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Urbit

urbit.org

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Re: Urbit

#31

Post by bronzejaguar »

ShamelessC wrote: post #24

I found the descriptions to be far too abstract and mysterious. I guess it gives the project a sort of cool hacker vibe, but I really just want a few screenshots of the interface of the actual OS. As it stands, I have no clue whether it's an actual operating system like Windows/Linux/MacOS or if it just vaguely fits the definition of an OS. I've seen in other comments here that it's both an "Overlay OS" and a VM that…

It’s software that you run on your computer on macOS or Linux. It provides a VM that only does IO to the underlying system through a typed kernel interface. That’s it. There are blog posts showing the software running on it.

I think you’re right about making it concrete instead of metaphorical

Re: Urbit

#32

Post by SrslyJosh »

ShamelessC wrote: post #24

I found the descriptions to be far too abstract and mysterious. I guess it gives the project a sort of cool hacker vibe, but I really just want a few screenshots of the interface of the actual OS. As it stands, I have no clue whether it's an actual operating system like Windows/Linux/MacOS or if it just vaguely fits the definition of an OS. I've seen in other comments here that it's both an "Overlay OS" and a VM that…

The project is exclusionary by design--instead of using an existing programming language or even keywords/terminology from an existing human language, the creator decided to make everything up, right down to new names for existing symbols. F'r example:

gar >

hax #

hep -

kel {

sel [

ser ]

sig ~

soq '

Have to agree about the screenshots--if there's something useful here, why not show it off?

Re: Urbit

#33

Post by all2 »

matildepark wrote: post #21
pickdenis wrote: post #8

Does anyone know how Urbit's solving the problem of being incredibly slow? It's running on a naively simple virtual machine and they claim that higher level operations can be abstracted and implemented in native code (called jets last time I heard) to make the overall execution time reasonable. Or, alternatively: Does anyone even actually use urbit? I tried once and it was so god damn slow it made me sad. It's so coo…

(Obvious disclosure that I work on the project.) Slow, like, literally the VM is slow? There's infrastructure work being done to rewrite the VM at the moment, though there's been some major work in the last six months on this front as well that personally have felt like night and day. Slow, like, the network is slow? There's an update going out shortly with a rewrite for Ames that makes it a bit easier to work on. Th…

I'm curious: why reinvent the VM "wheel"? Why is LLVM inadequate? Or any other VM?

More specifically, what functionality does Urbit require that makes a bespoke VM necessary?

Re: Urbit

#34

Post by [deleted] »

sneak wrote: post #5

The project founder’s wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin It has leaked over to the project WP page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit I personally choose not to run this software or support this project. YMMV.

[deleted]

Re: Urbit

#35

Post by basilisks »

sneak wrote: post #5

The project founder’s wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin It has leaked over to the project WP page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit I personally choose not to run this software or support this project. YMMV.

It’s an open-source project. Anyone can work on it or fork it. If you’ve got technical criticism, let’s hear it.

Re: Urbit

#36

Post by belisarius222 »

zamadatix wrote: post #14
pickdenis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that you need to do more dissecting yourself. It would be unjust to summarize urbit like that. It really is as they say, an "Operating Function."

"Operating function" is just more abstract woo. My description says what it was made to do not how it is supposed to make you feel or the fancy terms people have come up with to describe how it goes about making you feel that way. Is it not "peer to peer network via blockchain focused on social communication."? If so feel free to explain why and what the website means when it talked about each of those things. If it'…

Urbit only uses a blockchain as a ledger of who owns which addresses within the network and root DNS for peer discovery.

The OS itself runs as a VM on your machine (either a Linux or MacOS host, for now), and that is the only place your data lives.

Urbit does implement a peer-to-peer encrypted, authenticated network among these VMs. It's not solely socially focused, though.

It's also intended to be your personal archive for things like your personal financial data, pictures, nusic, notes, and private documents like tax records and medical histories.

And not only an archive, but also your personal "agent", in the sense that it's a program that's on all the time, on the network on your behalf, to serve your blog, for example.

You can access Urbit through the command-line or a webpage that it serves for you.

The state of an Urbit VM is a folder on the host OS. You can zip it up, move it to another computer, and restart it there seamlessly.

None of these features by themselves is particularly interesting. What's unique about Urbit is that all of this is accomplished using a very small set of primitives, making it easier to write applications that don't go through some huge company that tracks your every move and has a conflict of interest between serving you and serving advertisers.

If you're interested in learning more details of how it works, there is actually quite a bit of technical documentation at https://urbit.org/docs

We're obviously still trying to figure out how to describe this thing. It doesn't occupy a slot that people already have in their minds for a piece of software, except maybe "personal server", but even that is somewhat vague.

Because there's a different world of computing inside Urbit, with its own libraries, apps, languages, etc., it can take a while to wrap your head around.

What's funny about this is that the Urbit world is orders of magnitude simpler than a standard Unix-based stack. We've just spent so much time learning things like DNS A records vs. CNAMEs and what 'xzvf' do for tar, that a parallel universe of these constructs seems bewildering again.

Re: Urbit

#37

Post by belisarius222 »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #32
ShamelessC wrote: post #24

I found the descriptions to be far too abstract and mysterious. I guess it gives the project a sort of cool hacker vibe, but I really just want a few screenshots of the interface of the actual OS. As it stands, I have no clue whether it's an actual operating system like Windows/Linux/MacOS or if it just vaguely fits the definition of an OS. I've seen in other comments here that it's both an "Overlay OS" and a VM that…

The project is exclusionary by design--instead of using an existing programming language or even keywords/terminology from an existing human language, the creator decided to make everything up, right down to new names for existing symbols. F'r example: gar > hax # hep - kel { sel [ ser ] sig ~ soq ' Have to agree about the screenshots--if there's something useful here, why not show it off?

Canonical pronunciation for each character is a wonderful thing, and I use it all the time to discuss code. If there's one thing other projects should steal from Urbit, it's this.

Spoken programming languages FTW.

The pronunciations are no more exclusionary than learning Cyrillic, and the effort pays off.

Re: Urbit

#38

Post by belisarius222 »

iudqnolq wrote: post #19
bronzejaguar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urbit is an overlay OS, a functional VM you can run that does strictly typed p2p networking with other urbits. So, it’s software you run on your computer or on a VPS. The thing you’re looking at buying is the Urbit equivalent of a domain name. You can read more about the design decisions in their PKI blog post. (Most recent one, I think)

Is an overlay OS a program that runs on another OS?

Yes. Not exactly a standard term, but there is no standard term for what Urbit is. It's VM, personal server, yes -- but those don't clearly convey the scope of the project.

Re: Urbit

#40

Post by iudqnolq »

belisarius222 wrote: post #38
iudqnolq wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is an overlay OS a program that runs on another OS?

Yes. Not exactly a standard term, but there is no standard term for what Urbit is. It's VM, personal server, yes -- but those don't clearly convey the scope of the project.

How is it a personal server if I need a personal server to run it? Am I buying compute power on other people's computers? Also, why call it an OS if it doesn't replace existing ones?
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