My sense is that the project started in its inner sanctum and has been iterating gradually towards something that can be understood and used.

It actually can be explained simply:

Cross platform deployed VMs with their own primitives that also have the ability to network with each other via a custom protocol.

That's interesting and potentially very valuable.

Keep in mind this whole Hacker News and Ycombinator paradigm is effectively an outworking of the same process. Some savant Lisper with their own dialect making in a unique way that over time was re-coded and made more accessible.

> If you wake up in the desert, unsure how you got there, you’ll be fine so long as you remember your Urbit ID and passkey.

https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/urbit-id/

>the One True Way" never works,

It works for Apple.

Apple doesn't have a One True Way -- they have a relatively-simple and relatively-uniform product line that represents their interpretation of human-computer interaction. They focused on building systems that everyone could use and love immediately, and it turns out that a lot of people appreciate that emphatic commitment to the human over the machine.

Jobs insisted on elegance and simplicity throughout, creating products that were instantly loved and admired, products that people would be proud to own and display. Technobabble was worthless to him and he did everything possible to keep it away from his customers. He expected his engineers to deliver something decent and real and trusted them to figure out the details, focusing exclusively on the vision of shipping usable, beautiful products that provided immediate value to every user, regardless of technical background.

Steve Jobs's devotion to elegance resulted in products so appealing and downright seductive that they fundamentally changed the public's expectations from computers and consumer electronics generally -- not just once (Mac), not just twice (iPod), but at least three times (iPhone; honorable mention: NeXT/OS X).

We lost him too soon.

Meanwhile, in Yarvin via Urbit, we are offered a ground-floor rate of only $512 per placard in The One True E-fief. Urbit is here to show us that they know best. That we'd be better off if we'd just raise our eyes out of the mud long enough to recognize our obvious inferiority, take our oaths of fealty, pay our taxes, and some day, when They've decided the time is Right, They'll bestow upon us The One True Network.

There could not be a starker contrast.

We haven't lost him out of misfortune, as many other things he made horribly wrong and nobody talks about anymore, because, you know, survival bias, he also thought cancer could be cured with diets.

He was man that even his daughter despise for being inhuman with his own flesh and blood, for denying she was her child for years.

Having interacted with Apple users since 1984, the only common trait they have is exactly believing there is only one true way, not that their way is better thanks to the sum of well though technical factors, but because it's a faith, that, as any other faith, is impenetrable to critics and doubts.

The fact that the failure of Next is still told as a great success speaks volumes.

Another famous example is the Apple III, costed a fortune to build, sold poorly and the people who worked at it remember that

"The Apple III was designed by a committee headed by Steve Jobs, who would demand one thing one day then the opposite the next."

Jobs built a cult, not a technical revolution.

> The fact that the failure of Next is still told as a great success speaks volumes.

NeXT resulted in the web browser and the iPhone.

Only because they explicitly refuse to solve a large amount of problems, focusing narrowly on certain profitable ones.

I hear that their more satisfied customers cheerfully instruct the others to adjust their expectations and habits and to buy the insurance.

Really? Last time I checked Apple had folded on the whole issue of having native apps on their phones.

Adapt and embrace has worked _very_ well for Apple.

Apple has "Many little true ways" which integrate beautifully into people's existing lives. Completely opposite from what Urbit is trying to do, which is to dictate that their "one way" shall rule over humans in every aspect, and shall replace everything else that came before.

This is not only arrogant, but stupid approach to building things if you want to get adoption. To build things for the people, you should try your best to integrate into the existing world, not to replace the world itself.

Urbit is literally the opposite of Apple.

I couldn't even get through the introduction without repeatedly rolling my eyes at the narcissism scattered throughout it.

Bollocks. Yarvin left Urbit nearly a year ago. https://urbit.org/blog/a-founders-farewell/