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updates: add missing newsletters
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1++++
2+title = "A brief update from Tlon"
3+date = 2020-09-30
4+description = "A brief update from Tlon for ~9.30.2020"
5+slug = "/updates/2020-09-30"
6+[extra]
7+author = ""
8+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl"
9++++
10+
11+Hello!
12+
13+And just like that, it’s Autumn. We’ve disappeared into Urbit these past few months and have been hard at work, building great things:
14+
15+1 - Tlon Hosting
16+
17+Tlon, the company we started to get Urbit off the ground, is now offering hosting. This makes using Urbit about as easy as using any mainstream app. We’ve been enjoying using Urbit ourselves quite a bit, and we’re really excited to be able to more easily invite our friends.
18+
19+Sign up for the waitlist: https://tlon.io.
20+
21+There’s a secret to moving ahead in the line: reply ‘as if in a still pool’ to the question ‘How’s your day going?’ in our questionnaire. We’d like to make sure everyone on this list can get access as soon as possible.
22+
23+We’re going to run a live demo showing off how our hosting service works on the 9th. You can sign up for the event here: https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/273439025/
24+
25+2 - Providers
26+
27+We’re not the first ones to offer hosting, it turns out. People in the community have been busy building out the first onramps into Urbit. We heard https://www.geturbitid.com, https://planet.market and https://urth.systems are all starting to come online. It’s still early, but what they have in the works is really cool to see.
28+
29+We also caught wind of https://urbit.me the other day, a nice little tool for finding specific sigils.
30+
31+(And we can’t forget about https://urbit.live, the first ones to get into this arena.)
32+
33+I wrote a little bit about how I see the future of Urbit Providers here: https://urbit.org/blog/providers/
34+
35+3 - Update + updates
36+
37+There’s too much to cover in a single email, so I wrote a little post about what we’ve been working on over the past few months. Check it out on the blog: https://urbit.org/blog/20200929-state-of-urbit/
38+
39+We also updated our roadmap in Understanding Urbit: https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/roadmap/
40+
41+4 - The beginning of urbit.org
42+
43+We’re very happy that ~wolref-podlex has formally joined the community as Interim Director of the Urbit Foundation. We expect the foundation to become a separate entity soon, but for now we’re incubating it inside of Tlon.
44+
45+Last month he wrote about how we are working to separate the governance of urbit.org from Tlon: https://urbit.org/blog/first-steps-towards-urbit-org/
46+
47+Just recently, he announced the recipients of our biannual Gifts program: https://urbit.org/blog/gifts-q3-2020/
48+
49+5 - Hooniversity
50+
51+If you’re interested in learning Hoon, the next session of the community-run Hooniversity is set to start on October 12th.
52+
53+For more information about the course, head over to the Hooniversity site: https://hooniversity.org/ and sign up for the session here: https://hooniversity.org/enroll/.
54+
55+If you can't wait for the 12th, join the Hooniverse group on Urbit in advance by joining the ~hiddev-dannut/new-hooniverse group on Urbit or at https://twitter.com/hooniversity1
56+
57+We’ve been pretty much living on Urbit as of late. If you’re curious to connect with us (and are up for running your own Urbit node) you can always find us in the Urbit Community group: ~bitbet-bolbel/urbit-community. Instructions on how to install and set up Urbit are here: https://urbit.org/using/install/
58+
59+We love getting questions, comments, and replies to these newsletters. One thing we heard loud and clear last time around is that you want to hear more from the team. So much happened in the past few months that we have a glut of things to talk about in the coming weeks. Expect more dispatches in the near future. For the meantime, feel free to reach out via email (support@urbit.org) any time.
60+
61+See you on the network,
62+Galen / ~ravmel-ropdyl
63+
64+https://twitter.com/urbit
65+https://github.com/urbit/urbit
content/updates/2020-10-29-update.mdnew file+49
@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
1++++
2+title = "A brief update from Tlon + urbit.org"
3+date = 2020-10-29
4+description = "A brief update from Tlon and urbit.org for ~10.29.2020"
5+slug = "/updates/2020-10-29"
6+[extra]
7+author = ""
8+ship = "~roslet-tanner + ~wolref-podlex"
9++++
10+
11+Hello!
12+
13+We’ve quite a few updates for you this month which are covered in detail below—that said, it’s important that you know that our newsletters are splitting in two: one will continue to come from Urbit, and another from Tlon. Practically, that means that you’ll get another email from Tlon in about two weeks. Read on for more details!
14+
15+1 - Developer Calls
16+
17+Developer calls are coming (back)! A member of our community, ~naplet-hildec, is leading the charge to reintroduce regular calls for Urbit developers to gather and learn from one another. Each call will feature a different speaker that will present on a specific topic, followed by a Q&A. Calls will last an hour and will be held roughly every two weeks.
18+
19+Expect a detailed overview on our blog (https://urbit.org/blog), announcements on https://twitter.com/urbit, and within Urbit Community soon! For now, save the date: the first developer call is on Thursday, November 5th (12PM ET, 9AM PT, 5PM UTC), and will feature a discussion about graph-store by Tlon developer ~tacryt-socryp.
