Virtualized Empires, Hooning with GPT, Multiplayer Begins
Plus free-trial hosted planets and paywall your content
Justin Murphy
March 27, 2023
Hey folks, here’s everything you need to know about Urbit this week! In one short email you can skim in under five minutes.
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And as always, we give out free Urbit ships at imperceptible.computer.
Announcement: Imperceptible meetup this Friday on Realm at 11am Central.
We’ll hang out in one of Realm’s live voice Rooms inside our Space at ~hatryx-lastud/other-life. If you don’t have Realm yet, signup to try the private alpha here.
If you promise to join us on Friday at 11am Central, hit reply to this email and I’ll send your invite sometime this week!
GPT-4 Can Write Hoon. In this example it just made one small error.
Urbit multiplies the power of AI for individuals. "Urbit multiplies the power of AI for individuals. An easy-to-use personal server expands what normal people can do with AI. E.g., I could always publish a new web page—for free—using my %Page app. But now I can design & publish interesting pages instantly."
Just launched: Urbit Studio, a better way to publish and sell content. Substack charges 10% for credit card paywalls. Ghost has huge monthly fees. In 2023, that’s robbery. We’re charging nothing- you keep everything you earn.
Wigwam Demo. A vision for a radically simple Urbit experience.
Realm's voice chat + multiplayer cursor system. “Worked well even for people who've never used Urbit before. If you run an internet community, you need to see this.”
New updates to %blog. Post folders. New styling. Better error handling. Improved theme editor.
Urbit, Virtualized Empires, and Democratic Technics. "To understand Urbit’s critique of our current Internet, I find it helpful to begin with a distinction that the 20th century historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford took up in his work... For Mumford, democratic technics are small-scale and artisanal... In modern crypto parlance, we might say that ‘democratic’ technologies are permissionless and open... By contrast, we can think of authoritarian technics as exhibiting — and even requiring — hierarchy, systems of expertise, and centralized control."
Tlon is giving out free hosted planets. Some limitations apply, but check it out.
No One Can Kill Crypto. "I just read another analysis of how the US Government could kill crypto whenever it wants. It's a stupid but unfortunately widespread belief. This belief tends to be held by people who 1) don't understand the source of US power 2) don't realize that most capital is held by non-Americans 3) don't study what happens when countries ban crypto and 4) have not lived in countries with currency problems. AKA amera-cucked theorycels." From the %blog of ~nilrun-mardux.
This is what the mainstream media won’t show you. The Pokur app.
New app: %login. Maintain a database of username and passwords for websites you serve from your Urbit.
If you ever thought buying + hosting an Urbit planet is expensive… The early cypherpunk pioneers were happy to pay $3 an hour in 1985 for a much worse product. "Urbit is basically the WELL for millennials and zoomers."