Urbit :: the good, the bad, and the insane

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2021-05-24 19:30:07

Originally, I wanted to write in the layout of the good, the bad, and the ugly, but I’m not entirely sure how that would pan out.1

And before I do that, here’s a PSA: there’s a tl;dr at the end. So you don’t need to read all this drivel. You’re welcome.

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).

And all of that in the name of delivering you flaky, unreliable, and feature-poor implementation of an internet forum. (in a nutshell)3

An additional component of Urbit is its “distributed” identity component, where your identity is uniquely tied to a 32-bit integer. And to go with the zeitgeist, it’s backed by Ethereum blockchain. Naturally.

This project started in 2002 as a PhD thesis to reinvent computing. Over the next 6 years the progress was a language specification (Nock) for a turing-complete language with ~11 instructions.

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