20+
21+2 - Weekly Design Streams
22+
23+Tlon’s design team will stream for an hour every Friday (5PM ET, 2PM PT, 9PM UTC). Expect discussions on current projects, thoughts on Urbit interface design, live QA sessions, and more.
24+
25+Tune in here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyBGqTPD2uj9kbEJsxWnRxQ
26+
27+3 - Hoon School
28+
29+If you’re interested in learning hoon, check out Hooniversity—the home of Hoon School—at https://hooniversity.org/. If you’re ready to enroll, join the Hooniverse group via public channel ~hiddev-dannut/new-hooniverse. You can also find them on Twitter as hooniversity1 or via email at join@hooniversity.org.
30+
31+4 - Tlon + urbit.org Newsletters
32+
33+“Ultimately, Urbit presents more possibilities than any one organization can manage.”
34+~wolref-podlex
35+
36+If you’ve been following along with our recent dispatches, you probably know that there are some exciting changes afoot. Tlon, the company building Urbit, has been developing a plan to separate itself from the governance of urbit.org (https://urbit.org/blog/governance-of-urbit/) for quite some time. Over the past few months, we have taken concrete steps to make this separation real. It might be a good idea to revisit ~wolref-podlex’s post (https://urbit.org/blog/first-steps-towards-urbit-org/) from this summer, where he discusses what led us here and why we’re doing this now.
37+
38+Urbit has matured to the point that Tlon can become just another entity in the Urbit ecosystem, so we need to separate the updates about Tlon-specific things from Urbit-specific things. Going forward, communications from Tlon and urbit.org will be issued as separate newsletters, with Tlon’s focusing on Landscape and the communities that form there, and urbit.org’s centered on Urbit’s infrastructure and community-led initiatives.
39+
40+Thus, this marks the last urbit.org + Tlon newsletter—in a couple of weeks, you will receive a newsletter from Tlon. You can manage your preferences for both of these newsletters independently by unsubscribing with the footer links.
41+
42+Getting on Urbit is now a lot simpler: Tlon’s hosting service is live. Join the waitlist at https://tlon.io.
43+
44+That’s it for now. See you on the network!
45+
46+~roslet-tanner and ~wolref-podlex
47+
48+https://twitter.com/urbit
49+https://github.com/urbit/urbit
content/updates/2020-12-01-update.mdnew file+68
@@ -0,0 +1,68 @@
1++++
2+title = "A brief update from urbit.org"
3+date = 2020-10-29
4+description = "A brief update from urbit.org for ~12.1.2020"
5+slug = "/updates/2020-12-1"
6+[extra]
7+author = ""
8+ship = "~wolref-podlex"
9++++
10+
11+Hello!
12+
13+As the year of “but wait, there’s more!” draws to a close, we have some big news of our own to share:
14+
15+1 - Network Breach
16+
17+Easily the biggest and most important news this month is that another network breach is coming at the beginning of next week. For the unfamiliar, this is when the entire network is effectively reset in order to apply a more foundational change than can be done with an OTA. The specific update in question that’s going out is Arvo/Vere version negotiation. This is a big milestone that enables Vere and Arvo to be updated independently without worrying about version incompatibilities.
18+
19+Any form of breach, network or personal, means that your ship will be reset to a blank slate. In the past this meant that all of your data would be lost, which usually wasn’t an issue due to the immaturity of user space software.
20+
21+Fortunately, big changes in Urbit are becoming less and less catastrophic in 2020: Tlon will be providing a special tool (called “flagday”) that can be used to back up your ship, export your data, and re-import everything into your fresh ship.
22+
23+The folks at Tlon are pretty sure that this will be the last time we have to deal with one of these, but it’s hard to say. What’s clear is that the impact of a network breach on the community is being taken seriously, given the work put into tooling for the preservation of user space data.
24+
25+Make sure to read the full FAQ here on https://urbit.org/breach, which will be kept updated throughout.
26+
27+2 - Urbit Events Series
28+
29+In our last newsletter we announced the return of developer calls, and I’m pleased to say that we’ve done two over the past month, both of which have gone very well. Our first call featured Tlon engineer Logan Allen (~tacryt-socryp), with a discussion about graph-store, and our second call featured Mark Staarink (~palfun-foslup), who discussed the BitTorrent tracker and corresponding CLI he built.
30+
31+You can find both of the recordings on our YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNYIS9_SktINCC9yqO4CFZw/featured.
32+
33+The next developer call (and last of 2020) will be held on Thursday December 10th, which will feature a discussion by ~timluc-miptev, a member of our community who will be discussing the Bitcoin system he’s built to enable ship-to-ship payments within Urbit.
34+
35+In January of 2021 we’ll be putting on our first Town Hall. This will be a three hour event with multiple talks that aren’t solely development focused, a keynote presentation, and some other fun stuff. If you’ve got a talk you’d like to give, a project to show off, or something you’d like to see discussed, please reach out to ~wolref-podlex in Urbit or via email at josh@urbit.org.
36+
37+3 - Community Content on the Blog
38+
39+“In order to get to the next phase of creating new social processes, we need our technology to be organic and democratic, in the sense that everyone can participate and shape it.”
40+~radbur-sivmus
41+
42+In November we saw two posts on the blog from community members.
