I still haven't dived into it, it felt obscure and obtuse last time I checked, but are the cool kids actually using it? I.e. do you have any more link to this niche community, to check what's the status of the project?
> Urbit is not PGP. It's designed to feel more like the early Internet, ie, a wide-area world of nontrivial default trust. At present, it would be foolish to go full cypherpunk, because we're a long way from being worth attacking.
It's not as much that. If I am going to be owning a service that I want to use among my peers generally someone has to run the thing and generally I am that person. If I am relying on urbit.org then the goal described in this overview of "Your urbit presents your whole digital life as a single web service. And since it's yours, open source and patent-free, it never shows you ads. Or loses your data. Or updates without your consent." is not met. If urbit.org is so entrenched and the galaxy lookup so well defined how do I use this when you are gone? The galaxy lookup is clearly one of the most critical pieces of the design yet seems the most weak. In the world of online games the lookup service is what has a community live or die, and I did not see a better answer after writing the comment.
It seems that the only way is to recompile and distribute an alternate version of the software.
> Hoon is unusual, but I wouldn't call it "esoteric" -- that term is reserved for languages which genuinely don't care about usability.
I would class it as such because there doesn't seem to be a description (going by the whitepaper) of modularity/code layout/best practice sort of thing. There is also the complexity of symbol management from bash/perl/php land that seems to be in Hoon too. I work with grammars all day and I guess I was just looking for a more formal description of the language.
> the deepest problem with Urbit: it’s light on actual substance. Urbit seems to have spent many years developing fundamental infrastructure – programming languages, tools, etc. – that are a gigantic maintenance burden and orthogonal to its actual mission. That’s a huge distraction, and as a consequence, the “stuff you can do with your Urbit server” section was unimpressive.
This is really the crux. There's nothing on the urbit website but obfuscation of this fact. It's a vanity project reinventing everything from scratch, and the "use cases" are post hoc. If they actually cared about those use cases, they'd do things differently.
Urbit is TempleOS, but written by a neoreactionary instead of a schizophrenic. It's a weird hobby project not a serious attempt to accomplish anything, and it shows up on HN way more than the actual substance merits.
> Blatant plug: Urbit (urbit.org) is a general-purpose OS built on the event-sourced model.
I've looked through its documentation, and while I couldn't make heads or
tails of it, Urbit seems to be everything but an operating system. Espeically that
it needs unix system to run.
>Summarization: Urbit is a reaction to Unix-driven software complexity that dominates modern software development.
I keep reading explanations about Urbit along these lines but what's perplexing about this explanation is Urbit does nothing to achieve this goal. Regardless of the fact that Urbit is referred to as an operation system it still isn't one. It relies on a conventional OS, often UNIX family OS's like Linux to run. Urbit just layers a new even more complicated software and networking stack on top of the 'Unix-driven software complexity' that still underpins Urbit. Urbit does nothing to address these problems, it just makes them worse. Urbit's underlying software stack (Nock, Hoon, etc.) is just bizarre and non-nonsensical. For example, this gem from the docs:
"A loobean is a Nock boolean - Nock, for mysterious reasons, uses 0 as true (always say "yes") and 1 as false (always say "no")."
Wat? Why?!? And it doesn't end there. Urbit is littered with these WTF design choices and terminology. No one in their right mind is going to build professional software solutions on a platform like this. You might as well just be developing software in something like Brainfuck.
Agree, term is wrongly used. Here it is used in the literal meaning of it. A software stack upon which you can execute other apps. The original concept iirc was to run both natively and overlayed but seems they've settled down to just the later.
>It's a freaking web app.
You can use Urbit without ever touching the web app and the neworking protocol is independent of http.
I agree that it's useful. My understanding is that the project's unique nomenclature (but more importantly the way it presented itself) was specifically adopted in order to select for a community of early adopters whose minds were open to novel concepts, and who's initial investment to even begin engaging with it ensured a certain degree of loyalty, and created a somewhat closed community.
Urbit seems to be loosening up on a lot of that obscurity. Its elevstor pitch has really been refined, and its introductory posts do a solid job of easing you into the concepts and architecture of the project.
If you checked out Archive.org's earliest records for Urbit's website, it did a decent job of communicating the project's goal. However, by early 2014 its website had been rewritten such that it you could be forgiven for thinking it was some spiritual successor to templeOS, so far as it went to justify or describe itself as anything other than a jumble of conceptually interesting software components.
Moldbug did something similar with his writing in UR, or at least that's how he rationalized some of his rhetorical choices. He's brilliant, but I honestly find his writing a little obnoxious because of it.
> What that means at the time of writing2 is that it’s a single-threaded interpreter running as a unix process that speaks udp protocol to a meshed network (and http to your browser).
I've looked up Urbit a couple times before, and this paragraph is the first time I ever even had an inkling of what it was.
This is a pretty short critique about apparent issues with Urbit, from a non-ideological viewpoint and detached from referencing the author- though a reply points out those technical criticisms may have been inspired by ideology!
> while (if I recall correctly) decoupling it from the underlying physical machine it's running on
> Urbit is a new clean-slate, full-stack server. It's implemented on top of the old platform, but it's a sealed sandbox like the browser.[0]
It appears that you do indeed recall directly.
Also, thank you. The two quotes from your comment, plus your sentence following, do describe it in a nice single paragraph. Granted, I do have to research most of the technologies in the stack, admittedly.
The whole reason Urbit exists is that Unix + the internet is broken and needs a complete overhaul
Re: the different names, there are slight differences between gates and functions, but I agree they're not important enough to merit the change in name. But hey, it takes a purist to spend 15 years rewriting the whole stack from scratch!
> why would a developer prefer to write Self-Hosted!Instagram instead of just Instagram?
Because urbit is designed to make that an easy thing to do. Say you've got a webserver, and you want to put a picture of your kid on it, but you only want the server to serve that picture to your Mom. On unix, that's really complicated, you need to do a lot of things to make that happen - not just implement a web app that includes authentication and give your Mom a new login and password to memorize, but also configure the web server properly and make sure your server is locked down and stuff like that.
On Urbit, that would be really easy, the equivalent of "mkdir mom; chmod +r mom; mv pic.png mom", because it abstracts away things like cryptographically verifying identities in the same way that unix abstracts away sending a file to a printer.
Ideas are cheap, and Urbit isn't just an idea any longer. It's a working system that's been built by dozens of people over the years, and it's only picking up steam.
In Ron Garrett's words:
> The mere fact that Urbit is still a thing, that it has not yet collapsed under the weight of its own intentionally induced baggage, is worrisome to me. Something is keeping that project alive, and it's not technical merit. I don't see a lot of viable options other than some kind of fanaticism.
Looks like he and his ilk are just wrong and having a hard time believing that. It's alive because an increasing number of people want it to be, and no amount of theorizing can deny the reality of actual growth — which, in case everyone forgot, is what the OP is showing.
> Urbit's Nock, which, other than the jet concept, I honestly think is either a strange art project or snake oil, so I won't discuss this further.
Urbit is very real, though whether it will go anywhere or not is a different question. You can run the code today, the language is.... weird as, but there it is, running and doing what it does.
I still haven't dived into it, it felt obscure and obtuse last time I checked, but are the cool kids actually using it? I.e. do you have any more link to this niche community, to check what's the status of the project?
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