After reading a few articles I felt like I finally figured out what Urbit was and wrote down my sense in a Tweet thread: https://twitter.com/ianbicking/status/1

After reading a few articles I felt like I finally figured out what Urbit was and wrote down my sense in a Tweet thread: https://twitter.com/ianbicking/status/1249862161758916609 https://twitter.com/ianbicking/status/1249862161758916609 In summary: Urbit is a functional/deterministic VM. That's mostly it. It runs a bytecode called Nock. The only language that really compiles to Nock is a weird language called Hoon. Because the VM is functional and deterministic, it is (in theory) also portable – you pick up the (ever-evolving) VM image and move it somewhere else, and it should act the same. Since the VM may move around there's also an identity/networking layer so you can talk to the VM wherever it is. Right now Urbit is a program called u3 (runs on Linux or whatever) that runs Nock programs. OS 1 is such a program that does a couple things. It's unclear to me if they've really built an OS or just a library of routines that can be used to build a single multipurpose application. The most direct article I found was "Review of Urbit": https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of-urbit-e7cc4c35f149 https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of-urbit-e7cc4c35f14... Urbit's own "Common Objections to Urbit" was helpful, in a methinks-he-doth-protest-too-much sort of way: https://urbit.org/blog/common-objections-to-urbit/ https://urbit.org/blog/common-objections-to-urbit/ And that article pointed me to "Houyhnhnms vs Martians" which was helpful though also as weird as Urbit: http://ngnghm.github.io/blog/2016/06/11/chapter-10-houyhnhnms-vs-martians/ http://ngnghm.github.io/blog/2016/06/11/chapter-10-houyhnhnm... While some people say Urbit is feudalistic, I tend to agree more with those that call it simply obscurantist. More occult than fascist.