43+
44+Aesthetic Culture (https://urbit.org/blog/aesthetic-culture-1/) was posted by ~nartes-fasrum, who compiled art from all over Landscape into a digest. This is the first in a series, many of which will be exclusive to the Urbit Community group in Landscape.
45+
46+Models of Society (https://urbit.org/blog/20201119-models-of-society), an essay by ~radbur-sivmus, explores modes of messaging, the importance of a sense of place in communication, and how Urbit provides the fundamental substrate for facilitating new forms of societal processes.
47+
48+Our blog will continue to feature regular updates from the folks at Tlon, but it’s exciting to be able to feature content from our growing community about a broader range of topics.
49+
50+4 - Hoon School Hiatus
51+
52+Hoon school is going on temporary pause after the conclusion of the current batch.
53+
54+I’ll be working with our instructors, ~risruc-habteb and ~rabsef-bicrym, to synthesize their learnings from the many classes given in 2020 and design a new curriculum for 2021.
55+
56+We’re pretty excited about what an updated course will look like. I can’t go into details yet, but at a high level we’ll be looking to give a more holistic overview of the system through development of practical, full-stack Urbit applications.
57+
58+--
59+
60+You would think that a network breach would be a worrisome event. With so much effort having gone into creating groups and the content within them, it’s easy to imagine that a network breach, even with flagday, would pose a serious threat to community engagement.
61+
62+Personally, I’m not worried at all. The vibe in the room over at Urbit Community is, as usual, calm. From my perspective the greater Urbit Community is more engaged than it ever has been: between the degree of engagement throughout Landscape groups, the steady stream of new projects being undertaken, to the ongoing commitment shown by many community members to continue building on Urbit, it has become clear that Urbit is indispensable to lots of people.
63+
64+That’s all for now. See you on the network!
65+Josh / ~wolref-podlex
66+
67+https://twitter.com/urbit
68+https://github.com/urbit/urbit
content/updates/2021-01-15-update.mdnew file+60
@@ -0,0 +1,60 @@
1++++
2+title = "A brief update from urbit.org"
3+date = 2021-01-15
4+description = "A brief update from urbit.org for ~1.15.2021"
5+slug = "/updates/2021-01-15"
6+[extra]
7+author = ""
8+ship = "~wolref-podlex"
9++++
10+
11+Hello, and happy new year!
12+
13+As is customary for the first communication of the new year, I’ll be doing a retrospective of what was accomplished last year and a forward look at urbit.org’s priorities for next year. Make sure to read to the end for the details about our upcoming Town Hall event!
14+
15+1 - 2020
16+
17+In spite of the many challenges presented over the last year, it was a resoundingly good one for Urbit.
18+
19+It seems like a long time ago now that the folks at Tlon rolled out OS1 (now called Landscape), just as the pandemic forced everyone into their homes throughout the world. At the time, “Urbit is for Communities” (https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-is-for-communities/) was just a vision, but now it’s been transformed into reality—there are more thriving communities in Landscape than any of us can keep track of, with new faces popping onto the network on a daily basis.
20+
21+Landscape brought many new ships onto the network which helped identify those areas in which Urbit’s infrastructure could be most improved. Ford Fusion eliminated the possibility of a partially-applied over-the-air (OTA) update through a drastic reduction in the size and complexity of the codebase. The efficiency of the OTA process was improved by several orders of magnitude, and many long-standing memory issues were resolved. Now we deploy code on our infrastructure nodes and see users receive an update, over a decentralized network, often in less than a minute.
22+
23+After improving the stability of the system Tlon turned its attention to bringing more ships onto the network. A long-standing barrier to Urbit’s adoption has been the technical knowledge required to host one’s own ship—this prompted Tlon to build and launch an Urbit hosting service (https://tlon.io), the waitlist for which is now thousands deep.
24+
25+With Tlon becoming more singularly focused on building products on Urbit, concrete steps have been taken towards making urbit.org a separate organization that’s focused on long-term development of Urbit’s platform. I joined to lead that effort back in August (https://urbit.org/blog/first-steps-towards-urbit-org/) and have since spent the majority of my time working with dozens of contributors on projects spanning documentation, education, external integrations, and much more.
26+
27+We rounded out the year with a full network reset (called a “continuity breach”), which has in the past has been synonymous with loss of all data on the network. This time things went differently: tooling was made available to the community that allowed ships to preserve their data, which enabled most to seamlessly rejoin post-reset. This is a significant milestone for the project as it signifies not only a commitment to technical excellence, but to supporting our budding community.
28+
29+2 - 2021
30+
31+In the last two weeks we’ve seen a huge amount of inbound interest as people are waking up to the inherent problems with using centralized services run by MEGACORPs—we’re just happy we started working on Urbit all those years ago. While we tend to not plan more than about six months in advance, I can still talk at a high level about what urbit.org will be focusing on in the immediate future (Tlon’s next newsletter will provide a similar overview of what they’re working on).
