What does Urbit do?
I have seen several high ranking posts related to Urbit. I have spent some time on the site, but I cannot figure out the purpose of Urbit. What problem does it help solve? What does it do?
Basically, Urbit's thesis is that "the internet is broken"---that it's a square peg document delivery system hammered viciously into a round distributed applications hole---and that UNIX is overpowered / for sysadmins. Urbit's goal is to replace your C-based OS and your HTML-based web with a unified, typed functional, VM-ish "thing". (Source: what I remember from the presentation video.)
To summarize: fix broken web, fix broken OS, create the developer's idea of a decent functional language. I think he knows he's being quixotic, but his morale is good and he's having a nice time of it.
Anybody at all please go ahead and correct me if I got anything wrong---I'm absolutely not an expert on any of this.