jlehman

Yes, it’ll be much easier to put the surveillance measures they’ve been trying so hard for into EU-based companies.

As annoying and ill-formed as your takes usually are, the central point of this one seems correct to me. Using an in-group reference on a page designed to onboard new people is probably ineffective, so thanks. We've removed that.

You've given zero justification for this assertion. Pointing to the years-absent founder's background and your personal speaking relationship with him (?), whom none of the people that worked on the content in the OP have EVER worked with, sounds like a straw man. At the very least it's lame reasoning.

Your central point is "A is a cult, because X is a characteristic of cults and A has X characteristic, therefore A is a cult." By that reasoning, all domains that have a need to use precise language to describe their concepts are cults. Like physics. Quark? Definitely a cult.

We shipped a proper mechanism for software distribution last October. If you haven't booted up since then you might want to. Discovery still requires word of mouth (but not for long...), but sharing them is now as simple as sharing a link in chat or punching something like the following into the Dojo.

|install ~dister-norsyr-torryn %canvas

edit: yes, there's an ecosystem of developers shipping software now. Here's a screenshot of my homescreen, which I cleaned up a couple of days ago to remove some apps I don't use often: https://imgur.com/7keFr7Y

Of the apps you can see, 13 were created by distinct developers. Some people are more prolific.

It has enough users to be useful now, which number in the thousands. It's also not a service that anyone maintains on behalf of others, so there's no one that needs to have a critical mass for it to be useful. Nearly everyone running Urbit is self-hosting locally or on some VPS somewhere, and they can do that indefinitely even if no more code was ever pushed.

If this kind of stuff made anyone want to throw in the towel Urbit wouldn't be a thing anymore. There's only a millstone around its neck on HN, but HN is gradually becoming more and more irrelevant. To our base and the people finding us, "I don't think about you at all" reflects their sentiment for HN conversations and the tenor of conversation that happens here.

I'm just here because someone told me (from within Urbit) that this post went up, it's Friday and I don't have as many meetings, and I couldn't resist myself. You seem fine though, so boot a comet and hit me up on the network if you want a planet or something to keep the conversation going.

Which part of my response do you read as asking for a litigation?

Ideas are cheap, and Urbit isn't just an idea any longer. It's a working system that's been built by dozens of people over the years, and it's only picking up steam.

In Ron Garrett's words:

> The mere fact that Urbit is still a thing, that it has not yet collapsed under the weight of its own intentionally induced baggage, is worrisome to me. Something is keeping that project alive, and it's not technical merit. I don't see a lot of viable options other than some kind of fanaticism.

Looks like he and his ilk are just wrong and having a hard time believing that. It's alive because an increasing number of people want it to be, and no amount of theorizing can deny the reality of actual growth — which, in case everyone forgot, is what the OP is showing.

> An especially admirable thing about the way Garrett has approached this mess is that he's managed, as far as I can tell, to reliably avoid taking the bait on the drama about the project's founder...

Well, your link shows that this statement is false:

> ...But Curtis is more than just a bad reinventor of things. He is also Mencius Moldbug, a prolific pseudo-intellectual influencer of the alt-right. His politics worry me much more than his coding style. And because of my personal dealings with him, I am not sanguine about his ability or that of his followers to separate the two.

It clearly colors his thinking, as he admits, to some degree.

For anyone out there that's not content outsourcing their views to a mob with a bone to pick:

Urbit is not intentionally obfuscated. It's intentionally different from the rest of the modern software stack, because that's the point. It makes sense that that would make it look obfuscated. There are claims out there that it was in fact intentionally obfuscated years ago in its early days as its founder's personal project. Maybe? Not sure. Regardless, things change and this project is over a decade old.

If you find the state of discourse here off-putting, malicious, and obviously ideological, like I do, and would rather see for yourself, I'm happy to onboard you to Urbit personally for free and show you what it's actually about.

Follow our Getting Started guide (https://urbit.org/getting-started), boot a comet for free, and send ~wolref-podlex a DM, and I'll get you a planet.

The views of an employee who left the company years ago and has been completely uninvolved since should hardly be treated as canon.

Disclaimer: I work on Urbit full-time.

There are some good write-ups on the technical decisions here:

https://urbit.org/blog/precepts https://urbit.org/blog/precepts-discussion

Funnily enough, most of the "mystique" isn't really intentional. It's that the inevitable "muh Curtis" arguments that always show up have discouraged many of the team from bothering to engage in explaining the project (here moreso than anywhere else) and instead focus on building the thing.

Summarization: Urbit is a reaction to Unix-driven software complexity that dominates modern software development. The thesis is that cascading complexity cannot be solved without a complete rewrite of the computing stack, and that goes all the way back to the operating system. Here's an even better summarization: https://twitter.com/pcmonk/status/1201298411011629063

Alternative summarization: the internet, being built on a hodgepodge stack of tooling that wasn't made for people to communicate the way that they actually do now, has major incidental flaws. Urbit is a completely rebuilt computing stack that better maps to what we want to do with networked computers. That involves things like, but not limited to baking a non-fungible, valuable identity into the networking layer.

This is another good summarization, although the sections after "Urbit ID" are out of date: https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit

Why would you think he spent a lot of effort? The second sentence literally says that he did not.

