Yeah. How much of your system runs GNU? (Rhetorical question.) Stallman isn’t less politically charged than Yarvin, even before the recent comments; the difference is that Stallman leaned left, which is more accepted in the affluent intellectually-oriented minds of software people
I don’t think it’s accurate to describe Stallman as a libertarian. As far as I’m aware, he describes himself as a socialist and holds non-free-software-related political views that are generally consistent with the left wing of American politics, including fiscally. Many of his views on software freedom are consistent with some strains of libertarianism, but I think it’s ultimately a limitation of the “left-right” metaphor when talking about political beliefs to describe him as otherwise socially left, fiscally right.
I don’t know if he does. I remember reading an essay by him claiming that free software is not socialist, but I can’t find it right now. I think is more likely that he regards himself as more in the classical liberal tradition.
I was wondering how long it would be before someone would chime in with this tired bit of commentary.
Every comment you’ve left in this thread has been inflammatory and off-topic. The Urbit guy wrote some things you don’t like. We get it. The weird thing to me is the most hysterical people who constantly yell at those they deem right-wing also have funny ideas about when prejudice is acceptable, i.e., punching down vs punching up, power dynamics, etc. How much authority or power do you think CY/MM has?
This is a horrendously boring topic, and you have made this forum a more boring place for having brought it up. Please just stop. Let’s focus on technology.
The piece of technology was founded by someone with very strong visions as to what society should be, which means that in the software, there are design decisions being made to align with this. In this case, there’s a very strange belief in a feudalistic system where - even if the names were changed from lords/dukes/etc. to galaxies/planets/etc. - this influence still exists in the software. I believe it bears mentioning.
Yep. He’s said some horrendous things and excluded a lot of people. I have no interest in this project if it can’t bring itself to align with the values of the community.
Kind of seems like it has, though? Or at least they kicked him out and erased his name from their public intro, probably other places. I guess it’s down to who exactly you mean by “the” community.
To me the style of this seems incredibly pretentious (esp with the whole MEGACORP and whatnot)
There’s also basically no technical information about how they plan to accomplish this absolute ubiquity with logging into any computer using it, buying a coffee with it, etc… These sort of things require incredibly widespread adoption and I really don’t think this pipedreamy project is ever going to reach that.
Also, the moment they started talking about blockchain/ethereum I lost interest. The whole purpose of blockchain is, from what I can tell, a totally public immutable database, effectively. I really don’t want every bit of my digital life in some system that I can’t wipe it from.
The only way I think this would seem worse is if they were hyping some token they wanted people to invest in.
Some other things:
According to their blog - “Urbit … includes money as a native service”
Why should an OS have anything to do with money?
“Creating a new sound currency, however is not our goal; Bitcoin has already done that.”
Ethereum is only used to assign IDs. All the rest of the data is stored in a file system. As for technical info, everything is open source https://github.com/urbit
“Imagine that you can login from anywhere with one simple, memorable name and password. And when you do, an entire OS appears for you. Inside is your whole digital life.”
So if it’s just stored in a filesystem, how is it distributed to anywhere you can log in?
So now I have to set up a server? Either by paying for a VPS (on a computer I don’t own, going against the whole concept…) or set it up so my own home computer acts as a server? So now I have to expose my home network to the internet, go through all the trouble of setting that all up…
Yeah no thanks. If they want their shit to be the “way of the future” they better have it more ironed out than this.
The whole point of Urbit is to make it as easy to setup a personal cloud as it is to setup iOS. You don’t have to do any Linux sysadmin stuff, you just run Urbit and it does all the networking and security and updates etc. All of this is explained in the documentation. It’s a work in progress and it’s not quite push-button yet, but it’s getting there and it’s already better than any alternative.
Suppose you set up urbit for the first time on your local PC and use it for a while. Let’s say you create a document in your part of the (virtual) urbit filesytem.
Now, throw that PC away and get a new one. Don’t back up anything except your urbit credentials or keys or whatever.
Reinstall urbit, log in. Wait for it to sync. Look, there’s your document.
I’ve heard something about hypothetical “urbit hosting” as a service in the future. That would get you out of the VPS/personal PC requirement.
This is my obligatory statement regarding how the people behind urbit rub me the wrong way. The basic idea behind their plan to make their distributed system popular is novel and appealing, though. They have made low-level stuff available first–arcane toys that only the most elite hobbyists can even assemble, much less build anything with. Then, when abstraction and convenience layers are built over that, they release those and make the documentation a little more mainstream.. They’re building from the bottom up, rather than trying to make a web 2.0 shiny 30mb javascript monstrosity and sell it directly to muggles. They recognize that old computers and networks weren’t accessible to the uninitiated, and those systems took over the world. I worry about these people.
Also, all the names they give for everything make me want to gag. It all sounds like wannabe-Sci-Fi names for stuff. Behn, Eyre, Gall, Jael, Arvo, Hoon, Nock, Vere… come on.
Imagine that you can login from anywhere with one simple, memorable name and password. And when you do, an entire OS appears for you. Inside is your whole digital life. Every conversation you’ve ever had, all your biometric data — every step and heartbeat. Your personal mesh of devices: your doors, your car, your irrigation. All of your communities, every message you’ve shared with friends and family. Every connection you’ve made and every archival piece of data, in one place. Secure and private, forever.
Wow, no. Hell to the no.
(Am I understanding correctly that this vast quantity of sensitive information would be stored in a public blockchain, protected only by non-quantum-safe encryption?)
To me it’s clear that the last 3 billion to sign up are considered non-people by the design of the system. They don’t deserve to participate as equals - they must act as servants or sharecroppers to the 4 billion “planet” addresses for access to Urbit.
Currently the feudal lords of the internet are Zuck, Dorsey, etc. Urbit’s aim is to move users’ data from centralized servers at Facebook/Twitter datacenters into somewhere you personally control. The network governance is modeled after a republic, so it’s actually an improvement from what we have currently. And Yarvin is no longer part of the project, any of his philosophy has been stripped from Urbit (if it was ever there to begin with).
And Yarvin is no longer part of the project, any of his philosophy has been stripped from Urbit (if it was ever there to begin with).
The fundamental idea of Urbit (buried under the slick marketing, and the weird esoteric programming language) is digital scarcity - replicating the scarcity of physical land on this planet in cyberspace.[1] Once the system is up and running, those that control the land can extract rents, or exclude those under them from occupying land they control, or entering strategic partnerships with other land owners… this is where Yarvin/Moldbug’s ideals of “digital feudalism” are expressed.
“Normal” ideals of cyberspace assume that scarcity has no place there - stuff like information and software can be replicated endlessly at very little marginal cost. Urbit explicitely rejects this.
Now, I don’t have a problem with this concept intellectually. People have different ideals and projects for the future of digital governance. But hackers interested in contributing to Urbit should understand the trade-offs they would be making, as opposed to contributing to a more “mainstream” project.
[1] this is anologous to Bitcoin being considered “digital gold”.
ICANN is insufficiently regulated and holds an artificial monopoly. There’s no technical limitation to prevent everyone on earth having their own TLDEdit apparently there is a hard-coded character limit to the TLD. That said, I welcome competition in this space and would like to see ICANN lose its monopoly.
Facebook and Twitter identities are not artificially limited de facto - the services are awash in bots.
And in any case, I stated the following:
[…] I don’t have a problem with this concept intellectually. People have different ideals and projects for the future of digital governance.
I just wish that people pushing Urbit would be honest about the project’s ultimate goals.
I would assume, though, that Yarvin must be a Galaxy owner, giving him explicit power over what gets built and who gets added to the Urbit network.
The whole situation with Galaxies in general is problematic: it seems like they’re designed to lock in power over the network to 256 people, and there is no sanctioned way to transfer that power if the ruler does not want to give up their key. This is what people mean by “baking in” his philosophy into the design of Urbit.
Galaxies can change hands like any other cryptographic asset. It just hasn’t been tried yet (afaik). Galaxies have power like ISPs have power, that doesn’t stop you from switching ISPs or running stuff on your own computer.
More importantly, though, it’s not like there’s any hard reason you can’t have more ISPs. The internet is built to accommodate any number of them, it’s only the fact that it’s expensive that’s preventing competition.
Same with social networks today: there’s not much reason you can’t operate your own, and many people do, through Mastodon and the like. It’s only market forces that keep people on the small number of dominant networks.
Meanwhile in Urbit, it’s specifically designed such that a limited group of 256 people have dominion over everyone in the system. This group of people cannot be removed or competed against within the bounds of the system unless you convince them to sell their assets.
For a system that’s aiming to replace all computing, that’s a scary prospect.
And that’s only assuming that only one person will own each galaxy: we could easily see power consolidation via existing galaxy owners buying other galaxies.
Much as this page is getting high and mighty about the MEGACORP, I don’t see it as a preferable alternative.
In any one location, likely no. Across the entire world, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if the number greatly exceeds 256, especially if you count cell phone service providers.
Urbit, in contrast, is intended to be a global system, and has a hard limit of 256 leaders for all people on their system.
After seeing everyone start to gush over this for the past couple days I was legitimate wondering if this was the same project as the one I remember being described as ‘digital feudalism’.
This is a plain attempt for a few people to solidify their power over the next iteration of web technologies so I think it is absolutely legitimate to call out their philosophy (which, again some people in this thread are saying isn’t relevant). This is a power structure we can still opt-out of, and I’m inclined to do so.
So when they say « you can login from anywhere with one simple, memorable name and password », where is the « one place » that data is streaming down from?
Wait, this implies that if your server is destroyed, you lose data. That’s incorrect, right? Everything in your server (node) is also stored across other nodes, and your node helps store other people’s data, right? Did I get this wrong?
Afaik there is no replication currently, but you could certainly create an Urbit app that does the replication across certain machines. It would be a lot easier to make in Urbit than Linux because the network stack is tightly integrated with the rest of the programming environment.
That seems like an extremely important thing to have mentioned in the first page or two, floating at least somewhere in all the Glorious Future marketing talk. -.-
From the way they talk about all this, it seems like they want it to last for an incredibly long time, they make it sound like they want it to last literally thousands+ years.
Sounds like the 4B limit isn’t really up to the task of lasting thousands of years and becoming an extremely widespread standard for computing.
I like the sleek presentation style, and I see the appeal of decentralised social networking software. My values don’t necessarily align with the values of a few Californian individuals who have managed to politick their way into a position of immense power.
As a layman however, the following sentence worries me (emphasis my own):
Your Urbit is a permanent, private archive.
I’m not comfortable with the idea of a permanent record for social data. How would I then disown the moody poetry I wrote as a 13 year old? Will it haunt me forever?
I’m a bit disappointed that the interviewer didn’t mention a single question regarding addiction or any ethical dimension. It’s kind of been assumed that not liking pornography is just a conservative, right-wing thing, but I don’t think that’s correct. I personally perceive it to be pushing harmful stereotypes (both as in what women should look like, or how intimacy should look like), and then there’s the problem with trafficking, and never knowing what’s actually going on behind the scenes. Chomsky says it well.
Setting aside things like these, which should be enough to say something isn’t right, but knowing the digital world (where creating addictions has become a common and often even necessary business model) reading
you have to be clever to innovate at the bleeding edge of the web.
makes me somewhat uneasy. Especially a front end developer should have to think about these questions. They are the ones tasked with creating “seamless experiences”, ultimately, disregarding the influence it has on people’s daily and personal life’s. I don’t think the interviewer should have just glossed over this. YouTube has hateful or harmful videos, but their raison d’être isn’t hosting them. PornHub will have it a bit harder that hosting and spreading pornography isn’t a big part of what they are.
From the technical perspective it’s somewhat interesting, I guess. It’s about the problems of high-demand video streaming, probably above the level of most other video sites, but still way below sites like YouTube. That’s like having an interview with a slaveholder on what kind of whips they have found to have the best quality CIA agent on what the best strategies are to manipulate a foreign election.
Edit: Rewrote a few sentences to avoid confusion, and replaced my analogy with a different one.
I’m a bit disappointed that the interviewer didn’t mention a single question regarding addiction or any ethical dimension.
Porn has been around a really long time. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing new to be discovered or discussed almost anywhere on earth on the topic, much less here.
Like, the human race has brute-forced about every part of that solution space we can. There is not a dirty thought we can have that hasn’t occurred to scores of other people at one point in history or another–of this I’m certain.
Not in the way it is now, as an endless torrent on demand. Modern porn has demonstrably changed society in ways that ancient porn did not. For example, women now believe that pubic hair is unclean and as a result of excessive pubic hair removal are getting health problems that pubic hair can prevent.
Also, just being around forever does not categorise something as innocuous or beneficial.
Hairstyles have been coming and going in fads ever since we left the trees and discovered hair can be cut and washed. Having this apply also to pubic hair is not exactly a huge change.
Quantity acquires a quality of its own, you know. Not to mention that quality is altogether different as well: 4K video isn’t the same as a blurry black and white photo. There’s a strange blindness to this effect in the tech industry, whether it comes to social media, endless tsunami of content on Netflix, or indeed porn. Much like Facebook’s idea that more communication is unconditionally better has backfired spectacularly, maybe it’s the same with porn. And then of course there’s also all the engineered “engagement” in all these areas. Don’t be so quick to say it’s all totally harmless.
I’m a bit disappointed that the interviewer didn’t mention a single question regarding addiction or any ethical dimension.
The audience is web developers wanting to read something interesting about web development at a big company. They also want most of them to enjoy the article. Talking about the damage they might be doing doesn’t serve either purpose. Most would’ve just clicked the little X or otherwise moved on.
There’s been a lot of good writing on that subject for anyone looking for it. The key words are easy to guess.
You’re kinda circling back to the same point. Yes, talking about ethical implications of our jobs is hard, and uncomfortable, but it’s necessary. Of course nost people don’t want to do it, off course most people don’t want to read about it. But it’s our responsibility to talk and to read about those things. “I don’t like doing it” is not a valid excuse for not doing something it’s your responsibility to do.
That said, the comparison with slavery is a bit out of place, imo.
You’re doing that trick many people do here where it becomes all or nothing in every post, forum, etc. The stress of introspecting on these topics make many people do it at certain times and read relaxing content at other times. They’re fine splitting it up. Dare I’d say most people prefer that based on that simply being most popular way content is done online.
