Urbit OS 1 - <AUTHOR> https://urbit.org/blog/introducing-os1/ <comment><USER2> Nock and Hoon are intentionally obscure. There is no good reason for either of them to be the way they are. Until they come to grips with this, Urbit is somewhere in between an art project and a pyramid scheme.

Here is a legible alternative to Nock's vision of a "minimalist combinator VM": [http://tunes.org/~iepos/joy.html](http://tunes.org/~iepos/joy.html)

            [A] a = A
            [A] b = [[A]]
        [A] [B] c = [A B]
            [A] d = [A] [A]
            [A] e =
        [A] [B] f = [B] [A]

There you go, "Maxwell's equations of software", without the obscurantist nonsense.

<comment><USER3> Just out of curiosity, have you verified in some way that your alternative is legitimate? (Like maybe there are some contexts you haven't considered where other aspects of Nock are necessary.)

If so, are you sure the Urbit folks just didn't happen to discover this simpler/clearer way of doing it? Or do they have some motivation for making it obscure?

<comment><USER4> It's intentionally obscure, I believe the stated reason was that moldbug only wanted people to use Urbit who have buy-in in the form of having spent/wasted a significant amount of time and effort

<comment><USER5> In this aspect and many others, Urbit is reminiscent of Scientology.

<comment><USER6> Or the Gurdjieff movement, which (also like Urbit) is full of completely made up terms and concepts like "organ kundabuffer", "being-partkdolg-duty" and "the sacred Rascooarno", which the faithful just sort of accept and don't really explain except in their own terms, or with reference to other bits of Gurdjieff's impenetrable prose. When confronted, Gurdjieffites usually resort to the sort of tactics displayed upthread, if they're feeling charitable: "Have you considered that you are simply, in your somnambulent ignorance, criticizing that which you do not understand because your sleep prevents you from understanding? Come talk to me after you've spent 20 or 30 years in the Work and have something to criticize." In short, to criticize the system you must first embrace the system in its totality, only then will you understand it well enough to level legitimate criticism.

If they're not feeling charitable, they might declare you an Eternal- Hasnamuss-Individual and tell you your destiny is to become food for the moon. But at least they won't sue you or send private investigators after you (I think), so that's nice.

<comment><USER7> I think you've been hanging out with the wrong "Gurdjieffites".

At least some of those terms are pretty easy to figure out.

"organ kundabuffer" was a specific organ that excreted some kind of drug (in Gurdjieff's pre-history.)

"being-partkdolg-duty" is the task and operation of remembering oneself.

"the sacred Rascooarno" is death of the physical body.

...and so on.

<comment><USER6> > "organ kundabuffer" was a specific organ that excreted some kind of drug (in > Gurdjieff's pre-history.)

So basically you have to be on board with his sci-fi extended universe in order to grasp the cause behind the central tenet of the Fourth Way: that man is asleep.

> "being-partkdolg-duty" is the task and operation of remembering oneself.

Defining one Gurdjieffism in terms of another Gurdjieffism. Nice. "Remembering oneself" is, roughly, what Hackernews knows as mindfulness, but seems to involve a lot more following Gurdjieff (or one of his disciples, or his disciples' disciples, there must be an unbroken chain to the Master you see) around, scrubbing his floors and latrines, and doing his silly dances. Giving him your money also seemed to help.

> "the sacred Rascooarno" is death of the physical body.

So why does Gurdjieff say "the sacred Rascooarno" and not "death"? Because the Gurdjieffian concept of death is alien to anyone outside the Work. As you say, Rascooarno is the death of the physical, _planetary_ body, but a person (or "three-brained being"), in the course of their life, has or develops other, "finer" bodies made up of even smaller particles than the matter which makes up their planetary body, like the body-kesdjan, which is often equated to the astral body but isn't really. One might say, in other religions, that a person has a soul. But for Gurdjieff even this is wrong: it's more like a person has the _potential_ for a soul. Thanks to -- you guessed it -- the maleficent consequences of the organ Kundabuffer, a soul can only be attained through 20 or 30 years or so in the Work... do you see where I'm going with this?

Anyway, if you had a true friend in the Work, that friend would rebuke you for doing what Gurdjieff specifically enjoined his followers not to do: attempt to interpret his works to outsiders, lest you transmit wrong information and cause those outsiders to be crystallized in the wrong hydrogens.

<comment><USER7> > So basically you have to be on board with his sci-fi extended universe in > order to grasp the cause behind the central tenet of the Fourth Way: that > man is asleep.

Yes and no. His opus "All and Everything" is comprised of three volumes. The first "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" (itself divided into three volumes) is the part that is couched as a kind of autobiographical reminiscences of an alien, Beelzebub, to his grandson on the occasion of his pardon and reprieve from exile to Mars. It's allegory. That book is designed to affect the mind of the reader, it's a machine or program, not a book _per se_.

> Defining one Gurdjieffism in terms of another Gurdjieffism. Nice.

Don't be pissy.

> "Remembering oneself" is, roughly, what Hackernews knows as mindfulness, but > seems to involve a lot more

"Remembering oneself" is literal. As literal as words can be. There was no concept of mindfulness in the West at the time. Buddhism was alien and barely known.

> following Gurdjieff

He discouraged followers.

> (or one of his disciples, or his disciples' disciples, there must be an > unbroken chain to the Master you see)

The Fourth Way is not a lineage school. There may be people out there who try to make something like that out of it, I don't know. I don't hang out with them. The "Eneagram" craze was an example of a kind of degenerate cargo-cult residue of Gurdjieff's effect. But I don't think you should blame him for what people do with his work after he died.

> around, scrubbing his floors and latrines,

I'm not sure what you're referring to. Are you upset that he didn't clean the toilets personally at his dance school?

> and doing his silly dances.

Have you seen them? They are not silly.

> Giving him your money also seemed to help.

He could extract money from people seemingly at will (have you read the story of the time he nearly initiated an orgy?) He also spent lots of money, time, and effort feeding and taking care of elderly people during the war. In Paris if I recall correctly.

> So why does Gurdjieff say "the sacred Rascooarno" and not "death"?

To distinguish it from the current concept of death, which is very different. the sacred Rascooarno is a natural _molting_ of the physical body, like a kind of second birth, and life carries on in the second and third being bodies. Our deaths, however, are merely the wearing out of a machine. Not having "coated" higher being-bodies into our physical body by the process of "being-partkdolg- duty" we "die like dogs", leaving nothing.

> But for Gurdjieff ... it's more like a person has the potential for a soul.

Exactly! Everyone says "There's a soul" or "There's no such thing" and Gurdjieff comes along and says "You have to make one sucker!"

It's the first new thing under the sun, eh?

> Thanks to -- you guessed it -- the maleficent consequences of the organ > Kundabuffer,

You lost me...

> a soul can only be attained through 20 or 30 years or so in the Work...

No, you "coat" a "second being-body" and then you "coat" a "third being-body" and then you molt ("the sacred Rascooarno") and leave the Earth to go live in space with cool aliens that like you, or something.

