@@ -19,9 +19,9 @@
1919;h4: — Galen Wolfe-Pauly
2020;br;
2121
22−The Urbit address space is now live on the Ethereum blockchain. We’re calling it ‘Azimuth’ and you can find it at [`0x223c067f8cf28ae173ee5cafea60ca44c335fecb`](https://etherscan.io/address/0x223c067f8cf28ae173ee5cafea60ca44c335fecb) or [`azimuth.eth`](https://etherscan.io/address/azimuth.eth). Owners of Azimuth ‘points’ (galaxies, stars or planets) can use [Bridge](https://github.com/urbit/bridge/releases) to manage them and view their balance now.
22+The Urbit address space is now live on the Ethereum blockchain. We're calling it 'Azimuth' and you can find it at [`0x223c067f8cf28ae173ee5cafea60ca44c335fecb`](https://etherscan.io/address/0x223c067f8cf28ae173ee5cafea60ca44c335fecb) or [`azimuth.eth`](https://etherscan.io/address/azimuth.eth). Owners of Azimuth 'points' (galaxies, stars or planets) can use [Bridge](https://github.com/urbit/bridge/releases) to manage them and view their balance now.
2323
24−Sometime in the next few days, owners of Azimuth points will be able to boot Arvo, the Urbit OS, from their Azimuth point and request access to one of our ‘cities’: private communities for chat and discussion. These new cities use Landscape, a brand new UI for using Urbit in the browser.
24+Sometime in the next few days, owners of Azimuth points will be able to boot Arvo, the Urbit OS, from their Azimuth point and request access to one of our 'cities': private communities for chat and discussion. These new cities use Landscape, a brand new UI for using Urbit in the browser.
2525
2626This means you can boot a deterministic OS from an identity you own, join a totally independent, decentralized and self-governing network and run a clean, simple UI. Pretty exciting. Is it ready for ordinary users? Definitely not.
2727
@@ -31,14 +31,14 @@ But Urbit is not a 'product' in the conventional sense. Urbit is a public thing.
3131
3232With Azimuth on the blockchain, it's time for us to start engaging with the world more directly.
3333
34−We aren’t calling this a launch. There’s no keynote. There’s no dancing on stage. I mean, it’s 2019. You must be pretty sick of being marketed to. We'll try to stick to the specifics here. What's new, what we've been up to and what works. There's too much to fit into a single post, so we'll keep it pretty light for now. Each of these sections will probably get its own post in the near future.
34+We aren't calling this a launch. There's no keynote. There's no dancing on stage. I mean, it's 2019. You must be pretty sick of being marketed to. We'll try to stick to the specifics here. What's new, what we've been up to and what works. There's too much to fit into a single post, so we'll keep it pretty light for now. Each of these sections will probably get its own post in the near future.
3535
3636> Note: As of `~2019.1.14` we're in the process of rebooting the Arvo network. We expect it to be back online before the end of the week. We'll update this post and [tweet](https://twitter.com/urbit) when the network is online and stable.
3737
3838
3939## Rethinking the stack
4040
41−We’ve started to talk about Urbit as a stack of three parts: Azimuth, the address space and identity layer on Ethereum; Arvo, the OS and overlay network; and Aegean, a pattern for building decentralized communities on the Arvo network.
41+We've started to talk about Urbit as a stack of three parts: Azimuth, the address space and identity layer on Ethereum; Arvo, the OS and overlay network; and Aegean, a pattern for building decentralized communities on the Arvo network.
4242
4343We tried to capture this separation in [the primer](/primer), a new overview of Urbit. Explaining Urbit has always been challenging. A monolithic project that is OS, network, language, VM and UI barely makes sense. Separating the layers helps, we think.
4444
@@ -49,43 +49,43 @@ Let's step through them to see what's new.
