Urbit: an operating function

http://urbit.org/preview/~2015.9.25/materials/whitepaper

by privong • 11 years ago

212 152 11 years ago

urbit.org

pcmonk5• 11 years ago

Front page with demo videos: http://urbit.org

jpt413• 11 years ago

Currently under delightfully heavy load, it would seem, since I can icmp but not http it.

pcmonk5• 11 years ago

Sorry, whenever we push updates we have a brief period of inavailability. Should be working now.

xena• 11 years ago

This is a really interesting read. I'm excited for urbit now!

kungfooguru• 11 years ago

Reading anything from them always reminds me of TempleOS. There are some hilarious gems if you skim it, like "Urbit is highly intolerant of computation error, for obvious reasons, and should be run in an EMP shielded data center on ECC memory."

MichaelAza3• 11 years ago

I always think of TempleOS as well. Both project maintainers have created some impressive and/or interesting technology that is hindered by inflated self importance and being different for the sake of being different. Another common point - HN has a soft spot for both and upvotes most content related to these projects.

yarvin928• 11 years ago

It'd be interesting to hear a more detailed description of what you'd classify as "different for the sake of being different."

There's certainly plenty of code in this world that's the same for the sake of being the same. It's not terribly interesting to use CGA graphics for the sake of being different. On the other hand, I do wonder whether my children will grow up learning 1970s programming for the sake of being the same.

dustingetz2• 11 years ago

being different for the sake of being different

Urbit has brilliant technical insight into perhaps the hardest problem our industry currently faces: why does everything always turn into a big ball of mud?

Urbit may turn out to be incredibly important. Parent comment is unjustified, uninformed, poor tone and ad hominem.

yarvin928• 11 years ago

TempleOS is definitely more of a religious experience. They're also way ahead of us in CGA graphics.

I think pretty much anything but the most fly-by-night data centers use parity memory, but I'm always concerned by the failure to spend a couple extra bucks on chicken wire for EMP shielding. The Carrington event actually did happen.

thesnider• 11 years ago

I wouldn't be so sure of that -- none of Google's clusters use ECC, for instance.

agumonkey4• 11 years ago

Urbit confuses me to frightening levels. Psychedelic substances levels. Kudos to them.

tptacek7• 11 years ago

It's too bad, really, because someone should do a serious general-purpose overlay network project, and it's clear that Urbit isn't it.

yarvin928• 11 years ago

You're probably capable of something more interesting than a "middlebrow dismissal..."

fit2rule4• 11 years ago

Interesting stuff, but in my usual 15 minutes of attention-span for things like this, utterly impenetrable. Can anyone who has had the privilege of being invited to the Urbit network enlighten us as to just how useful it is shaping up to be in light of, say, the situation with IPFS by comparison? (http://ipfs.io) Because to me, it seems that IPFS may well be ahead in terms of actual applicability right now. Am I mistaken?

yarvin928• 11 years ago

I love IPFS, and it's definitely ahead in terms of applicability.

IPFS is solving a different problem -- it's a storage network, not a personal server. IPFS is more comparable to Freenet or BitTorrent. Urbit is more comparable to Sandstorm, although of course they're technically very different.

fit2rule4• 11 years ago

Like I said, I'm yet to finish boning up on what, exactly, Urbit is .. Sorry - not trying to be pedantic - but how is IPFS not a personal server? I can serve content with it right now, in fact - its what I mostly use it for at the moment.

I guess Urbit is more of an 'operating environment' that allows applications to be built, then?

pkinsky• 11 years ago

Is Urbit comparable to Ethereum?

akhilcacharya2• 11 years ago

Interesting stuff, but in my usual 15 minutes of attention-span for things like this, utterly impenetrable.

It's pretty much designed to be as hard to understand as possible.

Look at the source/demo videos - it seems like it's designed to be obfuscated.

https://github.com/urbit/urbit

http://urbit.org/preview/~2015.9.25/materials/part-i

Personally, I can't get over the really made up words.

yebyen• 11 years ago

Personally, I can't get over the really made up words.

The idea of having new names for everything is that when you use a name you've already seen before in another context, you carry forward any ideas you have about things with that name based on their implementations in those other languages.

