
A Founder's Farewell - exolymph
https://urbit.org/posts/essays/a-founders-farewell/
======
hprotagonist
I read the entire thing (and watched the 2013 demo) and still have not the
first clue what Urbit _is_. Too many neologisms, not enough ELI5.

Claiming that you don't use "the lambda calculus" to do dependency resolution,
of all things, seems weird to me. Even from my 30k foot understanding, that
seems like a non-sequitur at best.

~~~
thanatropism
That's a misrepresentation. I took the trouble to find the offending
paragraphs on my phone and paste them:

\----

Dependencies

20th-century languages are all at least vaguely based on a formalism from the
‘30s called the “lambda calculus.” The fundamental operation in lambda
calculus is variable reduction from name to value. So lambda languages all
have a symbol table or environment which binds names to values.

Modern build systems assemble large programs out of small files by reusing
this symbol table for global function names, a process called “linking.”
Unfortunately, linking causes a problem known as “dependency hell,” involving
baffling, unpredictable upgrade failures. The fundamental problem is the
“diamond dependency” — when a build requires two different versions of one
symbol.

~~~
empath75
‘From the 30’s’ sounds like it’s ancient technology. Most programming
languages include arithmetic, a formalism from 3000 years ago.

~~~
thanatropism
He does make a number of references to "20th century's computer science" that
imply he's got the new stuff. He also says "functional programming without
abstract math", which reads a lot like "Austrian economics" (which Moldbug and
Land swear for).

I'm saying this in a thread about his politics, but my basic evaluation holds:
he's probably not discovered a new system of government and a new computer
science. But he's careful and scholarly with his arguments, and worth knowing.

------
sn41
Many of these kind of personalities unthinkingly identify themselves on the
"winning" side of an ideal corporate utopia. It seems that they do not
envision the misery they will have to face when they are (likely) on the
disenfranchised side. Human rights and democracy do have a reason for their
existence.

(Of course, I've no idea what Urbit means. I've tried many times to get it,
thought I was stupid, but it seems no one else really understands it either.)

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I don't think there's anything "unthinking" about it, in this case.

------
aaronbrethorst
Yarvin's wikipedia page is worth a read:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin)

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _In Yarvin 's view, inefficient, wasteful democratic governments should be
> replaced by sovereign joint-stock corporations whose shareholders, all
> property owners, elect an executive with plenary authority. The executive,
> unencumbered by liberal-democratic procedures, can rule efficiently._

Huh.

> _He also disputes being an "outspoken advocate for slavery", but has argued
> that some races are more suited to slavery than others._

(I followed up on the source for that, to see if he was misrepresented, and
found the direct quote "We thus observe slavery not as a perversion, but as a
natural relationship, like marriage.")

~~~
YouAreGreat
> argued that some races are more suited to slavery than others

> see if he was misrepresented

Did you find out whether or not he was misrepresented?

~~~
PhasmaFelis
You don't think I might have mentioned it if he was?

He says that people who are loyal, hardworking, and not too bright are best
suited to being slaves, and it stands to reason that some races are more
inclined towards those traits than others, and that probably includes
Africans.

~~~
zozbot123
Of course, this is a nice way of saying that slavery _doesn 't_ make rational
sense - that it's a case of pure "might makes right", exactly as common sense
would suggest. Think about it - if your slaves are "loyal and hardworking", do
you even _need_ to enslave them by coercion? Of course not - they'll work for
you voluntarily as long as you treat them in a way that they accept as fair!
(And oftentimes - perhaps even _most_ of the time - they turn out to be a lot
brighter than you gave them credit for while treating them as mere slaves.)
And if this is the _best_ case, what about everyone else? No, what the
slaveowner really dreams of is that he's going to control his slaves purely by
their _fear_. And Moldbug is saying: "nah, that's not going to work. Deal with
it."