These higher being bodies are like holograms that you use to store human-style experience in the next world. They're like emulators for your old software, eh?

> do you see where I'm going with this?

Yeah, but why? You obviously know a lot of this stuff but seem really unimpressed. Is it so wrong that _I_ got a lot out of G.I. Gurdjieff without becoming some sort of esoteric edgelord weanie?

I know there are a lot of knobs and fools out there. The "enneagram" craze proves that. But there's also something else there. (Or maybe I'm just crazy. I still haven't quite decided yet.)

> Anyway, if you had a true friend in the Work,

I don't.

> that friend would rebuke you for doing what Gurdjieff specifically enjoined > his followers not to do

Well, fuck em' Gurdjieff didn't appoint a successor, so I'll say what I like to whom I please.

> attempt to interpret his works to outsiders, lest you transmit wrong > information and cause those outsiders to be crystallized in the wrong > hydrogens.

Yeah, this is almost certainly "pearls before swine" but whatever, I'm bored and lonely.

"What was that about hats?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We should have an "Explain Urbit" competition. I haven't looked at it in years, but when I read about it, my initial version was something like:

"Think of abstracting an OS into a namespace, which uses a crypto layer to instantiate verifiable versions of itself - and then you write programs for it in a functional DSL, which do the stuff you do in a browser today, but with the benefit of a kernel of security proofs, strong anonymity, and federation."

Then 5 Whys:

\- a.0 To re-establish the any-to-any principles of the internet as trustworthy federations.

\- a.1 Because the current OS ecosystem is still an artifact of the very problems the internet was designed to solve.

\- a.2 Because politics and messy human stuff.

\- a.3 Because (the author believes) governments have become parasites that are killing their host.

\- a.4 Because the people with the outlier intelligence necessary to form a just society are captured and cannot find one another or do not have sufficient tools to organize themselves.

If you read the websites, it's more like if a Rick and Morty fan BBS met Skynet at a cypherpunks key ceremony, and that would probably suffice for most use cases.

<comment><USER9> Hmm, point "a.3 Because governments have become parasites that are killing their host," resonates with truth, but not all of the truth. We must be in a local maxima (minima?) at the moment - I don't believe we've found the best political system. I will think on this government-as-parasite idea, some more.

<comment><USER8> a.3 was an attempt to summarize the terabytes of text generated by people within a few degrees of the project in a pithy statement - about which somebody else has said they "did for words what bitcoin did for electricity." It's a bunch of rhetorical logic fractals.

In short, avoid.

<comment><USER10> This is a reply to both you and OP, but I don't see what Urbit has to do with any government, its inventor's political opinions notwithstanding.

<comment><USER11> Urbit may not have much to do with any specific government but it absolutely has a lot to do with governance and society in general. If you do not believe there are fundamental flaws in not only the reality of the internet / online services but the structure of the system in which they grew, Urbit is not worthwhile for you. If you do believe there are flaws, but you disagree about what the flaws are and how to solve then, Urbit may even be counterproductive.

Here are the first words of the intro on Urbit's home page: [https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/](https://urbit.org/understanding- urbit/)

> _We think the internet can't be saved. The way things are going, MEGACORP > will always control our apps and services because we can no longer run them > ourselves._

> _The only way out of this mess is with a completely new platform that's > owned and controlled by its users._

A little later: [https://urbit.org/understanding- urbit/interface/](https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/interface/)

> _One way to imagine Urbit is as the Western answer to WeChat: a seamless, > multi-purpose, vastly extensible social network, but without the > surveillance._

And from their "Beliefs and Principles" page: [https://urbit.org/blog/beliefs- and-principles/](https://urbit.org/blog/beliefs-and-principles/)

> _The ability of the engineering community to govern itself through > republican forms is not an abstract theory; it 's a proven fact._

> _Urbit should never fall under any kind of central control. All transitions > in galaxy ownership should divide positions, not unite them. Galaxy and star > ownership should also be separated. It is harmful for a single entity to > hold both galaxies and stars._

> _Urbit has zero tolerance for abuse, nor does it facilitate censorship. > Urbit will do everything possible to help you block content you don 't want > to see. It does nothing to help you block content you don't want others to > see._

If you are happy with the role of governments and corporations in Western society and the resulting online landscape, it's not clear you need Urbit. It's fine, but it's overhead. If you're happy with the role of governments and corporations _in China_ , for instance, if you like WeChat and how it works and why it works, Urbit is actively useless to you.

And you can oppose China (or even Western governments) and find Urbit useless too: if you believe the problem is with the holders of power but not the very concept that people can hold that much power, or you are skeptical of mechanisms to prevent people from holding that much power - perhaps because you fear covert power and collusion, or because you fear that tools that inhibit the accumulation of power are more likely to harm the powerless than the somewhat-powerful - Urbit doesn't present you with solutions that help you.

I think it's entirely fair to say that beliefs about governments are absolutely a part of why Urbit was created and why it continues to get development interest from people besides the creator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I searched "Urbit" in the HN archives. The old discussion is still relevant for a project as long-term as this, and the more recent you get the more Urbit is misunderstood or attacked simply for being different.

Years on from the first announcements this hugely ambitious project is finally showing real-world practical application that is already superior to the alternatives in some dimensions, and with great potential for growth. If you're sleeping on this it's like sleeping on the Bitcoin whitepaper. The dimensions for the future of computing are being hashed out in front of you.

A congratulations to everyone involved.

<comment><USER13> Could you explain what Urbit's main goals or purposes are?

I feel like, for Bitcoin, the intent and outcome might not be perfectly aligned, but I get what it was for and how it is used.

<comment><USER14> The main goal of the people working on Urbit, as with most ventures, is to make money.

They make money by selling you an identifier that gives you access to their network for ~$10-$20. They have 2^32 identifiers so they expect to make a lot of money.

Keep in mind that this identifier doesn't mean you "own" or "control" much, as it is folded under a parent identifier of which there are only 2^8, all controlled by the original Urbit creators/their associates.

The rest is a semi-interesting mix of distributed systems + crypto ideas as other commenters have tried to summarize; there are other, less indecipherable, projects with similar ideas.

<comment><USER15> Could you name some similar projects? Do you mean something like blockstack or dfinity?

<comment><USER16> holochain

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Congratulations. One of my main critiques of Urbit was that I've been waiting years for something more widely usable and it seems that finally things are turning around.

There's a lot of very shallow and superficial negative opinions about Urbit, while it's one of the most interesting projects being developed online, IMO.

I do have my own set of criticism (see: [https://dpc.pw/pragrammatic-critique- of-urbit](https://dpc.pw/pragrammatic-critique-of-urbit)), but overlay I hope it will be successful.

<comment><USER18> I don't know man, I tried to use it two weeks ago and I couldn't even get the chat to work. Neither could I try out their functional programming language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Lots of people, including myself are quite confused by exactly what Urbit is. It seems like most people familiar with it have internalized its conventions to such a degree, that they can only describe it in the most broad and unspecific of strokes.

I'll take a stab at it, as someone who just spent five minutes skimming its description of its address space, and trying to parse people's varying descriptions of the project.