There's a specific meaning for the words that are used for the introductory language concepts: arm, gate, battery, sample, core, rune, glyph, ... twig, jet, and so on.

Many of these are either new concepts, or new arrangements of old concepts. A gate is not a lambda or a function, neither is a core, and if either were called those things anyone who hadn't seen them explained before would probably go ahead and take the big word to their nearest search engine, only to become even more confused by idiosyncratic and sometimes conflicting explanations of those ideas that appear slightly differently in hundreds of other languages.

I think that Hoon hopes to be the first programming language for a lot of people one day, so they won't usually be coming expecting familiar things to have familiar names.

jpt413• 11 years ago

You mean that out of all the things in this combinator [0] flavored abstract rewrite system [1], programmed via a symmetrical [2], forward-inferenced [3] typed language, exposing modula-2 style per-code-block compilation control [4], all designed to support a content centric [5], natively networked [6] global computing environment with sovereignty-hard siloing capabilities [7], the most difficult part to understand is the naming scheme?

Edit: In the early Urbit docs [8] there was a nigh ad nauseam emphasis on the "stupidity" of the project. What the epiphany of careful inspection revealed was that this stupidity was not that of intellectual deficiency, but rather opposition to "cleverness" of the kind that tends to foster (and infest) Urbit's peer group of deep stack [9] rebuilds. One of the most insightful comments I've heard after springing Urbit on unsuspecting PL professionals was (paraphrased): "It [Urbit] does all the things we've said we wanted, in the worst possible way." All words are equally made up until grounded in referents. The question is, are the Worfian shorthands new words provide worth the cost [10] of expanding the symbol table, as compared to the interpretation overhead of translating new concepts into old? Under the burden of internalizing all the content linked below and more, I judge new vocabulary justified.

[0] http://www.ucombinator.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_rewriting_system (ARS being the most mechanical of the pure computational models outside reversible logic)

[2] http://tunes.org/wiki/symmetric_20lisp.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_chaining

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2#Description (see Definition/Implementation modules)

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_centric_networking

[6] http://netcentriccomputing.org/

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security (not yet fully implemented)

[8] http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/moron-lab-goals-princip...

[9] I won't say full stack, because the reshaping blade only penetrates OS deep. For a hardware-grounded reset, see good old Loper OS (http://www.loper-os.org/?p=8).

[10] Because words are context dependent, this expansion is only logarithmic with respect to the increase of immediately referable concept space.

jitl• 11 years ago

the concepts expressed in the first section "Obstacles" are interesting and make for good reading, but the implementation strategy in "Definition" are nuts. The authors completely disregard human nature and usability when designing Hoon. Random variable names? Sigils-only syntax? If they want to replace Unix and the Internet, they should remember why Unix won: because it was easy tp get things done.

In Urbit new developers not only have to learn all the new concept words, they also have to suffer through a brainfuck/perl syntax and a hostile programming style. Success seems impossible.

pcmonk5• 11 years ago

The random three-letter variable names are only used in the kernel, and they're meant to only be used in code that's small/simple enough that they're warranted. In my opinion, we use too many of them, and I've been converting many of them to longer, more descriptive names. The rule that "punctuation is syntax, text is content" is useful, and it becomes very natural with a bit of practice.

Hoon is very much not designed to be apparently usable, it is designed to be actually usable. Personally, I find it to be one of the most usable languages I've ever used.

yarvin928• 11 years ago

Apparent usability isn't the same as actual usability. Pretty much everyone who learns Hoon is surprised by how easy it was, which may be a good thing or a bad thing depending.

There are about a hundred runes (digraphs) in Hoon, but you mostly see only 10 or 15. Also, they're organized by internal structure (all | runes do the same kind of thing), and most runes are macros which resolve to about 20 built-in forms. It's a couple of orders of magnitude easier than learning Chinese, which again may be a good thing or a bad thing.

Variable names designed to be memorable rather than meaningful are pretty normal in both math and functional programming. Math uses Greek letters for the same purpose, for instance. Also, as we note explicitly, this is a style that's optimal for simple code - in any language, you'd probably write add(a, b), not add(left_argument, right_argument).

