Nock and Hoon are intentionally obscure. There is no good reason for either of them to be the way they are. Until they come to grips with this, Urbit is somewhere in between an art project and a pyramid scheme.
Just out of curiosity, have you verified in some way that your alternative is legitimate? (Like maybe there are some contexts you haven't considered where other aspects of Nock are necessary.)
If so, are you sure the Urbit folks just didn't happen to discover this simpler/clearer way of doing it? Or do they have some motivation for making it obscure?
It's intentionally obscure, I believe the stated reason was that moldbug only wanted people to use Urbit who have buy-in in the form of having spent/wasted a significant amount of time and effort
Or the Gurdjieff movement, which (also like Urbit) is full of completely made up terms and concepts like "organ kundabuffer", "being-partkdolg-duty" and "the sacred Rascooarno", which the faithful just sort of accept and don't really explain except in their own terms, or with reference to other bits of Gurdjieff's impenetrable prose. When confronted, Gurdjieffites usually resort to the sort of tactics displayed upthread, if they're feeling charitable: "Have you considered that you are simply, in your somnambulent ignorance, criticizing that which you do not understand because your sleep prevents you from understanding? Come talk to me after you've spent 20 or 30 years in the Work and have something to criticize." In short, to criticize the system you must first embrace the system in its totality, only then will you understand it well enough to level legitimate criticism.
If they're not feeling charitable, they might declare you an Eternal-Hasnamuss-Individual and tell you your destiny is to become food for the moon. But at least they won't sue you or send private investigators after you (I think), so that's nice.
"In his most important book, BEELZEBUB'S TALE TO HIS GRANDSON, Gurdjieff talks about an organ that was implanted into humanity called the "organ kundabuffer". It was planted by two archangels in response to galactic catastrophe which affected the solar system which includes the planet Earth.
The organ was temporarily implanted into humankind in order to minimize the sorrow of adapting to the stabilization period where the two moons, Luna and Anulios, would return to a balanced orbit around the Earth."
> "organ kundabuffer" was a specific organ that excreted some kind of drug (in Gurdjieff's pre-history.)
So basically you have to be on board with his sci-fi extended universe in order to grasp the cause behind the central tenet of the Fourth Way: that man is asleep.
> "being-partkdolg-duty" is the task and operation of remembering oneself.
Defining one Gurdjieffism in terms of another Gurdjieffism. Nice. "Remembering oneself" is, roughly, what Hackernews knows as mindfulness, but seems to involve a lot more following Gurdjieff (or one of his disciples, or his disciples' disciples, there must be an unbroken chain to the Master you see) around, scrubbing his floors and latrines, and doing his silly dances. Giving him your money also seemed to help.
> "the sacred Rascooarno" is death of the physical body.
So why does Gurdjieff say "the sacred Rascooarno" and not "death"? Because the Gurdjieffian concept of death is alien to anyone outside the Work. As you say, Rascooarno is the death of the physical, planetary body, but a person (or "three-brained being"), in the course of their life, has or develops other, "finer" bodies made up of even smaller particles than the matter which makes up their planetary body, like the body-kesdjan, which is often equated to the astral body but isn't really. One might say, in other religions, that a person has a soul. But for Gurdjieff even this is wrong: it's more like a person has the potential for a soul. Thanks to -- you guessed it -- the maleficent consequences of the organ Kundabuffer, a soul can only be attained through 20 or 30 years or so in the Work... do you see where I'm going with this?
Anyway, if you had a true friend in the Work, that friend would rebuke you for doing what Gurdjieff specifically enjoined his followers not to do: attempt to interpret his works to outsiders, lest you transmit wrong information and cause those outsiders to be crystallized in the wrong hydrogens.
> So basically you have to be on board with his sci-fi extended universe in order to grasp the cause behind the central tenet of the Fourth Way: that man is asleep.
Yes and no. His opus "All and Everything" is comprised of three volumes. The first "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" (itself divided into three volumes) is the part that is couched as a kind of autobiographical reminiscences of an alien, Beelzebub, to his grandson on the occasion of his pardon and reprieve from exile to Mars. It's allegory. That book is designed to affect the mind of the reader, it's a machine or program, not a book per se.
> Defining one Gurdjieffism in terms of another Gurdjieffism. Nice.
Don't be pissy.
> "Remembering oneself" is, roughly, what Hackernews knows as mindfulness, but seems to involve a lot more
"Remembering oneself" is literal. As literal as words can be. There was no concept of mindfulness in the West at the time. Buddhism was alien and barely known.
> following Gurdjieff
He discouraged followers.
> (or one of his disciples, or his disciples' disciples, there must be an unbroken chain to the Master you see)
The Fourth Way is not a lineage school. There may be people out there who try to make something like that out of it, I don't know. I don't hang out with them. The "Eneagram" craze was an example of a kind of degenerate cargo-cult residue of Gurdjieff's effect. But I don't think you should blame him for what people do with his work after he died.
> around, scrubbing his floors and latrines,
I'm not sure what you're referring to. Are you upset that he didn't clean the toilets personally at his dance school?
> and doing his silly dances.
Have you seen them? They are not silly.
> Giving him your money also seemed to help.
He could extract money from people seemingly at will (have you read the story of the time he nearly initiated an orgy?) He also spent lots of money, time, and effort feeding and taking care of elderly people during the war. In Paris if I recall correctly.
> So why does Gurdjieff say "the sacred Rascooarno" and not "death"?
To distinguish it from the current concept of death, which is very different. the sacred Rascooarno is a natural molting of the physical body, like a kind of second birth, and life carries on in the second and third being bodies. Our deaths, however, are merely the wearing out of a machine. Not having "coated" higher being-bodies into our physical body by the process of "being-partkdolg-duty" we "die like dogs", leaving nothing.
> But for Gurdjieff ... it's more like a person has the potential for a soul.
Exactly! Everyone says "There's a soul" or "There's no such thing" and Gurdjieff comes along and says "You have to make one sucker!"
It's the first new thing under the sun, eh?
> Thanks to -- you guessed it -- the maleficent consequences of the organ Kundabuffer,
You lost me...
> a soul can only be attained through 20 or 30 years or so in the Work...
No, you "coat" a "second being-body" and then you "coat" a "third being-body" and then you molt ("the sacred Rascooarno") and leave the Earth to go live in space with cool aliens that like you, or something.
These higher being bodies are like holograms that you use to store human-style experience in the next world. They're like emulators for your old software, eh?
> do you see where I'm going with this?
Yeah, but why? You obviously know a lot of this stuff but seem really unimpressed. Is it so wrong that I got a lot out of G.I. Gurdjieff without becoming some sort of esoteric edgelord weanie?
I know there are a lot of knobs and fools out there. The "enneagram" craze proves that. But there's also something else there. (Or maybe I'm just crazy. I still haven't quite decided yet.)
> Anyway, if you had a true friend in the Work,
I don't.
> that friend would rebuke you for doing what Gurdjieff specifically enjoined his followers not to do
Well, fuck em' Gurdjieff didn't appoint a successor, so I'll say what I like to whom I please.
> attempt to interpret his works to outsiders, lest you transmit wrong information and cause those outsiders to be crystallized in the wrong hydrogens.
Yeah, this is almost certainly "pearls before swine" but whatever, I'm bored and lonely.
Have you tried to look up definitions for some of them? I tried to figure out what a "hasnamuss" is, and about halfway through https://www.doremishock.com/beelzebub/hasnamussfieldguide.ht... found myself overcome with the urge to sneeze. The tick marks had gotten up my nose, as I'm sure you'll agree is a very present danger given their swarming multiplication throughout the text. But, having got past them, I found they'd done me a sort of mercy in distracting from the vast swamp of sheer nonsense into which I might otherwise have fallen.
It appears from https://gnosticteachings.org/books-by-samael-aun-weor/the-el..., too, that: "It is necessary to know that the Kundabuffer Organ is the negative development of the fire." That's something I am certainly glad now to know! It makes the rest of it seem so much simpler.
(Leaving aside sarcasm for a moment, "the negative development of the fire" seems like just the sort of thing a Quaker might describe as a perversion of the Inner Light, or a Catholic might regard as akin to what would become of humans absent the Holy Spirit indwelling. I'm sure someone conversant with the inner mysteries of Gurdjieff's particular flavor of syncretistic guff would consider both of these analogies to be shocking misapprehensions of the true nature of whatever it is supposed to be. But I'd be astonished to find such a person able to usefully explain what it is supposed to be.)
> Have you tried to look up definitions for some of them?
No.
I've read Gurdjieff's "All and Everything" (as much of it as has been published) and thought about it deeply. Even so, I don't think I understand even half of it. The part I do understand makes me think that Gurdjieff was a genius, comparable only to Leonardo da Vinci, with the difference that, where Leonardo explored the external world, Gurdjieff explored the internal world.
FWIW, as far as I can tell the "kundabuffer" was literally an organ that excreted some kind of drug. It deranged our thinking and perception, essentially making us high, so that we wouldn't notice that we were being used to somehow stabilize the orbit of the Moon after some disaster. Eventually the Moon's orbit was stabilized and the organ removed, but it was too late. The effects persisted. No one (of the alien/angels that were doing all this) noticed the problem until one person discovered that earthlings were destroying each other. (War is unknown other than on Earth. The rest of the Universe literally have no idea. Which is why no aliens land on the lawn: they're all totally terrified of us.)
The big deal is that you've nicely brought me back to my point.
>Even so, I don't think I understand even half of it. The part I do understand makes me think that Gurdjieff was a genius
By taking something relatively simple, combining it with other nonsense you heard or made up, wrapping it all in deeply nested layers of made up BS and obscurantist terminology, definable only in terms of itself, you too can develop a complex, seemingly consistent "system" that looks to the unwary like a work of profound intellect! And all you have to do next is pitch it with a hot take about something that everyone knows about and relies on (e.g., "the default state of man is sleep"/"the internet is broken"), to which your system is the only solution!
> The big deal is that you've nicely brought me back to my point.
I shouldn't have omitted the sarcasm tag on that line.
> By taking ... the only solution!
Yeah, I know. I have to resist the urge to start a religion almost daily. I'm only saved by misanthropy: I couldn't stand to have the bobbies milling around.
But that's not what Gurdjieff did.
> A lesson Curtis Yarvin has learned very well.
My take from the very beginning is that Yarvin is brilliant but mentally ill. I don't mean that in a derogatory way! I feel for the guy. It seemed clear (to me anyway) from his early writings about Urbit that he's a little touched. Over the years he's seemed to get a little better.
If Yarvin is mentally ill, then so was Gurdjieff. Both wrestle with ideas that seem to be too big for them, and both clearly struggle in so doing, or at least in making their big ideas comprehensible to those less inspired.
Of Gurdjieff's work I'm comfortable saying, in paraphrase of the apocryphal Dr. Johnson, that what is worthwhile is not original, and what is original is not worthwhile. Granted that I haven't studied him deeply - but I haven't done so because, where I have looked at his work, I've found nothing that other schools of enlightenment theory haven't said better both before and after him. Robert Anton Wilson is in my estimation much more worth anyone's time, not least because he doesn't seem nearly so much to deliberately cultivate opacity.
In Yarvin's case, I suppose time has yet to tell. Certainly his opinion of the status quo, with regard to tools ostensibly for communication between people, is one I share. I doubt Urbit is the solution, but as I said, time will tell.
> If Yarvin is mentally ill, then so was Gurdjieff.
I don't see how that follows.
> Both wrestle with ideas that seem to be too big for them, and both clearly struggle in so doing, or at least in making their big ideas comprehensible to those less inspired.