I'd love it if someone more familiar with the project could tell me how off- base I am.

\- Urbit is a virtual computing platform in-which all devices (ships) are members of federated network.

\- The federated network is hierarchically organized in such a manner that anyone can join, and receive a unique 128-bit address, but you're incentivized to join as a child of a node on the next level up the hierarchy (in-which case the first 64 bits will be your address, and the next 64 bits are your parent's address).

\- your address is cryptographically signed by the parent, which serves as a reputational voucher. Your parent node also serves as a package manager for your vm(?).

\- This system allows network nodes to ostracize branches of the network of ill-repute, in order to incentivize parents to 'disown' bad actors, as well as good clients to transfer to parents that don't vouch for bad actors.

\- your vm is just that. A sandboxed computing environment in-which to exectute arbitrary code/applications either pulled from your parent node, or exchanged between you and your peers, as well as a mechanism to store and cryptographically sign data data you've generated/data that others have generated which you've cached.

<comment><USER20> It wants to be secure personal server that anyone and their mother can setup and use. I have hard time understanding how people have hard time understanding this. It's not that "complex" guys.

<comment><USER19> It's mostly a component of how deliberately obtuse the terminology behind it was early on (with no clear explanation), and how smarmy the early adopters are/were about describing it early on. I knew a guy who was big into it back in 2013. He refused to describe it as anything other than 'everything you could ever want computing to be'. Ask for specifics, and he'd just use the project's own terminology and act like you were stupid if you wanted clarification.

Personal server doesn't really do the project justice, because it does nothing to differentiate it in someone's mind from spinning up a vm on digitalocean with no specific intent. It will make more sense once the platform actually has software you can point to, but it'll still need more explanation to justify its existence.

<comment><USER20> While both are personal servers, I think Urbit is (and can be) a lot more friendly to average person than telling Average Joe to setup a vm in digitalocean and then through some magic make it communicate with your friends.

<comment><USER19> Which is kind of my point. The layman isn't going to get the meaning of 'personal server', but the term itself is too broad for the technically proficient.

Like describing ios as 'windows on a phone'. The interaction models are completely different, and so to are softwares that most people would want to use on or is even available for it.

Nothing about Urbit as I understand it is fundamentally alien to most developers save its nomenclature, and the way it's architected. But without that base of knowledge, the advantages and limitations of its model - and by extension its applications, are hard to wrap your head around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I tried to understand how Hoon and Nock work once and got completely lost. They happily claim that their definition of Nock is super simple and Turing Complete, and I'm used to dealing with some really abstract things, but I simply can't deduce it. Their definition of Nock contains a couple of different combinators. They start out really simple: one to increment, one to tell if something is a list or an atom, one for equality. Then comes this one:

        /[1 a]            a
        /[2 a b]          a
        /[3 a b]          b
        /[(a + a) b]      /[2 /[a b]]
        /[(a + a + 1) b]  /[3 /[a b]]

And then I'm completely lost. What on earth does this combinator do? Every time I try tracing it with an example list it quickly goes into infinite recursion.

<comment><USER22> Did you come from the Nock 4K thing seen in [https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/nock/definition/](https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/nock/definition/) but without the rest of the stuff on that page? It's explained in words there:

> / (slot) is a tree addressing operator. The root of the tree is 1; the left > child of any node n is 2n; the right child is 2n+1. /[x y] is the subtree of > y at address x.

> For instance, /[1 [531 25 99]] is [531 25 99]; /[2 [531 25 99]] is 531; /[3 > [531 25 99]] is [25 99]; /[6 [531 25 99]] is 25; /[12 [531 25 99]] crashes.

(edit: there's also more at [https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/nock/explanation/.](https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/nock/explanation/.))

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Suggestion to the leads of this project: make the product objective/statement clearer.

Maybe I'm not the target demographic for this but I was met with a wall of text and couldn't make much of it all. It seems exciting and also complex, at least for me, but selecting the right words can go a long way.

I know that I can search the archives and this current thread to get more context but this might not be the case of whoever gets directly to the introduction page.

Feel free to contact me should you want to review those texts. I'd gladly try to give you my humble help.

<comment><USER24> > make the product objective/statement clearer.

They intentionally make Urbit obscure, for reasons explained in the UR post introducing the idea 2011. It basically has to do with keeping out people who are a net drain on a new software project (software entryists, "developer evangelists", etc.).

<comment><USER25> If their goal is to never gain enough momentum to make this more than a toy project, then that makes sense.

Personally it annoys the fuck out of me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> [https://urbit.org/faq/](https://urbit.org/faq/)

> Urbit started back in 2002 as Curtis Yarvin's personal project. Curtis > developed the original prototype for Urbit and, separately, wrote a blog on > history and politics under the pen name 'Mencius Moldbug'.

> In early 2019, Curtis left the Urbit project and gave all of his voting > interest (both as address space and voting shares in the company) back to > Tlon. He retains a non-voting, minority interest in both the address space > and the company — but is not involved in the day-to-day development or > operations.

> Curtis laid the foundation for Urbit by delivering its first prototype but, > since 2013, it has been refined and almost entirely rewritten by a community > of developers. No one working on Urbit today had anything to do with > Curtis's writing. For the most part, we couldn't be less interested in it.

Thought this was interesting.

</comment><comment> lachlan-sneff I think the many of the ideas behind Urbit are exciting, but I don't think it's putting itself in a good position. It's just too weird. If it used WebAssembly instead of some small, functional bytecode, you'd lose some beauty perhaps, but it'd be much more palatable.

<comment><USER17> Hoon does have some very nice security / usability things, that a plain WASM doesn't: every function call is pretty much a sandbox, everything is serializable and sandboxable (so you can eg. exchange code around safely), great reflexivity/inspectability, etc.

It looks weird, and names are weird (which IMO is unnecessary), but the underlying mechanisms are actually not that difficult to grasp.

<comment> lachlan-sneff Yeah, I wish wasm had more support for pure programming. Of course, state can be constrained, but it's pretty heavyweight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> We might not fully understand what Urbit is, but we can't say they don't have some attractive design, from the layout of the article to the screenshots themselves

<comment> core-questions Building a new aesthetic resonates deeply with the kind of people interested in this project

<comment><USER27> That's very odd for a project that goes down all the way to defining a "bytecode" and re-implements everything on top of it.

Kudos to you for doing it though. Do you have resources on design guidelines defining your project ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> So suppose Urbit is genuinely useful. What is to stop someone from forking it, stripping out the obscurantism, writing friendly documentation, then redistributing galaxies/etc in a different way?

I don't see the moat.

<comment><USER29> It would take a complete rewrite. Urbit is written entirely in an idiosyncratic programming language stack that compiles to an idiosyncratic combinator language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have mixed feelings on urbit. I think it's a really interesting idea, but it's implementation is too obscure and complex. I do, however, sympathize with their goal and appreciate the UI design of this new web app.

I struggle to see the practical benefit of urbit versus something like sandstorm.io, although I don't think that project is perfect either. With WebAssembly getting its footing, it's hard for me to justify a future platform that requires code to be written in a specific language.