You mean "after spending just a few hours poking around it"? It's a big, ambitious project that's been worked on now for nearly two decades.

It seems more likely that you're disappointed by your understanding of the execution, which can be nothing but extremely limited.

Reminds me of this essay: http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html

Just reach out to [email protected] if you want to get this figured out. They're very helpful.

> He didn't understand how someone could have such disregard for the value of human life and democracy...

Maybe he hasn't heard about Tiananmen Square[1], since in China it never happened[2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...

I don't know who "centimeter" is and never claimed to agree with their viewpoints, so I'm not sure what the other viewpoint is that you're referring to.

The Chinese language looks extremely arcane to me, but that doesn't make it so. Quantum computing is pretty arcane-seeming too. Urbit probably seems arcane to those that know nothing about and haven't invested the time to learn. Fortunately, the docs are very good[1] and updated frequently[2]. They're also publicly available and lots of people[3] are working pretty hard to make them understandable.

Urbit is really welcoming to everyone, should they take a moment to ask about it. Here's[4] where you can find out how to get in and get set up. Here's a place where, earlier today, I offered a free planet to someone that asked[5]. And here's[6] what ended up happening.

[1] https://urbit.org/docs

[2] https://github.com/urbit/docs/commits/master

[3] https://github.com/urbit/docs/graphs/contributors

[4] https://urbit.org/using/install/

[5] https://twitter.com/cjremus/status/1334140349900611584

[6] https://twitter.com/cjremus/status/1334304210750464004

Really? How do you figure?

Canvas is pretty cool: https://github.com/yosoyubik/canvas

There's a bittorrent tracker you can read about on the mailing list too which is pretty neat.

There are a couple of folks working on supporting ship-to-ship bitcoin payments, which is very nearly to a working demo.

If you haven't been on in a while, Landscape (the web client that ships with Urbit) itself is also really awesome.

You should try out Urbit. I hear they have a community like that in there.

Apparently it's taken us ~30 years to come close[1] to this number of users on the current internet. Seems like not an issue for a very long time, and if it becomes one, it can be amended.

That said, anyone can get on Urbit for free as a comet. The only real limitations on comets are social in nature—not technological.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

The problem of the technological cage posed by reliance on cloud services is one of the reasons Urbit is being developed. It's a personal server that operates on a P2P network. You own your own data, and your messages are encrypted. It feels like a cloud service, except you own it completely.

The project has been in the works for over a decade. It works, has an active community, and is making rapid strides in functionality and stability. I'd know, because I use it every day. Here's a good primer on what Urbit is looking to create: https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-is-for-communities/

Many seem to like to whine about Urbit and claim that it's creating a kind of digital feudalism. Perhaps they think that what we currently have isn't that. I have no interest in engaging with those old and tired arguments, which is why I originally ignored them and looked into it myself. If you also like to think for yourself, let me know and I'll bring you onto the network.

A significant aspect of Urbit is its use of the Ethereum blockchain (called UrbitID), but not to produce any form of cryptocurrency—it's used to produce a form of cryptographic asset that more closely resembles property, since ownership of that asset (called a ship) confers value in the form of an identity within a network. DNS is to ICANN as UrbitID is to Ethereum. The regulatory aspect of who's who is decentralized rather than centralized.

Business models on Urbit don't really have to do with sale of ships though—they're finite and not meant for high-frequency trading. Business models that are emerging are more likely to involve providing services to users of the network, just as domain sales are a small fraction of the "business model" for the internet.

Whoa! This is great! My compliments to the author.

That concise, plain explanation exists in someone else's words four sentences into the above link:

"Urbit is a new OS and peer-to-peer network that’s simple by design, built to last forever, and 100% owned by its users. Under the hood, Urbit is a clean-slate software stack compact enough that an individual developer can understand and control it completely."

That's what it is. Concise and plain. Why re-explain something that's already well-written by another? Is following links and reading for half a minute too much to ask these days? If so, I'd suggest that the ask isn't very genuine.

The term "operating system" is far more precise than "fully featured"; in other words, the accretion of a certain number of features does not constitute "operating system" at some point.

From Wikipedia: "An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs."

It does that, which you can read about here: https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/arvo/arvo/

Whether it's hosted on top of Unix at the moment is beside the point.

"Urbit is a clean-slate OS and network for the 21st century."

The best way to get an idea is to read this series https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/. This is also a great high-level introduction that skips the more technical aspects: https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-for-normies/.

I'd try to explain more here, but I cannot do a better job at than they've already done.

Edit: Also, it's despised by many on ideological grounds due to its creator's (who is no longer affiliated with the project in any way) political views from a decade ago. I'm not going to comment on this any further, because it's a tired case (discussed in literally every other thread on HN about Urbit) and I find it quite petty.

As an active user (completely unaffiliated with Tlon), I can say that communities are truly booming on Urbit right now. Their newly released OS1 is pleasant to use and quite functional. The discourse in the many notebooks and chats I'm a part of is lively and engaging. If you're curious, boot[1] a comet[2] and message me at ~wolref-podlex—I'd be happy to set you up with a planet.

[1] https://urbit.org/using/install/

[2] https://urbit.org/using/operations/creating-a-comet/