Way to miss the _actual_ argument he's making, dude. You were not even on the
same wavelength.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _Of course, this is a nice way of saying that slavery doesn 't make rational
> sense_

Have you read the post we're discussing?

~~~
zozbot123
Of course I have - that's why I wrote the above. Moldbug may acknowledge that
slavery seems to arise "naturally" in some circumstances, but he's not
laboring under any delusion that what's "natural" \- be it slavery or marriage
- is _per se_ good or desirable.

------
geofft
> _Urbit 's distribution and sponsorship hierarchy of galaxies, stars and
> planets is not designed as a political structure, or even a social
> structure. The actual social layer is in userspace -- one layer up. Socially
> and politically, Urbit is a flat network of planets. Galaxies and stars are
> plumbing._

Here are some statements about how the plumbing is done, from Urbit's own
website, that I suppose must be non-political:

" _...most theories of property agree that anyone whoever creates or discovers
new property starts out by owning it. Because galaxies are premined, Urbit
starts as a centralized system. But it has two strong motivations to
decentralize. One, the more decentralized Urbit is, the more Urbit is worth.
Two, the only way for Urbit to fund its own development is to homestead its
own real estate._ "

From a page on "Common objections to Urbit," under " _Urbit doesn 't have
enough planets for every human being._": " _A 32-bit planet is a tool, not a
toy. Like a car, it 's a device for a responsible and independent adult. There
aren't 4 billion cars in the world, nor 4 billion independent adults. If you
aren't an independent adult, and you don't need or even shouldn't have
unconditional digital freedom (no one's 8-year-old daughter needs
unconditional digital freedom), a moon from someone else's planet is fine._"

(They redid their website apparently but the posts are archived at
[http://web.archive.org/web/20181214175456/https://urbit.org/...](http://web.archive.org/web/20181214175456/https://urbit.org/posts/address-
space/) and
[http://web.archive.org/web/20181214190532/https://urbit.org/...](http://web.archive.org/web/20181214190532/https://urbit.org/posts/objections/)
respectively.)

Moldbug thinks he's being non-political. I don't think we should trust him to
even know what that means. This might be a good chance to recover whatever
interesting ideas are in Urbit (if there were any; it's not clear to me that
there are any) for the common good, but there are almost certainly deep-seated
assumptions that weren't even publicly stated in the FAQs about who gets to
control what and who doesn't.

... edited to add:

> _When you live in Manhattan, you simply don 't worry about who owns it or
> why; and nor does it matter. Are they Jews? Muslims? Christians? Communists?
> Italians? You don't care and you don't have to._

That's hardly my experience, but, sure.

~~~
zozbot123
> ... If you aren't an independent adult, and you don't need or even shouldn't
> have unconditional digital freedom (no one's 8-year-old daughter needs
> unconditional digital freedom), a moon from someone else's planet is fine."

What's wrong with this? A 32-bit namespace for full-blown "server-like"
identities still beats today's world where everyone and their dog just crowds
onto a _single_ centralized service like Facebook, enjoying an equivalent "not
an independent adult" status. Besides, the IPv4 address-space _is_ 32-bit,
_and_ is nowhere near efficiently utilized - so Urbit's projected "neo-feudal
dystopia" is already here even in the best possible case. (No, IPv6 rollout is
not helping practically, at least not yet.)

~~~
geofft
Nothing's wrong with it per se, it's just 100% a political opinion encoded in
the bit width of the protocol.

~~~
zozbot123
Isn't the exact same political opinion "encoded" in IPv4, and/or the continued
use thereof? It seems weird to complain about Urbit specifically when it's
just perpetuating such a long-standing practice, and even mitigating it (to
the extent that its address space sees more efficient use than IPv4 itself).

~~~
wmf
Perhaps the difference is that IPv4 was an experimental protocol that was
supposed to be replaced while Urbit seems to explicitly plan to remain 32-bit
forever.

~~~
yebyen
Everyone who makes this argument seems to be plainly ignoring a good half of
the address spec, that Urbit's 32-bit namespace is part of a total 128-bit
address space.

If I told you that IPv6 has 32 of its 128 address bits reserved as markers for
making top-level subnets out of them (this is not true, but for argument's
sake, pretend it was) would you say "Oh no, there's not enough IPv6 for
everyone to have their own subnets" ?

Of course you wouldn't, because addresses are 128 bits long and there's enough
address space for "EVERY ATOM ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, and still have
enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths." per the first StackOverflow
post I could find on the subject.

Is there enough address space for every atom on the surface of the earth to be
neatly organized into subnets according to ownership rights? Well that's
debatable, and if you want to compare apples to apples, you should ask that
question.