What if we had a federated computing platform that ran code via WebAssembly, stored data wherever the user would like including an option for IPFS, and managed identity via OAuth / SSL certificate authorities / private/public keys? It could be interacted with via a web portal, and apps could be provided APIs to interact with other apps and the rest of the system.

I can see something like that being built to fulfill similar goals (as I understand them... I could be wrong) but using existing tech: HTTP3, TLS, IPFS, WebAssembly

</comment><comment><USER31> If I understand correctly, Urbit is a new OS kernel and application layer, with a new weird FP language on a weird VM. Its first app is a crypto ID system.

Am I wrong or am I wrong?

<comment> lachlan-sneff It's not an actual "kernel". It's an application that hides all hardware specifics from applications that run inside it. Or something like that, I have no idea.

<comment><USER32> It's an actual kernel the same way a virtual machine is an actual machine.

To unpack that: a virtual machine could be a real machine, it just happens to instead by a software-hosted emulation thereof. There's a hardware JVM in your SIM card, for an example.

arvo (the kernel) is the same deal: there's nothing stopping someone from implementing the syscalls it uses (used to be seven of them IIRC), writing some drivers, and running it on bare metal.

But that's a lot of work, and the Unix-hosted virtual kernel works well enough. The whole thing may be fairly compared with inferno, which is a hosted plan9 which runs on a VM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> How different is it from Dat or Solid? They promise decentralized environment and control over data too and are less obscure.

<comment><USER34> Dat and Solid only cover data storage while Urbit also provides a VM to execute apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm actually quite excited by the curiosity/comprehension ratio regarding Urbit. Those who don't understand it dismiss it entirely.

</comment><comment><USER36> Galaxy holder here. AMA.

It's very disappointing to see all of the knee-jerk reactions about urbit here.

I bought my galaxy from Tlon a couple of years ago before Curtis left the project. I don't know Curtis, only met him once for a brief lunch. I used to browse his blog, and honestly found it thought-provoking but ultimately wrong. To say that I don't share his political and philosophical views would be an understatement.

And yet, I find that the structure of the Urbit network means that it doesn't matter. I have my galaxy and I can do what I want with it, which will definitely at times not be what Tlon wants me to do with it, and if you are a planet or a star under my galaxy and you don't like it you can move to another. There are 255 other galaxies and 64,999 other stars.

I don't understand the criticism of this being digital feudalism. I mean, if you want to call a planet a "peasant", and you want to say that stars and galaxies are some sort of feudal lord, then okay, but specifically what do you mean? As opposed to Facebook, or Google, as a galaxy owner I don't have your data, can't look at your traffic, and can't monetize your personal information. I can't spam you. The only thing I can do is block you, and in five minutes you can switch over to another galaxy. As long as there is one independent galaxy out of 256, then every person on the network can switch over to that galaxy. There's no monopoly power here unless you own all 256 galaxies, which would basically amount to a failure of the whole system and frankly I don't see how that could happen. I'm not selling mine.

There is also a lot of criticism about selling address space. Well, of course there are 4 billion addresses, and at $10 a piece, that's a lot of money some day if the network succeeds. But if the network succeeds, we are talking about a new Internet, and I think $40 billion is modest. It's also important to be clear that for everyone who bought address space already, we certainly didn't pay $10 per address, so Tlon isn't laughing all the way to the bank. And as a galaxy holder, I'm figuring that planet prices go down and maybe go as low as five dollars each or free as a loss leader. The money will be made in providing hosting and value added services on top of the network, and what exactly is wrong with that? Right now, OS1 has a built-in blog application, a chat application, a slack clone, and a reddit clone. Short on features, sure, but if all of that isn't worth a one time fee of $5, then I would argue you're just being a stubborn polemicist.

I'm also a critic of the tendency to be obscure. Curtis' trollishness, without a doubt comes out in the programming language. Again, I don't really care. I don't know Hoon. Maybe i'll learn it at some point. Hoon school classes are constantly full. People will learn it. For those who don't want to, there will be APIs, so that I can write in my native language. That's totally possible, and the whole thing is open source.

Finally, the whole "I can't figure out how to use it argument" is not unique to Urbit. Yes, the documentation needs to be improved. Yes the sign-up process needs to be improved. That is priority #1 from the team. But really, how easy is linux to use? In my opinion, not. I've been a mediocre developer for 10 years, and I still can't maintain my own box. I set up a server 10 years ago, and I went to set up that same server, with the same software today, and running the same commands doesn't give me the same thing. All new versions, with all new dependencies, some of them conflict. I break out in cold sweats every time I have to do a security update or upgrade, afraid that everything is going to break. The only thing to do is learn the new magic phrases to make the box do exactly what I want it to do. For me Linux is totally opaque, obscure, and I've given up on understanding it.

I am assured by the team, and I believe them, that we will have easy, non technical installation and hosting by the end of the year.

And that's why i'm excited about Urbit. It's an IOS and app store that I own and control 100%. It's a VPS that (soon) will just work, that maintains itself, that keeps my data under my control. It's a merciful exit from this horrible, dare I say it, feudalistic system in which the lords of FB, Google, and the like own and use (abuse) my data as they please.

So, I get it if you have impressions of the project based on how it was two or five years ago, but you are mistaken. The core developers on Urbit are some of the hardest working, competent, and idealistic people i've ever met. It's a joy to be involved, which is not what I can say about a lot of projects.

The thing I love most about Urbit is it's not blowing $1 billion on marketing, or trying to be the cool thing on the block. Ever since I've been involved, they have quietly kept their head down and shipped. Even against all of the hate, and I have a lot of respect for that. Go watch the launch event for OS1 and watch one of the core developers talking about how badly he wants to build the best e-reader ever, and tell me that the passion isn't contagious.

<comment><USER37> Thanks for writing this. All of the stuff about urbit being a cult or a scam that comes up every time it's discussed here seems orthogonal to what actual urbit enthusiasts care about, which is just that it performs a use case we actually want. All I want is the "you can share a file with someone you know without dealing with a social media corporation or being a part-time sysadmin" part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> urbit "why":

> Each user runs their own node completely independently. Everyone using Urbit > OS owns their own identity and data. ... over an encrypted and authenticated > network.

Interesting note about OS 1 in particular:

> One really critical thing about OS 1 is the pattern of 'groups sharing > modules'. This pattern makes it perfectly clear how a virtual computer can > outcompete a bunch of different services. ... quickly outruns the messy, > disconnected world we're currently stuck in.

</comment><comment><USER39> I've been told what Urbit is about 10 times now and I still don't fully get it.

<comment><USER40> After reading a few articles I felt like I finally figured out what Urbit was and wrote down my sense in a Tweet thread: [https://twitter.com/ianbicking/status/1249862161758916609](https://twitter.com/ianbicking/status/1249862161758916609)

In summary: Urbit is a functional/deterministic VM. That's mostly it. It runs a bytecode called Nock. The only language that really compiles to Nock is a weird language called Hoon. Because the VM is functional and deterministic, it is (in theory) also portable – you pick up the (ever-evolving) VM image and move it somewhere else, and it should act the same. Since the VM may move around there's also an identity/networking layer so you can talk to the VM wherever it is.