Then, other people think they should be mentally engaged on these topics at all times in all articles, forums, etc due to their importance. They also falsely accuse people of not caring about social responsibilities if they don’t discuss them in every article where they might come into play. You must be in that group. Author of the original post and their audience is not. Hence, the separation of concerns that lets readers relax just focusing about web tech before optionally engaging with hard realities of life at another time in another article.
This isn’t a “what if my open source library was used by some military”-kind of question, I think that there is a much stronger connection between the two. Front end design is related to user behaviour, and I still consider this relation to be a technical question (UI design, user protection, setting up incentives, …).
If the interviewer had asked these questions, and the interviewee had chosen not to comment, that would have been something, but the article currently just brushes it away affront by saying “ Regardless of your stance on pornography, …”.
I’m a bit disappointed that the interviewer didn’t mention a single question regarding addiction or any ethical dimension
A tech-related, Lobsters-worthy discussion of the topic would focus on how they collected user behavior, analyzed it, measured whether they were reaching their goals, strategized for how to achieve them, and specific methods of influence with associated payoffs. It would actually be more Barnacles-like since marketing is behind a lot of that. These technical and marketing techniques are politically-neutral in that they are used by many companies to measure and advance a wide range of goals, including pornography consumption. They could be discussed free-standing with little drama if the focus was really on the technology.
You were doing the opposite. That quote is an ethical question, even says so, where you have political views about pornography consumption, you wanted theirs explored, and you might have had some goal to be achieved with that. The emotional language in the rest of your post further suggested this wasn’t about rational analysis of a technology stack. You also didn’t care what the writer or any of their readers thought about that. So, I countered representing the majority of people who just wanted to read about a web stack. A mix that either doesn’t care about ethics of porn or does with it being a depressing topic they want to handle at another time.
I was on 2nd cup of coffee when you wanted me to be thinking about lives being destroyed instead of reading peaceful and interesting things easier to wake up to. Woke up faster in a different way. Oh well. Now, I’m off this drama to find a Thursday submission in my pile.
A tech-related, Lobsters-worthy discussion of the topic would focus on how they collected user behavior, analyzed it, measured whether they were reaching their goals, strategized for how to achieve them, and specific methods of influence with associated payoffs.
I think these kinds of things were missing from the article. I know this isn’t the place to discuss pornography, and I try not to go into it in the comments. What I just brought up was a disappointment in the style and focus of the interview, and it being one-sided.
The emotional language in the rest of your post further suggested this wasn’t about rational analysis of a technology stack.
Well I do think it’s important, so I apologize for being a tad emotional. But other than what I wrote, I don’t have anything else to contribute. I neither run nor plan to run a streaming site, so I end up not having too strong opinions on what is being used in the backend stack ^^.
A mix that either doesn’t care about ethics of porn or does with it being a depressing topic they want to handle at another time.
I understand that, that’s why I prefixed my top comment with what you quoted. I furthermore feel obligated to apologise if anyone had to go through any inconvenience thinking about the “ethics of porn” because of my comment, I guess? No but seriously, bringing up a concern like this, which I explicitly tried to link back to a technical question, should be ok.
“I furthermore feel obligated to apologise if anyone had to go through any inconvenience thinking about the “ethics of porn” because of my comment, I guess? No but seriously, bringing up a concern like this, which I explicitly tried to link back to a technical question, should be ok.”
There’s quite a few people here that are OK with it. I’m not deciding that for anyone. I just had to remind you that caring people who want a break in some places exist and that you do more good by addressing the porn problem where it’s at. I appreciate you at least considering the effect on us.
“I neither run nor plan to run a streaming site”
The main problem is consumer side where there’s mass demand following by all types of supply and clever ways to keep people hooked. You can’t beat that since they straight-up want it. What you might do is work on profiles for porn sites with tools such as NoScript that make them usable without the revenue-generating ads. Then, lots of people push for their use. If there’s any uptake, they get a temporary hit in their wallet but maybe an offset with ad-free Premium. I’m not sure the effectiveness. I just know they’re an ad model with tools existing to attack that.
Griping about it on technical sites won’t change anything because… most viewers aren’t on technical sites and those that are rarely changed. So, it’s just noise. Gotta work on porn laws, labor protections for those involved, ethical standards in industry itself, ad blocking, etc.
If you would like to discuss the ethical aspects go to a different forum. I would rrecommend the community around Thaddeus Russell’s podcast for a critical and reasoned take from people that actually interact with sex workers https://www.thaddeusrussell.com/podcast/2
I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, but I’m not here to discuss the ethical aspects, not am I in a position to be able to. My comments are related to the interviewer and his choice of questions.
Your gave opinions, stated as scare-hints without support:
“then there’s the problem with trafficking,”
“which should be enough to say something isn’t right,”
… and then based upon the now well-built pretext that porn “isn’t right” (and is therefore ethically ‘wrong’) - you commented on what the interviewer should have done - i.e. they should have had the same opinions and conceptions as yourself - and they should have turned the interview into one about ethics.
The interview was interesting to read, because of the info about the tech. As bsima says, please take ethical discussion elsewhere.
As you said, I prefixed the controversial parts by saying that it was my opinion. But I don’t think that the interviewer must have shared my views. The point I was raising was that I thought it wasn’t appropriate for the interview to just ignore a quite relevant topic, since this was about PornHub specifically, not their parent company.
IMO, a just final question like
“What are you doing to enforce age restrictions?”
or
“Due to recent reports, do you think that doing something against pornography addiction among younger generations can be tackled technically or does it need more (social) effort?”
would have been more than enough, as to just show this is being considered. I’m not a journalist, so I don’t know how these questions could be phrased better, but I hope you do get my point.
Looking at this thread, I didn’t respond to people who started talking about the harmfulness of pornography or the lack thereof. This even though I would like to – yet I understand that it is off topic. In fact most of this sub-thread has been more about the meta-discussion.
All I can say is that I will be more careful not be too provoke these kinds of discussions in the future. I was thinking critically a lot about the topic the last few months, so my comment might not have been as neutral as some might have wished.
My analogy is that the direct consequences of technical questions are being more or less ignored, which I think is fair in both questions. Of course it’s not identical, but that’s stylistic devices for you.
I could come up with quite a few objections to pornography, but the chap in your video link is not only not convincing, he is also hinting that he watches porn even though he denies it. He backs up his statement “porn is degrading to women” by qualifying “just look at it” which implies that he does that enough to have an opinion.
Atlas of a lost world by Craig Childs was so great. Lovely writing and great info about our Native American ancestors, pairs nicely with the book 1491 (cant remember the author). I haven’t read Sapians but I imagine these two books cover the same ground (at least in the Western Hemisphere) without as much cult-like following.
Now I’m reading “we are all completely beside ourselves” by Karen joy fowler, recommended by a friend with whom I drink wine and talk about life with. So I’m expecting this to be a good book.
I most recently finished Metamorphosis by Kafka. I read it on my kindle whilst in the queue to go up the Church of our Savior in Copenhagen. I tend to read multiple books at once so to start and finish a book in a single sitting was pretty unusual but worth it.
Just before that I finished Random Acts of Heroic Love, which I thought was beautifully written.
I’m currently reading through Augustine’s Confessions, Wittgenstein by David Pears, Singer’s Animal Liberation, and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
I’m also working through K&R’s The C Programming Language. Next in my backlog is Jeeves in the Offing by Wodehouse and Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks.
I read Birdsong a couple of years ago and would recommend it. I found the first part pretty hard going: it read like an over-wrought romance novel, but the rest of it was great, if somewhat haunting.
Yeah, I got given it as a birthday present last year, but have had so much else to read I haven’t managed it yet. During high school we had to analyse part of it, and had the kind of English teacher who would encourage everyone to read it and then explain the whole plot, giving the majority of the class no reason to read it. Since then I’ve planned to, but never quite got around to it.
I definitely intend to, although I’ve got a significant backlog of physical books and epubs to read first. Unfortunately I just caused a bit of an issue for myself by accidentally sitting on my Kindle, so a lot of my epubs I won’t be able to read for a fair bit longer (no way am I reading a book on a backlit screen) - so if I can find a cheap physical copy, I might be reading it sooner!
Me too :( gonna have to takevto ebay rather than buy direct though, because I maintain that the models past the Kindle 4 (aka all the touchscreen ones) don’t feel right.
A github fork is a convenient UI over git’s branches.
You create your own personal copy of the repository and the github platform does some configuration that allows you to use their nice UI for allowing them to merge your branch/changes even if you don’t have write access to the project. They have a nice UI for doing the commentary and reviews etc.
Nothing says you have to use this. You can do bare git stuff, ask for write permissions, push your changes etc. etc.
This post is complaining that github adds a value - for most users - by giving them a easy to use UI over git.
The article is mostly about how github has overloaded the term ‘fork’, giving it the same meaning as a traditional personal repo copy. Forking a project, as the article mentions, is taking it and giving it new life as something else, without necessarily contributing changes back to the original repo (article gives the example of the ffmpeg –> libva forking).
Github is taking well-established terminology and giving it new meaning in their proprietary platform, which causes confusion.
The article is mostly about how github has overloaded the term ‘fork’, giving it the same meaning as a traditional personal repo copy.
It’s somewhat difficult to take this complaint seriously considering the article then proceeds to do the exact same thing by using the term “branch” to mean “clone of a git repo” instead of the already existing meaning of “branch within a git repo”.
Either pedantry over terminology is a big deal or it isn’t (my take is that it really isn’t), but the author needs to pick a lane.
Your application of branch is too specific and tied to the idea of a canonical upstream repository. Cloning is the process of creating a local branch which mirrors a remote branch. The end result is still a branch.
Your application of branch is too specific and tied to the idea of a canonical upstream repository.
Not at all, it’s merely tied to the semantics of git, the DVCS under discussion here.
Cloning is the process of creating a local branch which mirrors a remote branch.
Cloning creates a local copy of a remote repository and (typically, unless you do some things to restrict it) all branches within it. Creating a local branch which mirrors a remote branch is not a clone operation, it’s a git fetch —track.
It’s incorrect to describe a fetch as a clone. It’s incorrect to describe a repository as a branch. These are all distinct concepts in git, with different semantics, regardless of whether or not your development model involves a canonical upstream or not.
I’m definitely simplifying things a lot, and I appreciate your clarifications. But my point is that you end up with your own “master” branch, which is discrete from the other branch. The repo is just a container for that branch, no matter where you have it pushed. The key distinction between your repo and the other repo is the branch you’re doing your work on. Thus, I think branch is a valid term to use here.
Which possibly is an over load of “forking processes”, which possibly is a overload of the term “fork” meaning a thing with multiple prongs. “clone-ing” a repository relates to “A clone” of something and so on. Language is malleable.
Github forks allow you to neatly merge back to what you forked from. Again, you don’t need to use this. I think this is just a bad argument.
I think it’s easier to understand the implicit criticism by wondering about how Github would have been if it wasn’t based around forking a project to contribute to it. Currently the data that is used to create a pull request – in addition to the reference to which you want to contribute changes – is the name of your personal fork, and of the branch you want to send.
Now if forks were not pervasive, how would people be able to contribute to projects on github? Well, either they would have to indicate the URL of a full git somewhere (and a branch name), or they would submit to github a series of patch (by sending an email, or by uploading git format-patch files, etc.).
Those two models are not much harder to implement than the current forking model, and/but they immediately make github a partially federated platform, making it easy to contribute to a github-hosted project without yourself being on github or hosting your personal working copy on github.
You can see how that is not much less convenient for users, and how it makes it much easiers for users to migrate to another platform.
Personally I’m not at all surprised that github is not interested in supporting these less-centralized workflows, but I am a bit disappointed that Gitlab has not yet invested much effort in supporting them. Contrarily to github, there are many instances of Gitlab (the free version) around, and merge-requests-across-instances would be directly useful to me today. In fact, there are some instances that I avoid using specifically because they restrict account creation (or creation of new projects for untrusted users), which kills collaboration in a fork-centric model. (See gitlab issues #4013, #260, patch by email #40830).
Now if forks were not pervasive, how would people be able to contribute to projects on github? Well, either they would have to indicate the URL of a full git somewhere (and a branch name), or they would submit to github a series of patch (by sending an email, or by uploading git format-patch files, etc.).
But “Github forks” being pervasive does absolutely nothing to prevent you from continuing to do just this?
Unless the complaint here is “if I email a patch to a maintainer, they complain that it’s a PITA to deal with and ask me to just submit a PR”, in which case…
You can see how that is not much less convenient for users
I’ve worked in both models, I strongly disagree.
Federation is great. Emailing patches around sucks a ton.
I agree. However, after thinking about it a bit, @gasche’s comment made me wonder about a word where github supplied a “git-format-patch-pr” – similar to emailing patches, but which instead uploaded patches to github from a local branch into some ephemeral PR specific location. All this instead of having to create a fork and open a PR.
The Phabricator workflow is pretty similar to what you’re describing: you can use arc to upload patches from a local branch. Or just paste diff output into a web form without even committing anything :D
I like this workflow so much, but I couldn’t convince my co-workers of its qualities, because they (understandably) get uneasy about the fact that patches don’t have a clear “target” – and they can mean different things depending on what they are applied to. (If anyone has a suggestion for a solution for this, please contact me.)
(So instead they keep using Bitbucket and adopt all kinds of terrible practises for the only reason that doing the right thing is made highly inconvenient by bitbucket.)
I agree. However, after thinking about it a bit, @gasche’s comment made me
wonder about a word where github supplied a “git-format-patch-pr” – similar to
emailing patched, but which instead uploaded patches to github from a local
branch into some ephemeral PR specific location.
I wonder if it would be considered rude to simply attach a patch to the
relevant github issue..? Or link to a patch stored on a paste service
like ix.io? You can add to github issues over email, so with this method
you could sort-of submit patches over email, bypassing the whole PR
interface.
