Blog Urbit Community Update - October 2024

Piraeus: A Zoomable Tiling User Interface

In a new essay, Curtis Yarvin (~sorreg-namtyv) outlines Piraeus, a tiling user interface that represents your entire digital life on an infinitely zoomable surface. The essay contains significant technical and aesthetic guidance that the UF team is currently implementing.

Today, the Urbit experience involves several different UIs. Landscape is the current landing page that contains all your apps. Bridge is the website for claiming and activating a new ship. Sky is the UI in development for Shrubbery, our experimental application framework. Piraeus will combine all of these into a single cohesive experience.

This new UI will give you a sense of place while also enabling exploration, through smooth zoom animations and visual cues like "you are here" markers. You will also be able to travel to other users' data spaces, creating a globally navigable data space.

“Zooming is the intersection of the spatial sense of a hunter-gatherer ape with the natural tree structure of information.”

Urbit's Path to Mainstream Adoption

In another essay, Curtis Yarvin (~sorreg-namtyv) outlines Urbit's path from "fanware" to mainstream adoption. There are three components:

1. Tlon: Urbit’s oldest and most important product company. Their efforts are central to Urbit’s growth. The Urbit Foundation will own the systems layer while allowing the product needs of companies like Tlon to drive system-level decisions.

2. Utopia: A social project to curate networks of high-quality users, with the aim of growing communities and conversations as excellent as that of Usenet in its heyday.

3. Hegira: A unified computing environment with a focus on "power users". For example, we can provide scheduling and contact management tools much more powerful than what’s offered by Google or Apple. Your Urbit should also be a personal creative content archive that handles everything from taking notes to publishing blogs.

These 3 initiatives will grow us beyond users that stay for our ideals, to those that care less about ideals and simply rely on the software for their daily lives.

Subassembly PNW

Oct 20-22

Subassembly kicks off today. Nestled in the foothills of the picturesque Mount Rainier, we’ll be in for a roster of incredible talks. Some highlights:

• ~nolmes-wacmyl (@BackTheBunny) will speak on the direction of the crypto landscape and the foundations of token value.

• ~simfur-ritwed (@Halikaarn1an) will speak on creating a functional, human-oriented, digital civilization.

• ~minder-folden (@thezavant), a world renowned mentalist, will speak on identity, branding, and experiental design.

• ~sorreg-namtyv (@sorreg_namtyv) will speak on his experience founding Urbit and on the governance of Urbit today.

• ... and much more

Check out the full list of talks in this thread on X. You can also check out the Subassembly event page for more info. Our deep gratitude to Tocwex Syndicate for making this event come to life.

Urbit Systems Technical Journal: Vol. 2

The Urbit Systems Technical Journal publishes technical articles on Urbit’s ongoing development. It aims to document the engineering work necessary to realize our vision of a sovereign and principled computing system.

This second issue of USTJ showcases Urbit's public-key infrastructure namespace, aspects of Urbit's conceptions of files and HTTP messaging, and its solid-state reproducible build system. It features articles by core devs ~wicdev-wisryt, ~rovnys-ricfer, ~lagrev-nocfep, and more.

You can preorder your copy here. They will also be available at Subassembly.

Obelisk: SQL for Urbit

Obelisk, by Jack Fox (~nomryg-nilref), is a SQL-like database and scripting language for Urbit. After 2.5 years of work, it was officially released this week. It’s a monumental achievement that totals around 30,000 lines of code.

A SQL-like relational database on Urbit opens up a world of possibilities. For example, any app using Obelisk comes with powerful search built in. In addition, the join operation allows data to be easily composed across different apps.

Check out the Github and the User’s Guide.

Hats off to ~nomryg-nilref for one of the most impressive Urbit projects we’ve seen.

Third Wartime Address:

On the Governance of Urbit 

This Friday, Oct 25, at 5:30 PM PT / 8:30 PM ET, our founder Curtis Yarvin (~sorreg-namtyv) will speak on Urbit’s governance and answer questions from the community.

Join us in the %radio app on Urbit, in channel ~dyl, to ask questions and participate in the live chat.

You can get a new Urbit ship preloaded with %radio using this Red Horizon link. If you already have a ship, you can install %radio from ~nodmyn-dosrux.

We’ll also be streaming to this Youtube link, and on X.

From Around the Network

Thanks for checking out this edition of the newsletter. In case you’re not on Urbit yet, you can get a planet and join the UF General group here. As always, we look forward to spending time on the network together!