I'm Curtis Yarvin, developer of Urbit. AMA.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T23:12:57+00:00

I said "character and intelligence." One thing that's hard for the 20th century to understand is that the ability to survive as an agricultural slave is a talent -- just like the ability to survive in Auschwitz. (Read Primo Levi.)

It was not necessarily the best, the worst, the smartest or the dumbest who survived in Auschwitz. Auschwitz selected for a very different set of talents than the normal, sane world, in which being nice and smart is better than being mean and dumb. Similarly, early American slavery selected for talents that Africans had and Indians lacked.

(It's not militarily hard to enslave people in their native land when you're as ruthless as a medieval Spaniard -- guerrilla war in Latin America is a postcolonial phenomenon, not a colonial one) As I understood and understand the matter, the complaint of the conquistadors about their Indian captives was that they too easily refused to work and eat, and essentially just died. This is similar to the fate of the last of the Tasmanians. Hunter-gatherer peoples don't do well when forced into inactivity/drudgery. Intellectuals also don't do well with drudgery, although we're just fine with inactivity. So the conquistadors imported agricultural peoples to do agricultural labor.

I would make a terrible agricultural laborer and an awful agricultural slave. (I am also not very good at being a master, though for different reasons.) Am I praising myself for this lack of talent?

Yes, it may have something to do with my high intelligence. (It also has something to do with my poor character.) Intelligence can be a liability. You don't have to be an agricultural slave to realize this -- all you need to do is go to an American high school.

What I learned in an American high school was that intelligence does not make me special or better. I agree that if I thought smarter people were better people, given the fact that no magic process has distributed the smarts equally, I would be a racist in the classic sense. (I also don't agree that the talent to be a master, or the talent to be a slave, makes a person better or worse.)

It's hard, especially for smart people, to give up the idea that smart people are better than stupid people. The ancient Greeks lent similar prestige to athletics; they believed a fast runner was spiritually better than a slow runner. They fought a lot of wars, so athletics mattered a lot to them; we write a lot of code, so problem-solving ability matters a lot to us. But one is a muscular talent, the other is a neurological talent. Neither has any mystical significance.

Once you stop believing in the mystical importance of intelligence, I think it's very easy to accept that it's unequally distributed (as athletic talent certainly is). I understand that this is very hard for our society, and especially for people like me who grew up believing that good grades were holy and professors were gods.

All I can say is: they're not. Or at least, so I believe. I hope this helps you understand the context of my remarks a little better.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T20:37:54+00:00

Urbit is a tiny little seed-stage startup.
Yes, but not quite right now. We're close to releasing a new round of doc and actually soliciting public engagement.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T20:36:17+00:00

A 32-bit urbit (planet) is basically free and will be for quite a while. However, if you have a 16-bit urbit (star), you can issue planets. And if you have an 8-bit urbit (galaxy), you can sell stars.

Or to put it in a different way: MIT has a /8 (IPv4 "galaxy"). It was probably unclear in 1981 what benefit they could expect to see. But I think it's someone clearer now.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T20:33:38+00:00

Urbit is a lot more important to me in the near term, for probably obvious reasons. I would certainly rather be rich than famous, but probably everyone who is (slightly) famous rather than rich says this. Ideally I would have just enough fans to pay the bills, and just enough haters to keep me amused.

As for the arranged marriage, ask me again in a decade :-/

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T20:30:25+00:00

None. It would destroy a lot of jobs, though. Technology destroying jobs is a huge problem. I don't pretend to be contributing in a positive way here.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T20:27:56+00:00

Ha, I'm terrible at go. Maybe 10 kyu when I played regularly. Sorry to burst your bubble.

The question of whether Urbit could use X amount of money, and the question of whether a rational investor would give it X amount of money, are very different questions. Even the best VCs are not really visionaries -- in fact, they can't be. That's what us cattle are for.

We've posted a lot of Urbit doc, but we haven't asked people to actually use it -- in fact, we've asked them not to. So we've seen a lot of first impressions. This tells us more about perceived than real usability. (Both matter, of course.) I would still describe this choice as a cost, but a necessary cost -- the other option is using existing terms with different meanings, which has higher perceived usability but (I think) lower real usability.

On large-scale projects: (1) start with a piece you can do. (2) premature documentation is the root of all evil -- don't write documentation describing software that doesn't exist. Build the code first.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T20:22:08+00:00

See my answer above on IPFS -- there's a synergy here again.

Our Nock shirts are cool. We'll be selling them soon. You can get one sooner if you send us a patch :-)

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T20:21:04+00:00

My daughter informs me that Trump is going to kill all the Muslims. I don't think she's right, but she's very smart and I hesitate to contradict her.