That's not my view FWIW. Gurdjieff was very clear when he wanted to be and also very obscure when he wanted to be, often at the same time, but always in service of his fundamental goal: Transformation of man.
If you examine the notebooks of Leonardo you don't have to be able to read them nor understand every drawing to realize that you're witnessing the work of a towering genius, a mind beyond the ken of the vast majority of people not just in his own time but even far into the future.
That's what I see in "Beelzebub's Tales". Of course it's obscure and hard to understand (in places): he's trying to construct and communicate a whole world view to future generations that overturns the epistemological foundations of common society. It's gonna be a challenge to "grok".
> Granted that I haven't studied him deeply - but I haven't done so because, where I have looked at his work, I've found nothing that other schools of enlightenment theory haven't said better both before and after him.
I don't know what to tell you. I've also studied him deeply and compared to most "other schools of enlightenment theory" he's like an adult among kindergartners.
> Robert Anton Wilson is in my estimation much more worth anyone's time, not least because he doesn't seem nearly so much to deliberately cultivate opacity.
I love RAW. He is ~#3 in my personal pantheon. But he once wrote a book that, by his own admission, was crammed with jokes that no one ever got.
> In Yarvin's case, I suppose time has yet to tell. Certainly his opinion of the status quo, with regard to tools ostensibly for communication between people, is one I share. I doubt Urbit is the solution, but as I said, time will tell.
Regardless of Urbit, I care about Yarvin and I hope he's a healthy happy person, or at least on his way.
> That's not my view FWIW. Gurdjieff was very clear when he wanted to be and also very obscure when he wanted to be, often at the same time, but always in service of his fundamental goal: Transformation of man.
I hear this Gurdjieffite dodge a lot. "He totally meant to do it that way, for reasons you and I can't fathom. It was all part of his brilliant plan, for he has assumed no less of a burden on himself than the total transformation of mankind!" They say that about his numerous scams like painting sparrows yellow and selling them as canaries. "That was just Gurdjieff testing the public, to determine who was truly worthy of receiving his teachings." No, it was a scam.
For God's sakes they say that about his penchant for reckless driving -- which nearly got him killed twice! It's just proof of his Jedi reflexes which he developed through his genius and years of study.
Come on, man! I won't doubt that he was a clever bloke -- as is Yarvin -- but he was a huckster. His stock in trade was getting people to think he was a unique genius with the power to bring about a new age of enlightenment. It's a testament to his intelligence that it worked, but it doesn't legitimize his claims or even put him on equal footing with Da Vinci.
And no, I haven't been hanging around "the wrong Gurdjieffites". The argument that you are not allowed to criticize Gurdjieff or his Great Work without having fully oriented your brain to his cosmology and philosophy is so common that there's a Gurdjieffian slur for it. "Wiseacring" is the word Gurdjieffites use to mean "talking about things you do not and cannot understand because you are not yet as galaxy-brained as Gurdjieff was".
My exposure to Gurdjieff's impenetrable web of BS and the cult of personality around him that it induced has made me suspicious of anyone who claims to be or is claimed to be a towering intellect with unique powers to change the world, especially if they are surrounded by sycophants who confuse obscurantism for genius. Yarvin rings this same alarm inside me, as does Stephen Wolfram.
I've been very careful, and I've worked very hard, and I like to think I've come a long way, but I might just be crazy. I don't think I am, but I can't rule it out.
In re: the canary caper, that story comes from Gurdjieff himself, from his book. It's only assumed to be true, and autobiographical. Why did he include it?
If Ouspensky couldn't fully understand Gurdjieff (as I believe) why should we expect to, who haven't the benefit of ever meeting him? I just pulled my copy of "Beelzebub's Tales" and read some passages to double check, and yeah, he's unfathomably intelligent. I actually read Wolfram's tome. The whole damn thing. (He cured me of megalomania!) To me there's no comparison.
I appreciate the chance to discuss this stuff. It almost never comes up IRL. As I said, I got a lot out of Gurdjieff (or think I did), and you have made it plain that you did not. Fair enough.
>> The No. 1 Cause of IT Failure: Complexity. ... According to software architect Roger Sessions, the primary cause of software project failures is complexity. Complexity can create delays, cost overruns and systems that don't meet business needs, according to Sessions, who is chief technology officer at ObjectWatch Inc.Dec 21, 2009
Another question below mentions these points:
Software Management Common Software Failure Causes
Lack of user participation.
Changing requirements.
Unrealistic or unarticulated project goals.
Inaccurate estimates of needed resources.
Badly defined system requirements.
Poor reporting of the project's status.
Lack of resources.
Unmanaged risks.
It doesn't make sense to me why barrier to entry being too low would be a problem. Am I missing something? The one thing that comes to mind is javascript but it isn't really a failure if the metric is user adoption.
Having been part of relatively niche communities that went "mainstream" I can see the appeal, but it is interesting they received investments from A16Z and others.
> Just out of curiosity, have you verified in some way that your alternative is legitimate? (Like maybe there are some contexts you haven't considered where other aspects of Nock are necessary.)
If you want a Turing complete combinator VM with transparent serialization of all values, there it is. Nock is not a serious language, I would love to hear what aspects you think it has that could be relevant in whatever context.
I'm pretty sure Yarvin's motivation for making the project obscure was just trolling.
> I would love to hear what aspects you think it has that could be relevant in whatever context.
I wasn't taking issue with what you said, just trying to understand how well-grounded it was. I personally have little familiarity with Urbit, just a bit of curiosity (enough to read a few HN comments on the subject).
> If you want a Turing complete combinator VM with transparent serialization of all values, there it is.
I guess the piece that's missing for me is why you believe that set of properties forms a complete set of requirements for the language.
Like maybe they described Nock as "a Turing complete combinator VM with transparent serialization of all values," so then finding something else fitting that description is supposed to be equivalent—but I wouldn't consider it to necessarily be so, since people often speak informally when giving some abstract summary like that (it's not necessarily meant to be exhaustive).
Hmm, I looked around on that post at all the parts referring to Nock and I still don't see anything that would convince an impartial reader of what you're saying.
Are you taking issue with the style/language the post is written in? I mean it does sound to me like someone a little too fascinated by their own ideas... —but I it seems too uncharitable to dismiss it because of that.
What I got from my quick skim is that the author was well aware of some similarity to combinatory logics, but intentionally took a different direction with Nock:
> Unlike the lambda calculus, Nock represents code as data, not data as code. This is because it is system software, not metamathematics. Its loyalties in this matter are not even slightly divided.
Or
> As you'll quickly see if you try this exercise, raw Nock is not a usable programming language. But nor is it an esoteric language or automaton, like SK combinators. Rather, Nock is a tool for defining higher-level languages - comparable to the lambda calculus, but meant as foundational system software rather than foundational metamathematics.
This sounds reasonable to me. I don't know if Nock successfully fulfills this claim, but without assuming the author is just straight up lying about this stuff, it seems like, "Any combinatory logic would do the trick" is probably not accurate.
Have you ever implemented a programming language before? You are relying a lot on "quick skims" and the POV of an "impartial reader", i.e. someone who does not know the domain. It's much easier to see through the bullshit if you're familiar with PL.
> Unlike the lambda calculus, Nock represents code as data, not data as code. This is because it is system software, not metamathematics. Its loyalties in this matter are not even slightly divided.
This does not mean anything.
> But nor is it an esoteric language or automaton, like SK combinators. Rather, Nock is a tool for defining higher-level languages - comparable to the lambda calculus, but meant as foundational system software rather than foundational metamathematics.
This is hilarious considering Nock is, in fact, esoteric. SK combinators are also very comparable to lambda calculus, and it's not clear what "foundational system software" even means in the context of a combinatory logic just like SK combinators. And why would Nock be any good at "defining higher level languages"? Keep in mind that their idea of "higher level languages" includes Hoon, another esoteric language.
You skimmed it quickly and didn't see anything that jumped out to you as wrong. That's a good explanation for how a cup and ball game like Urbit got as many users as it did: you need a bit of specialized knowledge to see that it's full of hot air.
I think you've got me wrong on this—the idea that I'm "relying" on "quick skims" and the POV of an "impartial reader," would imply that I'm somehow using these things against you. I literally am an impartial reader trying to understand this, who spent a little time reading a resource you pointed me at.
If I missed what you wanted me to discover in the resource, you could just highlight it here. But instead you've chosen to question my competence and make another series of ungrounded derogatory assertions about the tech.
Now including some mistakes, or at least overly uncharitable interpretations that are useless to an impartial reader:
> This is hilarious considering Nock is, in fact, esoteric.
It's esoteric sure, but it seems like his usage here refers to Esoteric Languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language) —which has a separate meaning (e.g. languages "as a proof of concept, as software art,"). That seems to be the whole point when he compares it to e.g. lambda calculus: he is maximizing practicality over mathematical elegance. So it makes perfect sense to point out that while it's esoteric it's not an Esoteric Language.
> This does not mean anything.
Again, if you take an uncharitable extreme, I agree: it's basically a meaningless thing to say. But if I wanted to be charitable I could come up with several ways of interpreting it.
> SK combinators are also very comparable to lambda calculus
Yes, I got the sense he was using them pretty much interchangeably here, using SK combinators as an example of an esoteric language, and in the next sentence he prefers "lambda calculus" because its a formal system in mathematical logic rather than a computational system, and the whole purpose of the sentence is to make a distinction between software foundations vs. mathematical foundations.
Unless you show an interest in exchanging ideas over rhetoric in your reply—don't expect any further responses from me.
I'm not questioning your competence, most people have not implemented a PL before. It's not a question of competence, it's a question of specialized knowledge.
> It's esoteric sure, but it seems like his usage here refers to Esoteric Languages
Yes, that's the sense that I meant it in. Nock is an esoteric language just like those others on that website.
> he is maximizing practicality over mathematical elegance.
Nock is not practical. He is certainly not maximizing practicality by making a combinatory logic that can only increment integers and then recognizing and "accelerating" a particular implementation of decrement! Let's look at Nock:
This is what I mean by being too charitable. There is absolutely nothing whatsoever that is practical about Nock.
> because its a formal system in mathematical logic rather than a computational system
I really don't think this means anything. The lambda calculus is one of the paradigmatic computational systems, and SK combinators are closely related. And it turns out formal systems in mathematical logic are also related through the Curry-Howard-Lambek correspondence. So there's no meaningful distinction between these things.
> I think you've got me wrong on this—the idea that I'm "relying" on "quick skims" and the POV of an "impartial reader," would imply that I'm somehow using these things against you. I literally am an impartial reader trying to understand this, who spent a little time reading a resource you pointed me at.
No, what I'm saying is that, as an impartial reader, you are giving them too much of the benefit of the doubt, and also not spending a lot of time with it. There's nothing wrong with that, but it means you can get taken for a ride by people who are making a smokescreen.
Okay, I'll try to be charitable with you here and assume you've just missed this.
The problem with claims like:
> Nock is not practical. He is certainly not maximizing practicality by making a combinatory logic that can only increment integers and then recognizing and "accelerating" a particular implementation of decrement!
Is that you are evaluating a component of a larger system in isolation. The form of your argument is that this component, which is a language, has obvious deficiencies/impracticalities that can be established in terms of the language itself and how it relates to other languages.
But this doesn't take into account how the language (which is the component I spoke of) relates to the system in which it's embedded.
The appearance of impracticality is often present in foundational systems. How easy would it be do use your same form of argument and deride the Peano axioms as obviously impractical because: look how much work it is to do arithmetic with a 'successor function'—ridiculous! (i.e. the 'impracticality' depends completely on what you're trying to do with it)
This was what I was trying to investigate from the beginning: how have you verified that Nock's peculiarities don't have legitimate reasons in the context of the system of which it is a component?