A github fork is a convenient UI over git’s branches
Not in my experience. It usually consists of:
Patch my clone
Try to push
Get permission denied, since I forgot that I don’t “own” the remote
Go to the GitHub page
“Fork” the repo
Edit .git/config, or try to remember what the git remote commands are, to change origin to my “fork” (I usually keep the previous remote as upstream, since my “fork” will inevitably fall behind and need regular pulling and pushing)
Try to push again
Go back to GitHub and use the “pull request” UI
Add a comment to the pull request that links it back to the “issue” that caused me to make the change
Try to keep track of both threads of conversation, until the patch gets merged
Have a small existential crisis as I debate whether to delete this “fork”, to cut down the hundreds of repos I have to wade through; or whether I should be a good Netizen and preserve the URLs.
Afaik you don’t have to change the upstream, you can just say git push <alternate upstream>. I might be wrong about that, though; might be confusing it with git pull. Also, afaik deleting the ‘fork’ is standard practice; you aren’t really contributing to linkrot that way, because you’re not erasing any content, and no one is linking to such a fork.
To be clear, I still think the github pull request ui is awful, but ^^^ is my understanding of how it works.
Indeed, git push takes either a URL or remote name as its first numbered argument. Sometimes if I need to make a quick push to a remote I don’t use commonly, I’ll just detach HEAD, make commit/s, then git push git@wherever:whatever.git HEAD:remote-branch.
Gmail should white-list any email with a good PGP signature at the SMTP
level. In fact all SMTP servers should do this. This seems not difficult
to implement - certainly no more difficult than a massive RL spam
algorithm - and would mostly solve the problem of blocking individual
hackers running their own servers since those people (myself included)
tend to sign all their emails anyway. This is how the “Web of Trust” is
supposed to function, right?
The same as “blocking misconfigured SPF prevents spam” : spammers are too lazy to setup the full stack… Until they do.
But this gives you an indicator of what mail can be trusted, and the user would add up email to its “confidence list” and get to a special all-whitelisted inbox :
Mail from people we know (whitelist them), automated notifications (whitelist them), mailing lists (whitelist them) or spammers (in greylist).
SMTP would then never block any whitelisted email.
The problem is to make a difference between the not-yet-known-sender mail and the spam.
This is not how it is imenented though… From the user point of view, just a blacklist rather than white/grey/black-list.
No control over what’s in, just to add more things among what’s out.
In brief: one group of computational linguists developed text-generation
software called SCIgen that writes computer-science papers; they’re in the
right form, have grammatical sentences, but are nonsense. Labbé and Labbé
built their own computational-linguistic system to detect SCIgen papers and
discovered there are quite a lot of them in published computer-science
conference proceedings. There was subsequently a piece in Nature about the
retraction by publishers of some of these papers: see https://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763
I’ve worked almost the full stack, from enterprise cloud databases to web apps. Looking for something high level and challenging, perhaps a startup. I’m really flexible. I like functional programming too, Haskell and Clojure mostly.
I don’t really care to what extent Yarvin is a cryptofascist (he might be) or a windbag (he is) or if he should learn to trim down his writing (he should).
No, no, I want to complain specifically about his technology. Because that’s why we’re here: to discuss technology.
To me, this language looks like an unfortunate cross-breeding of Scheme, J, and a dash of diff syntax for good measure.
The official way to pronounce Hoon characters is awkward. Further, the name for the different structures in the language–“wing”, “cell”, “tall rune”, “flat rune”, “gate”, “face’. It feels needlessly obtuse.
The C [source] for Urbit makes choices that I don’t really approve of:
There’s an elaborate reasoning for ignoring stdint (it’s too long to type). There’s the use of kitchen-sink headers. There’s the lack of include guards or pragmas.
And lastly, there’s the fact that a lot of dependencies are kinda farming all the interesting OS work out. Like, I’d be really impressed by a bootable distribution of Urbit, but they kinda skipped that.
Let’s talk about those things, not whatever it is moldbug is up to.
The thing I dislike the most about hoon and the whole urbit system is how it revels in using unfamiliar names and syntax for everything. I don’t really buy the “late binding” argument they give, and given Yarvin’s oversized ego I’d be more inclined to believe that the renaming of things is just to make it look foreign and to steal ideas and still give himself credit for them.
I’m not great at hoon but the type system is very similar to clojure’s spec, except built into the compilation and every level of the rest of the system. I think it’s a great idea and wish I had more time to study it.
Hoon is the higher level language Tlon is committed to developing, and given the scarcity of resources and everything else about the system Tlon is committed to developing it makes sense they will not develop any other language.
The community (this is an OSS project, after all) can still develop a transpiler from any other language.
How does this relate to the deflating crypto bubble? Urbit seems to rely on Ethereum, but to what extent is blockchain/crypto-currencies fundamental to it?
Urbit uses Ethereum to encode who owns which assets (“Azimuth points”). Other than that, Urbit does not rely on any blockchains/cryptocurrencies. However you could, for example, store your bitcoin wallet keys in your Urbit.
Based on reading the above comments, there’s a reason for that. I don’t understand it either, and it would seem that its author didn’t optimize for accessibility :)
Urbit’s innovations have stood in the dark shadow of moldbug’s neofeudalist writings. Every time Urbit comes up in conversations among crypto people here in Berlin, someone in the group says “but have you looked at what Curtis wants the world to look like?” and then the subject changes.
I think it’s good for the project that people can say “yeah but he’s gone now, what do you think about the ___ mechanism?” since there are some interesting ideas to examine in there. They built everything from scratch. A VM, a language, a filesystem, etc etc etc…
But still, this is kind of like if Terry had stepped away from TempleOS.
The whole concept as I understand it seems pretty interesting, but come on - the entire ecosystem of Urbit is still absurd. Hoon, the weird new pronunciation scheme you have to learn, the obtuse naming schemes…
I found the weird names annoying as well, but Curtis does come up with a valid reason for this, in that everything gets rewritten and refactored multiple times, so “…it lets the hard problem of naming get solved later, and hence better.” As the system gets more mature, and actually usable, it would be nice if they came up with some meaningful names for the bigger components (e.g. rename Ford to Build System).
He also admits his biggest mistake was assigning 1 to false and 0 to true. I’m sure this was a result of his habitual contrariness.
Every time Urbit comes up in conversations among crypto people here in Berlin, someone in the group says “but have you looked at what Curtis wants the world to look like?” and then the subject changes.
And I find this quite baffling. It’s deeply disappointing that people whom I respect default to this gossip-driven analysis instead, that a project as ambitious and worthy as Urbit gets buried in “foogate” style rumors.
Urbit is fascinating. It is the only project I know of designed to address distributed problems (viz. community moderation, censorship, identity, ownership) from an incentive-based approach instead of the typical GNU-style “sheer will and religion” approach.
Since Curtis apparently wants the world to be in a certain manner and more or less spun up his own world in Urbit, maybe it’s prudent to consider what Curtis’ opinions on things are before adopting the project that likely embodies them?
I’m not sure myself, but in a project like this, it may be hard to meaningfully separate creator and creation - even after the creator left (as the fundamental architecture is still shaped in his image).
I think the new primer https://urbit.org/primer/ makes a good case that there is nothing actually feudal about Urbit in practical terms. Once you own a planet, the personal level of Urbit entity, you are free to have its traffic routed by any star, the network routing level, that will accept you. This could be a problem it Facebook or some government buys up every star in the system, which is unlikely for the foreseeable future.
Of which there will be - by design (“Any reputation system needs scarcity of identity.”) - fewer than there are people on this planet right now (4 billion in total). Given how these systems work, it will be interesting to reclaim “lost” ones, reducing supply even further over time.
Will everybody else be a sharecropper? Or will they have to spin up their own network?
Now these identities can be subpartitioned (“moons”, again 2^32, and they’re bound to their “planet”), but if global network size doesn’t matter, why setup such limits in the first place? This isn’t the 1970’s anymore (as they correctly state in their marketing material).
This could be a problem it Facebook or some government buys up every star in the system
They merely need to control the galaxies: “The galaxies form a senate which updates the logic of the Ethereum land registry by majority vote”. The platform doesn’t seem to design elections for this “senate” into the platform.
“Tlon remains the guardian of the urbit.org galaxies. We have always wanted the address space to be widely distributed.” - address space, yes. But Tlon owns the right to repartition the entire platform as they “bought back” galaxies. Even if you “own” a planet, that’s only one of Tlon’s decisions away from not being yours anymore.
Since control over your data is bound to a planet, which is contingent of (at some point) a galaxy “sponsoring” you, and they can make up all the rules, it looks like just the same kind of sharecropping to me as any of the big vendor-lock platforms that make up the modern internet. Just with more obscure ownership.
This is just dishonest. The “rules” are voted on by a senate, the same way the rules of the internet are voted on by the IEEE currently.
Tlon owns the right to repartition the entire platform as they “bought back” galaxies. Even if you “own” a planet, that’s only one of Tlon’s decisions away from not being yours anymore.
False. Owning Urbit addresses is like owning a bitcoin wallet. Tlon can’t take it away from you any more than Satoshi can.
(edit:)
if global network size doesn’t matter, why setup such limits in the first place?
Global network size does matter, as you quoted, “Any reputation system needs scarcity of identity.” It seems to me like you are giving Urbit a bad-faith reading. If you try a good-faith reading, try the “principle of charity”, you might find that you agree with Urbit more than you realize.
Who or what makes up the senate? I quoted the part of their marketing material already and to me it looks like absolute rule by whoever controls a majority of galaxy nodes, so 129 hosts. The rules they vote on make up the “land registry”, from which, apparently, everything else is derived.
“Any reputation system needs scarcity of identity”
Yes, I quoted that.
But how is a reputation system relevant to what you can or cannot do to your append-only data log? I prefer scuttlebutts solution to approximately the same problem: you keep your log, I keep my log, and if I decide to trust you, I also look at your log (and parse the bits you decide to share with me by giving me the keys).
No need for reputation except the reputation that already exists in the real world, that makes me decide whether to trust you.
[edit to add: the Urbit folks claim elsewhere that galaxies and stars are entirely meaningless, but since they’ve been made part of the fabric that makes up the platform, by having them spawn each other and planets, they can’t be that meaningless. Otherwise, why add them in the first place?]
Galaxy owners. See the bottom of https://urbit.org/primer for the distribution. I don’t think anyone really knows exactly how this will work yet, the owners are pretty well distributed with nobody owning 51% of the address space.
But how is a reputation system relevant to what you can or cannot do to your append-only data log?
It’s not. A reputation system is relevant to how valuable my Urbit is. If I start spamming people with my planet, then the star that is my supervisor can stop sending me packets. I could move to another star, but if my reputation gets bad enough, nobody will want to send/receive my packets, and my Urbit will become worthless, I wouldn’t even be able to resell it. This is not the case with e.g. email addresses, which spammers can create ad infinitum. That is the only reason for the scarcity of addresses.
Re: the append log, only I can write to that, no different than scuttlebutt.
Also, nobody claimed galaxies and stars are meaningless; they are network infrastructure responsible for routing packets. They are arbitrary in that a planet doesn’t really care which star it’s getting packets from, just like you don’t care which AWS data center is serving you a website.
Paraphrasing a comment I made about Jordan Peterson’s work - learning Urbit and the weird way it is structured is a significant time investment. A simple heuristic to determine whether something is worth your time is to check what the creator of this thing is like.
In the case of JP, my impression is unfortunately only 3rd hand.
In the case of Jarvin, or rather his alter ego Mencius Moldbug, I have read some primary material, such as the following blog post:
Imagine that the BTC/USD market is perfectly liquid with no exchange overhead. Imagine also that there are two types of BTC users: Jews, who speculate (holding BTC long-term with the expectation that it will appreciate against USD); and Aryans, who only trade (and sweep all BTC balances into USD at the end of every day). These are simplifications, of course—but edifying ones.
Jarvin was (in my imperfect recollection) criticized for the use of these terms, and (again, iirc) replied that he was only being “provocative”. Fair enough, I’m sure Jarvin (and people of his ilk) have plenty of experience in discussing whether what they’re writing is only provocative or if they’re genuinely anti-Semitic (Jarvin identifies as a Jew, I believe). It’s a depressingly common occurrence online.
But from a step outside, looking at something to invest time and effort in, and seeing that a project is closely identified with a person I would never want to be associated with, it’s quite easy to choose not to delve too much further.
I also happen to believe that he (along with many cryptocurrency enthusiasts) are fundamentally mistaken about how economics work, and I discount Urbit for that reason too.
In the case of Peterson, his work is philosophical, so that heuristic makes a large amount of sense. Although when dealing with someone so, uh, misrepresented by various groups, I’d think it would be more sensible to actually look at the (readily, freely available) source material.
I agree that it is a significant time investment to fully understand, but I think you can get a good approximation of his basic mindset by watching one of his non-combative interviews, or one or two of his (non-biblical) lectures .
In the case of JP, my impression is unfortunately only 3rd hand.
I meant it in the narrow sense that I cannot offer any first-hand critique of his work. I’m really hesitant to parrot statements like “Person X holds Y views” unless I’ve verified this personally.
(I’d love to post a link to my comment but it’s really hard to find on the site, I’ll try to update if I can find it)
However, there’s a limit of how much time I’m prepared to spend just to be able to defend or criticize someone. In JP’s case, my desire to engage with his work is minimal since his most well-known public stance is vociferously anti-trans.
In JP’s case, my desire to engage with his work is minimal since his most well-known public stance is vociferously anti-trans.
This is a good example of why it is worth going to the source. Peterson is not anti-trans, which he has stated many times and demonstrated by having respectful, productive interviews with at least one trans person that I can think of (Theryn Meyer).
The popular narrative conflates his objection to compelled speech in general with his objection to trans people (who were the subject of a particular piece of compelled speech legislation).
if they’re genuinely anti-Semitic (Jarvin identifies as a Jew, I believe)
…
are fundamentally mistaken about how economics work, and I discount Urbit for that reason too.
What? You seem confused. Urbit is a technological structure, not a political one or economic one.
Urbit is a technological structure, not a political one or economic one.
The entire premise of Urbit is the ownership of “scarce resources” (analogous to physical land) where one can seek rent. That’s both economic and political.
Urbit’s distribution and sponsorship hierarchy of galaxies, stars and planets is not designed as a political structure, or even a social structure. The actual social layer is in userspace – one layer up.
Socially and politically, Urbit is a flat network of planets. Galaxies and stars are plumbing. No one cares which star is your sponsor, any more than your Facebook friends care who your ISP is, or you care what data center Facebook is in.