32+
33+Growth in Urbit’s developer community has been growing organically in lockstep with the overall network growth. This means, happily, that there’s a pretty large pool of people eager to contribute to Urbit. The priority for urbit.org, therefore, is to improve its capacity to effectively assist contributors. Concretely, this means:
34+
35+- Rework urbit.org to better help developers learn how to contribute to Urbit
36+- Since Urbit is ready to build on top of, provide practical guides that demonstrate how to do so
37+- Guide developers to make high-value contributions to Urbit and its ecosystem
38+- Build community amongst contributors
39+
40+My strategy to date has been heavily focused on working directly with contributors to provide technical guidance and direction, and it’s been working really well. To that end, I’ll also be scaling the Foundation’s ability to provide such support by bringing more individuals into urbit.org that can mentor, review work, and provide guidance on where to best direct contributors’ energy.
41+
42+If you’re interested in helping build Urbit, you can head over to https://grants.urbit.org to claim a bounty or submit a proposal, join the Landscape group ~wolref-podlex/foundation to stay in the loop about what urbit.org is up to, or contact me directly at josh@urbit.org.
43+
44+3 - Town Hall
45+
46+In mid-February, we’ll be holding our first ever “Town Hall” event—it’s like a developer call, but longer, with more speakers, and covering a wider range of topics (not all of them technical!).
47+
48+We’re currently looking for speakers, so if you have an Urbit-related topic that you’d like to present, or would like to nominate someone else to present, please reach out to me by replying to this email. This could be an application you (or the nominee) has designed or built, an interesting use case, a design case study, or something completely different. Please don't be shy about reaching out—we're happy to work with you to figure out whether it makes sense to present a given topic, and how best to do so!
49+
50+Once we’ve finalized a date, we’ll broadcast it over our official Meetup group (https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/) and on Twitter. Stay tuned.
51+
52+--
53+
54+As a reminder, Urbit and Tlon have now split their newsletters in two—Urbit’s newsletter will cover the project and development community, while Tlon’s will focus more on the product development work on Landscape and the communities that form there. Tlon’s newsletter will arrive at the end of the month.
55+
56+That’s all for now. See you on the network!
57+Josh / ~wolref-podlex
58+
59+https://twitter.com/urbit
60+https://github.com/urbit/urbit
content/updates/2021-02-19-update.mdnew file+81
@@ -0,0 +1,81 @@
1++++
2+title = "A brief update from urbit.org"
3+date = 2021-02-19
4+description = "A brief update from urbit.org for ~2.19.2021"
5+slug = "/updates/2021-02-19"
6+[extra]
7+author = ""
8+ship = "~wolref-podlex"
9++++
10+
11+Hello!
12+
13+This week we’re introducing our newest grants program, Scholarships, sharing an update on the Urbit community, and introducing the newest members of the Urbit Foundation team. We’ve also got some important infrastructure updates about King Haskell and an overhaul of our Getting Started guide. Let’s dive in:
14+
15+1 - Scholarships
16+
17+I’m excited to announce the (soft) launch of a new type of grant we’re calling “Scholarships.” The big idea behind the program is to grow the base of individuals that can contribute to Urbit through hands-on, one-to-one mentorship with infrastructure engineers at Tlon.
18+
19+The program works by first having an infrastructure engineer define and scope a project, and then pairing them with someone from the community. Unlike other grants, these projects are centered on platform development, meaning Arvo or Vere, rather than on userspace development. Scholars will learn much about how Urbit works, take on impactful infrastructure projects, and gain insight into how infrastructure engineers think about building Urbit.
20+
21+We’ve begun scholarships with two members of the Urbit community who have demonstrated high technical aptitude and commitment via grants or other open-source projects. We don’t have any additional openings at this time, but expect to have a few more in the coming months.
22+
23+If you’re interested in a scholarship, sign up for the waitlist here: https://airtable.com/shr6Xmo55h8dZ0O46
24+
25+2 - Community
26+
27+Our community has been pretty busy lately. Here’s a non comprehensive list of what they’ve been up to:
28+
29+- ~timluc-miptev completed the Bitcoin gall agents. They’re now being integrated into Landscape as a wallet.
30+- ~sovmep-ripsum finished his work on ucal, an iCalendar-compatible calendaring backend for Urbit.
31+- ~tabnus-fondeg began work on Urbit LFS (large file storage) for providing file sharing and hosting support.
32+- ~sipfyn-pidmex is writing a comprehensive suite of documentation for graph-store to enable an easier on-ramp to building new social applications.
33+- ~minder-folden launched a new hosting provider that you can check out here: https://escapepod.store
34+- ~naltyc-wornes is contributing a set of official, battle-tested guides for running Urbit on “smol” devices to the urbit.org website.
35+- ~hocdep-labtul hosted his first Urbit UTC meetup, which featured ~timluc-miptev and received great attendance. We’re looking forward to the next one featuring ~nartes-fasrum on the Aesthetics of Urbit. Learn more here: https://www.urbit.computer/utc/#upcoming-meetups
36+
37+We’ll have a flurry of new bounties coming online in the upcoming weeks, so keep your eyes peeled —there might even still be an open one! Check them out here: https://grants.urbit.org/bounties.
38+
39+If you’ve got an idea you’d like to work on, make sure to submit a proposal. you’re not quite sure how to get started, book some time with me here and I can help you figure it out: https://calendly.com/wolref
40+
41+3 - Foundation growth
42+
43+This month the Urbit Foundation grew by 200%, which is less astounding when you know that it grew from one person to three. Nonetheless, this is a significant milestone for the community-focused arm of Urbit.
