The actual urbit is like docker with standard API for communication between all apps on different containers, but it runs on a lisp-machine like architecture, except instead of lisp there's a new esoteric language called Hoon.
If not for the scammy wealth extraction attempt with the name system, I would consider it to be in the same general category as TempleOS - a form of art.
> Urbit is a friendly network: a network on which you can assume that a stranger is nice until proven nasty. Friendliness is a direct consequence of scarce, individually owned identities. We're not changing human nature, just creating the right economic incentives.
> Most forms of network abuse are "Sybil attacks": they rely on an infinite supply of fresh identities. Scarcity makes reputation work. Spam is a business; if the cost of a new planet exceeds the amount of money you can make by spamming from that planet until its reputation is trashed, there will be no spam. [1]
While it's true an intent was selling the parts of the address space Tlon has to fund its development, its business model for consumers going forward isn't really to sell you planets; it's more about bootstrapping the project and offering hosting and support.
For investors, purchasing address space (i.e. a galaxy or star within Tlon's ownership) is a way of investing in an asset that could be a source of income while also having some influence over how the network changes in the future, in the way a stockholder would a company.
Essentially the address space is an attempt to create and maintain ideal incentives for the ICANN-esque players (galaxies), down to the ISP-esque players (stars) and the everyday user (planets), and their devices or additional users (moons) in a way that sustains the entire network.
Some lessons from neoliberalism are worth considering here. Sometimes people want to be fed trashy content. In those situations, planets offering trash will be popular enough to pay for the cost of (renting) the planet. (And make no mistake, rent and landlords are an inherent part of any real-estate offering!) So there will be spam, but it will look and taste like the offerings of Disney and Vicom, of Hasbro and Mattel, of Unilever and GSK.
Some lessons from other distributed systems are also worth considering. Technically, messages are always delivered by peers, despite the fact that the messages may have been composed by faraway unknown senders. This leads to local topological reasoning, and webs of trust based on peer-to-peer acquaintance. This can offer better performance and resiliency against attacks than Urbit's top-down neofeudal hierarchy of reputations.
I don't really want to support Tlon. If this is truly federated, then there ought not need be any corporate control over the system. History has shown that a few extremely ethical and competent hackers are more valuable in terms of software quality and usability than any sort of corporate planning.
I do appreciate that, by explicitly embracing blockchains, Urbit has demystified one part of its design: What makes Urbit property valuable? Only the hidden cryptographic keys at the base of Urbit's own signing system give any scarcity, and thus any value, to otherwise-uninteresting bitstrings. In other words, it's as valuable as ZCash or Bitcoin or any other digital gold; it's a Satoshi scheme.
u'i n'ae lojbo .i ku'i ka'eku https://zod.that.world/giveaway/
These decisions are arbitrary. You just make a bet that you can be attractive in a certain light, and you charge money in that light, and try to make every adjacent activity free.
From the practical standpoint, you have a linux process running from a data directory. You run it, and the you can access it via CLI and via web interface (which also has a terminal-like webapp). It then uses regular IP to talk to other urbits in P2P fashion.
From what I could find, the whole thing is full of magic and pretty opaque - you are only supposed to interact with it by running it and typing commands there. In particular, you’d probably want to back it up. The only instructions I could find is to stop it and tar it up, and back up manually. Better do it often if you want your “digital life” to be safe.
Just lost me.
> you are only supposed to interact with it by running it and typing commands
So, "the last computer you'll ever need" ... other than my phone, because the last time I wanted to type commands on a phone-sized device, was back when I was wet-dreaming over the Sharp Zaurus.
Given the artificial scarcity of the IDs and the semi-mystical woo describing the proposition, my spidey-sense is telling me some smart people have been busy devising an naivety-magnet, all the better to part people from their money ("buy a planet"...um, ok).
You can also generate a comet, which is effectively identified by the hash of its public key. Those are free; while eventually planets have some notional advantages, notably a default positive reputation, at the moment there are no downsides.
> This raw interface is vaguely modeled on the haskell aos-signature package, but is written in terms of ed25519 primitives instead of general ECC and changes how linkage tags are computed...
Re command line: I was based it off the public docs. Go to "https://urbit.org", click on "install". The very end of the instructions say:
> Type (add 2 2) into the Dojo.