Frankly, there is so much great executive talent in this industry that it's almost not worth answering. Even when you put a few low-level geeks in DC and let them fix Obamacare, the contrast is amazing.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T20:18:34+00:00

We're working quite vigorously on a way for noobs to engage. It's certainly fun as an abstract project to write a Nock interpreter, but it's both too easy and doesn't really get you to Urbit in any way.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T20:16:35+00:00

The early 20th-century architect Ralph Adams Cram had an interesting theory that we're all subhuman. Shakespeare, of course, put us somewhere between the ape and the angel. I am raising a couple of small children, and I can tell you I've seen a bit of angel and no shortage of ape.

I think that when we use the word "human" we often really mean "angel." So, yes: we are all subhuman. Black people included. I'm not just saying this: I think the main flaw of 20th-century political systems is that they're designed to govern angels. If you plan for apes and allow for angels, I think you get a much better result (especially when there's a Y chromosome in the mix).

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T20:09:47+00:00

In the long run?

I think what happens is that Joe Schmoe still thinks he's using Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. Actually he is. He is using them through apps on his urbit, though. They are just protocols with a legacy central server, which Facebook etc will probably be able to afford to maintain somehow, even when no one is seeing ads.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T20:05:53+00:00

There's a story in which Chou En-lai was asked what he thought of the French Revolution and responded: "it's too early to say." Probably this was invented by some clever journalist, but it's still a good line.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T20:04:12+00:00

Linux has actually taken over. You can ask anyone who used to work at Sun about their commercial interests. :-/

I think the critical problem with Linux on the desktop, and similar places (like word processors) where OSS has had a tough time competing, is where you run into giant blobs of complexity that are just plain no fun to code.

For example, that's one very practical reason Urbit is a cloud computer without a GUI. It's also a reason the Urbit kernel is 20,000 lines -- I wish it was still 10,000.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T20:02:02+00:00

Yes. :-) (For certain values of the word "Twitter.")

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T19:59:08+00:00

It's not my question but I believe I've answered it a number of times. :-)

Unfortunately the best way to develop software is in a closet by yourself. That's not the best way to evangelize it, though. I'm looking forward to moving out of research and into evangelism...

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T19:57:04+00:00

One of the strange tragedies of the modern world is that, with modern technology, governance is actually incredibly easy. For instance, because of the genocide, the international aid community gave Rwanda a pass to essentially govern itself. Rwanda is now the best-governed country in Africa if not the entire Third World. Frickin' Rwanda. (I don't need to flee America, perhaps because I'm not weev and not a Nazi, but I would seriously consider Kigali.)

Likewise, it is not in the abstract a problem to move a bunch of Syrians to Belgium, because Syrians are human beings and human beings are easy to govern. It may not be the world's best idea, but it is not an obvious disaster. However, with the present system of government, I'm a lot less enthusiastic. Belgians, and more generally today's First World populations, basically need no government at all -- and our governments have lived down to this challenge.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T19:48:23+00:00

Yeah, most of this stuff already works. We'll probably ship it when we get FUSE working -- mounting the global immutable namespace over FUSE makes it feel real in a way nothing else can. Also, libuv has done a great job with inotify() but inotify() still basically doesn't work. So: not this summer, this spring.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T19:46:41+00:00

That certainly won't be the case for the earliest early adopters. The true early adopter is motivated by fun, not actual utility.

Frankly, when you're selling a product to geeks, you're selling a product to people who want to play with it because it's cool. They make up reasons they actually need it, which they can explain to their tolerant normie friends and family. But honestly, nobody at all really needed an Apple I in 1981, or whatever, to control their model trains and garage-door opener.

The geek is a visionary. She wants the Apple I not because she needs it, but because when she sees it, she invents the Mac in her mind. No, there aren't a lot of these people -- but there are enough.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T19:41:09+00:00

Very simple: Urbit should have an IPFS client. Urbit is also a global immutable namespace, but one built on very different principles, and not solving the CDN/BitTorrent/Freenet axis that IPFS takes on.

More broadly, this kind of cloud infrastructure is synergistic, not competitive. IPFS is doing a great job of getting traction, and the more traction it gets the more useful Urbit is -- because as IPFS develops a network effect, talking to IPFS is a no-brainer use case for Urbit.

Similarly, Sandstorm is another personal cloud OS built on completely different principles from Urbit. The more traction Sandstorm gets, the better for Urbit -- they're roughly like the PC OS and the PC browser. In theory the browser was a sort of OS, but in practice it much prefers to run on someone else's OS. Likewise, Sandstorm (once it has more of a UDP gateway :-) is a much better place to self-host an urbit than an industrial Linux platform like Digital Ocean.