44+
45+~timluc-miptev (aka Tim) joins us from the developer community, where he’s been a prominent figure for some time as the creator of the popular Nock for Everyday Coders guide (https://blog.timlucmiptev.space/part1.html) and Complete Guide to Gall (https://github.com/timlucmiptev/gall-guide). He’s become a thoroughly proficient Hoon developer and Urbit architect through his work on Bitcoin integration, and will now be working to design grants and guide contributors in their development of their projects.
46+
47+~taller-ravnut (aka Mike) is passionate about community formation, and is excited to start working on supporting those that wish to host Urbit Meetups in their cities, universities, and timezones (since, at time of writing, IRL isn’t much of a thing). He’ll also be performing outreach to developers and developer communities to help spread the word and grow the contributor base of Urbit.
48+
49+There’s still tons of work to do and I don’t expect Tim and Mike to be the last additions to the team this year. If you’re interested in working at the UF, send me a DM for an invite to the group.
50+
51+4 - King Haskell
52+
53+King Haskell is a rewrite of the part of Urbit that talks to Unix and the outside world. When you switch to KH, the part of Urbit that runs Nock code stays the same. Importantly, King Haskell includes better facilities for NAT traversal, which should improve connectivity issues for self-hosted ships.
54+
55+As its name suggests, King Haskell is written in the Haskell programming language. Haskell is much easier (and more fun) for rapid development than C, and lightyears better for writing correct, bug-free code. As a result, we expect faster iteration times and more reliability in this part of the system.
56+
57+King Haskell is being shipped as part of a v1.2 release of the Urbit binaries. To run an existing ship with the King, say
58+
59+./urbit-king run path/to/your/pier
60+
61+To create a new ship, use the `urbit-king new` command.
62+
63+If you run into any problems doing this, or notice any incompatible behavior, please inform the authorities immediately.
64+
65+The Tlon Corporation is also using this new software on some of its infrastructure galaxies, but third party infrastructure ships should wait for further notice from us before doing so.
66+
67+5 - Getting Started guide
68+
69+Two members of our community have put a bunch of work into giving our Getting Started (formerly called Install + Setup) guide a facelift. They simplified the language, made the options much clearer, and improved some confusing instructions.
70+
71+If you’re looking to try Urbit or know someone that would want to run it, give our guide a try and let us know what you think!
72+
73+https://urbit.org/using/install/
74+
75+--
76+
77+That’s all for now. ~roslet-tanner will be in touch in a few weeks with an update from Tlon. See you on the network!
78+Josh / ~wolref-podlex
79+
80+https://twitter.com/urbit
81+https://github.com/urbit/urbit
content/updates/2021-04-01-update.mdnew file+89
@@ -0,0 +1,89 @@
1++++
2+title = "A brief update from urbit.org and Tlon"
3+date = 2021-04-01
4+description = "A brief update from urbit.org and Tlon for ~4.1.2021"
5+slug = "/updates/2021-04-01"
6+[extra]
7+author = ""
8+ship = "~wolref-podlex + ~roslet-tanner"
9++++
10+
11+Hello!
12+
13+Happy Spring from ~wolref-podlex and ~roslet-tanner. We’re here with a surprise joint Urbit-Tlon newsletter—we’ve been so busy producing content that we forgot to write about it. Plus, this is fun every now and then. Honestly, we have so much to talk about this month, we can’t cover it all without writing a book. Here are the highlights.
14+
15+1 - Events
16+
17+April is shaping up to be jam-packed with events. For starters, we’ve got three developer calls slated for April, all of which are on Thursdays at 9am PDT:
18+
19+4/1: Tyler Shuster (~radbur-sivmus) discussed Javascript apps on Urbit: https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/277261928/
20+
21+4/15: Raghu (~sovmep-ripsum) will talk about virtual desks, a key component of third-party software distribution, and the process of contributing to the Urbit kernel through our scholarships program.
22+
23+4/29: Edward Amsden (~ritpub-sipsyl) will be discussing and demoing his WebRTC work, which enables audio/video calls on Urbit.
24+
25+On April 27th, we’ll be launching our Bitcoin Wallet and preparing to roll it out to the network. This is the culmination of many months of collaboration between several members of our community and Tlon—we’re really excited (especially ~pindet-timmut). There might even be some cool swag, discounted hosting, and/or other giveaways. Regardless, you’re not going to want to miss it. RSVP here: https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/276741426/
26+
27+We’re also excited to announce that our much anticipated Town Hall event, a virtual mini-conference, will be taking place on May 20th and will feature a keynote talk from our good friend Justin Murphy. Mark your calendars for now—more details to follow soon.