Actually, Perl originally won because it was easy to get things done. It's had problems since, but for different reasons...

mst• 11 years ago

Every time I look at Hoon I think "this looks like the same sort of cliff-steep startup followed by 'woah' as vi", but I can never quite get past the cliff as yet.

chc4• 11 years ago

I'm not exactly unbiased to Urbit, but I found Hoon as usable as they say it is. It seems like everyone that hears about Hoon's rune syntax comments about how insane it is, but it really is easy to get into.

I'm partial to calling it "Chinese Lisp" - Hoon runes are converted directly into AST nodes, but instead of using friendly words it uses weird diagraphs. The fact that the runes are grouped into families makes it much simply, however. You don't have to know what "|*" does exactly, just know that all runes that start with bar (|) create the equivalent of functions, so it has to be related to that. Instead of memorizing 100+ runes that are all completely different from eachother, most of them are just variants of others and are even macros to other runes.

While it may look like garbage, programs such as a brainfuck vm[1] are easy to scan when you can get the gist of the program structure very easily.

While some of the names are quite a pain, a good portion of the stdlib's arms are teniously named related to their subject, or are very easily grouped with their function. snag is index, scag is prefix, slag is suffix.[2] The docs for the stdlib, along with examples of how to use it, are shipped with every planet at http://localhost:8080/home/tree/pub/doc/hoon/library, although the initial page generation takes a bit. I'm not that big of a fan of the CVC variable names, however.

1: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chc4/sample-apps/master/bf... 2: http://doznec.urbit.org/home/tree/pub/doc/hoon/library/2b#-s...

gkya• 11 years ago

I do computing daily i.e. I use the internet like anyone else, and I use Emacs for feeds, mail, writing, programming little tools in elisp etc. Now after having read this, I cannot see how it be supposed to improve my daily computing routine. I think that it is indeed revolutionary this Urbit thing, in that it is as opaque and unpractically idealistic as any other revolution.

csense2• 11 years ago

The architecture is exciting. The problem is that the aesthetics of the tooling seems deliberately designed to alienate new users. For example the whitepaper gives new names to every punctuation symbol!

And poking around the repo, there are gems like this:

"A...variable name is a random pronounceable three-letter string, sometimes with some vague relationship to its meaning, but usually not..."

"Nock, for mysterious reasons, uses 0 as true...and 1 as false..."

The architecture is really cool, but the syntax is terrible.

pcmonk5• 11 years ago

Traditional punctuation names suck. "Ampersand", "at sign", "caret"? For a language like hoon where we use a lot of symbols, that gets really tiring. Having one-syllable names for glyphs is really convenient, and they tend to roll of the tongue. Everyone's free to use whatever names they want, of course, we just find these useful. Most people love these once they get used to them.

I don't think you can judge syntax by looking at it -- you have to use it for a little while. Hoon's syntax looks hard, but it's actually rather pleasant to use.

yarvin928• 11 years ago

Also, the three-letter variable names aren't part of Hoon -- they're just a convention that works well if (and only if) you have short, simple functions.

I've actually taken to using TLVs with a Hungarian suffix in C -- it works well if (and only if) you have short, simple functions.

One way to think about variable names: declaring a variable is a way of saying "I couldn't quite get this into point-free form." Names should be the exception, not the rule. Again, this is much more true in a functional language.

tptacek7• 11 years ago

This right here is what I mean when I suggest Urbit is unserious. "Green is just yellow and blue. Why do we call it 'green'? That name sucks. From now on, we're going to call it 'yellue'."

There's overreaching first-principles boil-the-ocean dorm room rethinking of concepts, and then there's renaming the ASCII characters.

csense2• 11 years ago

For a language like hoon where we use a lot of symbols

Languages with lots of symbols tend to be incredibly difficult to read at first. If you have a programming language where a typical program looks like line noise, it means the programming language is going to likely have a very steep learning curve (because a lot of those operators are probably not going to have their standardized meaning).

Think about Python. A well-written Python program is similar to the pseudocode you would write on a napkin. For a concrete example, look at the whitepaper's definition of I1 in pseudo-code. The "pseudo-Hoon" implementation of I1 looks totally different from the pseudocode, and to even begin to read the Hoon code, I would have to look up the meanings of approximately 10 different operators.