If you review our conversation, you'll see that's what I was trying to figure out since my very first statement—and to this point, you have still not addressed it.
The initial poster is likely weary. I’ll try my hand exactly once. I know it can be frustrating for both parties, because sadly, to know that an expert is right, you need a bit of expertise.
Here we go.
Symmetries are useful to understand a domain. If you have one, you know that a point on the left will appear on the right. So question like “but how do you know that there really is a point on the right?” is simply because you know the proof of symmetry.
The answer to “how have you verified that Nock's peculiarities don't have legitimate reasons in the context of the system of which it is a component?” is in the same way. They mention Curry-Howard correspondence: I don’t want to lose too much time on it, but yes, it is a symmetry, so the point on the left called Nock has a corresponding point on the right called lambda calculus with the same properties; and the claims made by Nock’s author about there being no symmetry are disproved by old proofs.
In fact, there are a lot of 50-year-old systems that fulfill Nock’s goals. Since it is an old field, the majority of them had time to develop into practical systems that are much, much clearer and less esoteric.
Which brings me to the goal of Nock. Why do something esoteric when a bit of field knowledge shows the complexity is unwarranted?
One possibility is NIH.
A more likely explanation is getting users into the sunk cost fallacy. Why more likely? Because this technique has been used repeatedly by the author in other fields, like his political essays. I am not the first to have that thought; a quick Google search brings this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6qPextf9KyWLFJ53j/why-is-men...
It does work. So many pixels spilt over an awkward language named after a famous anti-semite admired by the author, Albert Jay Nock.
Hi espadrine. I appreciate your well-intentioned comment, but I believe the issue here is not about grasping the symmetry argument, rather it's that the symmetry argument is not an answer to the the actual question I've been posing since the beginning.
Please correct me if I'm wrong—but the symmetry argument is basically: Nock could be classified as a concatenative combinatory logic, which is a variation of "classical" combinatory logic; this classical variation, or a particular incarnation like the SKI combinator calculus, can be viewed as a variation on the untyped lambda calculus.
That establishes an association between Nock, the alternative posted by xkapastel (which is a concatenative combinatory logic), and the lambda calculus.
So from here we can say, "why not just use the non-obscure bit of combinatory logic instead?" (we choose this over lambda calculus since Nock's approach appears concentative too, avoiding lambdas)
And my answer is that if all you need is a concatenative universal model of computation—then you're done!
But—where is it actually established that that is the only requirement for Nock in the context of Urbit? That is the question I've been asking the whole time, and which is not answered by the symmetry argument.
Nock's essential structure may be that of a concatenative combinatory logic, but that doesn't mean there aren't other aspects of its design which are important for how it relates to other particulars of the Urbit system (for instance: maybe this variation has nice performance properties in connection with other parts of Urbit—I don't know).
It's not that the author is lying per se about the claims, it's that the claims are somewhere between meaningless and pointless. What is the difference between "code as data" and "data as code" and why does it matter? What is the use of a not-directly-usable programming language which can define higher-level languages? In which meaningful ways does, say, LLVM IR not treat "code as data" and not count as a not-directly-usable programming language on which other languages can be built?
I am not saying, nor is 'xkapastel, that there is no difference between Nock and LLVM IR or any combinatory logic or whatever. We're asking what the point of the differences is. Anyone can make up a language (or any other object or idea) and define claims about that language that no other language satisfies. The question is whether those claims actually represent something meaningful and worthwhile ("interesting properties," as 'xkapastel put it) or just unique. That's a matter for the judgment of the reader, and we cannot just defer to the judgment of the claim-maker that the claims are worthwhile.
LLVM IR treats code as data, like Nock, because LLVM IR, like Nock, is systems software, not metamathematics. Combinatory logic, by contrast, is metamathematics, and in combinatory logic, if you want numbers or lists, much less byte strings, you have to build them out of code, using Church numerals and the like. So, in this way, Nock is similar to LLVM IR and different from combinatory logic. There are a variety of practical benefits to representing code as data in this way, which I do not feel the desire to explain in detail at the moment, but suffice it to say that all practical programming languages and virtual machines share this property with Nock.
So, you might ask, do there exist purposes for which Nock is preferable to LLVM IR? Well, I don't know, but Moldbug's intent was for the answer to be "yes"; there are problems he wanted to solve which LLVM IR definitely does not solve. Foremost among these is getting people to impugn one another's competence on the orange website. No, wait, foremost among these is determinacy and permanence: it is the intent that the result of any Nock computation be deterministic and unchanging through all time. The meaning of LLVM IR, by contrast, changes every time someone fixes a bug in an LLVM backend, or introduces a new one.
You will note that this way that Nock differs from LLVM IR is also a way that SK-combinators differ from LLVM IR. SK-combinators also provide a deterministic computational system that is simple enough that we can imagine not changing it. That is why it was necessary to explain how Nock differs from SK-combinators.
So Nock shares some crucial attributes with combinatory logic and others with LLVM IR, but neither system has the combination of characteristics that Nock does.
Now, why would anyone want a deterministic, permanent virtual machine definition? I don't know why Moldbug wanted it. There are some reasons that I want it; I think reproducible computational experiments are an important way to communicate human knowledge, a way that could perhaps drastically reduce the loss of knowledge from one generation to the next, accelerating the ratchet of philosophical progress which made the modern world possible.
However, I don't want to have anything to do with Urbit! I don't want to use a virtual machine that people credibly say is named after a famous anti-Semite. I also think some of the technical choices in Nock are questionable and may turn out to be fatally flawed.
I despair somewhat in writing this comment because I feel that everything I'm saying is painfully obvious, but obviously there is something about the people I am talking to that makes it not obvious to them. But since I do not know what that is, it seems likely that my own words will be just as incomprehensible to them as Moldbug's voluminous, and to me perfectly clear, explanations. And the level of viciousness in the air makes me think that probably those people will respond to their own incomprehension by launching personal attacks on me, as they have been on each other. It's pathetic.
I think you won't be surprised that a) I don't disagree with any of what you wrote, b) I don't think it's super on topic, and c) I think claim b isn't obvious.
For the sake of argument, let's say "a deterministic, permanent virtual machine definition" is a desirable quality. LLVM IR at the latest version is a poor tool for this, yes. But LLVM IR at some fixed version of LLVM works fine. It's weird because now you can't use up-to-date versions of LLVM with it, but it's doable: pNaCl did exactly this, and dealt with forking the LLVM codebase in order to freeze the IR definition. If you don't like that, Java bytecode at some fixed version of the JVM probably works, .NET CIL probably works, WASM works (although it didn't exist when Nock was designed), etc. In fact, Urbit's web page compares itself to the JVM and WASM. Perhaps you could use Infocom's Z-machine, or BPF, or something. Alternatively, maybe you just want i386 assembly or ARM2 assembly or MIPS II or whatever. With a validator to make sure you're not using undefined/newer operations, and with some restrictions on threading and input (including input randomness), they're deterministic and permanent, and you've got a wide array of software tools for generating it.
But I think "why would anyone want a deterministic, permanent virtual machine definition" needs to be answered, if we're going to have any idea of what the topic of this comment chain is. We're talking about whether Nock and Hoon are intentionally obscure, which means talking about whether there exist less-obscure things that solve the same problem.
Moldbug's claim - which, even if he doesn't say it in as many words, seems obvious from the history of this conversation and how participants have read his work - is that a) there exists a set of constraints that describe a thing worth wanting for a real-world application, and one of those constraints is that it be a deterministic, permanent virtual machine, and b) his invention, Nock, is a novel solution that satisfies those constraints. If you don't have that, then Nock is, as 'xkapastel puts it, "somewhere in between an art project and a pyramid scheme."
So, for your use case, I might ask you whether the JVM or i386 assembly or whatever answers it, but for the use case of Urbit, we need to figure out what exactly those constraints are. And then we can evaluate whether Nock and Hoon are novel because they solve problems that haven't been solved, or whether indeed there exists a less-obscurantist solution that satisfies the constraints, and thus Nock and Hoon are simply exercises in "look how smart I am" / "you'd never have gotten this from mainstream software engineering, aren't you glad you listened to me" / whatever.
In other words, I think we are off-topic by discussing the merits of Nock in the abstract, and then constructing scenarios in which we find Nock valuable. (And, to the extent that Nock and Urbit as a whole are potentially exercises in crypto-fascist-advocacy, this would be playing into Moldbug's plan - Moldbug's philosophical work takes much the same approach, of making an interesting-sounding claim and then trying to convince you it has real-world relevance because it's just so interesting-sounding and just so different from mainstream opinions that it must have value, and it too can be defeated by keeping "Okay, what problem are you trying to solve" front and center, and therefore Moldbug wants you to forget about that. If we say "Nock is cool, but I wish it weren't named after an anti-Semite," we make people wonder about the anti-Semite; if we say "Nock is, actually, an unnecessarily-complicated rehash of things that already existed, named after an anti-Semite and dressed up to sound cool," then people understand what's going on.) We should first figure out what the problem Urbit needs Nock for, and then we can have a fair discussion about whether Nock is a meaningful invention.
Incidentally, https://ngnghm.github.io/blog/2016/06/11/chapter-10-houyhnhn... is an argument that Urbit, as a project, doesn't need a deterministic, permanent virtual machine definition at all - that there isn't a need for future-proof reproducible behavior in the system, that the constraint on using the Nock VM makes Urbit perform poorly, that the escape hatches to help Urbit's performance undermine the whole project (apparently the Urbit runtime statically recognizes a particular Markdown implementation in Nock and replaces it with a call to a different Markdown implementation in C), that the "simplicity" of Nock makes it harder to understand the high-level purpose of programs and defeats Urbit's claim that programs are understandable, that the Nock VM prevents an Urbit user from doing effective runtime resource control which would be a useful feature in practice, etc.
"LLVM IR at some fixed version" seems on the face of it like a reasonable attack on the problem, yes, and you can get close to solving the reproducibility problem that way. But you can't actually solve it, because LLVM IR is two to four orders of magnitude more complicated than Nock, so it's full of definitional ambiguities, which mean that in practice it is defined by the behavior of its implementation, which is full of bugs, some of which must be fixed because they are security holes. Even without fixing the bugs, its behavior will vary depending on what compiler it's built with and what CPU and OS it runs on. Operations as commonplace as sequences of two floating-point additions can give different results, sometimes radically different, for example in the presence or absence of guard digits, to say nothing of non-IEEE-754-compliant hardware like Intel Gen. In this particular case GCC has a flag, -fstore-float, to get deterministic behavior on some hardware, so you can read about the issue.
The same flaw (for this purpose) is present in JVM bytecode, i386 machine code, ARM2 machine code, CIL, and wasm. (e)BPF and the Z-machine might be plausible bases for a solution on those grounds, but you'd still need a lot of work to be sure you'd rooted out the sources of irreproducibility.
Now, as I said, I'm not convinced that Nock in practice solves the problem it sets out to, and Faré's criticisms that you have helpfully linked to are a major reason for that. But nothing that existed does in fact set out to solve that problem, much less succeed. It's true that some other computational basis would also have worked, given enough effort; but I think you are seriously underestimating the amount of effort required.
I do think my previous comment already explained why I think rigorous computational reproducibility is valuable.
I mean, I'm happy to say that neither Nock nor anything else solves the problem, and I think that gets to the same conclusion: Nock is not a useful/worthwhile invention, it is an obscurantist rehashing of old ideas with more emphasis on looking elegant than being elegant.
