Urbit revisited

Does any of you butts use #urbit?

I have made several attempts at getting urbit up and running throughout the years, but now is the first time I actually succeeded:

First impressions

I like the cool 24h analog clock — can I have one as a widget for my #android phone?

For an uninitiated like myself, the command language, #hoon, looks like #haskell and #brainfuck had a child. Here's ls(1) for urbit:

::  LiSt directory subnodes
::
::::  /hoon/ls/gen
  ::
/?    310
/+    show-dir
::
::::
  ::
~&  %
:-  %say
|=  [^ [arg=path ~] vane=?(%g %c)]
=+  lon=.^(arch (cat 3 vane %y) arg)
tang+[?~(dir.lon leaf+"~" (show-dir vane arg dir.lon))]~

The urbit universe revolves around galaxies, stars, and planets (possibly with moons), as well as ephemeral comets. Galaxies and stars are system entities. Planets are for mortal users like me, unless I just make do with a comet.

I dislike the hierarchy.

Planets can be bought for USD 20−100 a piece, paid with ETH (that has exorbitant transaction fees). Comets can be ‘mined’ and are free.

Networking seems to be IPv4 only. 😒

The groups/forums look like low quality IRC, but it seems to work.

Apart from chatting with people in the groups, I'm not sure where to go from here, but I'm glad I finally managed to boot the thing.

P.S.: #Urbit lives at https://urbit.org/

Hi @kas my son @Gabo sent me a link to a blog post on urbit this weekend. I hadn't seen it before, but the desktop thing looks really cool.

I'll see if I can get it running.