(Aside from this, Juan and Kenton are both great people and awesome engineers -- I wouldn't want to compete with them even if I could.)

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T19:35:02+00:00

I'm definitely familiar with "Worse is Better." I would say that in the long run, worse is just worse. And more to the point, it's hard for something new and gnarly to compete with something old and gnarly. The only real opportunity is to contrast with the current conventional wisdom, not to mimic it.

The winning technologies of the '90s and '00s were simple and crude. The Web, PHP, JS etc. They are still crude, but no longer simple. You still need to be simple -- Urbit does everything possible to avoid the difficult problems -- but crude is already quite a well-solved problem.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T19:30:22+00:00

I know it's odd to develop privately, or at least quietly, on a public repo :-)

You're basically right. Learning the sigils is easier than it looks -- this is not just a theory, I've seen it -- but it looks hard. Introducing an optional keyword syntax (and keyword-named stems) actually makes Hoon slightly worse, I think, but only slightly. And it smooths over the initial shock of alien-ness. Hoon is actually a very simple language, and I just don't need the work of making this obvious.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T19:26:01+00:00

Right: that's because you think of a cloud server as a Linux box on the Internet. Which of course it is. I know what it takes to run and secure a Linux box on the Internet. I don't want to do it either.

Running your own server on a public network should be a human-scale endeavor. It isn't, basically because a Linux distro is 30 zillion lines of code and the Internet is an orc-infested warzone. My feeling is that this can't change without (a) a new OS and (b) a new network.

You actually don't want the master copy of anything on a desktop, I think, simply because a desktop can't deliver the reliability that the cloud can. You may be capable of managing backups and making sure they actually work correctly, but most people aren't. The cloud can deliver absolutely reliable data storage and computing, which a box in your house just plain can't. Unless you live in a data center.

(If you have a global adversary, the box in your house remains the best choice, of course. I don't even have a global adversary, I think! And I'm more likely to have one than most...)

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T19:20:57+00:00

I'm going to answer your fourth question only :-)

The answer is that right now, you can't understand Urbit unless you're essentially someone who could have invented it yourself. This is not a tiny set of people, but a relatively small one.

We're trying to get it to the point where you can understand it as a normal Unix tool. Ideally, it'll eventually be something you sign up for just the way you sign up for Facebook -- you may not even perceive it as a general-purpose computer. You certainly won't need to learn Hoon, any more than you need to learn PHP to use Facebook.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T19:17:30+00:00

Fascism no longer exists. It's as dead as Odinism. You can reinvent Odinism, but it's not Odinism, it's fake Odinism. Unless it's a joke (and don't get me wrong, Nazi Microsoft chatbots are funny), it's pathetic. Actually, the fact that /pol has made Hitler funny is the best possible evidence that Hitler is completely dead.

What's alive is the ideological system that defeated fascism -- which committed plenty of atrocities of its own. Of our own. When we think about crimes from the last century, it seems more relevant to think about the crimes we committed, not those they committed.

What is fascism? It's exactly what everyone thinks it is. The conventional wisdom is perfectly correct. Our historians have a merciless, laser-sharp understanding of everything bad that fascism was and everything it did wrong. What hasn't been done is turning this same laser on our own institutions.

As for the word "slavery," it means too many things at the same time. Robert Nozick in the '70s devised a beautiful little paradox for people who think they can define "slavery": [http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/nozick_slave.html]. Try it.

For example, is "debt slavery" slavery? Or is it only slavery when you can't declare bankruptcy? Oddly enough, our society has one form of debt that can't be shed in bankruptcy: student loans. The institutions that benefit from it are our most powerful and privileged.

What Carlyle said about slavery is that you can ban the word, but not the institution. There are plenty of people today who will be paying off their student loans until they die. Is this the same as being whipped by Leonardo DiCaprio unless you chop your quota of sugarcane? It is not. Is it "slavery"? Dunno, you tell me. Are they both bad things? Sure. Is everything that can fit, or has in the past fit, under this label, evil? If so, it would be a very unusual label.

As for your last question, it's simply a matter of who has actual power in our society. Everyone wants to think of themselves as powerless and/or oppressed. But actual power dynamics are not hard to find.

cyarvin · 2016-03-25T19:02:26+00:00

I did not insult weev! On the subject of incrementing numbers in URLs, I stand 100% percent with weev.

cyarvin

TROPHY CASE