That's what I'm pushing back on. There's an idea that because Nock exists and looks cool, it must mean something. And just like the idea that because the rest of the blog where Nock was introduced exists and looks cool, it must be a meaningful philosophical contribution, it's not true.
For instance - Nock, as both its advocates and detractors readily point out, is too low-level to be a language to actually write in. So that means you're writing in some other language which has an implementation in Nock (or perhaps in Nock-and-hopefully-equivalent-C, how's that for security risk surface). And that other language is rich enough to have security issues just like LLVM, and it's either frozen and you accept the potential insecurity, or it's patchable and you accept the potential nonreproducibility. You haven't solved the problem, you've just shoved it up one level so you can get a cool blog post about your elegant lower level.
I agree, I'd love to have a language that solves the problem you describe. I don't think Nock is tangibly closer to solving it than other things are, nor do I think it is tangibly closer to solving the Urbit system's needs than other things are, nor do I think it has some other unspecified merit. And I certainly feel no obligation to figure out some use case which would make Nock look meritorious.
(And, again, Google shipped pNaCl as a way to run untrusted native code. They had to do something to deal with the very concerns you raise. And unlike Urbit, the stakes for getting it wrong were very real.)
Well, it's good that we've gotten to the point of us both agreeing that what is Nock designed to do is novel and useful. It's certainly up in the air whether Nock will succeed in doing it, but I think it has a better chance of doing it than systems that don't even try.
I want to point out an error in your reasoning here, though, which results in you seriously underestimating the importance of Nock's goal:
> you're writing in some other language which… [i]s either frozen and you accept the potential insecurity, or it's patchable and you accept the potential nonreproducibility
Suppose I gather some data, do some statistical predictions based on it, plot the results, write them up, and publish the whole bundle as a set of programs for some reproducible computing system, including a build script that rebuilds the article from the source text, the observation data, the statistical code, and so on, with a secure hash of the whole thing. I don't even need to include a PNG of the plot in the bundle — anyone in the future, whether in 02021, 02030, 03020, or 12020, can recompute that bitwise-identical plot from the source data. Moreover, if I made an error in my analysis — either due to a software bug or for any other reason — they can reproduce that error.
Suppose the statistical code is compiled from a Julia-like language to bytecode for the reproducible VM. To achieve reproducibility, I could include the compiled bytecode in the bundle, but a better solution is to include the version of the compiler that I was using. That way, someone who wants to criticize my conclusions in the future can recompile my statistical source code with a new version of the compiler to see if my results were due to a compiler bug. Lacking that, they can reproduce my incorrect results, and they can recompile my source with a new compiler and get a different executable that produces different results, but it will be harder to tell why they were different.
In neither case, though, does fixing compiler bugs destroy the reproducibility of the computation, as you say it does. The executable compiled by the buggy compiler will continue to produce unchanged results on future versions of the VM, as long as they are not buggy. Shoving the problem up one level makes it into a completely different kind of problem with completely different implications.
I don't think there's any other system out there that attempts to deliver this level of reproducibility today, although some video game emulators come close. I'm probably going to have to write one myself, because I'm not convinced Nock is going to achieve it. Substantial parts of Dercuano and BubbleOS are steps toward this goal.
>> Unlike the lambda calculus, Nock represents code as data, not data as code. This is because it is system software, not metamathematics. Its loyalties in this matter are not even slightly divided.
Isn't that pseudo-profound (i.e. sounds grand but says nothing)? It seems like you could say the same thing about assembly or Java.
> it does sound to me like someone a little too fascinated by their own ideas
This is perhaps the most simultaneously concise and accurate description of Curtis Yarvin, or at least of that of himself which he chooses to display in his writing, that I can imagine ever encountering.
We should have an "Explain Urbit" competition. I haven't looked at it in years, but when I read about it, my initial version was something like:
"Think of abstracting an OS into a namespace, which uses a crypto layer to instantiate verifiable versions of itself - and then you write programs for it in a functional DSL, which do the stuff you do in a browser today, but with the benefit of a kernel of security proofs, strong anonymity, and federation."
Then 5 Whys:
- a.0 To re-establish the any-to-any principles of the internet as trustworthy federations.
- a.1 Because the current OS ecosystem is still an artifact of the very problems the internet was designed to solve.
- a.2 Because politics and messy human stuff.
- a.3 Because (the author believes) governments have become parasites that are killing their host.
- a.4 Because the people with the outlier intelligence necessary to form a just society are captured and cannot find one another or do not have sufficient tools to organize themselves.
If you read the websites, it's more like if a Rick and Morty fan BBS met Skynet at a cypherpunks key ceremony, and that would probably suffice for most use cases.
Here's my attempt: if a smartphone is a thing that's designed to facilitate the development of secure, robust, powerful client-side software, Urbit is the server-side equivalent. It is (or, aspires to be) the thing in which you can write the server side of a client/server application, and have it be as easy to use as an ios app.
To see what I mean, imagine trying to do a simple client/server use case, e.g. 'I want to share this picture with Grandma', for urbit users. It would be pretty trivial - all of the hard parts (e.g. determining whether the person requesting the file is the person I intended to share it with) are handled by Urbit, in the same way that a smartphone handles screen orientation and touch events for the client software.
So, the vision is that the sort of people who currently have a cloud vm or a linux box in their basement to host a website/email server/game server/etc, would run those things inside urbit to take advantage of its security (it aspires to be literally uncrackable) and builtin functionality (auth, exactly-once messaging, etc).
Obviously, the main problem is that AFAIK none of those apps have been written yet...
> Obviously, the main problem is that AFAIK none of those apps have been written yet...
edit - other than the thing being launched today, which actually looks pretty cool. Time to install it again and see if I can dig up any working urbit ids...
The ‘Urbit for Normies’ post[0] and the HN discussion[1] (which unfortunately predominantly talks about the ‘normie’ in the title).
A Twitter thread[2] which tries to explain what Urbit is is mentioned in the HN discussion.
I personally explain it like this:
People can interact with anyone on the urbit network, just like currently anyone ‘can’ setup an email server on my own computer and interact with anyone other on the email network. The difference is that Urbit IDs have a price — so one can’t make a thousand email addresses and spam everyone, and that Urbit’s protocol is based on executable code — which means one can execute Nock(something like WASM) to get the data, not just plain text (like the web).
System designed from scratch so there can't be anything like Facebook hoarding your data or Google tracking everything you do, because they just can't be built.
I know it doesn't explains what Urbit actually is but, it provides an overview of the tip of the iceberg for those with some technical background, while highlighting some of the features of the architecture that common people can easily understand.
Hmm, point "a.3 Because governments have become parasites that are killing their host," resonates with truth, but not all of the truth. We must be in a local maxima (minima?) at the moment - I don't believe we've found the best political system. I will think on this government-as-parasite idea, some more.
a.3 was an attempt to summarize the terabytes of text generated by people within a few degrees of the project in a pithy statement - about which somebody else has said they "did for words what bitcoin did for electricity." It's a bunch of rhetorical logic fractals.
Urbit may not have much to do with any specific government but it absolutely has a lot to do with governance and society in general. If you do not believe there are fundamental flaws in not only the reality of the internet / online services but the structure of the system in which they grew, Urbit is not worthwhile for you. If you do believe there are flaws, but you disagree about what the flaws are and how to solve then, Urbit may even be counterproductive.
> We think the internet can’t be saved. The way things are going, MEGACORP will always control our apps and services because we can no longer run them ourselves.
> The only way out of this mess is with a completely new platform that’s owned and controlled by its users.
> One way to imagine Urbit is as the Western answer to WeChat: a seamless, multi-purpose, vastly extensible social network, but without the surveillance.
> The ability of the engineering community to govern itself through republican forms is not an abstract theory; it's a proven fact.
> Urbit should never fall under any kind of central control. All transitions in galaxy ownership should divide positions, not unite them. Galaxy and star ownership should also be separated. It is harmful for a single entity to hold both galaxies and stars.
> Urbit has zero tolerance for abuse, nor does it facilitate censorship. Urbit will do everything possible to help you block content you don't want to see. It does nothing to help you block content you don't want others to see.
If you are happy with the role of governments and corporations in Western society and the resulting online landscape, it's not clear you need Urbit. It's fine, but it's overhead. If you're happy with the role of governments and corporations in China, for instance, if you like WeChat and how it works and why it works, Urbit is actively useless to you.
And you can oppose China (or even Western governments) and find Urbit useless too: if you believe the problem is with the holders of power but not the very concept that people can hold that much power, or you are skeptical of mechanisms to prevent people from holding that much power - perhaps because you fear covert power and collusion, or because you fear that tools that inhibit the accumulation of power are more likely to harm the powerless than the somewhat-powerful - Urbit doesn't present you with solutions that help you.
I think it's entirely fair to say that beliefs about governments are absolutely a part of why Urbit was created and why it continues to get development interest from people besides the creator.
If that idea interests you, you may also find it worthwhile to consider the more general case of ideologies. Ideologies are parasite-like and replicate, seek hosts, defend themselves against other ideologies, etc. Ideologies often have less-palatable ideas lumped together with generally-agreeable ideas to aid in defensibility, express identity (through group membership) and so much more. I take governments to be expressions of particular (or collections of) ideologies.
Cool stuff. Ideologies mutate a bit, in particular when then change host. After a while, their current form may differ greatly from their original phenotype.
I searched "Urbit" in the HN archives. The old discussion is still relevant for a project as long-term as this, and the more recent you get the more Urbit is misunderstood or attacked simply for being different.
Years on from the first announcements this hugely ambitious project is finally showing real-world practical application that is already superior to the alternatives in some dimensions, and with great potential for growth. If you're sleeping on this it's like sleeping on the Bitcoin whitepaper. The dimensions for the future of computing are being hashed out in front of you.
I've been seeing Urbit on here since like 2011, and it's always been style over substance.
The broad outlines are great (personal servers), but have been attempted by many other projects with many other variations, from Sandstorm.io to Blockstack. Urbit is one of many in this category.
The unique thing Urbit brings to the table is their ability to fleece speculators with techno-mystical obscurantism. If Hoon, Nock, etc, are really so superior, why did it take them a almost a full decade to work up to the "my first CRUD app" portrayed here?
you've been able to download urbit and use it for decentralized chat and forum discussions (in an earlier version) via webui since ~2014. this is the first instantiation of something like a full social software suite, but it's also been basically entirely rewritten since the earliest versions.
> If you're sleeping on this it's like sleeping on the Bitcoin whitepaper. The dimensions for the future of computing are being hashed out in front of you.
I was certainly aware of Bitcoin by 2011, probably much earlier, and I have no regrets about not doing anything beyond learning about it. Should I?
In my opinion, it's too late for that. However, there are some healthy profits to be made with honest effort, most easily identified in the form of bounties. You can become a star owner by claiming and implementing a bounty listed on https://grants.urbit.org/. Some already claimed examples include: a Tor Nodes Relay Search Tile, an (HTML) Content Saver, and an Ethereum ABI Parser. In general, though, Tlon are very happy and willing to merge good pull requests, and often reward contributors with Urbit address space (which, if this gets big, will be worth quite a lot more than current market rates at, for example, https://urbit.live). Hope that helps.
In a word, no. Single urbit identities can be gotten for free (just show some interest and ask for one), but the only people selling them are people who bought them as investments.
The main goal of the people working on Urbit, as with most ventures, is to make money.
They make money by selling you an identifier that gives you access to their network for ~$10-$20. They have 2^32 identifiers so they expect to make a lot of money.
Keep in mind that this identifier doesn't mean you "own" or "control" much, as it is folded under a parent identifier of which there are only 2^8, all controlled by the original Urbit creators/their associates.
