bronzejaguar

God willing, the administrative state will be brought to its knees by the duly elected public officials meant to keep it in check.

This is the sort of thing Nietzsche alludes to as his "last man".

Fascinating how in the modern west all efforts are taken to commoditize the human body in every way imaginable, and even overwrite the history of efforts to treat the human body with respect. The false equivalency stating that a public space for women must necessarily be a place that allows prostitution is horrific.

not surprising that meat is the most bioavailable

P2P collaborative CMS for blogs that allows publishing from Urbit to the web: https://blog.tirrel.io/blog/this-page-is-hosted-on-urbit

From site:

Urbit provides foundational primitives at the operating system layer, serving as a better platform for building networked, decentralized applications.

Is this article a joke? There is no mention of why eating healthily would have negative life consequences. There is, however, a sleight of hand in which the author blames the subject of the piece’s “eating disorder” for him losing his job. Was he eating steak while working at a vegan smoothie shop? Clown world is back at it again.

Is this a joke? I’m not very good at reading sarcasm.

“Please, give us more power to tell you what’s right-think and wrong-think.”

It’s certainly in the genre of projects I find interesting. I personally like Urbit’s approach more, but I do check in on Holochain intermittently.

I’m curious as to your definition of decentralized here. It seems you’re using the term to mean “global commons”, when I generally would use the term to mean something more akin to “permissionless” or “exhibiting a resistance to control via a singular entity or small group of entities”. Urbit is certainly decentralized by either of the two latter definitions, though a particular Urbit server surely wouldn’t constitute a global commons, which seems closest to your definition.

Thanks, this is interesting. I enjoy looking at these sorts of projects and their approaches.

Storing data on Ethereum is absurdly expensive, but further, it simply provides a different value proposition than running your own personal server. These ideas aren’t mutually exclusive, nor can they reasonably serve the same needs.

> Right now it’s just a platform to make peer-to-peer servers.

Show me any other platform that allows one to easily build, distribute, and run long-running p2p services that communicate strongly typed data over the wire, or any strong decentralized identity system that can even begin to go toe-to-toe with Urbit.

Direct link to the article: https://www.alephcorp.xyz/urbit/to-the-stars

As far as I’m aware, there is no custom cryptography, and you can interact with it through a web UI now, not just through commands. Not sure where they got that idea.

You don’t, and the article is outdated and “titles” no longer exist.

It’s a personal server OS. MS-DOS was emulated on mainframes before it was run directly on hardware. Urbit wants to do the same, starting by being emulated on traditional computer OSes, and eventually moving to bare metal.

Funny, because Urbit’s address space has been around for longer than ENS, and makes different design tradeoffs than DNS. https://urbit.org/blog/pki-maze/

Yes! You get it

It’s software that you run on your computer on macOS or Linux. It provides a VM that only does IO to the underlying system through a typed kernel interface. That’s it. There are blog posts showing the software running on it.

I think you’re right about making it concrete instead of metaphorical

Urbit is an overlay OS, a functional VM you can run that does strictly typed p2p networking with other urbits. So, it’s software you run on your computer or on a VPS. The thing you’re looking at buying is the Urbit equivalent of a domain name. You can read more about the design decisions in their PKI blog post. (Most recent one, I think)

It’s way faster than it used to be (about 10x). I’m interested in knowing the progress of their new JIT interpreter, because they claim that’s giving them another 10x in internal tests

Founder isn’t associated with project anymore. Worth taking another look

It’s an overlay OS, a VM made to allow anyone to run their own server easily

I’ve really been enjoying the recent blog posts. The one about the idea maze / design space of building out a PKI was especially good.

first couple of paragraphs

A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a system for binding a set of keys to a name. Sometimes a small amount of metadata is included.

Existing PKIs include PGP-style "web of trust", SSL certificates, ZeroTier, Keybase, OpenID, Mozilla Persona, and Login with Google. These take unique approaches to the problem and have achieved some degree of success, but none provide globally consistent, permanent, and completely self-owned identities. Exhaustive exploration and categorization is unfortunately out of scope for this post, so we'll just describe Urbit's approach to achieving these properties in our PKI.

In Urbit, a "name" is often called a "ship" or an "address" because we use the metadata in the PKI to make names routable. The total data is two 256-bit asymmetric keys, a cryptographic suite number (to allow changing crypto algorithms), the revision number of the key, and the name of a ship that will route for it. This sums to less than 128 bytes of data.

Each PKI trades off various properties. We chose a tripartite system so that appropriate choices can be made for different use cases. Here, we explore the various properties we chose by following a series of binary choices -- the idea maze.

Love it!