4949
5050;img@"https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/bridge-0.png";
5151
52−As a quick refresher: Urbit addresses, now called Azimuth ‘points’, are short names like `~diblun-tidduc`. You own your Azimuth point with a private key and can use it as a routable network address on the Arvo network. You can read more about Azimuth in [the primer](/primer#what-azimuth-is). If you’re curious who owns all this address space, you can find that [in there too](/primer#azimuth-distribution).
52+As a quick refresher: Urbit addresses, now called Azimuth 'points', are short names like `~diblun-tidduc`. You own your Azimuth point with a private key and can use it as a routable network address on the Arvo network. You can read more about Azimuth in [the primer](/primer#what-azimuth-is). If you're curious who owns all this address space, you can find that [in there too](/primer#azimuth-distribution).
5353
54−In late 2017 we decided to migrate the yet-to-be-named Azimuth to a system of Ethereum contracts. After a year of coding, testing, auditing and migrating — they’re now fully deployed to the Ethereum mainnet.
54+In late 2017 we decided to migrate the yet-to-be-named Azimuth to a system of Ethereum contracts. After a year of coding, testing, auditing and migrating — they're now fully deployed to the Ethereum mainnet.
5555
56−Azimuth is basically two parts, a database of who owns which points, and a set of rules about what points and their owners can do. That set of rules is called Ecliptic, and can be found at [`0x6ac07b7c4601b5ce11de8dfe6335b871c7c4dd4d`](https://etherscan.io/address/0x6ac07b7c4601b5ce11de8dfe6335b871c7c4dd4d) or [`ecliptic.eth`](https://etherscan.io/address/ecliptic.eth). The top-level Azimuth points, the galaxies, can vote on upgrades to the Ecliptic contract, but they can’t edit the database of who owns what.
56+Azimuth is basically two parts, a database of who owns which points, and a set of rules about what points and their owners can do. That set of rules is called Ecliptic, and can be found at [`0x6ac07b7c4601b5ce11de8dfe6335b871c7c4dd4d`](https://etherscan.io/address/0x6ac07b7c4601b5ce11de8dfe6335b871c7c4dd4d) or [`ecliptic.eth`](https://etherscan.io/address/ecliptic.eth). The top-level Azimuth points, the galaxies, can vote on upgrades to the Ecliptic contract, but they can't edit the database of who owns what.
5757
58−The ownership database contract is called Azimuth, which you can find at [`0x223c067f8cf28ae173ee5cafea60ca44c335fecb`](https://etherscan.io/address/0x223c067f8cf28ae173ee5cafea60ca44c335fecb) or [`azimuth.eth`](https://etherscan.io/address/azimuth.eth). For those of you who own address space, you can use the `getOwnedPoints` function in the ‘Read Contract’ tab to check your balance. The function returns the number (not the phonemic string like `~ravmel-ropdyl`) of your points. Each Azimuth point is an ERC-721, non-fungible piece of digital property.
58+The ownership database contract is called Azimuth, which you can find at [`0x223c067f8cf28ae173ee5cafea60ca44c335fecb`](https://etherscan.io/address/0x223c067f8cf28ae173ee5cafea60ca44c335fecb) or [`azimuth.eth`](https://etherscan.io/address/azimuth.eth). For those of you who own address space, you can use the `getOwnedPoints` function in the 'Read Contract' tab to check your balance. The function returns the number (not the phonemic string like `~ravmel-ropdyl`) of your points. Each Azimuth point is an ERC-721, non-fungible piece of digital property.
5959
60−To manage your points, we built [Bridge](https://github.com/urbit/bridge/releases), a completely custom interface for interacting with our Solidity contracts. Interface quality is really important to us, and we couldn’t find anything in the 'crypto' world that met our standards. Bridge is good, but crypto UX is a hard problem. We've already got some ideas for improvements.
60+To manage your points, we built [Bridge](https://github.com/urbit/bridge/releases), a completely custom interface for interacting with our Solidity contracts. Interface quality is really important to us, and we couldn't find anything in the 'crypto' world that met our standards. Bridge is good, but crypto UX is a hard problem. We've already got some ideas for improvements.