The rest is a semi-interesting mix of distributed systems + crypto ideas as other commenters have tried to summarize; there are other, less indecipherable, projects with similar ideas.
How is the first link a "deep dive" or a good explanation of Urbit? He just puts Urbit down for being intentionally obscure and then confuses it with "Urbit Data", some random unrelated shitcoin that was going on at the time.
Nothing they say indicates they even read a single line of source, it's just the same insults you can find in any HN Urbit thread.
"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."
What the internet has become is no "garden". Urbit is trying to change the default internet user permissions from slave to master. Its ambition should be applauded, here of all places, especially with its hacker ethos.
The primary explicit goal, as stated by Yarvin in the post where he introduced the idea for Urbit (it might not have been named at that point), is to free user data from "silos" like Facebook and Google by shifting away from a client-server architecture to a more peer-to-peer architecture. Yarvin (and by extension Urbit) has a specific vision for doing this involving scarce identities, federated/feudalist network organization, etc.
it turns my gears when people describe urbit as 'feudalist'. feudalism is what we have now, where we're serfs on facebook's manor and can't pack our stuff and leave.
Urbit's stars, galaxies, etc., were originally called "czar", "duke", "earl", "king", and "pawn". Your issue is not with "people"; it's with Mencius Moldbug, who wrote Urbit.
That's not feudalism - serfs/peasants generally had freedom of movement. Urbit is pretty close to feudalism. It's also not putting words in Yarvin's mouth - he's been pretty supportive of feudalism in the past. (Some people have a bad reaction to that, but I don't really care.)
3. Fort allocation - digital feudalism
Lords are only one class of fort. A fort is always an atom.
It is classified by the size of that atom:
>= 2^64, < 2^128 : wolf (wild fort)
>= 2^32, < 2^64 : pawn (civil fort)
>= 2^16, < 2^32 : lord (civil fort)
>= 2^8, < 2^16 : earl (civil fort)
>= 1, < 256 : duke (civil fort)
== 0 : pope (trivial fort)
Many serfs could not legally leave the land they were attached to and did not have freedom of movement. Part of the value of that land when it was sold or traded was the serfs bonded to it. This shouldn't be particularly surprising because even some knights were owned by Lords and could be traded or given as gifts to other Lords.
I don't understand Urbit now and then. Is it artwork like TempleOS? Is it over-ambitious vaporware like Xanadu? Is it a revolution attempt like Bitcoin?
The technical details (Hoon and Nock) sound weird like TempleOS. Some claims (see parent) sound like Bitcoin.
Congratulations. One of my main critiques of Urbit was that I've been waiting years for something more widely usable and it seems that finally things are turning around.
There's a lot of very shallow and superficial negative opinions about Urbit, while it's one of the most interesting projects being developed online, IMO.
I don't know man, I tried to use it two weeks ago and I couldn't even get the chat to work. Neither could I try out their functional programming language.
Lots of people, including myself are quite confused by exactly what Urbit is. It seems like most people familiar with it have internalized its conventions to such a degree, that they can only describe it in the most broad and unspecific of strokes.
I'll take a stab at it, as someone who just spent five minutes skimming its description of its address space, and trying to parse people's varying descriptions of the project.
I'd love it if someone more familiar with the project could tell me how off-base I am.
- Urbit is a virtual computing platform in-which all devices (ships) are members of federated network.
- The federated network is hierarchically organized in such a manner that anyone can join, and receive a unique 128-bit address, but you're incentivized to join as a child of a node on the next level up the hierarchy (in-which case the first 64 bits will be your address, and the next 64 bits are your parent's address).
- your address is cryptographically signed by the parent, which serves as a reputational voucher. Your parent node also serves as a package manager for your vm(?).
- This system allows network nodes to ostracize branches of the network of ill-repute, in order to incentivize parents to 'disown' bad actors, as well as good clients to transfer to parents that don't vouch for bad actors.
- your vm is just that. A sandboxed computing environment in-which to exectute arbitrary code/applications either pulled from your parent node, or exchanged between you and your peers, as well as a mechanism to store and cryptographically sign data data you've generated/data that others have generated which you've cached.
> It seems like most people familiar with it have internalized its conventions to such a degree, that they can only describe it in the most broad and unspecific of strokes.
Let's see if I got the Urbit sales script down:
The internet and conventional computing are broken. The only way for people to regain control over their digital lives is to completely reinvent them. Urbit is that reinvention, a distributed platform that gives you a personal cloud that's as easy to manage as your smartphone.
It wants to be secure personal server that anyone and their mother can setup and use. I have hard time understanding how people have hard time understanding this. It's not that "complex" guys.
It's mostly a component of how deliberately obtuse the terminology behind it was early on (with no clear explanation), and how smarmy the early adopters are/were about describing it early on. I knew a guy who was big into it back in 2013. He refused to describe it as anything other than 'everything you could ever want computing to be'. Ask for specifics, and he'd just use the project's own terminology and act like you were stupid if you wanted clarification.
Personal server doesn't really do the project justice, because it does nothing to differentiate it in someone's mind from spinning up a vm on digitalocean with no specific intent. It will make more sense once the platform actually has software you can point to, but it'll still need more explanation to justify its existence.
While both are personal servers, I think Urbit is (and can be) a lot more friendly to average person than telling Average Joe to setup a vm in digitalocean and then through some magic make it communicate with your friends.
Which is kind of my point. The layman isn't going to get the meaning of 'personal server', but the term itself is too broad for the technically proficient.
Like describing ios as 'windows on a phone'. The interaction models are completely different, and so to are softwares that most people would want to use on or is even available for it.
Nothing about Urbit as I understand it is fundamentally alien to most developers save its nomenclature, and the way it's architected. But without that base of knowledge, the advantages and limitations of its model - and by extension its applications, are hard to wrap your head around.
I tried to understand how Hoon and Nock work once and got completely lost. They happily claim that their definition of Nock is super simple and Turing Complete, and I'm used to dealing with some really abstract things, but I simply can't deduce it. Their definition of Nock contains a couple of different combinators. They start out really simple: one to increment, one to tell if something is a list or an atom, one for equality. Then comes this one:
/[1 a] a
/[2 a b] a
/[3 a b] b
/[(a + a) b] /[2 /[a b]]
/[(a + a + 1) b] /[3 /[a b]]
And then I'm completely lost. What on earth does this combinator do? Every time I try tracing it with an example list it quickly goes into infinite recursion.
> / (slot) is a tree addressing operator. The root of the tree is 1; the left child of any node n is 2n; the right child is 2n+1. /[x y] is the subtree of y at address x.
> For instance, /[1 [531 25 99]] is [531 25 99]; /[2 [531 25 99]] is 531; /[3 [531 25 99]] is [25 99]; /[6 [531 25 99]] is 25; /[12 [531 25 99]] crashes.
Suggestion to the leads of this project: make the product objective/statement clearer.
Maybe I'm not the target demographic for this but I was met with a wall of text and couldn't make much of it all.
It seems exciting and also complex, at least for me, but selecting the right words can go a long way.
I know that I can search the archives and this current thread to get more context but this might not be the case of whoever gets directly to the introduction page.
Feel free to contact me should you want to review those texts. I'd gladly try to give you my humble help.
Obscurantism is very much the point, otherwise nobody even attempt to take it seriously. The target demographic is 'people whom you might be able to bamboozle into also becoming crypotnazis' which I realize sounds bananas but that's barely scratching the surface of the banananess of it all.
You might as well be asking spammers and 419 scammers to up their spelling and grammar so that more upstanding citizens could take advantage of those lucrative opportunities
They intentionally make Urbit obscure, for reasons explained in the UR post introducing the idea 2011. It basically has to do with keeping out people who are a net drain on a new software project (software entryists, "developer evangelists", etc.).
> Urbit started back in 2002 as Curtis Yarvin’s personal project. Curtis developed the original prototype for Urbit and, separately, wrote a blog on history and politics under the pen name ‘Mencius Moldbug’.
> In early 2019, Curtis left the Urbit project and gave all of his voting interest (both as address space and voting shares in the company) back to Tlon. He retains a non-voting, minority interest in both the address space and the company — but is not involved in the day-to-day development or operations.
> Curtis laid the foundation for Urbit by delivering its first prototype but, since 2013, it has been refined and almost entirely rewritten by a community of developers. No one working on Urbit today had anything to do with Curtis’s writing. For the most part, we couldn’t be less interested in it.
I think the many of the ideas behind Urbit are exciting, but I don’t think it’s putting itself in a good position. It’s just too weird. If it used WebAssembly instead of some small, functional bytecode, you’d lose some beauty perhaps, but it’d be much more palatable.
Hoon does have some very nice security / usability things, that a plain WASM doesn't: every function call is pretty much a sandbox, everything is serializable and sandboxable (so you can eg. exchange code around safely), great reflexivity/inspectability, etc.
It looks weird, and names are weird (which IMO is unnecessary), but the underlying mechanisms are actually not that difficult to grasp.
We might not fully understand what Urbit is, but we can't say they don't have some attractive design, from the layout of the article to the screenshots themselves
So suppose Urbit is genuinely useful. What is to stop someone from forking it, stripping out the obscurantism, writing friendly documentation, then redistributing galaxies/etc in a different way?
It would take a complete rewrite. Urbit is written entirely in an idiosyncratic programming language stack that compiles to an idiosyncratic combinator language.
I believe that a forked urbit could only create entirely new, independent galaxies/stars/planets if those were in a completely separate namespace (ie parallel universe). This could be great, maybe, for siloed intranets or maybe as a means of enjoying some of the benefits of urbit technology without paying for the 'land'. I might be wrong.
I have mixed feelings on urbit. I think it's a really interesting idea, but it's implementation is too obscure and complex. I do, however, sympathize with their goal and appreciate the UI design of this new web app.
I struggle to see the practical benefit of urbit versus something like sandstorm.io, although I don't think that project is perfect either. With WebAssembly getting its footing, it's hard for me to justify a future platform that requires code to be written in a specific language.
What if we had a federated computing platform that ran code via WebAssembly, stored data wherever the user would like including an option for IPFS, and managed identity via OAuth / SSL certificate authorities / private/public keys? It could be interacted with via a web portal, and apps could be provided APIs to interact with other apps and the rest of the system.
I can see something like that being built to fulfill similar goals (as I understand them... I could be wrong) but using existing tech: HTTP3, TLS, IPFS, WebAssembly
If I understand correctly, Urbit is a new OS kernel and application layer, with a new weird FP language on a weird VM. Its first app is a crypto ID system.
Yes, it's a new bytecode format and some application-layer stuff to go along with it (like some networking tools). This is almost impossible to determine because they intentionally made this as obscure as possible. A relatively clear explanation of what Urbit is and why they made it so intentionally confusing is available on the UR blog. I don't remember the title; something about computers in 2020.
it's a minimal turing-complete function, built out into a higher-level language and functional, deterministic operating system (arvo) that is virtualized on a host OS. arvo runs an encrypted overlay network that is decentralized and federated. individual instances have combination identities/routing addresses that are finite and cryptographically owned (built on ethereum at the moment, though perhaps not forever).
you could say its first app is a decentralized chat & social software suite. everything built on the OS gets the decentralized network 'for free'; apps become protocols.
It's not an actual "kernel". It's an application that hides all hardware specifics from applications that run inside it. Or something like that, I have no idea.
It's an actual kernel the same way a virtual machine is an actual machine.
To unpack that: a virtual machine could be a real machine, it just happens to instead by a software-hosted emulation thereof. There's a hardware JVM in your SIM card, for an example.
arvo (the kernel) is the same deal: there's nothing stopping someone from implementing the syscalls it uses (used to be seven of them IIRC), writing some drivers, and running it on bare metal.