Maybe "install" is wrong section? I went to "docs" instead, from that "operators manual" seems most user-friendly. But it is text only as well:
> Let's join the ~dopzod/urbit-help channel. Use ctrl-x to switch from the Dojo prompt to the Chat prompt. Then:
> ~sampel-palnet:chat-cli/ ;join ~dopzod/urbit-help
The only reference to web UI I found was in "Using Bridge" section, but that seems a pre-requisite to set up the system, not part of the system itself.
If there are web UIs, you really need to document them better. Some screenshots would be great, for example.
[0] https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/7ce50ad75e23fcec0c8cb6ad...
I think this is like half the problem
You can access your Urbit server by command line, or by web interface.
I don't understand this dogma that "ads = bad". At most, they're an annoyance. Not evil. They can influence purchases, but the final act of consumption is solely the individual's.
They're an easy target, but attacking them distracts from the much larger problem of government data collection and censorship.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/12/shen-yun-falun-...
...for anyone who hasn't seen the hoon programming language, take a look (the top is all comments, scroll down a bit); I'll wait: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/aug/les/arvo/h...
I submit that the line between genius and insanity is sometimes so fine as to be invisible.
Other items of evidence:
1. Urbit was founded by Curtis Yarvin, who writes a blog under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He espouses an extreme right-wing Ayn-Randian political philosophy. Go look him up and read some of his writing (he's quite prolific) and see for yourself. I suggest starting with [1].
2. Urbit makes extreme and unjustified claims about itself. The very first sentence on the web site is (as I write this) "Urbit is your last computer." Well, no, it's not. It's not even a computer at all. It's software. It's a badly designed, badly written, badly documented federated social network. And that's pretty much all it is.
3. Buried deep inside Urbit is a scam to take your money. The scam is quite well hidden, but it's pretty obvious once your attention is drawn to it. Part of the Urbit design is an address space analogous to IP addresses. The Urbit people call this address space "real estate" and they call Urbit "the biggest real estate platform in the world" [2]. They claim that these addresses have value because they are scarce [3]. Except that they aren't. The Urbit address space is 128 bits wide, meaning that there are vastly more Urbit addresses than there are elementary particles in the universe. But this fact is conveniently obscured in their documentation.
If you want what Urbit claims to provide, a computer that you control, just get a Linux machine. Gnu/Linux has its own political baggage attached to it, but it's not a scam. It has its obscure bits, but that obscurity is rooted in history rather than a deliberate attempt to mislead.
---
[1] https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-p...
[2] https://coinidol.com/urbit-data-the-next-real-estate-revolut...
You bet.
> I did a deep dive.
That was fast.
> brilliant people like Yarvin
I don't think he's all that brilliant. He does have one extraordinary skill, and that is to make himself appear brilliant by being prolific and obscure and using other psychological tactics. This is a very useful skill (Donald Trump used it to become president) but I think it is very important to distinguish it from actual brilliance. To my knowledge, Curtis has never done anything that is actually brilliant.
Here's a better link:
https://steemit.com/crypto-news/@dana-edwards/urbit-and-digi...
and another straight from the horse's mouth:
Is inaccessible but you dig into it, is obscure but are pieces of code written in C.
>Imagine that you can login from anywhere with one name and password.
>And when you do, your entire OS appears.
>Inside is your whole digital life. All of your communities, conversations, and connections. All of your biometric data and devices. Your entire personal archive in one place that’s secure, private, and designed to last forever.
What does this mean? My whole digital life? It sounds like I'm signing in to a VPS from which I access all of my digital life. Is that it? Do I get a VPS?
That seems kind of like what I'm getting. The first line on urbit.org is "Urbit is your last computer" - but I don't see how I'm buying a computer, for a one time fee, for life, without paying a ton of money.
I see this website [1] has an Urbit "Planet" available for .04 ETH, or about 6 USD. Could I get a life long VPS for 6 dollars? If so, I'd definitely be up for it. If not, what, exactly am I getting for 6 dollars?
The page "Understanding Urbit" also says that Urbit OS "can never show you ads". What does that even mean? It can't run Chrome? The OS can't show ads? Any image or text can be an ad. I don't get it.
What I would like to see is a simple explanation of what Urbit is. Maybe a video, where someone logs in to Urbit, and interacts with it in someway, doing something that can't easily be done in some other way. I'd like to know the difference between planets, stars, and galaxies.
There has to be a better way to explain this.
1 - https://opensea.io/assets/0x6ac07b7c4601b5ce11de8dfe6335b871...