If Urbit runs out of planets, then it will have roundly surpassed the
expectations of anyone who makes this argument. You don't solve these problems
on Day 1, it's really enough to have a plan that would allow 20-50% of people
on the planet to have a stake in ownership of Urbit at this stage. When it
starts getting cramped, how about THEN we spend some time and tackle scaling
past a usership base of 50% of the population of humans that are alive?

There was actually a point to the scarcity, it's meant to solve the spam
problem. "Planet" identities are meant to be precious. If your identity was
worth $10, you probably wouldn't use it to engage in spamming unless you were
sure that you could get more than $10 from the campaign before landing your
address on a blackhole list. (And if it was possible to reliably achieve a
profit like this, it would undoubtedly drive the price of a planet up, as
others figured out how to compete with you at doing that.)

And even that is a naive assessment of the scope of the idea and how it
prevents spamming. The identities are provisioned in a hierarchical fashion,
such that if you landed more than a couple of planets on such a spam list
(none exists today, but...), you would probably find out pretty quickly that
nobody with inventory is willing to sell you another one. (Lest they wind up
getting their whole "star system" banned from polite society for association
with spammers.)

~~~
zozbot123
I think it's 64 bits not a full 128, but still, you have a point. People have
actually suggested that scrapping IPv6 and lightly extending IPv4 to 64 bits
(creating a new "IPv5") in a very similar way to how Urbit works today would
be the right thing to do. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that this is a realistic
option by now. Switching to an entirely new, greenfield addressing layer like
Urbit might be the best option!

~~~
yebyen
Urbit moon addresses are 64 bits long, comets are 128 bits long.

You need a sponsor to get a moon, you only need a unix computer and a network
connection to get a comet.

I'm pretty out of touch with Urbit lore, but I'm not aware of anything you can
do with a moon that you can't do with a comet. The planet is worth more
because it can parent moons and stuff.

------
crankylinuxuser
History:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13594025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13594025)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272933](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272933)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15300173](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15300173)

------
spamizbad
Was Tlon a real thing or just a way for his patrons to basically “launder” him
money as a tax write-off?

~~~
wmf
Does money laundering require 20 employees?

~~~
spamizbad
Yes: sometimes even more. Example:
[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/sep/21/is-money-
la...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/sep/21/is-money-laundering-
scandal-at-danske-bank-the-largest-in-history)

------
legionof7
I met this guy at a social event once, did not realize who he was and I just
read his Wikipedia page. It makes a lot more sense now. He was extremely
arrogant and rude. Basically a worse version of the /r/iamverysmart archetype.
I sat next to him and he basically challenged me and another person for an
hour on Andrew Jackson trivia and the exact wording of his biography. Then he
ranted about democracy for a while so I left to go debate about 3D printed
guns and play cards. Was an interesting event.

~~~
thanatropism
Think what you will of his politics, but his Moldbug blog displayed erudition,
scholarship and analytical ability well beyond trivia -- unless of course
Moldbug was a collective and not just Curtis Yarvin.

(E: I refuse to say "not that I agree with his politics". Whether I do or not
should be immaterial here.)

------
saagarjha
For those out of the loop as I am, what is Urbit?

~~~
zozbot123
A serverless framework with very interesting theoretical properties and a wide
variety of plausible applications. The urbit.org site has a nice primer and
video introduction.

~~~
devmunchies
why is this being downvoted? i have no idea what urbit was and this was the
only helpful, non-political comment in this thread.

~~~
yebyen
These (handful of) Urbit threads are the only place I see this happen on HN.
People here just hate him. The last time I was in one of these threads, it was
"no platform for fascists."

Now that he's leaving, I wonder what the angle is supposed to be? And... it's
flagged off the front page!

~~~
nyolfen
this is probably a major part of why he's leaving, so his presence can't be
used as ammo by detractors. it always seemed like a major weak point for the
project to me; you can tell they've been trying very hard to avoid any related
subject in interviews etc

~~~
yebyen
So, maybe a minor victory this was flagged? I don't think that, but it is what
it is? (I think the post is great, I've only read 2/3 of it, but pretty on
message. Feel like I only just got to the technical part...)

------
jdhopeunique
What bothered me about the urbit system was that updates were "evergreen" and
distributed top down from the heiarchy of galaxies and stars. Any person in
the chain could make modifications and you were at the mercy of the parent not
to send a malicious update to your planet. Also, orthogonal persistance meant
data was never really deleted. This didn't seem to me like a personal server
much less something I'd want to store my entire digital life on.

