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Comment by routerl | Hacker News Reader

How's this one: I'm a competent, experienced, professional software engineer, who is utterly and completely incapable of grasping what and why urbit is, without seemingly investing far more time and cognitive capital than I'm willing to invest on something so nebulous.

From my perspective, urbit is quicksand: crypto wasn't this bad, NFT's weren't this bad; I was able to grasp the basics quickly and invest time into solving my confusions to my own satisfaction, without ever feeling like I was more drawn in than necessary (i.e. didn't over-invest, got out early).

To me, urbit is nothing more than a sign, just beyond a blackhole's event horizon, which says "come closer".

No thanks. I'm happy to stick to the fundamentals that have served me so well in my life and career.

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Interesting. I consider myself an average developer who picked up Urbit to play with in 2017 (when it was still very rough). I've been happily using it almost everyday for a couple of years now. I mean, it's just a peer-to-peer network built from first principles. That's really kind of it. I guess I don't really deep dive into the inner workings of its address space, OS, or functional programming language, but for an end user like me it works pretty great for distributed communication. I'm not trying to sell anyone on it by any means, but some of the most interesting things I've read have been in Urbit groups.

ChatGPT made a nice summary.

  > Provide me information on Urbit.

  Urbit is a decentralized, functional operating system and network, which
  aims to provide a secure and private computing environment for users. It
  is designed to be a platform for a new decentralized internet, and it
  uses a unique architecture that combines elements of functional
  programming, peer-to-peer networking, and blockchain technology.

  Urbit is still in development and not widely adopted yet, but it's a
  project with a new approach to computing and network, that aims to
  provide a more secure, private, and decentralized environment for
  users. The goal of Urbit is to provide an alternative to centralized
  systems, where users have more control over their data and devices, and
  where the network is more resilient to censorship, surveillance, and
  data breaches.

Answers, albeit very generic, the what and why.

As usual, ChatGPT is summarizing and regurgitating the (m|d)isinformation that's already out there.

It doesn't matter how many Tlon employees and Urbit fans protest otherwise, that what is inaccurate. Urbit is not an "operating system".

Here's the download page, where you can download Urbit for Linux, Urbit for MacOS, Urbit for Windows etc:

https://urbit.org/getting-started/cli

It's an application. It's not an "operating system". You need an operating system to run it.

It's also not a "personal server operating function" or "new kind of computer" as described elsewhere in the literature. It's a freaking web app.

I love that the CLI installation instructions describe themselves as "Installation instructions for power users". On the home page "All the smart people I know disappear into Urbit."

This is toy software, backed by a 100% transparent ponzi scheme, appealing to the most gullible out there who desperately want to be accepted by a "smart" minority group.

The network is more resilient to censorship, surveillance, and data breaches? Puhlease. The CLI example page shows you how to set up a basic Urbit instance which is accessed via ... unencrypted HTTP.

>Urbit is not an "operating system".

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.

We want to get to native, but you don’t replace the hardware in a day. It doesn’t make sense to build a custom nock cpu until it’s necessary.

For a new system to succeed it has to run on the hardware people have. That’s why there’s a runtime. It is an OS, but there’s an interpreter for the machines of today. If urbit succeeds then running it directly would be the ultimate goal.

I wonder what Yarvin thinks of NFTs. It’s like the VHS vs Betamax of cynical obfuscated decentralized scams.

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