But that's a lot of work, and the Unix-hosted virtual kernel works well enough. The whole thing may be fairly compared with inferno, which is a hosted plan9 which runs on a VM.
> Each user runs their own node completely independently. Everyone using Urbit OS owns their own identity and data. ... over an encrypted and authenticated network.
Interesting note about OS 1 in particular:
> One really critical thing about OS 1 is the pattern of ‘groups sharing modules’. This pattern makes it perfectly clear how a virtual computer can outcompete a bunch of different services. ... quickly outruns the messy, disconnected world we’re currently stuck in.
Question for the Urbit devs (when they get done celebrating and come in here to answer the questions, and sigh in dismay at the inevitable Nth round of hn-yarvin's-bashing):
In theory, it should be really easy to write a social media app in Urbit. I mean, that's kind of what it's designed for, right, to make it easy and secure to do the sorts of server-side use cases that we currently off-load to Facebook and Twitter and such?
So, where is it? I don't mean a legit FB/IG/TW/etc challenger, I just mean a toy proof of concept in which I can 'add' an urbit identity, 'share' a piece of text, and they would see it in their feed.
I know the easy answer is, "Why don't you write one?" Well, I'm a mediocre programmer and I already have a side project. This isn't me demanding that open source software be written for me; this is me asking, if the PoC social media site for urbit doesn't exist yet, does that mean that it's harder to make than a superficial understanding of the project would suggest?
> In theory, it should be really easy to write a social media app in Urbit.
Did you read the post? Have you looked at OS1? This is literally what OS1 is; it allows you to create groups which share notes, links, and chats. You get notifications in the dashboard if anything happens in any of the groups you are part of.
It's very disappointing to see all of the knee-jerk reactions about urbit here.
I bought my galaxy from Tlon a couple of years ago before Curtis left the project. I don't know Curtis, only met him once for a brief lunch. I used to browse his blog, and honestly found it thought-provoking but ultimately wrong. To say that I don't share his political and philosophical views would be an understatement.
And yet, I find that the structure of the Urbit network means that it doesn't matter. I have my galaxy and I can do what I want with it, which will definitely at times not be what Tlon wants me to do with it, and if you are a planet or a star under my galaxy and you don't like it you can move to another. There are 255 other galaxies and 64,999 other stars.
I don't understand the criticism of this being digital feudalism. I mean, if you want to call a planet a "peasant", and you want to say that stars and galaxies are some sort of feudal lord, then okay, but specifically what do you mean? As opposed to Facebook, or Google, as a galaxy owner I don't have your data, can't look at your traffic, and can't monetize your personal information. I can't spam you. The only thing I can do is block you, and in five minutes you can switch over to another galaxy. As long as there is one independent galaxy out of 256, then every person on the network can switch over to that galaxy. There's no monopoly power here unless you own all 256 galaxies, which would basically amount to a failure of the whole system and frankly I don't see how that could happen. I'm not selling mine.
There is also a lot of criticism about selling address space. Well, of course there are 4 billion addresses, and at $10 a piece, that's a lot of money some day if the network succeeds. But if the network succeeds, we are talking about a new Internet, and I think $40 billion is modest. It's also important to be clear that for everyone who bought address space already, we certainly didn't pay $10 per address, so Tlon isn't laughing all the way to the bank. And as a galaxy holder, I'm figuring that planet prices go down and maybe go as low as five dollars each or free as a loss leader. The money will be made in providing hosting and value added services on top of the network, and what exactly is wrong with that? Right now, OS1 has a built-in blog application, a chat application, a slack clone, and a reddit clone. Short on features, sure, but if all of that isn't worth a one time fee of $5, then I would argue you're just being a stubborn polemicist.
I'm also a critic of the tendency to be obscure. Curtis' trollishness, without a doubt comes out in the programming language. Again, I don't really care. I don't know Hoon. Maybe i'll learn it at some point. Hoon school classes are constantly full. People will learn it. For those who don't want to, there will be APIs, so that I can write in my native language. That's totally possible, and the whole thing is open source.
Finally, the whole "I can't figure out how to use it argument" is not unique to Urbit. Yes, the documentation needs to be improved. Yes the sign-up process needs to be improved. That is priority #1 from the team. But really, how easy is linux to use? In my opinion, not. I've been a mediocre developer for 10 years, and I still can't maintain my own box. I set up a server 10 years ago, and I went to set up that same server, with the same software today, and running the same commands doesn't give me the same thing. All new versions, with all new dependencies, some of them conflict. I break out in cold sweats every time I have to do a security update or upgrade, afraid that everything is going to break. The only thing to do is learn the new magic phrases to make the box do exactly what I want it to do. For me Linux is totally opaque, obscure, and I've given up on understanding it.
I am assured by the team, and I believe them, that we will have easy, non technical installation and hosting by the end of the year.
And that's why i'm excited about Urbit. It's an IOS and app store that I own and control 100%. It's a VPS that (soon) will just work, that maintains itself, that keeps my data under my control. It's a merciful exit from this horrible, dare I say it, feudalistic system in which the lords of FB, Google, and the like own and use (abuse) my data as they please.
So, I get it if you have impressions of the project based on how it was two or five years ago, but you are mistaken. The core developers on Urbit are some of the hardest working, competent, and idealistic people i've ever met. It's a joy to be involved, which is not what I can say about a lot of projects.
The thing I love most about Urbit is it's not blowing $1 billion on marketing, or trying to be the cool thing on the block. Ever since I've been involved, they have quietly kept their head down and shipped. Even against all of the hate, and I have a lot of respect for that. Go watch the launch event for OS1 and watch one of the core developers talking about how badly he wants to build the best e-reader ever, and tell me that the passion isn't contagious.
Thanks for writing this. All of the stuff about urbit being a cult or a scam that comes up every time it's discussed here seems orthogonal to what actual urbit enthusiasts care about, which is just that it performs a use case we actually want. All I want is the "you can share a file with someone you know without dealing with a social media corporation or being a part-time sysadmin" part.
Install urbit. Boot a comet (free). Join the chat groups. Ask for a planet (free). While not certain, in my experience, if Tlon people see interest, they’ll send you a planet. Or maybe just write to their support, they are super responsive.
They have 2^32 “planets” (a UUID that you can use to interact with the Urbit network), that they are each trying to sell for ~$10-$20 on a cute “exchange”: https://urbit.live/
(Of course you don’t really own anything when buying a planet because someone else owns the “star” and the “galaxy” and you can’t buy those unless you’re friends with them)
They even have a nice pyramid diagram for their not-pyramid-scheme:
In summary: Urbit is a functional/deterministic VM. That's mostly it. It runs a bytecode called Nock. The only language that really compiles to Nock is a weird language called Hoon. Because the VM is functional and deterministic, it is (in theory) also portable – you pick up the (ever-evolving) VM image and move it somewhere else, and it should act the same. Since the VM may move around there's also an identity/networking layer so you can talk to the VM wherever it is.
Right now Urbit is a program called u3 (runs on Linux or whatever) that runs Nock programs. OS 1 is such a program that does a couple things. It's unclear to me if they've really built an OS or just a library of routines that can be used to build a single multipurpose application.
people here are describing Urbit like they're discussing the meaning of the monolith in 2001, or the true meaning of Christmas. I like your take because you're describing what the code is, rather than the objectives or use-cases. it feels like TempleOS to me because (to me) the code is the point. it's an exercise towards creating a specific architecture as an end.
Nobody really "gets" Urbit - you're just supposed to nod amicably whenever someone brings it up.
In all seriousness, it's nice to see that the Urbit peoplo are actually making substantial progress on... whatever it is they're doing. I love huge, totally outlandish projects like this.
I believe it's an attempt at a truly distributed OS, but it is buried in about 10 miles of unnecessary obfuscation and wordplay. Apparently now it is a Slack-clone as well.
It seems similar to Tim Berners-Lee Solid. I guess the idea is to have a sort of pod of local data and a peer to peer system that enables people to connect those pods and build services on top of it.
That's about what I got from reading through the webpage.
I'm no expert, this stuff is definitely over my head, but here's my attempt to understand it: Let say you want a computer in the cloud. Today you probably do that by paying someone like Linode for something like a VPS. But under that model, Linode still has a ton of control over your computer in the cloud. With Urbit, it's distributed, so you aren't renting access to your cloud computer from some entity that has more control over it than you do.
Urbit isn't that distributed since your planet is running on one VPS.
(As an aside, the whole "$PROVIDER is going to hack into my VM" thing is pretty overblown. The cloud has existed for over 10 years and the worst that happens is the provider deletes all your data and you restore from backup onto a different provider. You do have a backup that isn't on the same provider, right?)
Walmart demands or strongly encourages that their suppliers not run on AWS, and Amazon is being investigated for spying on FBA data to enrich their own business. Other AWS competitors like B&H don’t host there out of fear of data safety and business continuity.
The worry is not that your provider will hack you, the worry is that your provider will silently steal your trade secrets.
Cryptographic keys that control identity and money are good distilled examples of this.
There's still no evidence that Amazon has ever done this. AFAIK potential customers are more concerned that AWS will use utilization metadata as a proxy for their customers' financials, like Facebook was using Onavo traffic data to decide which startups to buy and which to clone.
What VPS? Do you have to provide it yourself? Or is it assigned to you and managed by someone else? (I see a note in the article about "in the future, free hosting", but I'm not sure what that means.)
Everybody having their own VPS is far more distributed than Facebook/Twitter/Slack but it's less distributed than some of the social blockchain systems. They have some good commentary on this point: https://urbit.org/blog/common-objections-to-urbit/#gov
It's also just a programming language VM with focus on distributed apps and some opinions on network architecture.
That's the "what" it's just that the "how" (fucking hoon/nock) and "why" (moldbugs weird shit) is such a fucking rabbit hole that it obfuscates the very straight forward and uninteresting "what".
What I don't understand is, if they want to make the dissociation with Yarvin more clear, why not just change the name of the project?
I have the same question about ReiserFS.
I feel like it boils down to the fact that they know a bunch of their user or developer base would be angered by such a move, and that same portion are the folks the rest of the world would consider toxic, and so they just kind of ignore the question.
I don’t participate because whether he left or not, there has been no statement about whether or not he’s still a shareholder.
The success of Urbit could still be enriching its racist founder sitting on a founder-sized set of tokens or equity, even if he never worked there.
I’d much rather just participate in other projects.
EDIT:
...as of last I looked, there had been no statement. I’d still simply rather involve myself in other projects and communities, as it sounds like he would still benefit from the growth of the system, and I don’t think I’d get along with his compatriots that are still working there.
I try not to work on things where doing a good job means that someone who wants my friends to not have human rights makes more money for their cause.
1) There aren't shares to own. He owns some urbit identities, which will be worth real money IFF urbit is ever actually popular, which doesn't seem very likely at the moment.
2) You're calling a real live human being racist. Are you sure you know him well enough to stand behind an accusation like that? Or are you relaying third-hand opinions about his blog? I'm not a fan of his, but the blog posts that launched the #cancelyarvin effort seemed pretty innocuous to me.
Staying well clear of 2), but to address 1): Tlon is an ordinary corporation and I would be flabbergasted if cgy didn't retain shares in a corporation he founded.
Then there's address space, and my understanding is that he gave up control of his galaxies, which doesn't say anything about the stars and planets that were in them.
With a little spelunking in the old codebase, and inspection of the Azimuth contract, someone interested in the question could no doubt answer it with reasonable confidence.