You’re misunderstanding structures and the downstream implications that these structures cause. DNS is a techincal structure that has implications which are technical, political, and economic.
The US Congress is a political structure which has implications that are political and economic (and sometimes technical, in the case of, say, regulating Facebook data privacy or whatever).
DNS isn’t just a technical structure. The distinction between structures and implications (which I don’t think is useful in this context anyway) does to economics, but DNS does make political/social choices - for example, the number of root servers, control being hierarchical rather than distributed, and so on. All of these are both technical and political choices that the project makes, and that’s after generously excluding the organisations, committees, and documents that make DNS work.
Urbit’s choice to have “scarce resources” is an intentionally different political choice from the one DNS made, which never intended to hit the resource limits we currently have with IPv4 - which is why we now have IPv6, and an address space where addresses becoming scarce is almost entirely implausible for the foreseeable future. Urbit’s choice was made with full knowledge of how scarcity effects these systems, making it absolutely clear that the design decision is political, not technical.
Is there an example of a technology that doesn’t have political or economic implications? Considering the potential scope and impact of Urbit beyond its technological contributions seems especially important since it seems to me that it’s trying to alter the current conventional paradigm for internet services.
Is there an example of a technology that doesn’t have political or economic implications?
No. And I didn’t say it doesn’t have political/economic implications, in fact it definitely does. But in my opinion, the Urbit political implications are better than what we currently have. Consider:
Socially and politically, Urbit is a flat network of planets. Galaxies and stars are plumbing. No one cares which star is your sponsor, any more than your Facebook friends care who your ISP is, or you care what data center Facebook is in.
…
Because sponsorship has an escape mechanism, it is not a feudal bond (like your relationship to Facebook).
Urbit is a decentralized network of social networks. No one can regulate it. Urbit is made to blossom into an endless garden of human cultures, each of which must regulate itself, none of which can bother the others. The soil in which these flowers grow must be level and neutral.
I agree. It’s a kind of politics that makes people weak centered on our basic instincts of us vs them. The better route is to separate the two, ignore whatever bullshit he writes on his blog, focus on his technology, identify what good/bad can come out of it, and (if good) then either adopt or clone plus compete with it. The adopt or clone decision is where you consider the person. Even then, it’s not their political ramblings so much as what they do in a development and business context day to day. A person with strange beliefs who acts civil and hard working around others in a business is fine with me.
Edit to add: Work in diverse company with piles of people each with different beliefs, some diametrically opposed. We somehow still function and mostly get along with each other. Different mindset with effort put in is all it takes. Makes job more interesting, too.
Except Urbit is deeply rooted, in its design, by Jarvin’s beliefs about politics and economics. A technology can’t stand in isolation from its context when its a deeply social technology like Urbit.
That’s a statement of faith, not proof. Assuming no patent risk, I can literally take his tech, distill out ideas useful to me, and use it for those things. I could’ve done that without ever knowing what his political beliefs are. I can do it while knowing what his political beliefs are. I can even do it to support things he opposes. Therefore, they provably don’t matter if I’m not partnering with him.
They matter to you or others like you who feel a need to combine a person’s political beliefs or statements with everything they do. You’re limiting yourself voluntarily for ideological reasons. I intentionally avoided limiting myself that way since it reduces what I can get done with no value in return. My opponents who control the world in damaging ways also don’t limit themselves like you: they’ll work with or fund people whose beliefs or personalities they can’t stand if it achieves common goals. Got them where they are. Defeating them to stop real damage (vs crap people write on Internet) will take all kinds of people working together despite differing beliefs.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m all for appropriate parts of technology for uses outside their design. My statement wasn’t about restricting yourself. What I mean is that (and this is especially true in software) the design of a technology is better understood when looking at the “whys” and not just the “hows”. For example, why does Urbit limit its address space? It’s not a technological limitation. In fact, there are lots of parts of the system built around the idea of artificial resource scarcity. Without understanding this system “top”, which covers many lines of code in various components, how are you going to properly take what you need if say, you don’t want that silly limitation?
A person with strange beliefs who acts civil and hard working around others in a business is fine with me.
I find that a person with “strange beliefs” (to put it nicely) is also a strange person to work with. Most work is communist in nature ( in the Graeber definition of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”). When you ask for a code review, your colleague typically doesn’t say “I will do it but what will you do for me?”. If you need a wrench, the guy next to you doesn’t go “Only if you give me $1”. If the friction is low enough, or need great enough, people will typically do it. Any strange beliefs that stray away from this kind of work ethic typically make all work far less efficient, and even unworkable.
In fact, there are lots of parts of the system built around the idea of artificial resource scarcity.
Ok, now I agree with you there. What you’re talking about, though, is design goals. I’m all for understanding them since I need to understand the rationale behind the decisions. I think I avoided Urbit when I saw cryptocurrencies or something mentioned. The rationales might have a political component. I can still ignore that if I choose. Sometimes, I learn from it like with privacy techs whose features might be inspired by sneaky behavior of companies or governments. One can still separate design requirements from political motivations in most cases just by filtering and/or generalizing.
“is also a strange person to work with. “
Now, now, that’s jumping to conclusions. A person should be judged on what they actually do rather than hypothesizing. I only read a little on this guy with some people saying he’s really nice at conferences with informative talks. Some people said there were problems but those posts weren’t as specific. If he’s actually disrupting people, then he’s not a good guy to have around. If he’s not and is helpful, then he is potentially a good guy to have around. That’s how I do it with coworkers. It works with some being weird on occasion but they usually just avoid uncomfortable subjects if they know it bothers someone. Unless they’re assholes which is a different thing entirely. ;)
“When you ask for”
Since I know little about him, I’d say whoever you’re describing is a person that demands something in return for his work. Presumably, the employees aren’t working for free. They’re doing that, too. I’m also aware of, experienced a lot of, people trying to be users getting others to do their work for them or get something from nothing. They’re not give and take people so much as take, take, take. One strategy for dealing with that is to be a no, extra, free work by default person who is selective about their generosity. I just read an awesome article about such a transition recently.
Now, that said, a person that acts like that can also be a drain on a business or not right for its culture. Not even political culture so much as performance standards. If they’re paid to do an app, the best team will always be supporting each other to get it out the door in whatever state the business needs. I’d not hire such a person that made everything a trade if they were already getting paid for an outcome that required that minor thing to achieve. I’d rather them be helpful by default covering for each others’ weaknesses and helping them improve on them. I’m sure you’re of the same mind on that, too. :)
Re-reading what I wrote I was definitely a little obtuse. Let me elaborate, I find people with his kind of ideas usually hard to work with. But that’s just my experience. I didn’t mean strange ideas in general, but “strange ideas” as in, his ideas. Reading previous articles, it seems his co-workers basically seemed to have done what you would do, basically tiptoe around those issues to maintain a polite atmosphere. Which is fine and probably the most appropriate thing to do in that situation.
However, I think we can agree that we should not entertain asinine ideas. If he was a flat earther and designed his software to have a 2D address space because the plane is the way to go, we would certainly find that a strange design choice that introduces complexity. But for some reason when someone thinks some races are a better fit for slavery and that democracy is bad and incorporates those ideas into his design by having an ownership model based on those ideas, we seem to say “I can work with that guy, he is fine, he likes cats as I do”. To me, that’s just a form of support and validation. Maybe you are able to compartmentalize these things, but what if the person can’t and finds your support validation of the other stuff. I’m going to call in Godwin’s Law here and say, yes, Hitler also loved his mother and painted some nice stuff, but would I work with him on chemistry projects?
“But for some reason when someone thinks some races are a better fit for slavery and that democracy is bad “
Those are actually specific examples where I’d consider not working with someone. Especially if the project was about individual empowerment and decentralization. I’ve still worked with people who had a white supremacist background. We’d occasionally have to call them out on their behavior if a discussion between them and black folks involved race. They’d make an advance which we sane, white people would block. They almost always walk off. Then, it’s done. They and the black folks usually get along day-to-day with one we just fired being missed a lot. Might shock you with the stuff you read on tech forums about what blacks, Jews, etc believe and need for inclusive environments, eh?
“To me, that’s just a form of support and validation. Maybe you are able to compartmentalize these things, but what if the person can’t and finds your support validation of the other stuff.”
Which brings me to this. Down here in the South, we know there’s lots of racists on each side. As we might say it, we know everyone has a bit of bullshit or crazy shit in their head. With a Christian majority, we’re also taught that people are inherently sinful with us needing to admonish it, be forgiving, and be patient in helping them get better. So, what of these people who think other races are inferior and individual decisions are worthless? How to get them further away from these beliefs?
There’s only one thing that works that I can tell from observing where the South was and is today. That’s getting different people in one place forced to be around each other, tolerating each other, for long periods of time. For us, it starts in public schools where racist whites and blacks along with people in the middle are stuck together. Then in the workplaces. The process over time lowered that racist bullshit down to tolerable levels where the KKK-style people are fairly uncommon or rare depending on the area. They mostly hide from us. Even they often like black people where they are compartmentalizing what they learned to like vs what they were taught to hate.
What you’re advocating is essentially enlightened people pushing out those who still need to learn stuff away from those who will teach them. Then, they cluster into groups of racists who continue reading garbage, hating on people, plotting, and planning. Many such shunned groups ended up voting for Trump last election since he was only one pretending to care about them. There was no way to reach them since the radical-leftist liberals succeeded in censoring them off as many forums as possible. They similarly created their own recruiting locals and drowning out opposition. Division and siloing at an all-time high on the net like it used to be in meat space in the South. (slow clap for radical liberals)
We’re not showing support for these idiots: we’re showing them that people are better than they think. We’ll call them out where needed. If they disrupt too much and ignore warnings, we’ll eject them from that position so they know we mean business. They’ll have another chance to do better. Contrast that to radical-liberal doctrine behind CoC’s where statements on any medium or place will get people blocked from all places with similar CoC. See paragraph above for where that shit leads. My reaction is more patient and measured with a chance for people to learn over time. And it always takes time.
That’s getting different people in one place forced to be around each other, tolerating each other, for long periods of time.
I think this is absolutely right. I’m not advocating for people to splinter of and shun each other. What I’m advocating is people should not ignore bad ideas and make sure the other party knows. I’m not a moral relativist. And you are right about Trump folks feeling left out. You are also right that the liberals basically ignored them.
However, You are wrong that radical-leftists are liberals because they are not liberals. Radical leftists despise liberals just as much as the right does. But you won’t find that kind of discussion on Fox News or NY Times.
If he was a flat earther and designed his software to have a 2D address space because the plane is the way to go, we would certainly find that a strange design choice that introduces complexity.
I don’t know about you, but I would judge the idea as strange if I would not see the benefits of it, not because its author has different political views. If 2d addresses would solve many issues than it might be a good idea regardless of who came up with it.
Alternatively, they could do something like bank-level verification checking government ID’s and requiring a deposit to create an account. Then, maybe fining whoever is spamming. Then, it should go down. Worst case with low or now fines, whoever is compromised will find out about that changing their credentials or reinstalling their system.
Jumping from “there’s spam cuz addresses are free” to “need network address scarcity” is the kind of unnecessary, risky solution that crowd is fond of. Better to just fix the problems in existing systems or design new ones with methods proven in existing ones. They have an irrational aversion to doing that for some reason.
It could be bootstrapped that way. The different organizations become part of the reputation system. Hell, it might even become a new service from banks and credit unions. They already often act as notaries.
Are you using burst transmission or a mesh network not connected to the Internet (doubtful)? Otherwise, you already use a centralized service via one of the big ISP’s that ID’d you and took payment with centralized currency. They also regulate your computer usage far as the network goes. Although they got issues, they’re still less volatile than most of these decentralized systems. The most popular ones, esp Bittorrent, operate over the centralized ones, too, for their benefits. That’s despite decentralized options being available for a long time. They’re too slow and unreliable.
It always interests me that you rely on centralized services on one hand with justifications but tell me in other areas there can be no justification for relying on centralized service. Make up your mind. Meanwhile, the inconsistency suggests to me that we can leverage centralized services as a component in these decentralization schemes.
Decentralized computing infrastructure is something valuable we should work toward. We’re not there yet, but Urbit is a step in the right direction. Ofc sometimes its better to centralize some things, but in computing I’d rather have decentralized infra.
Spamming is not the main motivation. The main motivation is to provide a source of funding to the company by selling the space. Oh, and the designer was a neo-feudalist which probably inspired the whole enterprise.
The main motivation is to provide a source of funding to the company by selling the space.
I’ll add that I’m skeptical of all companies that look like pyramid schemes or at least just funnels of money to the creators in exchange for tech that’s highly risky. Throw in any cryptocurrencies to that list since they’re usually structured in an elitist way for founders. If it’s a money system, I want it done fairly by non-profits or public-benefit companies whose incentives will protect the currency, exchange, and so on. Preferably one that’s already profitable from another revenue stream where they don’t have to worry about trying to monetize the financial project. It can just breakeven with a slight surplus or donations to cover expansion.
Whatever his political stance he’s still as excellent a writer as he was one the old Usenet. One of the more memorable flames on talk.bizarre was from his hand.
I found him self-aggrandizing and subject to an inescapable superiority complex. When he writes philosophy he is unnecessarily verbose, so everything said seems tainted by trivial matters such as the author ego and it leaves me wondering whether the actual ideas expressed are self-sufficient or tainted by this ego: trying to project, to present himself: keeping at the marketing speak level and building an idea of himself, instead of leaving his ideas laid bare.
It’s not precise, and he just reads like an insufferable prick. I found Urbit rather interesting though, but I can only rejoice that the project is now without this guy.
I tried reading the linked post and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Maybe because it’s written “in-universe” so to speak and therefore addresses those people familiar with the specialized terminology of the Urbit system.
I would be okay with email notifications, but in the case of GitHub, there are many events that don’t trigger an email, so it doesn’t feel sufficiently “complete” to me. Until more email control is available, a specialized view built on the GH APIs (such as this tool) feels like a better way if you really want to stay on top of every event.
Yeah, but it’s not so bad after you setup the DKIM etc records properly. The sovereign README has instructions on how to do all that. The situation improves as the age of your domain increases too, I think.
have you seen - https://paperswithcode.com/ ?
someone pointed me to it after I made this spreadsheet, looks awesome
Oh boy, even more to add to this.