28+
29+2 - Content
30+
31+There’s been a ton of high-quality content produced lately. If you’re looking for something to watch, read, or listen to, here’s a roundup:
32+
33+~rovnys-ricfer has been recording an audio series about the design and rationale of Urbit called “Urbit from the Outside In.” Check them out here: https://twitter.com/rovnys/status/1371972157971050499
34+
35+~pindet-timmut and ~wolref-podlex appeared on Justin Murphy’s Other Life podcast—check them out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv9lymudGV8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jbjSUKRyGM
36+
37+A question was posed on our mailing list titled: “what is this?” The team and community did not disappoint with their answers: https://groups.google.com/a/urbit.org/g/dev/c/bdlPPnaccMc
38+
39+Simon Kovacs (~bacbec-lormur) wrote a great post for our blog titled “After the Machine War”: https://urbit.org/blog/after-machine-war/
40+
41+~poldec-tonteg talked to the guys at The Stack. Check out the podcast here: https://thestack.link/episode-13-martian-futurism-with-poldec-tonteg/
42+
43+3 - Documentation refresh
44+
45+Our Docs team completed a large overhaul of our documentation last month, making the distinction between “Usage documentation” (https://urbit.org/using), or how to use your ship, and “Development documentation” (https://urbit.org/docs) much clearer.
46+
47+We’ve had some excellent contributions from the community to our documentation, most recently a comprehensive set of overviews, guides and examples documenting threads from ~tinnus-napbus: https://urbit.org/docs/userspace/threads/overview/
48+
49+We’re pretty proud of the work that’s gone into clarifying everything and are still working hard to make the docs more and more helpful. Feel free to send us your feedback if you have any!
50+
51+4 - Landscape news
52+
53+The community on Landscape is continuing to grow. Over 30 groups were published to the Directory in March alone, and these are just the public groups that someone decided to broadcast. We think that’s pretty exciting.
54+There’s a new Cincinnati-centric group (~padwet/queen-city-urbit), a sewing group that sounds incredible (~pinwyl-hasfeb/seamstress-mafia), and the first digital maker space on Urbit (~tidrel-tabpub/freeside-mars).
55+
56+Check out the Directory (~bollug-worlus/urbit-index) to discover public groups and, if you’d like help getting your community onto Landscape, let us know. We’re here to help!
57+
58+5 - Hosting
59+
60+Over at Tlon, we’ve been really busy onboarding new hosting customers. All of our current onboarding sessions are completely booked! If you’d like to learn more about how it works, send an email to support@tlon.io. If you’re ready to get on the list, sign up at https://tlon.io/
61+
62+6 - Team news
63+
64+We're happy to share that longtime hooner ~littel-wolfur has joined the Tlon engineering team. Welcome, ~littel-wolfur! Also, we’ve made it official with ~wolref-podlex and dropped the “Interim” from “Director of urbit.org” (probably due to the quality of these newsletters).
65+
66+If you’re interested in working with Tlon or urbit.org, feel free to get in touch.
67+
68+7 - Culture recs
69+
70+Finally, we’re going to leave you with some recommendations from the team:
71+
72+~fabled-faster released an insane new mix that melted my face in a good way: https://soundcloud.com/flowerstructure/fs-s-s-2021
73+
74+Our designer ~natnex-ronret curates a playlist website. Check it out: https://www.door.link
75+~datnut-pollen has been trying to understand how information processing evolves over time in evolutive systems. Here’s what he’s been reading:
76+
77+(i) Connectom https://connectom.substack.com/p/connectom-the-book It is about thermodynamic/statistical mechanical processes as the fundamental driver of the evolution of biological, ecological, and human systems.
78+(ii) Topological phases emerge in an ecological model: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.20210128a/full/ and Topology protects chiral edge currents in stochastic systems: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02845 Topological protection for various dynamics is the main theme he reckons is missing from Connectom.
79+(iii) Homotopy theoretic and categorical models of neural information networks https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.15136 Topological techniques for understanding information processing in neural, metabolic, societal, and computational contexts.
80+
81+~simfur-ritwed recently re-read Pynchon's Vineland. It’s both a loom into the backwoods NorCal culture of the 80s and a typically Pynchonian fantasy about the dangers of media-saturated identity (quite prescient, turns out).
82+
83+In the wake of his recent trip to Brazil, ~wolref-podlex has been reading Os Sertões (the English version), the story of a war that took place at the end of the 19th century in the backlands (sertões) of Brazil, in which the Brazilian army brutally crushed the peaceful religious settlement of Canudos.
84+
85+Lately I (~roslet-tanner) have been getting back into Roy Ayers. This feels just right for spring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inPgcN_xF4w
86+
87+That’s it for now. We’ll be back with more news from Tlon and Urbit, respectively, in a few weeks. As always, let us know if there’s anything in particular you’d like to hear about next time.
88+
89+~wolref-podlex and ~roslet-tanner
content/updates/2021-05-05-update.mdnew file+70
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1++++
2+title = "A brief update from urbit.org"
3+date = 2021-05-05
4+description = "A brief update from urbit.org for ~5.5.2021"
5+slug = "/updates/2021-05-05"
6+[extra]
7+author = ""
8+ship = "~wolref-podlex"
9++++
10+
11+Hello!
12+
13+Welcome to the May edition of the urbit.org newsletter. April was a busy month with many updates to share—let’s dig in.
14+
15+0 – Updated Urbit Binaries
16+
17+Urbit’s binaries were updated to v1.5 on April 27th. Make sure to download and install the latest v1.5 binaries here: https://github.com/urbit/urbit/releases/tag/urbit-v1.5
18+
19+It’s as easy as shutting down your ship and replacing the old binaries! ~pilfer-pandex described the new release to urbit-dev as “a high priority fix for two networking bugs in urbit-king, and minor fixes to vere.”
