archive: https://archive.ph/ce7au
What the hell is this
Urbit is a decentralized personal server platform based on functional programming in a peer-to-peer network.
Am I having a stroke? What does “functional programming in a network” even mean? Does it mean anything? Do you torrent lambdas?
You wouldn’t download a closure
The Urbit software stack consists of a set of programming languages (“Hoon,” a high-level functional programming language, and “Nock,” its low-level compiled language)
Weird ass names aside (Hoon sounds like a slur or is it just me?), they built two languages? Also what does “its” refer to here, Urbit’s? From context it’s as if Nock was Hoon’s language, but that doesn’t make semantical sense.
Also editorial note, just say “a pair” if there are two, not “a set”…
a single-function operating system built on those languages (“Arvo”); a runtime implementation of that operating system (“Vere”),
What. A “single-function operating system” doesn’t even mean anything. Do they mean a unikernel? That at least is an actual term. And then what’s that other thing? A “runtime implementation of an OS”? What’s Arvo if it’s not implemented or doesn’t run, a fucking abstract painting of an OS?
And again, why do you need two languages to build this, it really seems you can have one? You’re designing them from scratch anyway specifically to build this OS, why not make one proper language? Linus Torvalds barely had one and he managed.
public key infrastructure, built on the Ethereum blockchain (“Azimuth”), for each Urbit instance to participate in a decentralized network; and the decentralized network itself, an encrypted, peer-to-peer protocol.
What are we doing here.
The 128-bit Urbit identity space consists of 256 “galaxies”, 65,280 “stars” (255 for each galaxy), and 4,294,901,760 “planets” (65,535 for each star) and comets under those.
What does any of this mean. Is it also a metaverse attempt? What the fuck is a planet in a network dude, would you call 123.73.41.0 more of an asteroid or a planetoid?
And now for a shot:
In 2022, the main software in an Urbit installation was a “bare-bones” text-based message board.
And chaser:
Tlon, the company founded by Yarvin to build Urbit, has received seed funding from various investors since its inception, most notably Peter Thiel, whose Founders Fund, with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invested $1.1 million.
So they built an artificially complex architecture, to the point where half of its description sounds made up, took the most complex kinds software engineering projects (a programming language and an OS), did them twice for good measure, slapped on a blockchain to be cool and hip I guess, for absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever. They didn’t have a use-case that would warrant any of this engineering effort, all they wanted was a message board, a problem we have solved in the fucking 90s (? Maybe earlier?).
But it’s good enough for the Lich King and Egg Boi to give them a million fucking dollars. God I hope at least they boughy some quality drugs with that money or else this was a giant waste of resources.
Conclusion: the Wikipedia article on Urbit is absolute garbage. I feel like I know less about what the fuck this thing is after I read it. Can anyone tell me why any of this? Why did they do this? Why do they need a custom OS? Who hurt them so bad they came up with such shitty names for everything? Would you nock a hoon or is that too vere?
EDIT: Bonus question, how is this pronounced? Instinctively I read the U as in “uranium”, but the article writes “an Urbit”, so it’s a short U like in “full”?
IIRC, “Galaxies”, “stars” and “planets” used to have more sensible, down-to-earth names that described their function. Unfortunately, this was something like “empires”, “kingdoms”, “duchies” and such, making the creepily hierarchical neoreactionary philosophy behind the project a little too explicit, so they muddied the waters to something plausibly deniable as “just some nerd shit”
Wait so it’s a decentralised network with a rigid authoritative hierarchy?
believe it or not, yes. there’s an extensive early awful.systems thread where @dgerard@awful.systems and I found Yarvin’s original spec that described this (since then Urbit’s gotten much more intentionally obscure, but the ideological base is exactly the same) which I can dig up if you’re interested
non-edit: fuck it here you go, and if you’d like more psychic damage just search our local threads for urbit because there’s so much more and it gets so much stupider
lol i basically wrote that article
i’m sorry, i was describing something that is garbage
the short description is “lisp machines but networked, for nazis, and they don’t fucking work”
i’ve always pronounced it ER-bit
lisp machines but networked
urbit’s even stupider than this, cause lisp machines were infamously network-reliant (MIT, symbolics, and LMI machines wouldn’t even boot properly without a particular set of delicately-configured early network services, though they had the core of their OS on local storage), so yarvin’s brain took that and went “what if all I/O was treated like a network connection”, a decision that causes endless problems of its own
speaking of, one day soon I should release my code that sets up a proper network environment for an MIT cadr machine (which mostly relies on a PDP-10 emulator running one of the AI lab archive images) and a complete Symbolics Virtual Lisp Machine environment (which needs a fuckton of brittle old Unix services, including a particular version of an old pre-ntp time daemon (this is so important for booting the lisp machine for some reason) and NFSv1 (with its included port mapper dependency and required utterly insecure permissions)) so there’s at least a nice way to experience some of this history that people keep stealing from firsthand
lol i basically wrote that article
Oops
To me it looked like someone wrote some babble about the architecture and then a Responsible Adult came in and added the thinly veiled sneers of “all they built is a text board, Yarvin is a certified idiot, none of this works”
I might read the primary source on this tomorrow if I hate myself hard enough, I am fascinated by why you need two languages and two OS things to run a nazi chatroom, sounds like some absolute pinnacle of human lack of thought
EDIT: I guess the actual concept might be so insane that there’s no way to write an article about it that makes sense and doesn’t use expletives
Yeah, there’s a number of people here who actually met Yarvin before he
- became a complete asshole, you can not even imagine,
- became a proud fascist and *monarchist*, and
- lost his mind.
Many of us also have SW experience and have tried to look into Urbit and all came to the same conclusion - it all seems to be based on both giving stupid names to existing concepts, and blindly doing the opposite of whatever anybody has done before without regard to reason.
I guess the actual concept might be so insane that there’s no way to write an article about it that makes sense and doesn’t use expletives
this is basically the problem. there was an article there already but it was based entirely on urbit’s descriptions of itself, which were all cultist gibberish. I went searching and found literally every Wikipedia-quality source I could. Most of these were about the people, not the tech.