I guess there are two different camps of language design -- the Perl / Ruby / shell camp where having lots of non-standard operators in your syntax is desirable, and the C / Python / Lua camp which prefers a small set of operators with meanings close to their "standard" mathematical ones.

JoshTriplett3• 11 years ago

Traditional punctuation names suck. "Ampersand", "at sign", "caret"?

Hence why geeks and programmers rarely call them by name. See http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/ASCII.html .

pjc50• 11 years ago

Clearly we should be using Victor Borge's phonetic punctuation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bpIbdZhrzA

zaphar• 11 years ago

I admit that I have a fondness for learning esoteric languages. That said I've actually gone far enough down the urbit rabbit hole to write a set of tutorials[0].

urbit has a high startup cost and is hampered by a lack of documentation as well as a desire to reinvent terminology as well as a fast changing API to write too. All of which means that it's more suitable for the curious and hobbyists right now.

I'm withholding judgement on whether it will manage to succeed despite these.

[0] http://hidduc-posmeg.urbit.org/home/pub/hoon-intro/

xixi77• 11 years ago

This has been done before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL

"The INTERCAL manual gives unusual names to all non-alphanumeric ASCII characters: single and double quotes are "sparks" and "rabbit ears" respectively. (The exception is the ampersand: as the Jargon File states, "what could be sillier?") The assignment operator ... is in INTERCAL a left-arrow, <-, referred to as "gets" and made up of an "angle" and a "worm"."

david-given7• 11 years ago

Slightly less insanely, Forth did this too. The ANS Forth spec defines official pronounceable names for all words:

http://lars.nocrew.org/dpans/dpans6.htm#6.1

The names are a mix between the visual (* is 'star', and ; is 'semicolon') and the semantic (<> is 'not-equals', and ! is 'store'). Some are a mix (+! is 'plus-store').

JulianMorrison2• 11 years ago

Don't blame Nock, Bash does that too. Return code 0 = true.

emmelaich2• 11 years ago

I call it the Tolstoy model:

    "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family
    is unhappy in its own way"

You only need one value for success/true. But you need many to indicate the modes of failure.

api2• 11 years ago

The inversion of 0/1 for true/false is common in good C APIs. 0 as true and 1 as false makes a lot of sense from a perspective of error handling. 0 means everything's okay, while nonzero means it isn't. Various forms of nonzero can then represent different kinds of fail. Variations on this theme are common enough in programming that the inversion is reasonable, and it does no harm in the simple boolean case.

The architecture is no more esoteric than Unix, C, C++, or a submicron-scale polished turd like HTML5+CSS+JavaScript+React+JSX+NodeJS or most other "stacks."

It's just unfamiliar because it's new, and that's okay, because it is not making any pretensions about not being new or about being a baby-step hack on top of our existing heap of hacks. If you're going to try to reinvent the OS and the platform, then go full Yoda and do or do not.

jpt413• 11 years ago

it is not making any pretensions about not being new or about being a baby-step hack

And, with its Kelvin (count down to zero, then freeze forever) revisioning scheme, Urbit admits its own mortality (or so it seems to me). Any change that can not be managed as an intrasystemic, in place upgrade must necessarily - and righteously - detonate the Urbit ecosystem as thoroughly as mature Urbit obviates Unix. Future competitors are thereby encouraged to be equally generalist, thus hardening Urbit against dissolution via tepid, partial reforms.

KaiserPro• 11 years ago

isnt this basically the same idea as plan 9, but with some more opinions on "decentralised" networks.

jpt413• 11 years ago

To the depths of my familiarity, Urbit is basically the same, to some shade or degree, including but not limited too, the ideas listed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279931

yarvin928• 11 years ago

Loosely, yes, they're both network operating systems. And of course, Plan 9 is brilliant. :-) All the details are different....

masonicb00m• 11 years ago

Awesome.

'For example, %= sounds like "centis" rather than "percent equals." Since even a silent reader will subvocalize, the length and complexity of the sound is a tax on reading the code.' This is great. Clever how some of the sounds are reminiscent of existing readings.

david-given7• 11 years ago

"Since even a silent reader will subvocalize..."

Actually, no. I don't.