Right now Urbit is a program called u3 (runs on Linux or whatever) that runs Nock programs. OS 1 is such a program that does a couple things. It's unclear to me if they've really built an OS or just a library of routines that can be used to build a single multipurpose application.

The most direct article I found was "Review of Urbit": [https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of- urbit-e7cc4c35f14...](https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of- urbit-e7cc4c35f149)

Urbit's own "Common Objections to Urbit" was helpful, in a methinks-he-doth- protest-too-much sort of way: [https://urbit.org/blog/common-objections-to- urbit/](https://urbit.org/blog/common-objections-to-urbit/)

And that article pointed me to "Houyhnhnms vs Martians" which was helpful though also as weird as Urbit: [http://ngnghm.github.io/blog/2016/06/11/chapter-10-houyhnhnm...](http://ngnghm.github.io/blog/2016/06/11/chapter-10-houyhnhnms- vs-martians/)

While some people say Urbit is feudalistic, I tend to agree more with those that call it simply obscurantist. More occult than fascist.

<comment><USER41> That "Review of Urbit" is the best post I've read on it, thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Question for the Urbit devs (when they get done celebrating and come in here to answer the questions, and sigh in dismay at the inevitable Nth round of hn- yarvin's-bashing):

In theory, it should be really easy to write a social media app in Urbit. I mean, that's kind of what it's designed for, right, to make it easy and secure to do the sorts of server-side use cases that we currently off-load to Facebook and Twitter and such?

So, where is it? I don't mean a legit FB/IG/TW/etc challenger, I just mean a toy proof of concept in which I can 'add' an urbit identity, 'share' a piece of text, and they would see it in their feed.

I know the easy answer is, "Why don't you write one?" Well, I'm a mediocre programmer and I already have a side project. This isn't me demanding that open source software be written for me; this is me asking, if the PoC social media site for urbit doesn't exist yet, does that mean that it's harder to make than a superficial understanding of the project would suggest?

<comment><USER43> > In theory, it should be really easy to write a social media app in Urbit.

Did you read the post? Have you looked at OS1? This is literally what OS1 is; it allows you to create groups which share notes, links, and chats. You get notifications in the dashboard if anything happens in any of the groups you are part of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> See, I'd love to play around with urbit, but having to buy cryptocurrency to buy something of dubious value for too much money seems, absurd.

I'm still interested in trying it, but I see no easy entry, which makes me question its value as a federated network.

<comment><USER43> Install urbit. Boot a comet (free). Join the chat groups. Ask for a planet (free). While not certain, in my experience, if Tlon people see interest, they'll send you a planet. Or maybe just write to their support, they are super responsive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Technical overview:

[https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/concepts/technical- overview...](https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/concepts/technical-overview/)

</comment><comment><USER46> What I don't understand is, if they want to make the dissociation with Yarvin more clear, why not just change the name of the project?

I have the same question about ReiserFS.

I feel like it boils down to the fact that they know a bunch of their user or developer base would be angered by such a move, and that same portion are the folks the rest of the world would consider toxic, and so they just kind of ignore the question.

<comment><USER47> I don't participate because whether he left or not, there has been no statement about whether or not he's still a shareholder.

The success of Urbit could still be enriching its racist founder sitting on a founder-sized set of tokens or equity, even if he never worked there.

I'd much rather just participate in other projects.

EDIT:

...as of last I looked, there had been no statement. I'd still simply rather involve myself in other projects and communities, as it sounds like he would still benefit from the growth of the system, and I don't think I'd get along with his compatriots that are still working there.

I try not to work on things where doing a good job means that someone who wants my friends to not have human rights makes more money for their cause.

<comment><USER37> 1) There aren't shares to own. He owns some urbit identities, which will be worth real money IFF urbit is ever actually popular, which doesn't seem very likely at the moment.

2) You're calling a real live human being racist. Are you sure you know him well enough to stand behind an accusation like that? Or are you relaying third-hand opinions about his blog? I'm not a fan of his, but the blog posts that launched the #cancelyarvin effort seemed pretty innocuous to me.

<comment><USER32> Staying well clear of 2), but to address 1): Tlon is an ordinary corporation and I would be flabbergasted if cgy didn't retain shares in a corporation he founded.

Then there's address space, and my understanding is that he gave up control of his galaxies, which doesn't say anything about the stars and planets that were in them.

With a little spelunking in the old codebase, and inspection of the Azimuth contract, someone interested in the question could no doubt answer it with reasonable confidence.

<comment><USER37> Oh, I'd forgotten about Tlon. Well, I looked it up, and what he claims to retain is "a few thousand stars" and a "non-voting minority in tlon". I guess the latter could be valuable monetarily (in some hypothetical future in which urbit is successful, anyway).

from: [https://urbit.org/blog/a-founders- farewell/](https://urbit.org/blog/a-founders-farewell/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I've been following Moldbug for a while and his extreme bigotry means this is something that should never succeed. Thankfully, urbit isn't doing that all by themselves

</comment><comment><USER49> So it's a slack like chat that runs in a VM in my browser? Sorry I read thier homepage and dont get it

<comment><USER50> Except this chat seems has a unique(feudalistic maybe?) update system:

[https://urbit.org/using/operations/stars-and- galaxies/](https://urbit.org/using/operations/stars-and-galaxies/)

Updates are passed down from galaxy to star to planet. Star owners can modify those updates to push custom software to planet VMs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I'm intrigued... but have no idea how to get an ID without dropping $30USD...

<comment><USER10> opensea.io has them for under $5

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Personal definition for Urbit: Confucianism in a made up software terminology.

<comment><USER53> As a Confucian and legalist (among other philosophical positions), there is one obvious gaping flaw in this classification: Urbit is obscurantist, while Confucius would have preferred that Urbit clearly define its terminology and goals [0], and that if it were truly an open project, that it would not try to divide people into groups based on allocation of private property, but instead unite them through common social visions and spaces [1].

Although, to be quite frank, I think that Urbit and its followers are usurping the name of philosophers like Mencius [2] when they try to play themselves off as Confucians or legalists. They are clearly neoreactionaries [3] and range from feudalism and monarchism to neo-fascism in their expressions of belief.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonious_Society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonious_Society)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mencius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mencius)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment)

<comment><USER52> Thank you for this comment. I need to broaden my readings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> > Urbit address space has value, which means the distribution of address space > has tax implications. You should speak with your tax advisor about these > implications.

oh to be a fly on that wall..

</comment><comment><USER55> It's an art project.

</comment><comment><USER56> Urbit is such a niche product that totally ignores the average consumer it's essentially dead on arrival.

They struggle to explain it to technical people. Imagine trying to explain this thing to your mother.

It's the fever dream of deeply technical types who have created a product so academic in nature that it's totally useless in practicality.

<comment><USER57> its an os, its social media without the middleman, its an identity, its many things. Sadly HN always seems to hate it whenever it get posted here.