Oh, I'd forgotten about Tlon. Well, I looked it up, and what he claims to retain is "a few thousand stars" and a "non-voting minority in tlon". I guess the latter could be valuable monetarily (in some hypothetical future in which urbit is successful, anyway).
Why would they change the name? Who would it fool? I mean, Yarvin left; that's a pretty substantive change. Anyone who isn't mollified by it isn't going to be mollified by a superficial one.
Yarvin/Moldbug's blog is titled "Unqualified Reservations" and is stylized as "UR" written in a serif font.
Changing the name and cleaning up the obscurity would be a genuinely good idea, but personally I'd prefer for this project to just die in obscurity. I don't think there is anything redeemable here, and the shitshow that follows every time it's brought up is exhausting.
An openly racist, far right blog. By an author who has stated that he believed some races were more suitable for slavery (he also seemed to have no problem with slavery of course) and that some races have genetic superiority to have better IQs.
(Just added it since I thought you forgot mentioning it)
As a Confucian and legalist (among other philosophical positions), there is one obvious gaping flaw in this classification: Urbit is obscurantist, while Confucius would have preferred that Urbit clearly define its terminology and goals [0], and that if it were truly an open project, that it would not try to divide people into groups based on allocation of private property, but instead unite them through common social visions and spaces [1].
Although, to be quite frank, I think that Urbit and its followers are usurping the name of philosophers like Mencius [2] when they try to play themselves off as Confucians or legalists. They are clearly neoreactionaries [3] and range from feudalism and monarchism to neo-fascism in their expressions of belief.
> Urbit address space has value, which means the distribution of address space has tax implications. You should speak with your tax advisor about these implications.
There are many valid arguments against Urbit, but this one...
>They struggle to explain it to technical people. Imagine trying to explain this thing to your mother.
...doesn't hold up for me. My grandparents understand computers only in terms of what they can do for them, and the buttons they need to click to make that happen. If Urbit ever matures, there will be applications of similar functionality and similar complexity to what non-technical people currently use.
Maybe a better question is, "what does Urbit do? Like, specifically - and using either standard technical jargon, comparison to other products on the market.
Because at this point it just sounds like a techno-cult.
Right now you can download urbit and message other people with an urbit planet if you know their id, and its peer to peer. you own the planet forever and you cannot be censored or have your data be sold to advertisers on social media platforms.
“An operating system in a box that connects with others to provide (mostly in the future) the kind of networked services and apps you enjoy now, but with your data stored locally instead of on corporate servers”
Easier than explaining bitcoin, honestly. No warrants made to mom or others on usability or service availability
"Have you ever had a software update break your computer or an app you used, or have you ever had a website you love disappear from the internet? Imagine if that could never happen again."
It's abundantly clear, and I'm not sure why people have a problem with that. Plenty of computing projects have required a long time before they become accessible to the common person as a packaged, supportable product.
Me not being able to explain Kubernetes to my mother hasn't stopped it from being a resoundingly successful project, and it's not clear to me why Urbit should be different.
As soon as the protocol is stable enough, if it is useful, it will be reverse-engineered and reimplemented in more-legible source code. From this, I can deduce that Urbit is not yet useful.
Just because it’s illegible does not mean it is suboptimal. It purposely breaks with existing conventions because it does things in a way not current code does.
Here [0] is but one example of Urbit's suboptimality: Their encoding into C is insecure, and they have no interest in changing it.
Writing a new operating system is hard. Taking lots of questionable paths, like writing "jet" templates [1] that call directly into existing C libraries, or defining a brand-new Boolean type that doesn't behave like standard Booleans, is not the right way to build confidence in any kind of quality, let alone optimality.
Also, as a word-choice note, "optimal" means "best". Urbit is clearly not the best operating system, because there is clearly no metric by which to measure it against other OSs. It doesn't support the same sorts of hardware or APIs or processes or other common components of our craft. "optimal" is a terrible word to use around greenfield projects and nebulous designs; reserve it for when you can prove that your approach truly is the best one.
That issue is pretty hilarious, and reveals a lot about Urbit. This topic on HN is my first exposure to the project, and I was on the fence about the (seemingly much debated) 'is this satire?' question. This ticket pushed me over to the 'yes' side.
Of course there is the 'loobean' schtick, but the best part is them sneaking in three-valued logic as a trojan horse, where the third state is "NO". They evens steer the reader towards the obvious footgun:
> You should ignore the numeric values and use comparisons against c3y and c3n for everything.
So I should say
if (bluebeanValue == TRUE) { ... }
and
if (bluebeanValue == FALSE) { ... }
Making any value outside the expected range mean "NO to any boolean test".
I’ve been following Moldbug for a while and his extreme bigotry means this is something that should never succeed. Thankfully, urbit isn’t doing that all by themselves
Originally Urbit was explicitly pitched as a political system. More recently they don't talk about politics and I don't think anyone has worked out what the emergent politics of the Urbitverse would be.
A digital product which, if it achieves the necessary adoption, would force anyone wishing to engage in modern society into a feudal system via network effects.
This seems a little like arguing privacy isn't a real concern with FAANG because they just products and you should use something else.
> A digital product which, if it achieves the necessary adoption, would force anyone wishing to engage in modern society into a feudal system via network effects.
Most other digital products (outside of some decentralized services and even then maybe not. See, for example email) have this problem but even worse in that you end up in a dictatorship. Is a feudal system with free exit worse than a dictatorship? I’d say no so does anyone make this argument against all non-decentralized services? I don’t think so.
I guess in the case of publicly traded companies, it's a kind of plutocracy? Control ultimately lies with the shareholders.
This is a fair point though, but I think the rationale for this criticism already accepts that our current infrastructure is less than ideal.
> so does anyone make this argument against all non-decentralized services? I don’t think so.
I think the people interested in decentralized services do make that argument, which is why they are so critical of the hierarchy of Urbit.
TBH I can see it from both sides. Dealing with bad actors and community management without any kind of hierarchy is very much an unsolved problem, probably unsolvable.
> I guess in the case of publicly traded companies, it's a kind of plutocracy? Control ultimately lies with the shareholders.
With the voting shareholders of whom are in many cases dominated by super-voting shareholders of which the control often lies specifically in the hands of a founder type. Could go in many directions but plutocracy would be very common in this conception. Interestingly, with the rise of index investing this could even be thought of as arising to a democracy in some sense.
> Dealing with bad actors and community management without any kind of hierarchy is very much an unsolved problem, probably unsolvable.
Yes, highly agreed. There is likely a broad truth regarding the justness of organizational systems and I'm very interested in exploring possible proofs of such impossibility but have yet to have the time. There are interesting tangential concepts such as Arrow's Impossibility Theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...) in the realm of Social Choice theory.
Personally a system that gives you more control over other users purely due to when you joined seems unpleasant. As long as I’m not obligated to join I don’t really care, people are free to join if that’s their thing, but it sounds like not a lot of fun.
So you're probably very against Reddit then? Reddit is inherently feudal in the same way: someone creates a subreddit over which they have near total power and loyal subjects are allowed to subscribe and post at the grace of the moderator lords.
Except there's nothing stopping you from creating your own subreddit. There's no limit to them.
In Urbit and Feudal systems, there's an idea of there being
1. A limited amount of land/resources
2. Some barrier to entry to getting them.
In Urbit, there are a set, fixed number of "galaxies" (similar to subreddits in your example) that have all already been given out. Planets themselves cost money and there's an exchange for them (https://urbit.live/)
Reddit isn't a comparison at all. There are very many examples of communities whose users got sick of the moderators of their subreddits so they split off and created a new community.
> As long as it’s voluntary, I wouldn’t call it evil. I also have no idea why you’d want to participate in such a system, but you do you.
Agreed 100%. The product, as best as I grok it, is totally garbage. But, that wasn't what was being said. What was being said was "Urbit is Nazi trash" and "Ubrit is feudal in nature and therefore bad". This kind of totalitarian thought policing is what is bad.
The nature of Reddit is very much so Feudal in all the same senses as Urbit except that Urbit is much more explicitly limited in the number of polities that can be created. Subreddits are inherently feudal in the exact same way in that some set of lords (moderators) have control over what happens in their domain (subreddit). Who can become a lord (redditors with X amount of Karma) is limited and so are subreddits, thought the limit is so large it's not really a practical limit. The principals are the same, still, so arguing against Urbit for being bad because of this nature is mostly if not entirely wrong. The reality is these arguments are more about moralizing than the actuality of what is presented.
You’re mixing your metaphors. Are lords people with karma, or are they moderators? Those are not the same groups, at all, with moderators typically having lower karma than top posters.
Secondly Reddit has no real hierarchy that’s built in. It’s true that there are a limited amount of resources, but being early gives you no particular right the creation of any new resources, nor does it obligate any new joiner to participate in any particular subreddit. New subreddits created by new redditors regularly surpass old subreddits, undermining the concept of there being a heirarchy.
Compare that to Urbit, where there is an explicit heirarchy. You’re either a galaxy, a star, or a planet. Each level is responsible for distributing the addresses below it, and has some level of control over them too, and if I’m reading this correctly has the right to collect taxes as well. This is explicitly Feudal, and in fact the original code names for these were “lords”, “dukes”, and “earls”.
Finally, Yarvin considers himself an absolute monarchist, and thinks that American democracy should be scratched and replaced with a totalitarian government. It’s not surprising that he’d build a system filled with references to his preferred political structure.
I'm not mixing metaphors. There is a limit to who can create a subreddit which is based on the amount of karma (it was claimed there was no limit on who can become a lord). The "lords" are the moderators of subreddits. This hierarchy is clearly built in. Above the moderators, of course, are the Reddit admins who have totalitarian power over all.
I'm not arguing that Urbit isn't feudal. I'm saying that a feudal structure to an online service that someone voluntarily chooses to be a part of is not inherently bad in any way. Additionally, there are tons of existing feudal services we use regularly that no one is upset about. The only reason anyone is upset about Urbit's structure is that it came from a racist.
Honestly, I care more about arguing about your metaphor than Urbit. I think Urbit is a weird little side project that’ll probably come to nothing, so I don’t really care. Now being pedantic on the internet is something I really care about.
If creating a subreddit makes reddit feudal, than everything is feudalism and the word literally means nothing. The hallmark of feudalism is not the presence of total control over limited resources, that’s common in a huge number of systems. What makes a system feudal is the binding of people into an immutable tree of hierarchical relationships, with peasants bound to lesser lords, lesser lords bound to greater lords, and so on up to the king.
Reddit is more akin to modern American property law; property owners have (more or less) total control over their property and who to rent it out to. But with huge amounts of unused land available, anyone not happy with their current home is free to go buy cheap land and do the hard work to build their own house if they want to.
Sorry my moralizing in characterizing the bad Ad Hominem fallacy wasn’t strong enough for you. In the future I will try my best to moralize in a way that involves something more akin to feeling the Holy Spirit as per fundamentalist Christian churches.
It's that difficult for you to tell us why the product Urbit is bad? You've already spent some time letting people know about how it's associated with a bad man and is therefore bad, but it's a huge effort to say why the product is bad beyond that association?
It's also interesting that saying that an argument that goes as "bad person is associated with thing therefore thing is bad" is invalid, is in your view equivalent to defending the bad person. This type of thinking is exactly the tool of totalitarians that you seem to be so adverse to.
>bad person is associated with thing therefore thing is bad
No, bad thing was created with fundamental bad ideas from bad person and, while bad person is not with the project anymore, the project still fundamentally relies on these bad ideas. Bad person being as bad as they are simply serves to amplify how bad all this is.
The fundamental bad idea being that someone can create a space in which they have control over it and the people who willingly choose to participate in? Is Reddit a "bad thing" too?
