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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Is this meant to be understandable by people? Am I missing some context?

You can get started, sort of, from the white paper: https://urbit.org/posts/

(TL;DR: "Urbit also invents a lot of alien technical jargon. We admit that this is annoying. Abstractly, it’s part of the clean-slate program: words smuggle in a lot of assumptions." - to which all I can say myself is: qupnux.)

I think the obfuscation is an elaborate hazing ritual that makes it optimal to cooperate with the existing community rather than defect and launch your own competing "land" registry.

You mean like cults do?

It reminds me of a previous techno-utopia.

I guess I'd put it on a poster as: lyrics by blockchain; melody by Xanadu.

I think you need to demonstrate some truly massive and revolutionary value before you ask people to learn your new language, otherwise you really just come off like a cult.

Exactly. One of the primary MOs of a cult is to hijack people's language and replace it with their own. It is a means of thought control, a method of creating a sense of belonging, and a way to make cult members feel superior about their "knowledge". Onecoin has become an outright prosperity cult in Asia. I see shades of the same everywhere in crypto.

You just haven't realized the truth: that Unix and the internet have failed us massively and need to be completely reinvented from scratch by wise and benevolent engineers who have our interest at heart.

Curtis, in his eminent brilliance, was the first of us to realize this, and so became the first of these wise and benevolent engineers, forging a bright path for other open-minded people to follow.

Now come, let's get you changed into this robe and learning these chants. :)

Yeah, I was waiting for the "you can use Urbit to do X". No idea what it's for. There was a bit about real estate transactions .. then alot about space.

I think this is the closest it gets: "Your Urbit instance is your personal server. Your urbit should eventually contain and manage your whole digital life. You may compute at home or in the cloud, based on your security/privacy tradeoff, but Urbit's formal semantics makes ships trivial to migrate. You'll never be locked in to one computing provider."

Somebody put up cash on the barrelhead, a bounty for the Urbit developers and hypemen to develop an actual app -- a simple strip-poker game -- in Urbit.

There were no takers.

The question of "but what can you actually do with it?" went unanswered by Urbit's own promoters, even when they were incentivized with real cash money to come up with an answer.

I never heard of this. Like, never even in passing have I seen that bounty mentioned. One of the trivial apps that was demoed literally years ago was a simple tic-tac-toe app, and there is even a MUD written for Urbit, so saying it's impossible to write apps for it isn't true. The web server is hosted in Urbit, along with the developer chat room. And really, the problem isn't that apps are impossible to write but that they would be easier to write using a different platform, which is probably true (for strip poker at least), since you don't need anything more complex than a couple hundred lines of C.

IIRC, that particular episode happened in, like, 2013, when Arvo (Urbit OS) was barely prototype-grade. Urbit developers decided to work on the OS rather than chase after a bounty of about $1000.

There was also no meaningful documentation at the time, which is why nobody else could complete it.

I'm confused. Is this just saying that Urbit supposed to replace my Windows desktop and all the cloud services I use?

Also, what does "Urbit's formal semantics makes ships trivial to migrate" mean?

> I'm confused. Is this just saying that Urbit supposed to replace my Windows desktop and all the cloud services I use?

You'd run an Urbit instance (a planet) in the cloud (ideally, on three separate machines where a disk write succeeds if two out of three nodes receive it) and then run sub-instances (moons) on each of your personal computing devices (computers, phone, tablets). You could then interact with your planet and/or moons from your browser.

You'd do this because you want to run cloud-type services like photo sharing and (micro)blogging and such, but you _also_ want to do so through your own UI, not UI controlled by someone else whose interests are disaligned with yours, like Mark Zuckerberg's.

I can't imagine it'd replace standard OSs like Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.

> Also, what does "Urbit's formal semantics makes ships trivial to migrate" mean?

If you want to move a ship (a directory containing your planet's data) from one (cloud?) computer to another, all you need to do is shut it down, scp it to the new location, and then start it back up again.

If I didn't know what galaxies, stars, and planets were, and that instances of those are ships, this wouldn't make any sense at all.

The main audience of this post is people who're already into Urbit and understand some of the basic lingo around running a ship. If you don't have that terminology down, and don't know Ethereum either, this probably reads like Jabberwocky[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky

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