20+
21+1 – Upcoming Events
22+
23+Urbit Town Hall @ May 20th 12pm PDT – Keynote from Justin Murphy
24+This will be Urbit’s first ever town hall—a three hour event with talks on a variety of topics and a keynote from Justin Murphy (~hatryx-lastud). Justin had Urbit Foundation Director Josh Lehman on his Other Life podcast a few weeks ago (have a listen at https://share.transistor.fm/s/1c0c8c15) and recently formed a new group on Urbit (~hatryx-lastud/other-life).
25+
26+In his group, Justin has written a blog post called “Escape Velocity”, where he discusses selection effects on various platforms. Justin writes, “by creating a gravity well that sucks energy into real-estate value rather than monetized attention, Urbit exerts the lowest degree of arbitrary selection pressures on content creation, while optimizing those selection pressures that irreducibly characterize all human communication (e.g., the draw of being understood and appreciated by other people).” Tune in to Justin’s keynote on the 20th for more on Urbit as a platform for creatives.
27+
28+Developer Calls @ May 13th and May 27th
29+As you probably know, we have developer calls every two weeks. Stay tuned for more information on our events page: https://urbit.org/events
30+
31+Austin Urbit Conference @ September/October 2021
32+Although it’s too early to give a precise date, we are starting to plan an Urbit conference for this fall! It’ll be held in Austin, with many Urbit and Tlon employees in attendance. Stay tuned for more information!
33+
34+2 – April Developer Calls
35+
36+Developer Call: 3rd Party Software Distribution
37+In this talk, Phil (~wicdev-wisryt) and Raghu (~sovmep-ripsum) discussed the work they've been doing to clay to provide "virtual desks", an integral part of the infrastructure needed for safe, generic software distribution. This work is being done through our Scholarships program, in which community developers pair up with Tlon engineers to work on infrastructure projects. For more information about Scholarships, visit https://urbit.org/docs/development/grants/#scholarships
38+
39+Developer Call: Real-Time Communication on Urbit
40+Edward Amsden (~ritpub-sipsyl) gave us a look at the WebRTC Airlock library he has developed that handles the hard parts of WebRTC. When complete, this will allow developers to build applications on Urbit with audio/video calling capabilities. Once again, Edward’s work is sponsored as part of the grants program (https://grants.urbit.org)—check it out!
41+
42+3 – Urbit Bitcoin Launch
43+
44+This was a hotly anticipated event and it didn’t disappoint. In case you missed it, Urbit will soon have a Bitcoin wallet on the network, meaning you’ll be able to pay Urbit ships directly in BTC. Watch Urbit-Tlon personnel demonstrate and discuss this exciting launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aRnfacZPto
45+
46+Make sure to check out this related blog post by Christian Langalis (~pindet-timmut): https://urbit.org/blog/interplanetary-commerce/ and this great interview with ~timluc-miptev, one of the main developers on the project: https://subject.network/posts/bitcoin-with-timluc-miptev
47+
48+4 – Blog
49+
50+We have a couple of new posts to announce:
51+“Lunar Urbit and the Internet of Things”
52+This post is by Poprox (~datnut-pollen), a Tlon engineer who focuses on the importance of moons in the Urbit ecosystem. The post covers “the prehistory of moons on Earth, gives a snapshot of how moons are being utilized on Urbit in 2021, covers existing issues with consumer IoT and how Urbit resolves them, and speculates what the lunar locus of the Urbit ID address space may become in the future”. Read it here: https://urbit.org/blog/iot/
53+
54+“Community Spotlight: The Portico”
55+This post is an interview between me (~tirwyd-sarmes) and Josh Reagan (~taglux-nidsep), the founder of “The Portico”, an Orthodox Christian community. Josh has a PhD in logic, and writes about the intersection of Christianity and logic on his Urbit blog. In the interview we talk about community norms, the relationship between logic and religion, and the future of Urbit. Check out the interview: https://urbit.org/blog/community-spotlight-the-portico
56+
57+5 – Odds and Ends
58+
59+If you are a star or galaxy owner and are interested in sponsoring other ships, please message ~rapfyr-diglyt (david@tlon.io) to be added to the sponsors@urbit.org mailing list.
60+
61+~hodzod-walrus made a page with statistics on various stars: https://bacrys.org/uptime/
62+
63+~sitful-hatred beat us to the punch and released a guide on compiling Windows binaries—urbit.exe is near at hand! See the guide here: https://subject.network/posts/urbit-windows-binaries/ The official Urbit.org announcement should be around the corner, so keep your eyes peeled.
64+
65+Thanks for reading. Talk to you next month!
66+
67+Josh (~wolref-podlex) and ~tirwyd-sarmes
68+
69+https://twitter.com/urbit
70+https://github.com/urbit/urbit
content/updates/2021-06-16-update.mdnew file+75
@@ -0,0 +1,75 @@
1++++
2+title = "A brief update from urbit.org"
3+date = 2021-06-16
4+description = "A brief update from urbit.org for ~6.16.2021"
5+slug = "/updates/2021-06-16"
6+[extra]
7+author = ""
8+ship = "~tirwyd-sarmes"
9++++
10+
11+Howdy!