JoshTriplett3• 11 years ago

Neither do I. One of the very first things that guides on how to speed-read tell you is to stop yourself from internally reading aloud.

yarvin928• 11 years ago

"Subvocalize" has a literal meaning (micro-activation of the vocal cords) which good silent readers avoid. But you're still activating the vocal areas of the brain [0]. If you read much poetry, you'll see that the connection between reading and sound is pretty inseparable.

[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23223279

toothbrush• 11 years ago

JavaScript needed to be able to read text document. Next.

pcmoore• 11 years ago

For a more accessible alternative approach to all this madness see this mirror project

https://github.com/tibru/tibru

yarvin928• 11 years ago

They do say noitatimi is the highest form of yrettalf...

agumonkey4• 11 years ago

You're such a snoc.

jpt413• 11 years ago

I do so enjoy seeing the casual vivisection of that which tends towards attracting mystical appreciation; what remains intact is all the more deservedly numinous.

For an exactly diametric plunge from the same origin into the rarefied esoteric, there is: https://github.com/mnemnion/ax/blob/master/commentary%20on%2...

icebraining2• 11 years ago

Rarefied esoteric what?

fiatjaf4• 11 years ago

The aesthetics is what is making this thing possible. Thinking with the old words would not allow development of new things.

I don't know if this is good or bad, but it is sincerely trying to do new things, so a new language is appropriate.

Rusky2• 11 years ago

New things are developed every day with old words. There are existing words for just about everything Urbit does.

jpt413• 11 years ago

Indeed, even a Post Res mathematical structuralist will admit the instrumental utility of common words for similar entities; would you care to list a few, and their mappings between the jargon of Earth and Mars?

fiatjaf4• 11 years ago

You didn't get it. Not radically new things. There are existing words, but using them wouldn't allow the people from Urbit to think about combining concepts in the radically different way they are doing.

In fact, they would end up saying: well, all we are trying to do already exists, so let's just write a library here, another there. You can argue this would be better, but their goal is to do a completely different thing, even if it looks it could be done with a new library for something.

eggy2• 11 years ago

New things? Is Urbit based on Unix/Linux and the Von Neumann architecture? If so, it is just cosmetic coating on top of the same old foundation. I really like what's going on with people trying to create something like Urbit or old Lisp Machines on new hardware (not Von Neumann based). Interim OS, PilOS (PicoLisp on bare metal). I am still not sold on immutable data is the way forward either. I am reading a 1991 book by Peter M. Kogge "The Architecture of Symbolic Computers", playing with Shen, and interested to see what becomes of vector-based computing hardware with a language like J/APL. Lisp Machines still enthrall me, and I think a new take on them can be just what's needed to recreate computing. Not just a copy of the old Lisp Machines, but an entire rethinking of them.

jpt413• 11 years ago

For another Kogge devotee, see Loper OS: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=8

fiatjaf4• 11 years ago

The best tagline for the project is what is written on the whitepaper, that a planet in Urbit is "the browser for the server side."

throwawayyay1232• 11 years ago

I think it's important to note that Urbit - a very interesting piece of work that deserves more attention - would've been presented at Strange Loop if not the PC crowd made Strange Loop disinvite Curtis Yarvin (the creator of Urbit) for reasons unrelated to Urbit. Using throwaway for obviously reasons.

yarvin928• 11 years ago

I obviously find this a very interesting subject. However, I suspect there are better times and places to discuss it...

throwawayyay1232• 11 years ago

I don't mean to take attention away from the real conversation here. However, there are a lot of people who are unaware of the back story, and this seems like a good place to make people aware of it.

SrslyJosh2• 11 years ago

I like how your rhetoric removes all agency from the conference organizers, like they had no choice but to do what that horrible PC crowd wanted.

JulianMorrison2• 11 years ago

"Do users want their own general-purpose personal cloud computer?"

No, they do not.

General purpose computers, as such, are useless and boring. They are only useful when converted into one or more appliances. Modern OSes are very good at this. Cloud general purpose compute exists. Its niche to the community of appliance builders, because nobody has any use for it directly.

fiatjaf4• 11 years ago

"in the cloud, all users have is a herd of special-purpose appliances".

The argument of the whitepaper is that our current internet and Unix environment does not allow for anything else than a cloud with lots of special-purpose appliances, but that does not mean this is the desirable situation, neither for the appliance builders nor for their users.