6161
62−If you’re curious, you can find the source for the contracts in the [`urbit/azimuth`](https://github.com/urbit/azimuth) repo. The Bridge source is in the [`urbit/bridge`](https://github.com/urbit/bridge) repo.
62+If you're curious, you can find the source for the contracts in the [`urbit/azimuth`](https://github.com/urbit/azimuth) repo. The Bridge source is in the [`urbit/bridge`](https://github.com/urbit/bridge) repo.
6363
64−We had the source for our contracts audited by Open Zeppelin, Blockchain at Berkeley and Blocktrax. Did we miss something? We sure hope not — but we’d happily compensate anyone who can find bugs. Please reach out to security@urbit.org if you find something of concern. We’d be happy to hear from you.
64+We had the source for our contracts audited by Open Zeppelin, Blockchain at Berkeley and Blocktrax. Did we miss something? We sure hope not — but we'd happily compensate anyone who can find bugs. Please reach out to security@urbit.org if you find something of concern. We'd be happy to hear from you.
6565
6666;img@"https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/sigils.svg";
6767
68−Azimuth names have always had a pronunciation system. `~ronryd-nidseg` is 13,695,781, for example. Now, they also have a visual system. We call these strange crests from another planet 'sigils', and you’ll notice them used throughout all our new interfaces. You can find the source in the [`urbit/sigil-js`](https://github.com/urbit/sigil-js) repository. Building these was a lot of fun — we’ll save the details for a future post.
68+Azimuth names have always had a pronunciation system. `~ronryd-nidseg` is 13,695,781, for example. Now, they also have a visual system. We call these strange crests from another planet 'sigils', and you'll notice them used throughout all our new interfaces. You can find the source in the [`urbit/sigil-js`](https://github.com/urbit/sigil-js) repository. Building these was a lot of fun — we'll save the details for a future post.
6969
70−So, how do you get an Azimuth point? We’ve left that question unanswered intentionally. Azimuth points are meant to be like digital land, not currency. They should change hands slowly. In order to get an Azimuth point, you’ll need to find someone who already has one and is willing to part with it.
70+So, how do you get an Azimuth point? We've left that question unanswered intentionally. Azimuth points are meant to be like digital land, not currency. They should change hands slowly. In order to get an Azimuth point, you'll need to find someone who already has one and is willing to part with it.
7171
7272
7373## Arvo
7474
7575;img@"https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/fast-lux-3.gif";
7676
77−Arvo boots from Ethereum, is no longer embarrassingly slow, and has a brand new build system. [Our documentation](https://urbit.org/docs/learn/arvo/hoon) has also improved quite a lot. Hoon, Arvo’s programming language, has had a lot of work done to its type system and compiler. We built new tooling for generating static sites (you’re probably reading this on one right now) that are much, much faster and easier to use.
77+Arvo boots from Ethereum, is no longer embarrassingly slow, and has a brand new build system. [Our documentation](https://urbit.org/docs/learn/arvo/hoon) has also improved quite a lot. Hoon, Arvo's programming language, has had a lot of work done to its type system and compiler. We built new tooling for generating static sites (you're probably reading this on one right now) that are much, much faster and easier to use.
7878
79−It’s tough to talk about the progress we’ve made on Arvo without writing a long technical post. We'll save that for later. In a way, what’s remarkable about Arvo is that it has become *less* remarkable. It’s more stable, faster, and the code quality has improved.
79+It's tough to talk about the progress we've made on Arvo without writing a long technical post. We'll save that for later. In a way, what's remarkable about Arvo is that it has become *less* remarkable. It's more stable, faster, and the code quality has improved.
8080
81−There’s plenty of work to do, though. Should you be building on top of Arvo? Probably not yet. The kernel and kernel modules are really where the work still lies. We build things on top of Arvo, and in doing so it’s pretty clear that the system can be better. Clay (the filesystem) and Gall (the application model) are due for a rewrite. A complete rewrite of the web server, Eyre is almost finished.
