Earlier quoted context omitted.
If by "clean" you mean its fallback behavior without JS is to show a white page with nothing, then it is squeaky clean. :D
It also doesn't work on Windows 95 :(
Wait, people still use Windows 95?
What Urbit is
11–20 of 251 posts
Re: What Urbit is
#12I was checking out Urbit before, and it's an amazing idea. I can highly recommend anyone investigating it a little, just to get a notion how things could be.
I need to check the current progress. I hope the previous "invitation/ticket" I had is still working. :)
Re: What Urbit is
#13If the blockchain is useful in those areas where [almost] no trust exists, Urbit has the potential to be useful for essentially everything else.
To give a concrete example, this would be useful for any Ethereum app that doesn't want to store data on a central server (which most cannot do whether for legal, security, or ideological reasons). The idea to me is that the internet wasn't built very well to run decentralized apps [which is definitely the case if you've ever tried building one without having to rely on central servers for caching, storing accounts, comments, etc.]. It's, imo, a nice complement to blockchain tech like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Long term once it's out and running I see dapps like Augur [a decentralized prediction market which I work on - http://augur.net] using it so users can securely store their private keys, report data, market data, trade history, etc. and easily go across/between devices as opposed to just using localstorage [which is a pain to migrate using] or fetching it from ethereum every time [which is very time consuming and has lots of overhead].
If we're going to seriously move in this direction of decentralization, at scale we need something like urbit. No one else is really tackling the same set of problems.
Came across this quote on it by Alan Kay: "They have verve, and that's generally a good thing. In this case there are a lot of details that need to be grokked to make any reasonable comment. The use of combinators (a kind of dual of lambda calculus) harks back to an excellent thesis by Denis Seror at the University of Utah in the 70s that produced a safe, highly scalable and parallel implementation. I haven't looked at it more deeply (and probably should)." [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810177] - very cool!
Re: What Urbit is
#14I was checking out Urbit before, and it's an amazing idea. I can highly recommend anyone investigating it a little, just to get a notion how things could be. I need to check the current progress. I hope the previous "invitation/ticket" I had is still working. :)
Yep — your ticket still works.
Re: What Urbit is
#15Pro tip: I'm mildly clever. However I wan't able to understand the value or reasoning of this. Make it more clear and resell it to me
Re: What Urbit is
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
If by "clean" you mean its fallback behavior without JS is to show a white page with nothing, then it is squeaky clean. :D
Sorry about that. Since this page is built with urbit it's easy to just request the raw Markdown. Here's plain text for anyone interested: http://urbit.org/posts/overview.md Edit: it should be easy for us to stick that link inside a noscript tag be default. Issue here: https://github.com/urbit/arvo/issues/149
To be honest, the site could use some work. Low-hanging fruit mainly, I'm not even asking for anything browsers didn't do in the 90s.
You're doing a lot of work yourself: loading pages (why not let the browser do that, catch errors, display progress, etc.? Now it shows a spinner and if I hadn't backgrounded the tab already I'd have given up on loading because "clearly the spinner isn't doing anything"); opening links (I can't ctrl+click because, hey, you're handling the opening of links yourself; why not let the browser do that?); changing the title happens only after the new page loaded, which takes 20 seconds, during which time a white page is displayed with the old browser and the new URL already (the browser would change it to "loading new page" for you); and there are some cross-origin resources (alright, the browser doesn't do this, but it's almost difficult to mess that up with the widespread TLS support these days). I probably caught most of my personal things, but the general idea is to be more lazy ;)
Re: What Urbit is
#17Pro tip: I'm mildly clever. However I wan't able to understand the value or reasoning of this. Make it more clear and resell it to me
Consider what you would do with a personal server. Now imagine it's easy enough for anyone to use and maintain. Now imagine everyone's personal server could connect and communicate with each other seamlessly and securely, transferring data of any type.
That's the promise of urbit.
Re: What Urbit is
#18Pro tip: I'm mildly clever. However I wan't able to understand the value or reasoning of this. Make it more clear and resell it to me
The key for me was:
> Each urbit is a node on an global, encrypted P2P network. Your Urbit name, a generated pseudonym like ~talsur-todres, is also your network address. Like Bitcoin, Urbit address space is a cryptographic asset with a limited supply.
Additionally from the whitepaper:
> Functionally, Urbit is a full execution stack. VM, compiler, OS, network, web server, and core apps are 30kloc […]
It's a distributed, encrypted peer-to-peer virtual machine. Fascinating.
Interesting to see what Urbit _actually_ is after all the pretentious bullshit they've spouted in the past.
Re: What Urbit is
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the noscript tags for those pages could just show a link to the underlying .md? Then you don't need to worry about including it in the page, and it's still available. :)
Agreed. Thanks for saying something!
Typo:
> "Each urbit is a node on _an_ global, encrypted P2P network."
Re: What Urbit is
#20Technology aside, this is a masterpiece of clear and concise technical writing for a general audience.