I don’t buy this. Why does “no unexpected behavior” require the amount of obfuscation which they have in Urbit? I’ve been trying to pick it up a few times and I’m constantly struggling to understand how it behaves.

I'm not selling it, just explaining it. More info here: https://urbit.org/blog/toward-a-frozen-operating-system

in some parts of the world germans still get a negative reaction because of their countries history.

it's unfair, but unfortunately showing that those influences in urbit are gone or were not even there in the first place, is going to be a long and hard battle.

it's similar to the problem blockchain has today. for no fault of the technology on its own, blockchain is tainted by the massive amount of scams in the space.

and as urbit also uses a blockchain too it now actually has two problems.

i appreciate you joining this discussion, but think about what you end up doing here. you spend energy defending the project against arguments that have nothing to do with its technology. energy that you probably would rather spend elsewhere.

but the reality is that you are likely going to have these arguments for the foreseeable future with many that might otherwise join the project.

and if you hide those issues you will be accused of doing that instead.

germany is doing a lot of selfcriticism in order to atone for its history and it's making an effort to welcome immigrants, and yet there are people who don't believe their intentions as well as there are some germans who still reject immigrants.

it is going to take a few more generations for germany to overcome this, as it is going to take a few decades for the blockchain to overcome its reputation as a scam. likewise urbit will require some effort to get rid of this ball and chains.

i do wish you success, and i sincerely hope that these non technical problems won't be an achilles heel that bring the project down

I think you can, although I admit a lot of the discussion here is likely to focus on Yarvin himself. That is, there is a good argument that Urbit reflects Yarvin's politics in itself and as these politics are, clearly, broadly distasteful it's entirely reasonably that someone opposed to Right Libertarianism and ignorant of Yarvin would find Urbit undesirable on its own merits.

I don't like Yarvin either, but I do want a product that meets this use case. At this point I wish someone would clone urbit, since the hatred for the founder seems to mean it'll never get traction no matter what it does or how it works.

I mean, the left politics of Stallman _very much_ influence how Free Software ends up being used and incorporated. Consider how the GPL encodes the norm of working in common with one another, dragging profit seeking corporations into that as well, or into defending against it. It's like a whole thing.

> At this point I wish someone would clone urbit, since the hatred for the founder seems to mean it'll never get traction no matter what it does or how it works.

Right, what I'm saying is, even cloned, Urbit's going to be a non-starter for a lot of people. Rigidly hierarchical, rent-seeking obscurantism isn't, uh, popular. I _do_ think Kelvin versioning is compelling though. TeX comes to mind there as an excellent example.

What is the current state of the web?

Rigidly hierarchical

All internet governing bodies wield absolute power. Most of the computing experience is completely controlled by a handful of global corporations that are more powerful than many nation states.

You don't control or have any influence over most of this.

Rent seeking

AWS, domain names, social networks? The web is rent-seeking at every level.

Obscurantism

Most of the code we use is worse than obscure, it's literally proprietary.

I would say these qualities are very popular today.

Sure. I think the important difference here is the web has _become_ this way; the things you point out are problems to be solved. Whereas, Urbit encodes these norms as a social good.