71–80 of 309 posts
I've never come across this project before, but I've been playing around with a similar idea... Essentially I want to scrape data from my own accounts and anything I'm interested in following, on a home server and push that data to a sort of "dashboard" interface. To watch either on my phone or laptop or, in theory, anywhere. I've always hated current phone interface paradigm. I see a grid of app icons like having a…
I have seen Urbit a couple times but never really understood it. From the "Understanding Urbit" page - >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 de…
The part you buy is dns that runs on ethereum (iirc), but with artificial scarcity because they want to make money. This part is completely pointless, because the actual system could work as well on ens directly, or even dns. 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 ne…
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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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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?
It may be marketing genius if the goal is to appeal to the type of nerd who loves obscure systems and occult jargon... the kind that geeks out on the complexities of D&D while chatting you up about the rococo details of Eastern Orthodox dietary restrictions and how they may have impacted renaissance fashion. Everything about Urbit seems designed to be candy to these types.
I've learned a bit more about it from these comments and I don't think it's snake oil, but it is 100% not what I was expecting from the language used in the copy.
So yeah, seems like a good project that foregoes familiarity in order to create something cool albeit niche. But anyone who isn't on board with the vague descriptions will definitely feel mislead.
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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 arch…
The best way to describe it is to tell us why we would want to use it. Also, don't say "it's a computer". It's not. A computer is what I'm typing this on - a piece of hardware. So - why would I want to use Urbit? Which problems does it solve? How will it make my life easier? Does it have any features that will make me say "wow, this is so cool!"
Why would you want to use Urbit? The same reasons you want to use the modern consumer internet, which Urbit intends to pave over and replace with something better.
How is Urbit better? Because you'll have all your data and programs on one machine, which you control, using an open source operating system. You can build a peer-to-peer twitter or facebook clone on Urbit in a day or two, because the OS handles more of the distributed systems and identity problems that have killed most peer-to-peer projects in the past.
It's still in alpha, so it's a bit slow and buggy, and a lot more work has been put into kernelspace than userspace so far. What will make you way "wow this is cool" varies widely, but some good candidates are: - an internet experience not predicated on surveillance capitalism - no ads - control over your UI - a minimal aesthetic - interesting people to talk to on the network - lack of the twitter "thunderdome" feel - if you like to write programs, the Urbit system is fascinating to work with; I've learned a lot more CS from working on it
The other thing that's cool is that this new world isn't yet fully settled. You can write a little talkbot or something and still have a big effect on the culture.
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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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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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?
It’s a personal server OS. MS-DOS was emulated on mainframes before it was run directly on hardware. Urbit wants to do the same, starting by being emulated on traditional computer OSes, and eventually moving to bare metal.
Is this some kind of over-the-top joke that I'm not in on? I've browsed and read but honestly still can't understand what Urbit is. When I saw the picture of the stone with the thing on top I thought I was finally "in" on the joke, but they seem to continue on.
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I don’t know whether this matters, and I guess it probably doesn’t, but he was kicked off the Popehat blog not long after writing this, for virulent (and, since then, increasingly theatrical) racism.
Was the racism on Popehat or elsewhere? The departure announcement post[1] seems at least somewhat amicable, since it contains an advertisement for Clark's new website. [1] https://www.popehat.com/2015/12/30/i-cant-see-what-my-future...
https://www.popehat.com/2017/05/24/about-clark-being-purged-...
The links to Clark's tweets in this post don't work because he since got kicked off of Twitter too.