your feeling is that it's not going to be a light read.
So far I'm intimidated into skulking around the edges but hopefully not for long.
Bravo explorer!
You know even if we only got an PKI going that would be revolutionary. The 'modern' world hasn't a hope in hell of achieving that any time this century.
You don't need an invite to be able to play around with it, you'll just have to use a comet (which is the functionally same, but you have an uglier name). If you ask in :talk they'd probably send you a planet ticket, too.
You can say that since men have a statistically higher muscle density, they are genetically better slaves than women are. That does not mean that I'm advocating we enslave all men, or that slavery is anything other than abhorrent.
0: https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lam...
There's a lot of rationalization going on here for people that usually are quite capable of critical thinking.
Everyone focuses on something, if you want to extend your argument he should have also focused on diet, type of exercise, type of housing slaves are kept in, etc.
Focusing on every single factor that could possibly effect slavery would be an endeavor probably greater than the average lifetime.
Saying that some group of people or another would likely make better slaves than others is no different than saying that a certain group is more likely to be poor than another or be in jail than another. It may be considered in bad taste to discuss, but it isn't morally wrong to discuss.
It is simply remarking on what is, not what should be.
I have no idea whether genetics is a cause, I doubt it, but it is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis and thinking it is true does not make one racist.
1. (Least bad, though still racist/bad) Believing that other ethnic groups are "better" or "superior" rather than "different". So if you honestly believed that the ethnic groups are inferior due to their genetic traits (I do not consider being predisposed to slavery, jail, being poor etc something to consider a group inferior for especially since it wouldn't be that clear cut anyway. It'd actually be something like "predisposed to aggressive behavior, which leads to jail" or something anyway).
In the case of hard evidence of a genetic predisposition to something directly negative it is possible for this opinion to be technically correct but still racist and morally wrong.
2. (Worse than 1, implies 1) Believing that actions should be taken to the detriment of the "inferior" ethnic groups and/or benefit of the "superior" ethnic groups. This would include things like enslaving people, not hiring them, promoting/demoting people based on ethnic group etc. There are a lot of items in this list including everything America did to the detriment of the Africans.
3. (worse than 2, implies 1 and 2) Actually carrying out actions or encouraging others to carry out actions that are to the detriment and/or benefit on a particular ethnic group.
In my case, I'd be willing to work with a 1. but would respect them less than otherwise. A number 2. would be dicey, i -might- be able to work with them if they don't talk about it and aren't going around regularly talking about it to others but it would drive me crazy. I would not agree with censoring/banning people from number 2. I would quit/not hire/stay away from someone with number 3 and would support banning them from communities though still not censorship (I am hardcore against censorship).
This response applies to the previous line about being the intelligence of cattle as well, now that i've given it more thought.
Intelligence can be measured so more context would be needed here. In this hypothetical scenario has one group of humans either fallen through some kind of circumstance to a lower level of intelligence(not knowledge) or another has gained significantly more intelligence through some means? In that case they should probably be considered separate species not separate races so we're in a whole new ballgame.
Either way, when "humans" are potentially that different (there's no defensible claim today that any group of humans is significantly less intelligent than any other really) this issue gets very hairy.
Someone thinking that today would definitely be racist.
2. The author had an alt-right blog under a pseudonym. Some people think that makes him literally a Nazi. I don't agree with, er, basically any of his views, but I do enjoy reading his posts simply because they are fun to read. They aren't racist, except in the non-PC way, and has been nothing but nice when interacting with his online. None of those views bleed into Urbit, so I really don't care what political views Yarvin holds on his own.
3. Saying "only dedicated people would learn it" is just being mean. Hoon is unique from Lisp, and isn't even intentionally hard to learn - it's just different from nearly all other languages, because it compiles down to Nock, and builds primitives that make sense in the context of running on that VM. It's strongly typed, unlike Lisp, along with being pure. It's analogous to Lisp that you write code that is turned directly into an AST, but quite different. The part that is "completely foreign" is the weird syntax, which looks much harder to learn than it is, which they've recently admitted is too hardcore for newbs: They added keyword style in the last Hoon revision, so that you can code in nearly normal looking syntax, if you want. `:if(a b c)` instead of `?:(a b c)`.
Nock is kinda a Lisp variant, but there is a good reason behind having a small, perfect VM that never changes with some nice features, which are iterated in the docs and LambdaConf slides.
4. Urbit is open-source. https://github.com/urbit/urbit. If you read the website, they pledged a lot of the galaxies and Urbit namespace to what will become a non-profit spinoff. Not only that, but you can fork the entire network if Tlon turns out to be Evil Company Inc., by changing the hard-coded galaxy keys. I'll admit that there is a big difference between "open source" and actually being developed in the open, and hopefully they will open up about where they want to go with Urbit more, but it's by no means behind a company firewall.