<story><title>Urbit</title><url>https://urbit.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ALittleLight</author><text>I have seen Urbit a couple times but never really understood it.  From the &amp;quot;Understanding Urbit&amp;quot; page -&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Imagine that you can login from anywhere with one name and password.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;And when you do, your entire OS appears.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Inside is your whole digital life. All of your communities, conversations, and connections. All of your biometric data and devices. Your entire personal archive in one place that’s secure, private, and designed to last forever.&lt;p&gt;What does this mean?  My whole digital life?  It sounds like I&amp;#x27;m signing in to a VPS from which I access all of my digital life.  Is that it?  Do I get a VPS?&lt;p&gt;That seems kind of like what I&amp;#x27;m getting.  The first line on urbit.org is &amp;quot;Urbit is your last computer&amp;quot; - but I don&amp;#x27;t see how I&amp;#x27;m buying a computer, for a one time fee, for life, without paying a ton of money.&lt;p&gt;I see this website [1] has an Urbit &amp;quot;Planet&amp;quot; available for .04 ETH, or about 6 USD.  Could I get a life long VPS for 6 dollars?  If so, I&amp;#x27;d definitely be up for it.  If not, what, exactly am I getting for 6 dollars?&lt;p&gt;The page &amp;quot;Understanding Urbit&amp;quot; also says that Urbit OS &amp;quot;can never show you ads&amp;quot;.  What does that even mean?  It can&amp;#x27;t run Chrome?  The OS can&amp;#x27;t show ads?  Any image or text can be an ad.  I don&amp;#x27;t get it.&lt;p&gt;What I would like to see is a simple explanation of what Urbit is.  Maybe a video, where someone logs in to Urbit, and interacts with it in someway, doing something that can&amp;#x27;t easily be done in some other way. I&amp;#x27;d like to know the difference between planets, stars, and galaxies.&lt;p&gt;There has to be a better way to explain this.&lt;p&gt;1 - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;opensea.io&amp;#x2F;assets&amp;#x2F;0x6ac07b7c4601b5ce11de8dfe6335b871c7c4dd4d&amp;#x2F;4738720&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;opensea.io&amp;#x2F;assets&amp;#x2F;0x6ac07b7c4601b5ce11de8dfe6335b871...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nootropicat</author><text>The part you buy is dns that runs on ethereum (iirc), but with artificial scarcity because they want to make money. This part is completely pointless, because the actual system could work as well on ens directly, or even dns.&lt;p&gt;The actual urbit is like docker with standard API for communication between all apps on different containers, but it runs on a lisp-machine like architecture, except instead of lisp there&amp;#x27;s a new esoteric language called Hoon.&lt;p&gt;If not for the scammy wealth extraction attempt with the name system, I would consider it to be in the same general category as TempleOS - a form of art.</text></comment>
<story><title>Urbit</title><url>https://urbit.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ALittleLight</author><text>I have seen Urbit a couple times but never really understood it.  From the &amp;quot;Understanding Urbit&amp;quot; page -&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Imagine that you can login from anywhere with one name and password.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;And when you do, your entire OS appears.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Inside is your whole digital life. All of your communities, conversations, and connections. All of your biometric data and devices. Your entire personal archive in one place that’s secure, private, and designed to last forever.&lt;p&gt;What does this mean?  My whole digital life?  It sounds like I&amp;#x27;m signing in to a VPS from which I access all of my digital life.  Is that it?  Do I get a VPS?&lt;p&gt;That seems kind of like what I&amp;#x27;m getting.  The first line on urbit.org is &amp;quot;Urbit is your last computer&amp;quot; - but I don&amp;#x27;t see how I&amp;#x27;m buying a computer, for a one time fee, for life, without paying a ton of money.&lt;p&gt;I see this website [1] has an Urbit &amp;quot;Planet&amp;quot; available for .04 ETH, or about 6 USD.  Could I get a life long VPS for 6 dollars?  If so, I&amp;#x27;d definitely be up for it.  If not, what, exactly am I getting for 6 dollars?&lt;p&gt;The page &amp;quot;Understanding Urbit&amp;quot; also says that Urbit OS &amp;quot;can never show you ads&amp;quot;.  What does that even mean?  It can&amp;#x27;t run Chrome?  The OS can&amp;#x27;t show ads?  Any image or text can be an ad.  I don&amp;#x27;t get it.&lt;p&gt;What I would like to see is a simple explanation of what Urbit is.  Maybe a video, where someone logs in to Urbit, and interacts with it in someway, doing something that can&amp;#x27;t easily be done in some other way. I&amp;#x27;d like to know the difference between planets, stars, and galaxies.&lt;p&gt;There has to be a better way to explain this.&lt;p&gt;1 - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;opensea.io&amp;#x2F;assets&amp;#x2F;0x6ac07b7c4601b5ce11de8dfe6335b871c7c4dd4d&amp;#x2F;4738720&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;opensea.io&amp;#x2F;assets&amp;#x2F;0x6ac07b7c4601b5ce11de8dfe6335b871...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>theamk</author><text>Urbit “planet” is like a VM, but running an OS developed completely independently from existing computing words. There is a custom language, a custom network layer, a custom cryptography and custom identity system. There are even custom words for common terms. This has no GUI, but it does has a web interface that you can connect to.&lt;p&gt;From the practical standpoint, you have a linux process running from a data directory. You run it, and the you can access it via CLI and via web interface (which also has a terminal-like webapp). It then uses regular IP to talk to other urbits in P2P fashion.&lt;p&gt;From what I could find, the whole thing is full of magic and pretty opaque - you are only supposed to interact with it by running it and typing commands there. In particular, you’d probably want to back it up. The only instructions I could find is to stop it and tar it up, and back up manually. Better do it often if you want your “digital life” to be safe.</text></comment>