#urbit

[utilitymonstermash]

I know this is going to sound nuts, but there is some beautiful graphic design on Urbit. (Yes Moldbug's Urbit.) A lot of it is mood-board but there's some great oc as well.

[apodicticdotnet]

[ftwk]

[z-zzzzzzz]

[0ystercatcher]

not to go on abt tech but i actually. think Big Tech and Everything Apps are conceptually great. i like that google can do so much shit and being able to use one single account to do a lot of things like that. yes it has some security issues and google is. well. fucking google. so its not like i exactly trust them and i dont rely on it or any one service 100% bc i dont think they Are reliable like that rn. but what if they were though. what if i could use just one account to send money around and auto pay my bills and talk to friends and family and control my Gadgets and Devices. i actually think that would be useful and judging by how many people get sucked into idk, apple ecosystem for example, i dont think this is a particularly unpopular take. it Is tremendously convenient ...

[caprice-nisei-enjoyer]

Hot take: version numbers should go down, not up.

When you get to zero, stop!

woo work laptop has decided to develop inscrutable issues. there are many downsides to the standard development environment being a bleeding edge Linux.

[eightyonekilograms]

Speaking of higher interest rates breaking the internet, a podcast reminded me yesterday that probably the next single point of failure is CloudFlare. To be clear: for the most part, CloudFlare have been very much the good guys so far, they a give a lot away on their free plan and tons of hobbyist shit that would otherwise be nonviable because of DDOS attacks depends on it. But even today they nag free users a ton for the upsells, and I'm concerned they're just one bad quarter away from ending that generosity entirely and pushing a bunch of just-barely-economical projects off the internet.

And unlike e.g. Mastodon or Urbit or whatever where you can at least pretend there's some future where everybody runs their own tiny fediverse instances, there's no distributed community solution to DDOS attacks even in theory. There's no fix for them other than gigantic networks to absorb the traffic which require earth-breaking amounts of capital to build/maintain. If CF has to turn heel a bunch of stuff is going to vanish :/

[collapsedsquid]

Yarvin returning to Urbit, Nock and Hoon will never be the same.

[pandacommander24a]

Agreed, FASA TROs are better because they are written like they are real world machines, and have weird technical details. IlClan stuff is fine but it's often more stories about people and the machines are just vehicles, lol, for those stories.

FASA example; the Guilotine's "Fiber optic" cable will snap for the large laser in the left arm if you raise the laser arm up too quickly from the servos and armor not synching up right, disabling the gun until you can get a Tech to run a new one to the focusing laser. The solution was not to raise the arm or do so slowly so the cable didn't get pintch but could roll out of the way because it was free floating through the joint.

Or a common ammo feeding problem in Earthwerk Mechs meant the ammo could get jammed out of the torso, but the pilot could get the ammo feed running by having their mech's arm beat on the front armor of their mech causing the jam to slip free and the feed machinism restarted. Meaning it wasn't uncommon to see a mech just slamming their "chest"torso mid-battle like they have a smoker's cough.

The Blackjack likely does have some kind of Chain Cannon in something "small" like a 40mm gun, firing in some kind of full automatic fashion and some thousand rounds of ammo in it, if it were a real machine. The math you wagglewings did in the other threat doesn't quite match up in my mind's eye for the famous defense the Blackjack gave during the Second Succession War where it won back its fame. But burst firing its boofer guns and finding crack in the armor in the kurita's poorly mantained fodder machines with a spray pray from a desperate pilot does have that imagine.

My point was trying to make the AC2 into anything other than a classification used for tabletop is kind of folly. It's a shorthand for a small gun that goes far. There is a 1942 TRO, and it makes it clear that the classification are for the pre modern tech and the things in thier are unacceptable for modern play or even Battletech. And it has ac2 and ac20s on M3 Lees and Tigers but the armor it gives would make these pre-1950 tanks able to survive a A-10 Thunderbolt, something that kills tanks 30 years later.

At a certain point you have to stop thinking about the rules because, as pointed out, it's a poorly thought out bit of the rules.

blackjack? (original and modern for posterity)

Oof the original is not pretty, the modern looks so much better. But aesthetics aside, it's a pretty decent mech. The armament is a tad uninspired, but tbh, four medium lasers is pretty good. The AC/2s could use more ammo, methinks: once I saw the AC/2s were 40mm, my eyes glazed over and I had visions of Bofors guns going CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK on the battlefields of the 31st century, which... Yes, please. Give the guns more food. Other than that, it's decent.

[caprice-nisei-enjoyer]

Their benighted urbit vs our visionary tree calculus

[men-iss-vess-ull]

urbit names follow the same conventions as homestuck troll names

[aspergillosis]

I have a website at least deployed, tomorrow I'll find some CSS I don't hate and set that up. Tonight I do the QGIS tutorial but first, 20 pushups and a shower. God I'm so pleased with myself lately in terms of productiveness (coming from a good emotional place of curiosity and hype) to elaborate, this week I have learned a ton about crypto, set up my own wallet and imported my BTC from a paper wallet, set up my coinbase account, purchased a (overpriced) raspi 4 so I can start an urbit server on it, taught myself basic use of Github Desktop, applied to 3 jobs, and started messing around with QGIS. I also finished reading The Two Towers. I feel good! All these things are things I enjoy or think are really worth doing, and I feel more fulfilled spending my time doing this than scrolling endlessly on tumblr (boring) or socializing (lol what socializing)

[ftwk]

[z-zzzzzzz]

[tilde-he]

While a lot of the Urbit stuff seems, uh, unreasonable, the idea of an OS of sorts written for a mathematically specified machine model, where the OS shouldn’t change much, and where one could transfer this from computer to computer as long as there is an emulator for the machine model written for the particular hardware, seems fairly appealing.

The need to separately re-establish all of one’s programs and settings when moving to a new device, seems like a waste, and like it shouldn’t be that way. (Of course, there are VMs which can emulate some other physically existing hardware, but then you have all these different possible emulated hardwares, and the... well, it seems like there is more complexity that way, and more edge-cases where some aspects of the hardware might not be emulated quite correctly)

But the specific stack of 3 weird programming languages that the project uses, with their deliberately weird-sounding names for things, ugh.

Why?

Also, I feel like, ideally, a project for such an “eternal OS” would use formal methods to make machine-verifiable proofs of various properties of the OS, like what seL4 has.

Also, probably the machine model should resemble real hardware at least a little bit more than the one Urbit uses, does.

[dosesofcommonsense]

Blue Light Special courtesy of the CIA

You do realize how much longer you’re awake when you’re looking at a screen for hours, right?