The guy who created it, Curtis Yarvin is extremely right-wing and has been described as “the Alt right’s favorite philosophy instructor”.
Big oof.
Personally I’m fine with using, discussing and even contributing to a software system created by someone whose politics I don’t agree with.
P.S. for anyone interested in a thoughtful, thorough criticism of Yarvin’s political philosophy, I recommend this Slate Star Codex article: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/
Yeah. How much of your system runs GNU? (Rhetorical question.) Stallman isn’t less politically charged than Yarvin, even before the recent comments; the difference is that Stallman leaned left, which is more accepted in the affluent intellectually-oriented minds of software people
From what I’ve seen Stallman leaned libertarian (socially left, fiscally right).
I don’t think it’s accurate to describe Stallman as a libertarian. As far as I’m aware, he describes himself as a socialist and holds non-free-software-related political views that are generally consistent with the left wing of American politics, including fiscally. Many of his views on software freedom are consistent with some strains of libertarianism, but I think it’s ultimately a limitation of the “left-right” metaphor when talking about political beliefs to describe him as otherwise socially left, fiscally right.
I don’t know if he does. I remember reading an essay by him claiming that free software is not socialist, but I can’t find it right now. I think is more likely that he regards himself as more in the classical liberal tradition.
Stallman is a democratic socialist, historically supporting the US’s Green Party and Bernie Sanders.
I was wondering how long it would be before someone would chime in with this tired bit of commentary.
Every comment you’ve left in this thread has been inflammatory and off-topic. The Urbit guy wrote some things you don’t like. We get it. The weird thing to me is the most hysterical people who constantly yell at those they deem right-wing also have funny ideas about when prejudice is acceptable, i.e., punching down vs punching up, power dynamics, etc. How much authority or power do you think CY/MM has?
This is a horrendously boring topic, and you have made this forum a more boring place for having brought it up. Please just stop. Let’s focus on technology.
The piece of technology was founded by someone with very strong visions as to what society should be, which means that in the software, there are design decisions being made to align with this. In this case, there’s a very strange belief in a feudalistic system where - even if the names were changed from lords/dukes/etc. to galaxies/planets/etc. - this influence still exists in the software. I believe it bears mentioning.
Yep. He’s said some horrendous things and excluded a lot of people. I have no interest in this project if it can’t bring itself to align with the values of the community.
The tendency to universalize one’s values creates a problematic blind spot for a great many people
Kind of seems like it has, though? Or at least they kicked him out and erased his name from their public intro, probably other places. I guess it’s down to who exactly you mean by “the” community.
To me the style of this seems incredibly pretentious (esp with the whole
MEGACORPand whatnot)There’s also basically no technical information about how they plan to accomplish this absolute ubiquity with logging into any computer using it, buying a coffee with it, etc… These sort of things require incredibly widespread adoption and I really don’t think this pipedreamy project is ever going to reach that.
Also, the moment they started talking about blockchain/ethereum I lost interest. The whole purpose of blockchain is, from what I can tell, a totally public immutable database, effectively. I really don’t want every bit of my digital life in some system that I can’t wipe it from.
The only way I think this would seem worse is if they were hyping some token they wanted people to invest in.
Some other things:
According to their blog - “Urbit … includes money as a native service”
Why should an OS have anything to do with money?
“Creating a new sound currency, however is not our goal; Bitcoin has already done that.”
lol no it hasn’t.
Ethereum is only used to assign IDs. All the rest of the data is stored in a file system. As for technical info, everything is open source https://github.com/urbit
“Imagine that you can login from anywhere with one simple, memorable name and password. And when you do, an entire OS appears for you. Inside is your whole digital life.”
So if it’s just stored in a filesystem, how is it distributed to anywhere you can log in?
It works over a network… except instead of logging into facebooks servers, you log into your own server
So now I have to set up a server? Either by paying for a VPS (on a computer I don’t own, going against the whole concept…) or set it up so my own home computer acts as a server? So now I have to expose my home network to the internet, go through all the trouble of setting that all up…
Yeah no thanks. If they want their shit to be the “way of the future” they better have it more ironed out than this.
The whole point of Urbit is to make it as easy to setup a personal cloud as it is to setup iOS. You don’t have to do any Linux sysadmin stuff, you just run Urbit and it does all the networking and security and updates etc. All of this is explained in the documentation. It’s a work in progress and it’s not quite push-button yet, but it’s getting there and it’s already better than any alternative.
Suppose you set up urbit for the first time on your local PC and use it for a while. Let’s say you create a document in your part of the (virtual) urbit filesytem.
Now, throw that PC away and get a new one. Don’t back up anything except your urbit credentials or keys or whatever.
Reinstall urbit, log in. Wait for it to sync. Look, there’s your document.
I’ve heard something about hypothetical “urbit hosting” as a service in the future. That would get you out of the VPS/personal PC requirement.
This is my obligatory statement regarding how the people behind urbit rub me the wrong way. The basic idea behind their plan to make their distributed system popular is novel and appealing, though. They have made low-level stuff available first–arcane toys that only the most elite hobbyists can even assemble, much less build anything with. Then, when abstraction and convenience layers are built over that, they release those and make the documentation a little more mainstream.. They’re building from the bottom up, rather than trying to make a web 2.0 shiny 30mb javascript monstrosity and sell it directly to muggles. They recognize that old computers and networks weren’t accessible to the uninitiated, and those systems took over the world. I worry about these people.
According to bsima, I’m strictly wrong about deleting your local info and also keeping it. See https://lobste.rs/s/c5gp8j/understanding_urbit#c_xxca9r
(I’m not completely convinced, but that user sounds like they know much more about urbit than I do.)
Also, all the names they give for everything make me want to gag. It all sounds like wannabe-Sci-Fi names for stuff. Behn, Eyre, Gall, Jael, Arvo, Hoon, Nock, Vere… come on.
From the “Your Last Computer” page:
Wow, no. Hell to the no.
(Am I understanding correctly that this vast quantity of sensitive information would be stored in a public blockchain, protected only by non-quantum-safe encryption?)
ETA: Also, from https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/urbit-id/ it looks like they support only 4 billion Urbit IDs, which is already fewer than the number of people on the planet.
To me it’s clear that the last 3 billion to sign up are considered non-people by the design of the system. They don’t deserve to participate as equals - they must act as servants or sharecroppers to the 4 billion “planet” addresses for access to Urbit.
Urbit seeks to stratify it’s users into classes. This document by founder Curtis Yarvin describes the system as “digital feudalism.” https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/6ac688960687aa9c89d4da6fff49a3125c10aca1/Spec/urbit/3-intro.txt
The founder Curtis Yarvin wrote a “philosophy” blog for a while that describes his viewpoint as “neo-monarchism”.
I looked for a summary of this context and found this Verge article from 2017: https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/21/14671978/alt-right-mencius-moldbug-urbit-curtis-yarvin-tlon
Currently the feudal lords of the internet are Zuck, Dorsey, etc. Urbit’s aim is to move users’ data from centralized servers at Facebook/Twitter datacenters into somewhere you personally control. The network governance is modeled after a republic, so it’s actually an improvement from what we have currently. And Yarvin is no longer part of the project, any of his philosophy has been stripped from Urbit (if it was ever there to begin with).
The fundamental idea of Urbit (buried under the slick marketing, and the weird esoteric programming language) is digital scarcity - replicating the scarcity of physical land on this planet in cyberspace.[1] Once the system is up and running, those that control the land can extract rents, or exclude those under them from occupying land they control, or entering strategic partnerships with other land owners… this is where Yarvin/Moldbug’s ideals of “digital feudalism” are expressed.
“Normal” ideals of cyberspace assume that scarcity has no place there - stuff like information and software can be replicated endlessly at very little marginal cost. Urbit explicitely rejects this.
Now, I don’t have a problem with this concept intellectually. People have different ideals and projects for the future of digital governance. But hackers interested in contributing to Urbit should understand the trade-offs they would be making, as opposed to contributing to a more “mainstream” project.
[1] this is anologous to Bitcoin being considered “digital gold”.
So you must also be against ICANN and their limited TLD designations? And against Twitter/Facebook for limiting users (shadow banning)?
Where in my comment did I say anything that made you assume I hold the opinions you ascribe to me?
These are also artificially scarce resources
ICANN is insufficiently regulated and holds an artificial monopoly.
There’s no technical limitation to prevent everyone on earth having their own TLDEdit apparently there is a hard-coded character limit to the TLD. That said, I welcome competition in this space and would like to see ICANN lose its monopoly.Facebook and Twitter identities are not artificially limited de facto - the services are awash in bots.
And in any case, I stated the following:
I just wish that people pushing Urbit would be honest about the project’s ultimate goals.
I would assume, though, that Yarvin must be a Galaxy owner, giving him explicit power over what gets built and who gets added to the Urbit network.
The whole situation with Galaxies in general is problematic: it seems like they’re designed to lock in power over the network to 256 people, and there is no sanctioned way to transfer that power if the ruler does not want to give up their key. This is what people mean by “baking in” his philosophy into the design of Urbit.
Galaxies can change hands like any other cryptographic asset. It just hasn’t been tried yet (afaik). Galaxies have power like ISPs have power, that doesn’t stop you from switching ISPs or running stuff on your own computer.
Yes, and most people dislike their ISP.
More importantly, though, it’s not like there’s any hard reason you can’t have more ISPs. The internet is built to accommodate any number of them, it’s only the fact that it’s expensive that’s preventing competition.
Same with social networks today: there’s not much reason you can’t operate your own, and many people do, through Mastodon and the like. It’s only market forces that keep people on the small number of dominant networks.
Meanwhile in Urbit, it’s specifically designed such that a limited group of 256 people have dominion over everyone in the system. This group of people cannot be removed or competed against within the bounds of the system unless you convince them to sell their assets.
For a system that’s aiming to replace all computing, that’s a scary prospect.
And that’s only assuming that only one person will own each galaxy: we could easily see power consolidation via existing galaxy owners buying other galaxies.
Much as this page is getting high and mighty about the MEGACORP, I don’t see it as a preferable alternative.
Very fair.
Except: are there 256 ISPs? I mean, nominally is one thing. Practically?
(I don’t know the answer to this question.)
In any one location, likely no. Across the entire world, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if the number greatly exceeds 256, especially if you count cell phone service providers.
Urbit, in contrast, is intended to be a global system, and has a hard limit of 256 leaders for all people on their system.
The most entertaining read about Curtis Yarvin is Neoreaction a Basilisk, by Elizabeth Sandifer. I found a good review of it, though I read it over a year ago.
I backed this on Kickstarter, but I don’t think I’ve actually read it… thanks for the reminder!
After seeing everyone start to gush over this for the past couple days I was legitimate wondering if this was the same project as the one I remember being described as ‘digital feudalism’.
This is a plain attempt for a few people to solidify their power over the next iteration of web technologies so I think it is absolutely legitimate to call out their philosophy (which, again some people in this thread are saying isn’t relevant). This is a power structure we can still opt-out of, and I’m inclined to do so.
You are misunderstanding. Urbit does not store data on a blockchain. It uses a file system like Unix.
So when they say « you can login from anywhere with one simple, memorable name and password », where is the « one place » that data is streaming down from?
An Urbit server running wherever you have it running
Wait, this implies that if your server is destroyed, you lose data. That’s incorrect, right? Everything in your server (node) is also stored across other nodes, and your node helps store other people’s data, right? Did I get this wrong?
Afaik there is no replication currently, but you could certainly create an Urbit app that does the replication across certain machines. It would be a lot easier to make in Urbit than Linux because the network stack is tightly integrated with the rest of the programming environment.
That seems like an extremely important thing to have mentioned in the first page or two, floating at least somewhere in all the Glorious Future marketing talk. -.-
Regarding the 4B IDs, an ID is analogous to a phone number. There are about 4B active mobile phone numbers, and mobile phones seem to work ok, so it’ll probably work out https://www.statista.com/statistics/274774/forecast-of-mobile-phone-users-worldwide/
From the way they talk about all this, it seems like they want it to last for an incredibly long time, they make it sound like they want it to last literally thousands+ years.
Sounds like the 4B limit isn’t really up to the task of lasting thousands of years and becoming an extremely widespread standard for computing.
Let’s start with this decade first… increasing the 4B limit will be a good problem to have.
I’m really not following what you’re talking about, at all.
I like the sleek presentation style, and I see the appeal of decentralised social networking software. My values don’t necessarily align with the values of a few Californian individuals who have managed to politick their way into a position of immense power.
As a layman however, the following sentence worries me (emphasis my own):
I’m not comfortable with the idea of a permanent record for social data. How would I then disown the moody poetry I wrote as a 13 year old? Will it haunt me forever?
No because it’s private data
I’m a bit disappointed that the interviewer didn’t mention a single question regarding addiction or any ethical dimension. It’s kind of been assumed that not liking pornography is just a conservative, right-wing thing, but I don’t think that’s correct. I personally perceive it to be pushing harmful stereotypes (both as in what women should look like, or how intimacy should look like), and then there’s the problem with trafficking, and never knowing what’s actually going on behind the scenes. Chomsky says it well.
Setting aside things like these, which should be enough to say something isn’t right, but knowing the digital world (where creating addictions has become a common and often even necessary business model) reading
makes me somewhat uneasy. Especially a front end developer should have to think about these questions. They are the ones tasked with creating “seamless experiences”, ultimately, disregarding the influence it has on people’s daily and personal life’s. I don’t think the interviewer should have just glossed over this. YouTube has hateful or harmful videos, but their raison d’être isn’t hosting them. PornHub will have it a bit harder that hosting and spreading pornography isn’t a big part of what they are.
From the technical perspective it’s somewhat interesting, I guess. It’s about the problems of high-demand video streaming, probably above the level of most other video sites, but still way below sites like YouTube. That’s like having an interview with a
slaveholder on what kind of whips they have found to have the best qualityCIA agent on what the best strategies are to manipulate a foreign election.Edit: Rewrote a few sentences to avoid confusion, and replaced my analogy with a different one.
Porn has been around a really long time. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing new to be discovered or discussed almost anywhere on earth on the topic, much less here.