81+There's plenty of work to do, though. Should you be building on top of Arvo? Probably not yet. The kernel and kernel modules are really where the work still lies. We build things on top of Arvo, and in doing so it's pretty clear that the system can be better. Clay (the filesystem) and Gall (the application model) are due for a rewrite. A complete rewrite of the web server, Eyre is almost finished.
8282
8383
8484## Aegean
8585
8686;img@"https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/landscape-inbox.png";
8787
88−Aegean is a pattern for building ‘cities’: groups of people running the same ‘agent’ on their Arvo servers. Agents aren’t just ‘apps’ or programs. An agent rolls together the tools that a community needs. Today, our companies, communities, cults, cliques all have to duct tape together separate MEGACORP apps and services to compute together.
88+Aegean is a pattern for building 'cities': groups of people running the same 'agent' on their Arvo servers. Agents aren't just 'apps' or programs. An agent rolls together the tools that a community needs. Today, our companies, communities, cults, cliques all have to duct tape together separate MEGACORP apps and services to compute together.
8989
9090Aegean reverses this pattern. A community on Arvo is a city: just a bunch of people running the same agent. Each city is in control of its own codebase: the interface, application code _and_ data storage. This means a community can have complete agency over how to compute together.
9191
@@ -95,20 +95,20 @@ It's important to note: the pattern of these cities is _not_ the pattern of Azim
9595
9696Before we can let the ocean of cities grow we have to homestead a few of our own.
9797
98−Our first agent is called [Landscape](https://github.com/urbit/landscape), an agent for chat and longform discussion. We are using Landscape to run a few experimental cities over the next month or so. If you have an Azimuth point, you’ll need to [request access](mailto:support@urbit.org) to join.
98+Our first agent is called [Landscape](https://github.com/urbit/landscape), an agent for chat and longform discussion. We are using Landscape to run a few experimental cities over the next month or so. If you have an Azimuth point, you'll need to [request access](mailto:support@urbit.org) to join.
9999
100−Anyone can create their own city, of course. The source is open. But we’re not going to encourage you to just yet. Feel free to explore, but also be patient. We’ve got a lot planned around this. If Azimuth is done and Arvo is young, Aegean is just being born.
100+Anyone can create their own city, of course. The source is open. But we're not going to encourage you to just yet. Feel free to explore, but also be patient. We've got a lot planned around this. If Azimuth is done and Arvo is young, Aegean is just being born.
101101
102102
103103## Tlon
104104
105105;img@"https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/office-1.jpg";
106106
107−So who is behind all of this? A team of collaborators and contributors. Many of us work at [Tlon](https://tlon.io) — the company we started in 2013 to advance Urbit platform development. Tlon has attracted an incredible group of smart, talented people who want the world to be able to own and control their computers. I’m proud to work alongside them.
107+So who is behind all of this? A team of collaborators and contributors. Many of us work at [Tlon](https://tlon.io) — the company we started in 2013 to advance Urbit platform development. Tlon has attracted an incredible group of smart, talented people who want the world to be able to own and control their computers. I'm proud to work alongside them.
108108
109−One important omission on `tlon.io` is Curtis. As of today, he’s no longer working on Urbit. [His own words](/posts/essays/a-founders-farewell) are the best way to understand his thinking. It’s an achievement for the team, I think, that he can depart with confidence.
109+One important omission on `tlon.io` is Curtis. As of today, he's no longer working on Urbit. [His own words](/posts/essays/a-founders-farewell) are the best way to understand his thinking. It's an achievement for the team, I think, that he can depart with confidence.
110110
111−One major reason for that confidence is that Erik and Anthony have now become COO and CPO respectively. Having thoughtful, organized people leading the project is a huge benefit to the whole team. I’m very glad to have them on board.
111+One major reason for that confidence is that Erik and Anthony have now become COO and CPO respectively. Having thoughtful, organized people leading the project is a huge benefit to the whole team. I'm very glad to have them on board.
112112
113113
114114## Looking ahead