It's not simple enough for anyone to understand because you aren't saying what the "fundamental bad ideas" are!
Creating a space in which a set person has control isn't the problem, the problem is the limitation in who can control those spaces
Reddit doesn't make sense as a comparison because there are no limits to how many subreddits can be created, and communities split off from larger subreddits reasonably often when they don't like the rules.
In Urbit's system, you can't do that. If you don't like what the person at the top decides for your plebian self, then you're SOL.
This isn't really true. Anyone can make comets, which are low-trust entities but still can use the network without any parent at all. Stars and planets can move between their parent galaxy/stars respectively. There's so many stars it's very unlikely planets will be unable to find a host they're OK with, and while there's fewer galaxies, they've been distributed reasonably widely, to the point that for sure not all are controlled by the original creators and there's at least plausibly variation in thought among the owners. Beyond that it seems like your view of how stars/planets interact with their parents is more restrictive than reality, the intention is more infrastructure providers than the form of moderation you see in a subreddit.
The thing I think is most problematic is actually the numbers involved, specifically the fact that there's only 4 billion planets (still).
I'm not a fan of Yarvin or anything, but I don't think a project is inherently bad because of a bad founder (who is no longer involved [0]). What makes you say that Urbit is for Nazis? From my research of the project, it seems independent of any ideology.
It was created with the goal of a few folks having control over larger parts of the ecosystem ("galaxies") which then give out control over "stars" and "planets" - a structure that is mentioned in the very article you linked - with the author constantly saying "it's NOT feudalistic, I really mean it!!" even though it very obviously is.
Given this, it's clear that the political ideology of the author is involved in the core structure of the project, whether one likes it or not.
Alleged? Go look the galaxy/solar system/planet structure and everything around it. It is feudalism. It lines up with the philosophy Moldbug outlined.
> have to do with Nazis?
You should probably go actually read Moldbug so you can understand why some people describe him as being a Nazi. I'm not trying to put the burden of proof on you or anything, it's just that if you begin trying to boil down neoreaction into an HN post, is not gonna go well and will probably upset the mods.
But uh yeah, Moldbug is an authoritarian top-down feudalist that has problems with people that aren't white. This isn't like, an ad-hom or something, he kind of just out and says it.
The galaxy system does indeed seem like the weakest link of Urbit. I personally fail to see how 256 actors, even if we generously assume are all distinct, is much better than the small handful of actors who control the IP address spaces or the DNS TLDs. His assumption is that it will get more distributed over time, but I really don't buy it. He's designed centralizing vector into the system, which will attract bad actors and will only get concentrated into fewer hands with time and will weaken the intended goal of creating a censorship resistant network.
I'm not convinced this address space problem is even one that needs solving. For example, the Lightning Network built on Bitcoin appears to offer a better solution where every identity is simply a public key. Anyone can create any amount of them, no sponsorship needed, and no public keys are any more privileged than others. The system is resistant to spam because in order to convince other nodes in the network to relay information, you need to establish a payment channel by committing to some funds on the bitcoin network, which incurs a transaction fee. The number of potential public keys for secp256k1 is sufficient that for our purposes we can pretend that they're infinite, unlike Urbit IDs. Additionally, the LN has an incentive model for routing built into it, where any intermediate node offering to route a payment can take a small fee in exchange - this removes the necessity for the network to operate on altruism, and also highly encourages competition between node operators, who can be absolutely anyone, to route information. The network can become adequately distributed that no number of entities could collude to block messages as anybody can offer to route in their place - and earn from it. Additionally, nodes offering routing are really just blind actors who take a fee to pass on a message whose contents they don't know and don't know who sent, or who is receiving. Refusing to relay a message is self-harm, as it prevents you from earning the fee on it (and will most likely get you blacklisted, further preventing your ability to earn more fees.)
You say you're not a fan of throwing around the term "Nazi" lazily, but immediately in the previous sentence you suggest that you understand Nazism as a combination of "nationalism" and "socialism". Since this is a pretty common cudgel among far-right media commentators, used to disingenuously associate Nazi atrocities with left-wing politics, it's very difficult to read that in anything but bad faith. In fact this misrepresentation is so common that r/askhistorians has an entire section of their FAQ dedicated to explaining it: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/europe#wiki_...
I deleted part of comment above because it was in no way intended to begin an argument about Nazism nor associate it with anybody in particular. I'm not qualified to speak on the subject. I see the word Nazi used all too often where it really does not apply (from both left and right wing commentators), and I was merely suggesting it should not be used so liberally.
I agree that calling Nazism left-wing is a misrepresentation, and it's one that is almost always used in bad faith. However, if by "socialism" we mean "a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole", then it's fair to call fascism a combination of nationalism and socialism. As far as I understand, Mussolini started out as a socialist, but a bit later in life he rejected international socialism and instead embraced the combination of a form of socialism (in the sense given above) with nationalism. Fascism is not socialism, but it does incorporate socialist elements and was influenced by the socialist movement.
Now, if one insists that the term "socialism" be restricted to political and economic systems that do away with (or try to do away with) hierarchy then yes, fascism is not socialist, since fascism explicitly values hierarchy.
So basically, it depends on what one means by "socialism".
In any authoritarian system that assigns control of the means of production to the state, the means of production are controlled by the authority on the top, not by the community as a whole. Your attempt at justifying combining them relies on the fiction that state control is community control, and specifically that this is true in a dictatorial state. But the idea that a system that explicitly denies the vast majority of the community input or relevance in the rule is one where the community exercises control is ludicrous.
This is why you'll see pretty much every dictatorial regime that has claimed to be socialist have tried to justify their regimes by pretending to be democratic. E.g. China even today holds on to a total fiction of a multi-party political system [1] (note: I'm talking here only about the legal parties that colludes with the CPC; not about the suppressed opposition parties) including a comical "continuation" of the Kuomintang. Others have justified a claim to "democracy" by arguing systems of approval or internal party processes ensures democracy. But a fictional democracy does not grant control to the community as a whole.
That said, it is important to remember that Marx warned about reactionary forms of socialism already in the Communist Manifesto, calling out supporters of reactionary feudal systems that wanted to leverage socialist ideas to keep their people in line. The modern attempt to treat socialism as a single system rather than as a set of characteristics that can be applied to a huge range of otherwise mutually conflicting systems - including inherently regressive ones - confuses matters.
Does "socialism" ever mean "free-market capitalism"? It often seems that libertarians are on the receiving end of the "Nazi" label because they object to socialism or government intervention in markets.
It was not my intention to begin an argument, but merely suggest that we should all tone down on the "Nazi" slur as it no longer seems to carry any weight.
>Does "socialism" ever mean "free-market capitalism"?
I would say no.
>It often seems that libertarians are on the receiving end of the "Nazi" label because they object to socialism or government intervention in markets.
I think this happens mainly for three reasons. 1) Some people support socialism so furiously that they genuinely think pretty much everyone who opposes socialism is part of the same group of "reactionaries", etc. 2) Some people dislike libertarians and try to smear them by calling them Nazis. 3) A certain subset of self-identified libertarians has had, historically, and continues to have now, an involvement with populist conservatism and with right-wing regimes such as Pinochet's. There is also a subset of self-identified libertarians who promote racism, a subset who lean socially conservative, etc.
Some self-proclaimed libertarians oppose socialism so furiously that they view right-wing dictatorship as being a better option. Personally, I'd say that people like that are not libertarians at all, but they continue to self-identify as libertarians nonetheless.
> Some self-proclaimed libertarians oppose socialism so furiously that they view right-wing dictatorship as being a better option. Personally, I'd say that people like that are not libertarians at all, but they continue to self-identify as libertarians nonetheless.
Wholeheartedly agree here. Libertarianism is by essence, anti-authoritarianism. You can't be a libertarian and at the same time, want an authority to dictate the rulebook.
For me, socialism and fascism are two sides of the same coin, that Horseshoe Theory is a real phenomenon. Of course, the two sides both vehemently disagree that they are alike (which is certainly the case if you specifically consider the ethno-nationalism of the Nazi's for instance), but the overall framework of both socialism and fascism is the centralized rule of a population through a dogmatic ideology with force or threat of force for noncompliance.
There's an interesting phenomena in reverse of the "authoritarian libertarian" too, which is the "restricted speech liberal" - those self-labelling as liberals who are opposed to free speech.
> Wholeheartedly agree here. Libertarianism is by essence, anti-authoritarianism. You can't be a libertarian and at the same time, want an authority to dictate the rulebook.
Libertarianism started on the far left for exactly this reason. The term was coined by the anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque in a letter where he criticised Proudhon, the founder of anarchism, for not going far enough.
For a century libertarianism was inherently tied to anarchism and anarcho-communism and other forms of libertarian socialism that sees private property rights as inherently in conflict with liberty (Dejaque, already in his initial criticism of Proudhon, did call out Proudhons famous "property as theft" as something he agreed with)
> but the overall framework of both socialism and fascism is the centralized rule of a population through a dogmatic ideology with force or threat of force for noncompliance.
Centralized rule of any kind is inherently in conflict with a long range of socialist ideologies. Enough so that the Bolsheviks murdered a huge amount of socialists that opposed their coup.
He thinks the enlightenment was a bad idea and wants the world to return to feudalism, taking away the rights of Serfs, Jews, etc. This isn't quite Nazism but is pretty close to the beliefs of far-right groups like the neo-Nazis.
Quoting Terry Pratchett from memory: "They thought a king would make them free."
The thing is, feudalism works out really well for the king. Works out all right for the dukes, earls, and barons. Works out OK for the knights, and less well for the peasants. Those who advocate such stuff almost certainly think that they're not going to be the peasants. (They are also almost certainly wrong. If this dream/nightmare ever comes to pass, people like Moldbug will probably be used as useful idiots and then slaughtered like livestock as soon as they don't serve the purposes of the rulers. The rulers will be people who really understand power, not people who can write online screeds well.)
I'm sure some of it is good, honestly. But I think it's especially important to go to primary sources when people are talking about politics because (on all sides!!) people will often use imprecise language to make you think that something is worse than it actually is.
Feudalism/Democracy/Socialism/Capitalism/etc. ceased to explain reality a long time ago.
Regardless of one’s ideological starting point, the complexities of the modern world will necessitate an org chart which is both very broad and very deep.
A better explanation of what we have—and will continue to have barring some cataclysm—is laid out in Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution” and Michels’ “Iron Law of Oligarchy.”
Exactly. That's also a big part of why Mao and Stalin had such high body counts--position maintenance.
Even Hitler was not immune. There's a story in Speer's biography where he was lecturing the gauleiters for wasting materials and skilled laborers on their McCastles when the military was in dire need. After the lecture, Speer was warned by Hitler to never do this again. Speer noted that this was the first and only time he had ever seen Hitler visibly afraid and shaken. No one is indispensable.
Similar issues arose in ancien régime Europe for the same reasons (nobles of the robe).
Of course, if we bomb, starve, or plague ourselves back into the stone age, that would definitely flatten the org chart, and forms of government would regain their distinctions.
I think Yarvin's only beef is the same one held by most of our malcontents. They aren't upset because our system is evil (it is). They are upset because they aren't at the top of it.
edit: Will also add that China is perfect example of this. In the first generation, Mao starved the peasants and executed his enemies. Once the patriarch was pushed aside,
the system scaled-up and took control, and now we have a nation which is regularly held up as an example (or even a necessity!) by our own Western elites.
Here is a legible alternative to Nock's vision of a "minimalist combinator VM": http://tunes.org/~iepos/joy.html
There you go, "Maxwell's equations of software", without the obscurantist nonsense.