Like, the human race has brute-forced about every part of that solution space we can. There is not a dirty thought we can have that hasn’t occurred to scores of other people at one point in history or another–of this I’m certain.
Not in the way it is now, as an endless torrent on demand. Modern porn has demonstrably changed society in ways that ancient porn did not. For example, women now believe that pubic hair is unclean and as a result of excessive pubic hair removal are getting health problems that pubic hair can prevent.
Also, just being around forever does not categorise something as innocuous or beneficial.
Hairstyles have been coming and going in fads ever since we left the trees and discovered hair can be cut and washed. Having this apply also to pubic hair is not exactly a huge change.
As the article notes, gynecologists disagree, but what do they know, I guess.
Like comparing chewing coca leaves to mainlining cocaine.
Quantity acquires a quality of its own, you know. Not to mention that quality is altogether different as well: 4K video isn’t the same as a blurry black and white photo. There’s a strange blindness to this effect in the tech industry, whether it comes to social media, endless tsunami of content on Netflix, or indeed porn. Much like Facebook’s idea that more communication is unconditionally better has backfired spectacularly, maybe it’s the same with porn. And then of course there’s also all the engineered “engagement” in all these areas. Don’t be so quick to say it’s all totally harmless.
Well-put.
The audience is web developers wanting to read something interesting about web development at a big company. They also want most of them to enjoy the article. Talking about the damage they might be doing doesn’t serve either purpose. Most would’ve just clicked the little X or otherwise moved on.
There’s been a lot of good writing on that subject for anyone looking for it. The key words are easy to guess.
You’re kinda circling back to the same point. Yes, talking about ethical implications of our jobs is hard, and uncomfortable, but it’s necessary. Of course nost people don’t want to do it, off course most people don’t want to read about it. But it’s our responsibility to talk and to read about those things. “I don’t like doing it” is not a valid excuse for not doing something it’s your responsibility to do.
That said, the comparison with slavery is a bit out of place, imo.
You’re doing that trick many people do here where it becomes all or nothing in every post, forum, etc. The stress of introspecting on these topics make many people do it at certain times and read relaxing content at other times. They’re fine splitting it up. Dare I’d say most people prefer that based on that simply being most popular way content is done online.
Then, other people think they should be mentally engaged on these topics at all times in all articles, forums, etc due to their importance. They also falsely accuse people of not caring about social responsibilities if they don’t discuss them in every article where they might come into play. You must be in that group. Author of the original post and their audience is not. Hence, the separation of concerns that lets readers relax just focusing about web tech before optionally engaging with hard realities of life at another time in another article.
This isn’t a “what if my open source library was used by some military”-kind of question, I think that there is a much stronger connection between the two. Front end design is related to user behaviour, and I still consider this relation to be a technical question (UI design, user protection, setting up incentives, …).
If the interviewer had asked these questions, and the interviewee had chosen not to comment, that would have been something, but the article currently just brushes it away affront by saying “ Regardless of your stance on pornography, …”.
A tech-related, Lobsters-worthy discussion of the topic would focus on how they collected user behavior, analyzed it, measured whether they were reaching their goals, strategized for how to achieve them, and specific methods of influence with associated payoffs. It would actually be more Barnacles-like since marketing is behind a lot of that. These technical and marketing techniques are politically-neutral in that they are used by many companies to measure and advance a wide range of goals, including pornography consumption. They could be discussed free-standing with little drama if the focus was really on the technology.
You were doing the opposite. That quote is an ethical question, even says so, where you have political views about pornography consumption, you wanted theirs explored, and you might have had some goal to be achieved with that. The emotional language in the rest of your post further suggested this wasn’t about rational analysis of a technology stack. You also didn’t care what the writer or any of their readers thought about that. So, I countered representing the majority of people who just wanted to read about a web stack. A mix that either doesn’t care about ethics of porn or does with it being a depressing topic they want to handle at another time.
I was on 2nd cup of coffee when you wanted me to be thinking about lives being destroyed instead of reading peaceful and interesting things easier to wake up to. Woke up faster in a different way. Oh well. Now, I’m off this drama to find a Thursday submission in my pile.
I think these kinds of things were missing from the article. I know this isn’t the place to discuss pornography, and I try not to go into it in the comments. What I just brought up was a disappointment in the style and focus of the interview, and it being one-sided.
Well I do think it’s important, so I apologize for being a tad emotional. But other than what I wrote, I don’t have anything else to contribute. I neither run nor plan to run a streaming site, so I end up not having too strong opinions on what is being used in the backend stack ^^.
I understand that, that’s why I prefixed my top comment with what you quoted. I furthermore feel obligated to apologise if anyone had to go through any inconvenience thinking about the “ethics of porn” because of my comment, I guess? No but seriously, bringing up a concern like this, which I explicitly tried to link back to a technical question, should be ok.
“I furthermore feel obligated to apologise if anyone had to go through any inconvenience thinking about the “ethics of porn” because of my comment, I guess? No but seriously, bringing up a concern like this, which I explicitly tried to link back to a technical question, should be ok.”
There’s quite a few people here that are OK with it. I’m not deciding that for anyone. I just had to remind you that caring people who want a break in some places exist and that you do more good by addressing the porn problem where it’s at. I appreciate you at least considering the effect on us.
“I neither run nor plan to run a streaming site”
The main problem is consumer side where there’s mass demand following by all types of supply and clever ways to keep people hooked. You can’t beat that since they straight-up want it. What you might do is work on profiles for porn sites with tools such as NoScript that make them usable without the revenue-generating ads. Then, lots of people push for their use. If there’s any uptake, they get a temporary hit in their wallet but maybe an offset with ad-free Premium. I’m not sure the effectiveness. I just know they’re an ad model with tools existing to attack that.
Griping about it on technical sites won’t change anything because… most viewers aren’t on technical sites and those that are rarely changed. So, it’s just noise. Gotta work on porn laws, labor protections for those involved, ethical standards in industry itself, ad blocking, etc.
If you would like to discuss the ethical aspects go to a different forum. I would rrecommend the community around Thaddeus Russell’s podcast for a critical and reasoned take from people that actually interact with sex workers https://www.thaddeusrussell.com/podcast/2
I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, but I’m not here to discuss the ethical aspects, not am I in a position to be able to. My comments are related to the interviewer and his choice of questions.
Your gave opinions, stated as scare-hints without support:
… and then based upon the now well-built pretext that porn “isn’t right” (and is therefore ethically ‘wrong’) - you commented on what the interviewer should have done - i.e. they should have had the same opinions and conceptions as yourself - and they should have turned the interview into one about ethics.
The interview was interesting to read, because of the info about the tech. As bsima says, please take ethical discussion elsewhere.
As you said, I prefixed the controversial parts by saying that it was my opinion. But I don’t think that the interviewer must have shared my views. The point I was raising was that I thought it wasn’t appropriate for the interview to just ignore a quite relevant topic, since this was about PornHub specifically, not their parent company.
IMO, a just final question like
or
would have been more than enough, as to just show this is being considered. I’m not a journalist, so I don’t know how these questions could be phrased better, but I hope you do get my point.
…and yet, it’s the ethical aspects that you brought up.
Looking at this thread, I didn’t respond to people who started talking about the harmfulness of pornography or the lack thereof. This even though I would like to – yet I understand that it is off topic. In fact most of this sub-thread has been more about the meta-discussion.
All I can say is that I will be more careful not be too provoke these kinds of discussions in the future. I was thinking critically a lot about the topic the last few months, so my comment might not have been as neutral as some might have wished.
This is more than a little hyperbolic.
My analogy is that the direct consequences of technical questions are being more or less ignored, which I think is fair in both questions. Of course it’s not identical, but that’s stylistic devices for you.
I could come up with quite a few objections to pornography, but the chap in your video link is not only not convincing, he is also hinting that he watches porn even though he denies it. He backs up his statement “porn is degrading to women” by qualifying “just look at it” which implies that he does that enough to have an opinion.
Atlas of a lost world by Craig Childs was so great. Lovely writing and great info about our Native American ancestors, pairs nicely with the book 1491 (cant remember the author). I haven’t read Sapians but I imagine these two books cover the same ground (at least in the Western Hemisphere) without as much cult-like following.
Now I’m reading “we are all completely beside ourselves” by Karen joy fowler, recommended by a friend with whom I drink wine and talk about life with. So I’m expecting this to be a good book.
I most recently finished Metamorphosis by Kafka. I read it on my kindle whilst in the queue to go up the Church of our Savior in Copenhagen. I tend to read multiple books at once so to start and finish a book in a single sitting was pretty unusual but worth it.
Just before that I finished Random Acts of Heroic Love, which I thought was beautifully written.
I’m currently reading through Augustine’s Confessions, Wittgenstein by David Pears, Singer’s Animal Liberation, and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
I’m also working through K&R’s The C Programming Language. Next in my backlog is Jeeves in the Offing by Wodehouse and Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks.
I read Birdsong a couple of years ago and would recommend it. I found the first part pretty hard going: it read like an over-wrought romance novel, but the rest of it was great, if somewhat haunting.
Yeah, I got given it as a birthday present last year, but have had so much else to read I haven’t managed it yet. During high school we had to analyse part of it, and had the kind of English teacher who would encourage everyone to read it and then explain the whole plot, giving the majority of the class no reason to read it. Since then I’ve planned to, but never quite got around to it.
Do read Kafka’s other work if you haven’t already. I really loved The Castle (pardon the ssl error): https://bensima.com/2018/01/the-castle-by-kafka/
I definitely intend to, although I’ve got a significant backlog of physical books and epubs to read first. Unfortunately I just caused a bit of an issue for myself by accidentally sitting on my Kindle, so a lot of my epubs I won’t be able to read for a fair bit longer (no way am I reading a book on a backlit screen) - so if I can find a cheap physical copy, I might be reading it sooner!
I love my ebook reader and very strongly agree with this statement. Sorry to hear about your Kindle though D:
Me too :( gonna have to takevto ebay rather than buy direct though, because I maintain that the models past the Kindle 4 (aka all the touchscreen ones) don’t feel right.
I’m confused by this post.
A github fork is a convenient UI over git’s branches. You create your own personal copy of the repository and the github platform does some configuration that allows you to use their nice UI for allowing them to merge your branch/changes even if you don’t have write access to the project. They have a nice UI for doing the commentary and reviews etc.
Nothing says you have to use this. You can do bare git stuff, ask for write permissions, push your changes etc. etc.
This post is complaining that github adds a value - for most users - by giving them a easy to use UI over git.
The article is mostly about how github has overloaded the term ‘fork’, giving it the same meaning as a traditional personal repo copy. Forking a project, as the article mentions, is taking it and giving it new life as something else, without necessarily contributing changes back to the original repo (article gives the example of the ffmpeg –> libva forking).
Github is taking well-established terminology and giving it new meaning in their proprietary platform, which causes confusion.
It’s somewhat difficult to take this complaint seriously considering the article then proceeds to do the exact same thing by using the term “branch” to mean “clone of a git repo” instead of the already existing meaning of “branch within a git repo”.
Either pedantry over terminology is a big deal or it isn’t (my take is that it really isn’t), but the author needs to pick a lane.
Your application of branch is too specific and tied to the idea of a canonical upstream repository. Cloning is the process of creating a local branch which mirrors a remote branch. The end result is still a branch.
Not at all, it’s merely tied to the semantics of git, the DVCS under discussion here.
Cloning creates a local copy of a remote repository and (typically, unless you do some things to restrict it) all branches within it. Creating a local branch which mirrors a remote branch is not a clone operation, it’s a
git fetch —track.It’s incorrect to describe a fetch as a clone. It’s incorrect to describe a repository as a branch. These are all distinct concepts in git, with different semantics, regardless of whether or not your development model involves a canonical upstream or not.
I’m definitely simplifying things a lot, and I appreciate your clarifications. But my point is that you end up with your own “master” branch, which is discrete from the other branch. The repo is just a container for that branch, no matter where you have it pushed. The key distinction between your repo and the other repo is the branch you’re doing your work on. Thus, I think branch is a valid term to use here.
Which possibly is an over load of “forking processes”, which possibly is a overload of the term “fork” meaning a thing with multiple prongs. “clone-ing” a repository relates to “A clone” of something and so on. Language is malleable.
Github forks allow you to neatly merge back to what you forked from. Again, you don’t need to use this. I think this is just a bad argument.
I think it’s easier to understand the implicit criticism by wondering about how Github would have been if it wasn’t based around forking a project to contribute to it. Currently the data that is used to create a pull request – in addition to the reference to which you want to contribute changes – is the name of your personal fork, and of the branch you want to send.
Now if forks were not pervasive, how would people be able to contribute to projects on github? Well, either they would have to indicate the URL of a full git somewhere (and a branch name), or they would submit to github a series of patch (by sending an email, or by uploading
git format-patchfiles, etc.).Those two models are not much harder to implement than the current forking model, and/but they immediately make github a partially federated platform, making it easy to contribute to a github-hosted project without yourself being on github or hosting your personal working copy on github.
You can see how that is not much less convenient for users, and how it makes it much easiers for users to migrate to another platform.
Personally I’m not at all surprised that github is not interested in supporting these less-centralized workflows, but I am a bit disappointed that Gitlab has not yet invested much effort in supporting them. Contrarily to github, there are many instances of Gitlab (the free version) around, and merge-requests-across-instances would be directly useful to me today. In fact, there are some instances that I avoid using specifically because they restrict account creation (or creation of new projects for untrusted users), which kills collaboration in a fork-centric model. (See gitlab issues #4013, #260, patch by email #40830).
But “Github forks” being pervasive does absolutely nothing to prevent you from continuing to do just this?
Unless the complaint here is “if I email a patch to a maintainer, they complain that it’s a PITA to deal with and ask me to just submit a PR”, in which case…
I’ve worked in both models, I strongly disagree.
Federation is great. Emailing patches around sucks a ton.
“matt” [email protected] writes:
Having a fast tagging system like notmuch helps a lot, and doesn’t take much time to setup.
I agree. However, after thinking about it a bit, @gasche’s comment made me wonder about a word where github supplied a “git-format-patch-pr” – similar to emailing patches, but which instead uploaded patches to github from a local branch into some ephemeral PR specific location. All this instead of having to create a fork and open a PR.