<comment><USER56> Could you explain Urbit to your mother within a minute?

<comment><USER58> "An operating system in a box that connects with others to provide (mostly in the future) the kind of networked services and apps you enjoy now, but with your data stored locally instead of on corporate servers"

Easier than explaining bitcoin, honestly. No warrants made to mom or others on usability or service availability

<comment><USER59> Hypothetical response: "An operating system? Is it better than Windows? What games does it have?"

I'm not convinced that's an appropriate term to use here, even as part of a simplified explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> As soon as the protocol is stable enough, if it is useful, it will be reverse- engineered and reimplemented in more-legible source code. From this, I can deduce that Urbit is not yet useful.

<comment><USER60> Just because it's illegible does not mean it is suboptimal. It purposely breaks with existing conventions because it does things in a way not current code does.

<comment><USER53> Here [0] is but one example of Urbit's suboptimality: Their encoding into C is insecure, and they have no interest in changing it.

Writing a new operating system is hard. Taking lots of questionable paths, like writing "jet" templates [1] that call directly into existing C libraries, or defining a brand-new Boolean type that doesn't behave like standard Booleans, is not the right way to build confidence in any kind of quality, let alone optimality.

Also, as a word-choice note, "optimal" means "best". Urbit is _clearly_ not the best operating system, because there is clearly no metric by which to measure it against other OSs. It doesn't support the same sorts of hardware or APIs or processes or other common components of our craft. "optimal" is a terrible word to use around greenfield projects and nebulous designs; reserve it for when you can _prove_ that your approach truly is the best one.

[0] [https://github.com/urbit/urbit/issues/752](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/issues/752)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_metaprogramming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_metaprogramming)

<comment><USER61> That issue is pretty hilarious, and reveals a lot about Urbit. This topic on HN is my first exposure to the project, and I was on the fence about the (seemingly much debated) 'is this satire?' question. This ticket pushed me over to the 'yes' side.

Of course there is the 'loobean' schtick, but the best part is them sneaking in three-valued logic as a trojan horse, where the third state is "NO". They evens steer the reader towards the obvious footgun:

> You should ignore the numeric values and use comparisons against c3y and c3n > for everything.

So I should say

        if (bluebeanValue == TRUE) { ... }

and

        if (bluebeanValue == FALSE) { ... }

Making any value outside the expected range mean "NO to any boolean test".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's a scam.

They have 2^32 "planets" (a UUID that you can use to interact with the Urbit network), that they are each trying to sell for ~$10-$20 on a cute "exchange": [https://urbit.live/](https://urbit.live/)

(Of course you don't really own anything when buying a planet because someone else owns the "star" and the "galaxy" and you can't buy those unless you're friends with them)

They even have a nice pyramid diagram for their not-pyramid-scheme:

[https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/value-of- address-s...](https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/value-of-address- space-pt2a.svg)

<comment><USER62> It looks like so, yes.

Though, after digging in the doc, turns out there may be a way to create temporary free ids to try out Urbit: [https://urbit.org/using/operations/creating-a- comet/](https://urbit.org/using/operations/creating-a-comet/)

<comment><USER14> The first hit is always free :)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Whiteboard-driven development? - <AUTHOR> Someone recently suggested this process for designing a software architecture: get about a half-dozen developers together in a room for a few days and use the whiteboard to come up with architectural solutions.  I'm curious what HNers think about this process or how they've designed software architectures in the past. <comment><USER2> On a previous startup my CTO said lets meet for two weeks before we write a single line of code. I was in a hurry to get started because well money had started to flow out of my bank account!

But I agreed, we created a few walls worth of whiteboards using tile board from Home Depot because I was too cheap to spend the thousands of dollars it cost to buy that many square feet of regular white boards.

In short it was the single best thing we did. The original idea changed greatly as we marched towards product market fit and the model we crafted was flexible enough to accommodate all the changes.</comment>


Mylo: A leather-like material made from mycelium - <AUTHOR> https://boltthreads.com/technology/mylo/ <comment><USER2> Coincidentally, a friend recently showed me his "mushroom hat", which is made from "amadou": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadou](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadou). It's a wonderful lightweight texture, somewhere between leather and felt. A description of the manufacturing process (and the mushroom which it comes from) is here: [http://frimminjimbits.blogspot.com/2012/08/mushroom- cap.html](http://frimminjimbits.blogspot.com/2012/08/mushroom-cap.html)

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't it be extremely flammable though? Raw amadou can burn even with the smallest spark. We used to make lighters out of it.

<comment><USER4> This was my first thought. They must have some built in fire retardant layer. Otherwise you a cigarette burn would set you alight. Interesting point, I'm not sure how fast it burns. It might just smolder away. Still not desirable!

<comment><USER3> It's slow and not very "flammy", so it wouldn't turn you into a torch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Leather production comes at a very high cost to the environment. So I welcome any real alternative (assuming it is significantly less dirty).

[https://undark.org/article/leather-tanning-bangladesh- india/](https://undark.org/article/leather-tanning-bangladesh-india/)

<comment><USER6> Won't that leather still get used elsewhere? I don't think many animals are reared with the primarry intent of producing leather but rather becouse of our high meat demand and we can't make one without the other.

<comment><USER7> It will be interesting to see what happens over the next decade or two, once synthmeat is good enough to take over the market. Various breeds of cattle will likely go extinct, and the same social opprobrium that will wipe out the market for "real" meat will presumably affect leather goods as well.

<comment><USER8> When synthetic meat becomes good enough there'll still be loads of people who'll say it's inferior to the real thing. Apart from that I believe a happy cow is better than no cow so sustainable and environmentally-friendly livestock farms still have a reason to exist.

<comment><USER9> Well, already you have "loads of people" claiming that kobe beef is better than regular beef (or that the black iberian pig is better than other kinds of pig). Yet, since meet from those animals is expensive, in practice the vast majority of meat doesn't come from these species.

It can be identical with synthetic vs natural meat. Price can make the difference, and we can still reduce massively the amount of livestock we breed (e.g. make the farms more environmentally-friendly through regulation)

<comment><USER10> >"Well, already you have "loads of people" claiming that kobe beef is better than regular beef _(or that the black iberian pig is better than other kinds of pig)_. Yet, since meet from those animals is expensive, in practice the vast majority of meat doesn't come from these species.

Having just been on vacation in Malaga (highly recommended), Jamon Iberico Bellota -- the highest-quality ham from acorn-fed black iberian pigs -- is absolutely, genuinely so superior to lesser hams that it's not even funny. There is just no comparison.

It also costs at least €130/kg even the smallest local ham stores, so yes it is prohibitively expensive, you can expect to pay at least twice that for the genuine stuff, if you're not in Andalusia.

How much of the taste is because the diet, and how much is because of the breed? Who knows, but I think it's a combination.

<comment><USER11> It is and there are official classifications for that. _Ibérico_ is about the race, _pata negra_ (black paw) being a best subclass name that expanded to anything first class. If a Spaniard says you are _pata negra_ , it's actually good, not an indictment on your feet higiene :)

Bellota (acorn) the diet. You can find intermediate categories like "50% raza ibérica" or "recebo" for both.