------
platz
'Dependencies' section sounds a lot like what
[https://github.com/unisonweb/unison](https://github.com/unisonweb/unison) is
doing

~~~
Ericson2314
In general, Urbit is the neoreactionary's Unison.

------
kimawah
He's just saying that he left to avoid attacks from the press when they
launch.

------
mrlatinos
Who? Leaves where? Making what?

~~~
lisper
Trust me, you're much better off not knowing.

------
theparanoid
This is the end of Urbit.

~~~
lisper
Good riddance.

~~~
insertcredit
I've known you (from your posts at comp.lang.lisp) to be eager to present the
facts as you see them and thorough in your argumentation. What is it about
Urbit/Yarvin that merits this sort of post?

~~~
lisper
Have you ever looked at the Urbit code?

[EDIT] BTW, that was not a rhetorical question. I need to know so I can frame
my answer. And BTW2, thanks for the kind words.

~~~
insertcredit
I've spent enough time (not much) with urbit to write a Nock
interpreter/compiler. There are aspects of it that rub me the wrong way such
as the needless custom terminology and general esoteric nature that sometimes
reads like an occult grimoire but I also think that a lot of the criticism
aimed at them, especially the politics, is misguided. Having watched Yarvin
present on urbit a couple of times, I would say he is mostly driven by the
intellectual atmosphere of the early Internet, before the masses moved in,
thus his attempts to not "cast pearls before swine" by making things too
accessible so to speak. I do not agree with this stance but I can certainly
understand it without having to resort to conspiracies. Other than that, he
most definitely reinvented Lisp, badly, but I am willing to give him a pass
there too. There is nothing at all that attempts to make real the vision
behind urbit around today and I do think it is an interesting vision. Finally,
Alan Kay likes it.

~~~
lisper
OK, well, that's pretty much how I see it, except for one thing: I am
_vehemently_ opposed to making things unnecessarily complicated in order to
keep out the riff-raff, and I don't think one needs to resort to any
conspiracy theories in order to take that position. (If anything, there seems
to be a fundamental contradiction between Urbit's stated goal of
(re-)democratizing the internet and Curtis's approach. That and the fact that
they sold address space for cash. But at this point that is neither here nor
there.)

Ironically, I agree with Urbit's stated goal of making it easier to run your
own server. The reason I say "good riddance" that I was pretty sure that
Curtis's approach would fail, and Urbit would implode sooner or later. But as
long as it was alive (and funded by Peter Thiel) it was sucking all the oxygen
out of the room.

------
KiDD
Urbit sounds cool. Lets make sure no-one has access to it. great plan

~~~
antepodius
Make sure no-one has access to it?

I've not looked deeply into it to the point of setting it up myself, but as
far as I know anyone can self-host a 'comet' (an identifier type with 128-bit
address depth). If you wanted to interact with people through the system, you
don't have to own a planet, or even get a moon (subset of a planet) as far as
I know. Comet users would probably be second-class citizens when it comes to
spam filters and the like, though.

I'm interested to see where this whole thing goes, if it goes anywhere.
There's something appealing about insane, deliberately esoteric-seeming
systems.

------
wiggler00m
Did this guy spend 17 years building a decentralized platform, then launch it
on Ethereum (which is centralized), and quit?

~~~
JeremyBanks
The identity system is now on Ethereum. It has always been the least
innovative or sophisticated part of the project, but the one requiring the
most trust, so parking its root on Ethereum (at least for now) is a pragmatic
choice without many drawbacks.

As far as I understand (not too far), individual Urbit nodes can still
function independent of the Ethereum blockchain. Their parents can feed them
the subset of the Ethereum/Urbit PKI graph that they need to validate any
signature. The blockchain is only required if the node wants to personally
verify that an asset hasn't been double-transfered to multiple parties in
different forks, and don't trust their parents to have ensure that. This is a
strict improvement over the older Urbit model, where you had to rely on your
parents to relay that information.

The actual network and computing layers are still distinct from Ethereum, and
have no knowledge of it outside of the identity system.

It's a neat project. I'm glad I won't need to make disclaimers about Curtis
the next time I introduce it to someone.