The Phabricator workflow is pretty similar to what you’re describing: you can use
arcto upload patches from a local branch. Or just paste diff output into a web form without even committing anything :DI like this workflow so much, but I couldn’t convince my co-workers of its qualities, because they (understandably) get uneasy about the fact that patches don’t have a clear “target” – and they can mean different things depending on what they are applied to. (If anyone has a suggestion for a solution for this, please contact me.)
(So instead they keep using Bitbucket and adopt all kinds of terrible practises for the only reason that doing the right thing is made highly inconvenient by bitbucket.)
I wonder if it would be considered rude to simply attach a patch to the relevant github issue..? Or link to a patch stored on a paste service like ix.io? You can add to github issues over email, so with this method you could sort-of submit patches over email, bypassing the whole PR interface.
Worth noting that, while it doesn’t stop you from needing to make a fork, you can retrieve a
.diffor.patchfrom any comparison: https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit/compare/features/linuxprototype...github:linux-gvfs-provider.patchNot in my experience. It usually consists of:
.git/config, or try to remember what thegit remotecommands are, to changeoriginto my “fork” (I usually keep the previous remote asupstream, since my “fork” will inevitably fall behind and need regular pulling and pushing)Phew!
Afaik you don’t have to change the upstream, you can just say
git push <alternate upstream>. I might be wrong about that, though; might be confusing it with git pull. Also, afaik deleting the ‘fork’ is standard practice; you aren’t really contributing to linkrot that way, because you’re not erasing any content, and no one is linking to such a fork.To be clear, I still think the github pull request ui is awful, but ^^^ is my understanding of how it works.
Indeed,
git pushtakes either a URL or remote name as its first numbered argument. Sometimes if I need to make a quick push to a remote I don’t use commonly, I’ll just detachHEAD, make commit/s, thengit push git@wherever:whatever.git HEAD:remote-branch.Gmail should white-list any email with a good PGP signature at the SMTP level. In fact all SMTP servers should do this. This seems not difficult to implement - certainly no more difficult than a massive RL spam algorithm - and would mostly solve the problem of blocking individual hackers running their own servers since those people (myself included) tend to sign all their emails anyway. This is how the “Web of Trust” is supposed to function, right?
Devil’s advocate: what prevents a spammer from PGP signing their messages?
The same as “blocking misconfigured SPF prevents spam” : spammers are too lazy to setup the full stack… Until they do.
But this gives you an indicator of what mail can be trusted, and the user would add up email to its “confidence list” and get to a special all-whitelisted inbox : Mail from people we know (whitelist them), automated notifications (whitelist them), mailing lists (whitelist them) or spammers (in greylist).
SMTP would then never block any whitelisted email.
The problem is to make a difference between the not-yet-known-sender mail and the spam.
This is not how it is imenented though… From the user point of view, just a blacklist rather than white/grey/black-list.
No control over what’s in, just to add more things among what’s out.
Found this via the humanist mailing list: https://dhhumanist.org/volume/32/512/
I’ve worked almost the full stack, from enterprise cloud databases to web apps. Looking for something high level and challenging, perhaps a startup. I’m really flexible. I like functional programming too, Haskell and Clojure mostly.
For the emacs user there is https://github.com/magit/magit-stgit
er, i think that’s a typo because it links to “stagit - static git page generator” https://codemadness.org/git/stagit/file/README.html
Oops, you’re right.
Drinking wine with friends
I don’t really care to what extent Yarvin is a cryptofascist (he might be) or a windbag (he is) or if he should learn to trim down his writing (he should).
No, no, I want to complain specifically about his technology. Because that’s why we’re here: to discuss technology.
First, let’s look at some hoon:
To me, this language looks like an unfortunate cross-breeding of Scheme, J, and a dash of diff syntax for good measure.
The official way to pronounce Hoon characters is awkward. Further, the name for the different structures in the language–“wing”, “cell”, “tall rune”, “flat rune”, “gate”, “face’. It feels needlessly obtuse.
The C [source] for Urbit makes choices that I don’t really approve of:
There’s an elaborate reasoning for ignoring
stdint(it’s too long to type). There’s the use of kitchen-sink headers. There’s the lack of include guards or pragmas.And lastly, there’s the fact that a lot of dependencies are kinda farming all the interesting OS work out. Like, I’d be really impressed by a bootable distribution of Urbit, but they kinda skipped that.
Let’s talk about those things, not whatever it is moldbug is up to.
The thing I dislike the most about hoon and the whole urbit system is how it revels in using unfamiliar names and syntax for everything. I don’t really buy the “late binding” argument they give, and given Yarvin’s oversized ego I’d be more inclined to believe that the renaming of things is just to make it look foreign and to steal ideas and still give himself credit for them.
I’m not great at hoon but the type system is very similar to clojure’s spec, except built into the compilation and every level of the rest of the system. I think it’s a great idea and wish I had more time to study it.
Hoon is the higher level language Tlon is committed to developing, and given the scarcity of resources and everything else about the system Tlon is committed to developing it makes sense they will not develop any other language.
The community (this is an OSS project, after all) can still develop a transpiler from any other language.
I’m with you on that. This looks like the kind of crap no software developer should ever have to deal with. The hoon especially.
How does this relate to the deflating crypto bubble? Urbit seems to rely on Ethereum, but to what extent is blockchain/crypto-currencies fundamental to it?
Urbit uses Ethereum to encode who owns which assets (“Azimuth points”). Other than that, Urbit does not rely on any blockchains/cryptocurrencies. However you could, for example, store your bitcoin wallet keys in your Urbit.
I still don’t really understand urbit. Could a kind person explain me the project like i’m five?
Based on reading the above comments, there’s a reason for that. I don’t understand it either, and it would seem that its author didn’t optimize for accessibility :)
This is the best explanation: https://urbit.org/primer/
See the new primer they just released. The video in it gives an overview. https://urbit.org/primer/
Urbit’s innovations have stood in the dark shadow of moldbug’s neofeudalist writings. Every time Urbit comes up in conversations among crypto people here in Berlin, someone in the group says “but have you looked at what Curtis wants the world to look like?” and then the subject changes.
I think it’s good for the project that people can say “yeah but he’s gone now, what do you think about the ___ mechanism?” since there are some interesting ideas to examine in there. They built everything from scratch. A VM, a language, a filesystem, etc etc etc…
But still, this is kind of like if Terry had stepped away from TempleOS.
The whole concept as I understand it seems pretty interesting, but come on - the entire ecosystem of Urbit is still absurd. Hoon, the weird new pronunciation scheme you have to learn, the obtuse naming schemes…
I found the weird names annoying as well, but Curtis does come up with a valid reason for this, in that everything gets rewritten and refactored multiple times, so “…it lets the hard problem of naming get solved later, and hence better.” As the system gets more mature, and actually usable, it would be nice if they came up with some meaningful names for the bigger components (e.g. rename Ford to Build System). He also admits his biggest mistake was assigning 1 to false and 0 to true. I’m sure this was a result of his habitual contrariness.
Or perhaps cognitive contamination from /bin/sh.
And I find this quite baffling. It’s deeply disappointing that people whom I respect default to this gossip-driven analysis instead, that a project as ambitious and worthy as Urbit gets buried in “foogate” style rumors.
Urbit is fascinating. It is the only project I know of designed to address distributed problems (viz. community moderation, censorship, identity, ownership) from an incentive-based approach instead of the typical GNU-style “sheer will and religion” approach.
Since Curtis apparently wants the world to be in a certain manner and more or less spun up his own world in Urbit, maybe it’s prudent to consider what Curtis’ opinions on things are before adopting the project that likely embodies them?
I’m not sure myself, but in a project like this, it may be hard to meaningfully separate creator and creation - even after the creator left (as the fundamental architecture is still shaped in his image).
I think the new primer https://urbit.org/primer/ makes a good case that there is nothing actually feudal about Urbit in practical terms. Once you own a planet, the personal level of Urbit entity, you are free to have its traffic routed by any star, the network routing level, that will accept you. This could be a problem it Facebook or some government buys up every star in the system, which is unlikely for the foreseeable future.
Of which there will be - by design (“Any reputation system needs scarcity of identity.”) - fewer than there are people on this planet right now (4 billion in total). Given how these systems work, it will be interesting to reclaim “lost” ones, reducing supply even further over time.
Will everybody else be a sharecropper? Or will they have to spin up their own network?
Now these identities can be subpartitioned (“moons”, again 2^32, and they’re bound to their “planet”), but if global network size doesn’t matter, why setup such limits in the first place? This isn’t the 1970’s anymore (as they correctly state in their marketing material).
They merely need to control the galaxies: “The galaxies form a senate which updates the logic of the Ethereum land registry by majority vote”. The platform doesn’t seem to design elections for this “senate” into the platform.
“Tlon remains the guardian of the urbit.org galaxies. We have always wanted the address space to be widely distributed.” - address space, yes. But Tlon owns the right to repartition the entire platform as they “bought back” galaxies. Even if you “own” a planet, that’s only one of Tlon’s decisions away from not being yours anymore.
Since control over your data is bound to a planet, which is contingent of (at some point) a galaxy “sponsoring” you, and they can make up all the rules, it looks like just the same kind of sharecropping to me as any of the big vendor-lock platforms that make up the modern internet. Just with more obscure ownership.
This is just dishonest. The “rules” are voted on by a senate, the same way the rules of the internet are voted on by the IEEE currently.
False. Owning Urbit addresses is like owning a bitcoin wallet. Tlon can’t take it away from you any more than Satoshi can.
(edit:)
Global network size does matter, as you quoted, “Any reputation system needs scarcity of identity.” It seems to me like you are giving Urbit a bad-faith reading. If you try a good-faith reading, try the “principle of charity”, you might find that you agree with Urbit more than you realize.
Who or what makes up the senate? I quoted the part of their marketing material already and to me it looks like absolute rule by whoever controls a majority of galaxy nodes, so 129 hosts. The rules they vote on make up the “land registry”, from which, apparently, everything else is derived.
Yes, I quoted that.
But how is a reputation system relevant to what you can or cannot do to your append-only data log? I prefer scuttlebutts solution to approximately the same problem: you keep your log, I keep my log, and if I decide to trust you, I also look at your log (and parse the bits you decide to share with me by giving me the keys).
No need for reputation except the reputation that already exists in the real world, that makes me decide whether to trust you.
[edit to add: the Urbit folks claim elsewhere that galaxies and stars are entirely meaningless, but since they’ve been made part of the fabric that makes up the platform, by having them spawn each other and planets, they can’t be that meaningless. Otherwise, why add them in the first place?]
Galaxy owners. See the bottom of https://urbit.org/primer for the distribution. I don’t think anyone really knows exactly how this will work yet, the owners are pretty well distributed with nobody owning 51% of the address space.
It’s not. A reputation system is relevant to how valuable my Urbit is. If I start spamming people with my planet, then the star that is my supervisor can stop sending me packets. I could move to another star, but if my reputation gets bad enough, nobody will want to send/receive my packets, and my Urbit will become worthless, I wouldn’t even be able to resell it. This is not the case with e.g. email addresses, which spammers can create ad infinitum. That is the only reason for the scarcity of addresses.
Re: the append log, only I can write to that, no different than scuttlebutt.
Also, nobody claimed galaxies and stars are meaningless; they are network infrastructure responsible for routing packets. They are arbitrary in that a planet doesn’t really care which star it’s getting packets from, just like you don’t care which AWS data center is serving you a website.
Paraphrasing a comment I made about Jordan Peterson’s work - learning Urbit and the weird way it is structured is a significant time investment. A simple heuristic to determine whether something is worth your time is to check what the creator of this thing is like.
In the case of JP, my impression is unfortunately only 3rd hand.
In the case of Jarvin, or rather his alter ego Mencius Moldbug, I have read some primary material, such as the following blog post:
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/01/how-bitcoin-dies/
Jarvin was (in my imperfect recollection) criticized for the use of these terms, and (again, iirc) replied that he was only being “provocative”. Fair enough, I’m sure Jarvin (and people of his ilk) have plenty of experience in discussing whether what they’re writing is only provocative or if they’re genuinely anti-Semitic (Jarvin identifies as a Jew, I believe). It’s a depressingly common occurrence online.
But from a step outside, looking at something to invest time and effort in, and seeing that a project is closely identified with a person I would never want to be associated with, it’s quite easy to choose not to delve too much further.
I also happen to believe that he (along with many cryptocurrency enthusiasts) are fundamentally mistaken about how economics work, and I discount Urbit for that reason too.
In the case of Peterson, his work is philosophical, so that heuristic makes a large amount of sense. Although when dealing with someone so, uh, misrepresented by various groups, I’d think it would be more sensible to actually look at the (readily, freely available) source material.
I agree that it is a significant time investment to fully understand, but I think you can get a good approximation of his basic mindset by watching one of his non-combative interviews, or one or two of his (non-biblical) lectures .
Thanks for the suggestions!
I was a bit unclear when I wrote:
I meant it in the narrow sense that I cannot offer any first-hand critique of his work. I’m really hesitant to parrot statements like “Person X holds Y views” unless I’ve verified this personally.
(I’d love to post a link to my comment but it’s really hard to find on the site, I’ll try to update if I can find it)
However, there’s a limit of how much time I’m prepared to spend just to be able to defend or criticize someone. In JP’s case, my desire to engage with his work is minimal since his most well-known public stance is vociferously anti-trans.
This is a good example of why it is worth going to the source. Peterson is not anti-trans, which he has stated many times and demonstrated by having respectful, productive interviews with at least one trans person that I can think of (Theryn Meyer).
The popular narrative conflates his objection to compelled speech in general with his objection to trans people (who were the subject of a particular piece of compelled speech legislation).
I was prodded by your comment to read up a bit more about the entire Canadian controversy that I referred to.
You’re correct, based on the reporting I’ve read JP can’t be denoted as anti-trans. Thanks for encouraging me to learn more about this issue.
Thanks for being open to revisiting your views; that’s a remarkably rare virtue.
What? You seem confused. Urbit is a technological structure, not a political one or economic one.
The entire premise of Urbit is the ownership of “scarce resources” (analogous to physical land) where one can seek rent. That’s both economic and political.
Ok, but that’s no different from DNS.