<comment><USER10> Oh yes, I got a very thorough explanation and examples from a very dedicated ham shop owner. It was a bit of a lazy afternoon, so he took the time to properly school us on every detail and the classification system.

If you're ever in Malaga, hit up Azabache in the old part of town. One hell of a shop for ham and cheese and a bit of seafood.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "It's strong, and abrasion resistant." As a motorcyclist, I need to see a side-by-side abrasion resistance comparison. So far, nothing beats leather.

<comment><USER13> technically toilet paper is "strong, abrasion resistant".

But since they did not mention durability anywhere on the marketing speak, that means even their marketeer couldn't find a way to lie about durability qualities. Unfortunately nothing to see here :(

<comment><USER14> Also read between the lines about biodegradability - I'm betting this stuff breaks down relatively quickly?

<comment><USER3> Like leather. We treat leather.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can somebody explain how this is different to the "pleather" being made as a side-product from the production of Kombucha? Thats been a thing for a while now.

AFAIK its also grown by mould, from culture. But, it forms as a mat on top of the Kombucha fermenting liquid.

<comment><USER16> (please help me where I'm wrong other scientists... But here's my basic knowledge.)

Leather as you know it are combinations a few different (known) structural proteins secreted from mammals between skin cells, after the skin cells themselves have been removed, and the proteins become chemically glued together (cross-linked). The majority of that protein is collagen.

Plether is a plastic fiber (petroleum derivative) that is spun and processed in such a way as to have an appearance similar to the final leather product (kind of, close enough). It's not protein-based in any way.

This new leather, 'Mylo', is a protein-based 'fabric' where the base protein is secreted by fungi rather than mammals. However, fungi are similar enough to mammals evolutionarily, that the proteins they secrete are evolutionary related to those secreted by our own cells to make our skin. The primary protein in both cases is collagen. Additionally, fungi genetics are easily manipulable, so you can actually insert the DNA that encodes for mammal-like collagen, other proteins found in animal leather, or proteins with new or completely different functions that would never show up on the skin of a mammal (color, water resistance, enzymatic capabilities, etc.).

tldr: Pleather is nothing like animal leather chemically - but has some similar bulk properties. This new MyLo is chemically related (evolutionarily) to animal leather, but ultimately comes from fungi. _But_ because it's genetically known, it can actually include new capabilities that cannot be found in animal leather.

<comment><USER17> Yes, like us, fungi are opisthokonts, but where collagen is the mammalian structural protein used for making leather, fungal hyphae are principally comprised of chitin—structurally closer to the polysaccharide cellulose of the mentioned "kombucha leather" than to the collagen protein. Collagen is present in fungi in certain edge cases, but bulk mycelium is mostly chitin. This is speculation, but leather made from chitin may actually be a bit stronger than animal leather made from collagen. Maybe closer to keratin in strength? (Interestingly, keratin is chemically cleaved in hides during leather production--not entirely sure why, to enhance flexibility and allow access to the collagen fibers?). Agreed about fungi being easier to engineer. As you point out, endogenous expression of dyes in hyphae for different colors of mycelial leather is compelling. GFP would be cool too for the rave and nightclub crowd.

The Quorn meat analogue[1] is another product made from compressed mycelium. I've had "chicken" nuggets made from it. They're...not bad, but as far as mycelial structures go I prefer mushrooms.

1\. [http://www.misac.org.uk/PDFs/MiSAC_Briefings_1.pdf](http://www.misac.org.uk/PDFs/MiSAC_Briefings_1.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I believe they licensed the mycelium technology from a NY based startup called Ecovative, that has been shopping it around for furniture for some time.

<comment><USER19> Correct.

Proof: website: [https://www.ecovativedesign.com/](https://www.ecovativedesign.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The problem with pleather, in my experience, isn't that it feels insufficiently leather-like. The appearance is also just fine; the tendency to fade actually produces a somewhat nice pattern. The real problem is that the durability of most fake leather is drastically inferior to natural leather.

From personal experience, I had a leather jacket which I got in my first year of college (2008) and wore until it was stolen from my car in early 2016, when it was still in nearly-perfect condition (although the zipper got worse). I replaced it with a pleather jacket which has already lost most of the material on the right elbow and may soon develop a hole.

So I hope this mushroom-derived material will be at least _somewhat_ more durable. What I really want to see is a sort of fake leather made from a more resilient polymer, such as polyetherimide or one of the other "high- performance polymers". Until that situation improves, I think I'm going back to cowhide.

<comment><USER21> The durability isn't just a nice feature, but for motorcyclists is essential. I haven't found anything that comes close to the abrasion resistance that natural leather has (while looking like a leather jacket, not including things like kevlar for example).

Top it off with durability that can seriously last a lifetime and look better with age, there's no real competition in the synthetic leathers that comes close to the real thing.

<comment><USER22> I'm not a motorcyclist, and I noticed multiple comments mentioning durability of leather is important for motorcyclists. How come? Is falling off a common thing with motorcycles? It sure isn't very common with bicycles or cars.

<comment><USER23> I don't think it's about how often. It's about that one time it happens, you want protection. The skid distance on a motorcycle isn't comparable to a bicycle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interesting, although on the business side, what happened to the spider silk? Bolt closed a $125m round in November 2017. You only get that kind of money if you are a messianic founder or have lots of progress.... This feels like this is some kind of auxiliary parachute. I wonder if the investors knew. Ironic that Peter Theil's Founders Fund was one of the investors.... "We wanted spider silk and instead we got mushroom leather."

<comment><USER25> They have a separate section on their website describing their Microsilk, which is being used to produce ties.

[https://boltthreads.com/technology/microsilk/](https://boltthreads.com/technology/microsilk/) [https://ties.boltthreads.com/](https://ties.boltthreads.com/)

<comment><USER24> This is just speculation, but this looks to be in a "coming soon" state. They could be having any number of issues, including scaling, cost reduction, and the macro properties of the fabric may not have lived up to the early promises.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is exciting for new leather products, I'd like to see how a pair of boxing gloves or a pair of Thai pads made from such a material hold up. As for other leather goods. I usually just buy them second hand from a goodwill or something. Almost, Second-hand anything is good for the environment.

<comment><USER27> Second hand leather is better for the environment that this product, that is a fact.

<comment><USER26> that's what I was trying to communicate! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Very fun. A number of new players here. I look forward to the more exotic possibilities downstream. Integrating other biological capabilities, relaxing size, thickness, supplychain constraints, being part of a genetically-dynamic R&D process.

I'm curious about the different approaches between Bolt (who've so far at least been focused on fermentation) and Modern Meadow - versus newer smaller players like Provenance.

[http://www.modernmeadow.com](http://www.modernmeadow.com)

[http://provenance.bio](http://provenance.bio)

</comment><comment><USER29> Is it absolutely necessary to always write (tm) after every Mylo? It's so distracting. And, well, corporate. It's gross.

How do we get to a world where we can stop doing that? Or do we already live in one and not everybody knows?