SrslyJosh2• 11 years ago

I got as far as the first mention of Hoon, and then I thought to myself, "Oh fuck, didn't I read this a year or two ago?" It's all downhill from there.

ClintEhrlich3• 11 years ago

The flaw in this white paper is that it starts by explaining the solution instead of the problem. So everyone should start by skipping to the bottom and reading the conclusion:

In 1985 it seemed completely natural and inevitable that, by 2015, everyone in the world would have a network computer. Our files, our programs, our communication would all go through it.
When we got a video call, our computer would pick up. When we had to pay a bill, our computer would pay it. When we wanted to listen to a song, we'd play a music file on our computer. When we wanted to share a spreadsheet, our computer would talk to someone else's computer. What could be more obvious? How else would it work? . . .
The Internet didn't scale into an open, high-trust network of personal servers. It scaled into a low-trust network that we use as a better modem — to talk to walled-garden servers that are better AOLs. We wish it wasn't this way. It is this way.

This is the problem Urbit aspires to solve: Why does everything suck? Why aren't we living in the future we were promised in 1985, where everything is easy because all software plays nice together? Why do we have a planetary series of Rube Goldberg machines instead of the fun version of the Borg?

The answer is that we've been building everything on top of leaky abstraction, piling band-aids on top of band-aids instead of just starting with a stable foundation. Urbit's solution is to replace every OS, file system, and communications protocol on Earth with a single application: Urbit.

The project is meant to be the biggest pain in the ass ever. It's an attempt to fix everything that is wrong with computers by rebooting the entire information age.

The beauty is that it doesn't all have to happen at once. Urbit can function like a kernel for all non-Urbit systems: They get to call Urbit to receive its super-reliable data, but it never makes system calls so they can't inject side effects into the shiny new Urbit ecosystem. Over time, if Urbit works as intended, it will assimilate everything else.

Once you understand the stakes, Nock and Hoon no longer look like cruel jokes. It would be madness to expect coders to invest all that effort to learn 'just another language.' It's only pseudo-madness to make the same demands while promising that their code will still work a million years from now, because all computers will still be running Urbit.

Instead of caviling about details like how to pronounce the code when reading it aloud, let's delve into the issues that really matter:

I. Does modern computing suffer from a leaky abstraction problem that needs to be solved?

II. If so, is the solution to build an overlay network that provides a global static functional namespace?

III. If so, is Urbit a viable implementation of that solution?

IV. If so, what is the likelihood of Urbit reaching the critical mass necessary for mass adoption?

The last question is the one that interests me the most. In order to overcome the massive inertia behind legacy computing, Urbit needs a killer app: Something that exploits the new system's intrinsic advantages to accomplish feats that were previously impossible.

So... uh... Any suggestions?

yarvin928• 11 years ago

A hint: consider the difference between calling web APIs from a cloud appliance controlled by a third party, versus calling web APIs from a personal server controlled by the user.

A new network has no Metcalfe's law effect by definition. So an important early skill is parasitizing existing networks...

kopter• 11 years ago

If things are really so screwed up, and we need to recover the dreams of the past, why not "recurse on the idea of the computer", and invest in something like Pharo Smalltalk instead?

_m19m• 11 years ago

This seems to come up at regular intervals. It's worth noting that the architects of this system are the "facist teenage Dungeon Master[s]" of http://thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis

asdaqeqweq• 11 years ago

That doesn't seem worth noting.

a-dub• 11 years ago

The backup plan is to typeset and publish the mailing list as a collaboratively written science fiction novel in the event that the main project fails...

norswap• 11 years ago

I've always heard: do one thing and do it right. It's the Unix philosophy, before it was totally disregarded.

Urbit seems to take the total counterpoint of this advice, and I wonder whether it's a good idea.

What I don't get is what it is trying to achieve. The stated goal are too abstract. What are some use-cases? Is it really necessary to scrap the whole OS and languages to achieve these goals?

I do sympathize with the idea of rewriting everything from scratch, and I too feel that "almost everything is terrible" in software-land. But I doubt rewriting everything without having a firm grasp on the underlying issues is the way to go. It it a fun exercise, and inspiring besides, but I'm unsure it can be more than that.

Urbit: an operating function

Related Stories