Also:
DNS is absolutely a politic, economic and technical structure.
You’re misunderstanding structures and the downstream implications that these structures cause. DNS is a techincal structure that has implications which are technical, political, and economic.
The US Congress is a political structure which has implications that are political and economic (and sometimes technical, in the case of, say, regulating Facebook data privacy or whatever).
DNS isn’t just a technical structure. The distinction between structures and implications (which I don’t think is useful in this context anyway) does to economics, but DNS does make political/social choices - for example, the number of root servers, control being hierarchical rather than distributed, and so on. All of these are both technical and political choices that the project makes, and that’s after generously excluding the organisations, committees, and documents that make DNS work.
Urbit’s choice to have “scarce resources” is an intentionally different political choice from the one DNS made, which never intended to hit the resource limits we currently have with IPv4 - which is why we now have IPv6, and an address space where addresses becoming scarce is almost entirely implausible for the foreseeable future. Urbit’s choice was made with full knowledge of how scarcity effects these systems, making it absolutely clear that the design decision is political, not technical.
Is there an example of a technology that doesn’t have political or economic implications? Considering the potential scope and impact of Urbit beyond its technological contributions seems especially important since it seems to me that it’s trying to alter the current conventional paradigm for internet services.
No. And I didn’t say it doesn’t have political/economic implications, in fact it definitely does. But in my opinion, the Urbit political implications are better than what we currently have. Consider:
I agree. It’s a kind of politics that makes people weak centered on our basic instincts of us vs them. The better route is to separate the two, ignore whatever bullshit he writes on his blog, focus on his technology, identify what good/bad can come out of it, and (if good) then either adopt or clone plus compete with it. The adopt or clone decision is where you consider the person. Even then, it’s not their political ramblings so much as what they do in a development and business context day to day. A person with strange beliefs who acts civil and hard working around others in a business is fine with me.
Edit to add: Work in diverse company with piles of people each with different beliefs, some diametrically opposed. We somehow still function and mostly get along with each other. Different mindset with effort put in is all it takes. Makes job more interesting, too.
Except Urbit is deeply rooted, in its design, by Jarvin’s beliefs about politics and economics. A technology can’t stand in isolation from its context when its a deeply social technology like Urbit.
That’s a statement of faith, not proof. Assuming no patent risk, I can literally take his tech, distill out ideas useful to me, and use it for those things. I could’ve done that without ever knowing what his political beliefs are. I can do it while knowing what his political beliefs are. I can even do it to support things he opposes. Therefore, they provably don’t matter if I’m not partnering with him.
They matter to you or others like you who feel a need to combine a person’s political beliefs or statements with everything they do. You’re limiting yourself voluntarily for ideological reasons. I intentionally avoided limiting myself that way since it reduces what I can get done with no value in return. My opponents who control the world in damaging ways also don’t limit themselves like you: they’ll work with or fund people whose beliefs or personalities they can’t stand if it achieves common goals. Got them where they are. Defeating them to stop real damage (vs crap people write on Internet) will take all kinds of people working together despite differing beliefs.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m all for appropriate parts of technology for uses outside their design. My statement wasn’t about restricting yourself. What I mean is that (and this is especially true in software) the design of a technology is better understood when looking at the “whys” and not just the “hows”. For example, why does Urbit limit its address space? It’s not a technological limitation. In fact, there are lots of parts of the system built around the idea of artificial resource scarcity. Without understanding this system “top”, which covers many lines of code in various components, how are you going to properly take what you need if say, you don’t want that silly limitation?
I find that a person with “strange beliefs” (to put it nicely) is also a strange person to work with. Most work is communist in nature ( in the Graeber definition of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”). When you ask for a code review, your colleague typically doesn’t say “I will do it but what will you do for me?”. If you need a wrench, the guy next to you doesn’t go “Only if you give me $1”. If the friction is low enough, or need great enough, people will typically do it. Any strange beliefs that stray away from this kind of work ethic typically make all work far less efficient, and even unworkable.
Ok, now I agree with you there. What you’re talking about, though, is design goals. I’m all for understanding them since I need to understand the rationale behind the decisions. I think I avoided Urbit when I saw cryptocurrencies or something mentioned. The rationales might have a political component. I can still ignore that if I choose. Sometimes, I learn from it like with privacy techs whose features might be inspired by sneaky behavior of companies or governments. One can still separate design requirements from political motivations in most cases just by filtering and/or generalizing.
“is also a strange person to work with. “
Now, now, that’s jumping to conclusions. A person should be judged on what they actually do rather than hypothesizing. I only read a little on this guy with some people saying he’s really nice at conferences with informative talks. Some people said there were problems but those posts weren’t as specific. If he’s actually disrupting people, then he’s not a good guy to have around. If he’s not and is helpful, then he is potentially a good guy to have around. That’s how I do it with coworkers. It works with some being weird on occasion but they usually just avoid uncomfortable subjects if they know it bothers someone. Unless they’re assholes which is a different thing entirely. ;)
“When you ask for”
Since I know little about him, I’d say whoever you’re describing is a person that demands something in return for his work. Presumably, the employees aren’t working for free. They’re doing that, too. I’m also aware of, experienced a lot of, people trying to be users getting others to do their work for them or get something from nothing. They’re not give and take people so much as take, take, take. One strategy for dealing with that is to be a no, extra, free work by default person who is selective about their generosity. I just read an awesome article about such a transition recently.
Now, that said, a person that acts like that can also be a drain on a business or not right for its culture. Not even political culture so much as performance standards. If they’re paid to do an app, the best team will always be supporting each other to get it out the door in whatever state the business needs. I’d not hire such a person that made everything a trade if they were already getting paid for an outcome that required that minor thing to achieve. I’d rather them be helpful by default covering for each others’ weaknesses and helping them improve on them. I’m sure you’re of the same mind on that, too. :)
Re-reading what I wrote I was definitely a little obtuse. Let me elaborate, I find people with his kind of ideas usually hard to work with. But that’s just my experience. I didn’t mean strange ideas in general, but “strange ideas” as in, his ideas. Reading previous articles, it seems his co-workers basically seemed to have done what you would do, basically tiptoe around those issues to maintain a polite atmosphere. Which is fine and probably the most appropriate thing to do in that situation.
However, I think we can agree that we should not entertain asinine ideas. If he was a flat earther and designed his software to have a 2D address space because the plane is the way to go, we would certainly find that a strange design choice that introduces complexity. But for some reason when someone thinks some races are a better fit for slavery and that democracy is bad and incorporates those ideas into his design by having an ownership model based on those ideas, we seem to say “I can work with that guy, he is fine, he likes cats as I do”. To me, that’s just a form of support and validation. Maybe you are able to compartmentalize these things, but what if the person can’t and finds your support validation of the other stuff. I’m going to call in Godwin’s Law here and say, yes, Hitler also loved his mother and painted some nice stuff, but would I work with him on chemistry projects?
“But for some reason when someone thinks some races are a better fit for slavery and that democracy is bad “
Those are actually specific examples where I’d consider not working with someone. Especially if the project was about individual empowerment and decentralization. I’ve still worked with people who had a white supremacist background. We’d occasionally have to call them out on their behavior if a discussion between them and black folks involved race. They’d make an advance which we sane, white people would block. They almost always walk off. Then, it’s done. They and the black folks usually get along day-to-day with one we just fired being missed a lot. Might shock you with the stuff you read on tech forums about what blacks, Jews, etc believe and need for inclusive environments, eh?
“To me, that’s just a form of support and validation. Maybe you are able to compartmentalize these things, but what if the person can’t and finds your support validation of the other stuff.”
Which brings me to this. Down here in the South, we know there’s lots of racists on each side. As we might say it, we know everyone has a bit of bullshit or crazy shit in their head. With a Christian majority, we’re also taught that people are inherently sinful with us needing to admonish it, be forgiving, and be patient in helping them get better. So, what of these people who think other races are inferior and individual decisions are worthless? How to get them further away from these beliefs?
There’s only one thing that works that I can tell from observing where the South was and is today. That’s getting different people in one place forced to be around each other, tolerating each other, for long periods of time. For us, it starts in public schools where racist whites and blacks along with people in the middle are stuck together. Then in the workplaces. The process over time lowered that racist bullshit down to tolerable levels where the KKK-style people are fairly uncommon or rare depending on the area. They mostly hide from us. Even they often like black people where they are compartmentalizing what they learned to like vs what they were taught to hate.
What you’re advocating is essentially enlightened people pushing out those who still need to learn stuff away from those who will teach them. Then, they cluster into groups of racists who continue reading garbage, hating on people, plotting, and planning. Many such shunned groups ended up voting for Trump last election since he was only one pretending to care about them. There was no way to reach them since the radical-leftist liberals succeeded in censoring them off as many forums as possible. They similarly created their own recruiting locals and drowning out opposition. Division and siloing at an all-time high on the net like it used to be in meat space in the South. (slow clap for radical liberals)
We’re not showing support for these idiots: we’re showing them that people are better than they think. We’ll call them out where needed. If they disrupt too much and ignore warnings, we’ll eject them from that position so they know we mean business. They’ll have another chance to do better. Contrast that to radical-liberal doctrine behind CoC’s where statements on any medium or place will get people blocked from all places with similar CoC. See paragraph above for where that shit leads. My reaction is more patient and measured with a chance for people to learn over time. And it always takes time.
I think this is absolutely right. I’m not advocating for people to splinter of and shun each other. What I’m advocating is people should not ignore bad ideas and make sure the other party knows. I’m not a moral relativist. And you are right about Trump folks feeling left out. You are also right that the liberals basically ignored them.
However, You are wrong that radical-leftists are liberals because they are not liberals. Radical leftists despise liberals just as much as the right does. But you won’t find that kind of discussion on Fox News or NY Times.
I forgot about the definition dispute. My bad. Yeah, OK, your position seems a lot more reasonable. I like that. :)
I’m a lot less patient and tolerant than I used to be: particularly of stupid stuff directed at someone else.
I don’t know about you, but I would judge the idea as strange if I would not see the benefits of it, not because its author has different political views. If 2d addresses would solve many issues than it might be a good idea regardless of who came up with it.
The reason for network address scarcity is to make spamming cost-ineffective.
Compare that with the state of email spam, where email addresses are basically free.
Alternatively, they could do something like bank-level verification checking government ID’s and requiring a deposit to create an account. Then, maybe fining whoever is spamming. Then, it should go down. Worst case with low or now fines, whoever is compromised will find out about that changing their credentials or reinstalling their system.
Jumping from “there’s spam cuz addresses are free” to “need network address scarcity” is the kind of unnecessary, risky solution that crowd is fond of. Better to just fix the problems in existing systems or design new ones with methods proven in existing ones. They have an irrational aversion to doing that for some reason.
Relying on government ids is a centralized solution. Urbit is decentralized, thus needs a decentralized reputation system.
It could be bootstrapped that way. The different organizations become part of the reputation system. Hell, it might even become a new service from banks and credit unions. They already often act as notaries.
Yeah, I’d rather not have banks regulating my computer usage…
Are you using burst transmission or a mesh network not connected to the Internet (doubtful)? Otherwise, you already use a centralized service via one of the big ISP’s that ID’d you and took payment with centralized currency. They also regulate your computer usage far as the network goes. Although they got issues, they’re still less volatile than most of these decentralized systems. The most popular ones, esp Bittorrent, operate over the centralized ones, too, for their benefits. That’s despite decentralized options being available for a long time. They’re too slow and unreliable.
It always interests me that you rely on centralized services on one hand with justifications but tell me in other areas there can be no justification for relying on centralized service. Make up your mind. Meanwhile, the inconsistency suggests to me that we can leverage centralized services as a component in these decentralization schemes.
Decentralized computing infrastructure is something valuable we should work toward. We’re not there yet, but Urbit is a step in the right direction. Ofc sometimes its better to centralize some things, but in computing I’d rather have decentralized infra.
Spamming is not the main motivation. The main motivation is to provide a source of funding to the company by selling the space. Oh, and the designer was a neo-feudalist which probably inspired the whole enterprise.
I’ll add that I’m skeptical of all companies that look like pyramid schemes or at least just funnels of money to the creators in exchange for tech that’s highly risky. Throw in any cryptocurrencies to that list since they’re usually structured in an elitist way for founders. If it’s a money system, I want it done fairly by non-profits or public-benefit companies whose incentives will protect the currency, exchange, and so on. Preferably one that’s already profitable from another revenue stream where they don’t have to worry about trying to monetize the financial project. It can just breakeven with a slight surplus or donations to cover expansion.
You are right on the money here.
Great pun haha.
Lol no one owes moldbug respect
Whatever his political stance he’s still as excellent a writer as he was one the old Usenet. One of the more memorable flames on talk.bizarre was from his hand.
I found him self-aggrandizing and subject to an inescapable superiority complex. When he writes philosophy he is unnecessarily verbose, so everything said seems tainted by trivial matters such as the author ego and it leaves me wondering whether the actual ideas expressed are self-sufficient or tainted by this ego: trying to project, to present himself: keeping at the marketing speak level and building an idea of himself, instead of leaving his ideas laid bare.
It’s not precise, and he just reads like an insufferable prick. I found Urbit rather interesting though, but I can only rejoice that the project is now without this guy.
I tried reading the linked post and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Maybe because it’s written “in-universe” so to speak and therefore addresses those people familiar with the specialized terminology of the Urbit system.
Call me old fashioned but I like email
I would be okay with email notifications, but in the case of GitHub, there are many events that don’t trigger an email, so it doesn’t feel sufficiently “complete” to me. Until more email control is available, a specialized view built on the GH APIs (such as this tool) feels like a better way if you really want to stay on top of every event.
I self-host. Pretty easy with sovereign. Or if you want to use NixOS: simple-nixos-mailserver
Definitely worth it, even just for learning how email works.
what OS do you use for sovereign?
I tried to apply it to Debian Stretch (with ansible 2.8) and it just would not even go (complains about setup module failures)
Have you encountered any problems with sent mail being caught in spam? that’s one of the most common problems I’ve heard about with self-hosting.
Yeah, but it’s not so bad after you setup the DKIM etc records properly. The sovereign README has instructions on how to do all that. The situation improves as the age of your domain increases too, I think.