12+
13+It’s time for the June edition of the Urbit newsletter. You might have noticed that Urbit messages are being sent quicker, bitcoin wallets are flourishing, and that the network is rapidly picking up momentum in terms of users and communities. Urbit, now more than ever, is starting to feel like an organic self-sustaining ecosystem. It’s a good time to be here.
14+
15+0 – Upcoming Events
16+
17+Assembly: An Urbit Conference
18+Early October(ish) @ Austin TX
19+We’re busy putting together Urbit’s first IRL conference. We’ll let this email list know as soon as tickets become available.
20+
21+Developer Call: Programming Bitcoin on Urbit @ Thu Jun 17, 2021 9am – 10am PDT
22+Tim (~timluc-miptev) will be leading an open workshop on programming bitcoin on Urbit. Come join the call to learn about this integration—all are welcome! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltKz1MmluEY)
23+
24+1 – Technical Updates
25+
26+~tacryt-socryp has made a major performance improvement—sending and receiving messages are now 79% faster! He accomplished this by cutting down the time spent processing messages in arvo and he did it all despite being a newlywed. Big thanks to him!
27+
28+2 – The Urbit Town Hall Event
29+
30+Most of the big news this month was featured in our first ever Town Hall event, which was a big success. If you missed it, you can watch it here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YSwt0vDPj0). Here’s a quick recap of Josh’s “State of the Network” address:
31+
32+- The event started off with an animation produced by ~rivpyl-sidfyl with a script by ~minder-folden (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvsOGz-hM-o). This work was commissioned via our grant program (https://urbit.org/grants/proposals/urbit-explainer-video/). Urbit grants are predominately technical but if you have artistic chops we would be interested in hearing from you.
33+
34+- The grant program has been successfully churning out projects with 36 contributors in the last six months and 42 grants which are currently active. There is also a new class of grants called “apprenticeships” where a junior Urbit developer gets paired with an experienced Urbit developer to work on a project (while getting paid). Sign up before spots are gone (https://urbit.org/grants/apprenticeships/).
35+
36+- Post-facto gifts were made to Urbit’s community members for exceptional contributions: ~nodreb-borrus, ~tocrex-holpen, ~habsul-rignyr, ~libhut-samwes, ~litmus-ritten, ~locpyl-tidnyd, ~sitful-hatred, ~sigryn-habrex, ~mocrux-nomdep, and ~tapruc-solwer.
37+
38+- The Bitcoin Wallet application was rolled out to the network (see below).
39+
40+The next two sections of the town hall featured Hunter Miller presenting on Port (see below), and Justin Murphy discussing the role of teleology in Urbit’s success. There were also some great lightning talks at the end, although they were unfortunately not recorded—you had to be there!
41+
42+3 – Port (previously known as Taisho)
43+
44+An important goal for Urbit has been accessibility and now, thanks to Port, it’s easier than ever to get onto the Urbit network. Port lets you boot a planet, star, or even galaxy without ever touching a terminal. If you haven’t noticed, our homepage is now prominently featuring this development. The official urbit.exe is just around the corner but get your Mac friends to boot a comet! Thanks to Urbit contributor Hunter Miller for this important achievement! (https://github.com/arthyn/port)
45+
46+4 – Bitcoin Wallet
47+
48+You can now send bitcoin over Urbit just by using a ship’s name—it’s that easy. The official documentation is still in the works, but ~sitful-hatred has already produced this easy guide to getting started (https://subject.network/posts/btc-wallet-config/).
49+
50+5 – Gurgle.io
51+
52+A new website has been causing a stir in the Urbit community. Gurgle.io is an index of the public Urbit network. If a group is public it can be crawled via a comet/planet that acts as a listener. Many Urbit users have expressed discomfort as they were not asked permission before being indexed. The developers of the project have recently decided to cease operation of the project (https://twitter.com/gurgle_io/status/1404649313020514310).
53+
54+6 – Blog
55+
56+~sitful-hatred has a post on the relationship between %graph-store and hypertext where he traces the historical relevance of linkages and networks. Fascinating stuff! (https://urbit.org/blog/a-topiary/)
57+
58+There are two new posts from Poprox (~datnut-pollen), one on how the Urbit team is solving the problem of expensive gas prices (https://urbit.org/blog/rollups/), and the other was co-authored with Mark (~palfun-foslup) on the recent upgrade to Azimuth contracts (https://urbit.org/blog/first-contract/).
59+
60+7 – New Addition to the Team
61+
62+Me myself, Matt (~tirwyd-sarmes), am joining the Urbit Foundation to help with content. Please get in touch if you want to write or produce something for the blog or website (matt@urbit.org).
63+
64+8 – Odds and Ends
65+
66+~sipsen-pilser has released ~home-urbit, a one-stop shop for getting Urbit up and running on a home system (https://github.com/OdysLam/home-urbit).
67+
68+Jake Miller (~littel-wolfur) has successfully migrated his parents and fiancée onto Urbit. Click here for an Urbit-exclusive peek into the family life of the Millers. Hi Mr. and Mrs. Miller! (https://bit.ly/35qugfK)(https://bit.ly/3wt2ZFm)
69+
70+Thanks for reading. More updates next month!
71+
72+Matt (~tirwyd-sarmes)
73+
74+https://twitter.com/urbit
75+https://github.com/urbit/urbit