Fair! We do a pretty good job of generating this response.
The point is that we ought to have a permanent, immutable home for our personal computation that's universally available on the network. Not an app, not a service, but a general-purpose tool that I trust and can program. I have one on my desk, but I want one in the cloud that doesn't feel like flying a 747 (aka being a unix sysadmin).
Our approach is simple: the reason this doesn't exist is not because it's not a good idea, but because existing old-school system software is too complicated.
This reasoning is great and makes perfect sense. The thing that makes it look like performance art is where Urbit appears to replace that complexity with something incredibly obscure that does not look like it will do anything helpful.
I think this is just borne out of the stark and daunting difference between the way Urbit works and everything else we're familiar with.
I'm daunted by it, but I'm intrigued by it. I'm also pretty convinced that if I devote some time to it, it will make sense. And as a bonus I'll probably understand the rest of my computing a little better as well. Which is why I'm cloning the repo right now to have a play.
Just because a system is unfamiliar does not mean that it hides some new insights, though the reverse is often true. Urbit's problems are much bigger than that- it is full of redundancies and poor choices of abstractions, like using "jets" to optimize away peano numbers.
The point is that we ought to have a permanent, immutable home for our personal computation that's universally available on the network. Not an app, not a service, but a general-purpose tool that I trust and can program. I have one on my desk, but I want one in the cloud that doesn't feel like flying a 747 (aka being a unix sysadmin).
Our approach is simple: the reason this doesn't exist is not because it's not a good idea, but because existing old-school system software is too complicated.