<comment><USER30> They're asserting their trademark, using TM is legally impotent in the UK. Trademarks are trademarks, their legal status changes with registration when you get to use RTM.

Don't know if it works in other countries I assume it's different in USA, maybe affects damages?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Funny thing I am not sure what fungus it is. However, I have pulled small sheets of material that is almost like leather out from beneath the bark on firewood when splitting it. It's very white kinda soft too.

I wonder if this is the same thing, and then they just dye it.

-Edit- It usually looks like this, but sometimes grows into like a sheet between the bark, and wood. [https://projects.ncsu.edu/cals/course/pp728/Armillaria/fans....](https://projects.ncsu.edu/cals/course/pp728/Armillaria/fans.gif)

</comment><comment><USER32> Cool product, it just bothers me that they describe mycelium as the "underground root structure of mushrooms". That's like saying the rest of a plant is just part of a flower.

<comment><USER33> Yep. The truth is, mushrooms are really just the sex organs of mycelium.

<comment><USER34> More accurately, "Fruiting bodies".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I found the conversation between Paul Stamets and Joe Rogan to be super interesting: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPqWstVnRjQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPqWstVnRjQ) . Never really thought much about mushrooms until that episode. This proof of concept seems like a great taste of how much untapped potential fungi have for changing everyday life if we invest more into its research.

</comment><comment><USER36> Keep in mind, this only obviates one of the "sustainable" aspects of leather production, the raw untanned hides. From an environmental perspective its chrome tanning and dyeing that are the big hitters, and that would still be necessary here. They could veg tan it instead, but that only slightly lessens the environmental impact at significantly higher cost.

</comment><comment><USER37> Would this be a good candidate to use as a synthetic skin for touch-able robots and devices? I've thought for awhile that leather might be good for that, but something like this which could be grown with electronics, heating elements, and other things embedded directly into it would probably be much better!

<comment><USER38> It's very inelastic. Good skin will probably need to stretch reasonably well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Perhaps a silly question, but what does it smell like?

<comment><USER40> Exactly what I wondered as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is incredibly exciting from an environmental standpoint alone, let alone the implications for future materials research. I'm curious about the processing steps required to create the end product and the resulting durability.

</comment><comment><USER42> Simple question that they didn't answer anywhere: how long until your mylo jacket degrades into mushroom goo?

<comment><USER43> "We will undertake a full lifecycle analysis of Mylo™ prior to large scale commercial rollout, and we look forward to sharing those findings with the world."

I'm assuming this also means finding out how long 'til it disintegrates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> In their FAQ, I think they should address the question, "Is it possible that mold will grow from Mylo?" I'm sure the answer is no, but they should state it explicitly.

<comment><USER45> Considering it's still tanned the same way, that process will probably preserve it and prevent mold growth, just as with leather.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Very cool, but really wonder what the durability is. Is it more like faux leather which might be used as an accent or is it something you could actually use structurally.

</comment><comment><USER47> This seems to be another application of the organism used for the meat- substitute sold under the brand [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn). (Which is rather tasty when prepared right).

</comment><comment><USER48> One thing I do not get about leather is why do people like it?

One sibling comment mention durability. But otherwise I find it's very heavy, cold, not breathable, sensitive to water and doesn't really look that well.

Sure I do prefer suede office shoes over normal leather, but that's about it. There are probably some good industrial use cases, but I much prefer Gore-tex type of materials and especially Merino wool. It's breathable, doesn't attract smell, somewhat water resistant, doesn't hurt animals too much and is close to cotton. I am rarely into clothing brands, but Icebreaker and Allbirds are making really good stuff that I've been wearing non-stop for years now.

<comment><USER49> Looks is an opinion but at least it ages better than most materials. Old leather belts or watchstraps look fine after many years of use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> It's awesome to see some more players in this space. I've been keenly watching out for Modern Meadow's updates as well. Looking forward to seeing what this will bring!

</comment><comment><USER51> I wish one of their FAQ down the bottom was about water resistance.

<comment><USER52> There's probably a good reason they didn't mention that, or durability.

I do some leatherwork for fun and there's a lot of things that make it hard to replace. We'll see how it holds up when stitched.

I'm very open to trying it out, though. And maybe an upholstery waterproofer would do the job.

<comment><USER16> The fun part here is that, technically, once they get a 'good enough' product and workflow up and running, adding/changing/incorporating biological properties is (mostly) just a DNA-based bit-flip away.

We at Serotiny are already collecting protein domains from organisms with various capabilities - including water solubility, hydrophobicity, enzymatic capabilities, covalent attachment sites (for dyes), light-activated properties/crosslinking/dissociation/etc. And all of those protein domains we're collecting should be 100% compatible (+/\- a fair bit of a tooling- exercise) with both Bolt's leather and their silk.

So it should get fun once they have a solid and stable 'platform' up and running. They will be able to incorporate most any property from _nature_ with an existing proof of principal, not just any property form _mammalian hides_.

Congratulations guys!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Congrats! This looks like a home run.

Would love to see micrographs of the finished materials. Fungi possess wonderfully dense cobweb-like fibres. A terrific example of highly connected random graphs in nature!

[https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Scanning-Electron- Microg...](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Scanning-Electron-Micrograph- of-mycelium-viewed-at-approximately-100x-Credit-Paul_fig1_271214237)

</comment><comment><USER54> With lab grown meat on the horizon as a main stream consumer product, it's only natural to wonder whether we could also grow lab grown skin to create synthetic leather.

Perhaps that defeats the purpose of mushroom based "leather" though? You might be able to grow the skin artificially, but it will still need to be tanned at an environmental cost.

<comment><USER10> That all depends on which process will be cheaper and which material will have the most desirable properties. I certainly hope the competition fosters better products in the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Super interesting! However...

...my impression (not dispelled or even challenged by their marketing materials) is that we currently have effectively surplus hides as a side effect of raising animals for meat, milk, and other purposes.

So when they say:

> Livestock use an astonishing 30% of the earth's entire land surface and > cattle-rearing generates more global warming greenhouse gases, as measured > in carbon dioxide equivalent, than all transportation methods. Put simply, > as disposable incomes rise around the globe, we simply can't meet the demand > for meat — and leather consumer goods — using resources available on the > planet.

That seems to be about 90% true (but irrelevant) and 10% questionable. Livestock are very expensive environmentally, and as the world gets richer we will certainly struggle to support the current meat-heavy western diet for billions more people. But that still means we're going to be producing an enormous torrent of hides (more now than today). Are we really going to struggle to find enough _hides_ to meet global demand for leather good? Prices for raw inputs have been remarkably flat for the past ~20 years ([https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPU04190108](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPU04190108)).

Even from the perspective of minimising animal cruelty, leather from animals that would already be raised and killed for meat or because they were ending their useful life on a dairy farm isn't especially problematic.

Further:

> We carefully control the mycelium's growth conditions to produce a substrate > that can be cured and tanned into a soft, supple material that looks and > feels like leather.

So it still needs to be cured and tanned. Which no doubt helps it be a great leather substitute, but much of the cost (monetary and environmental) of leather isn't the hides, it's the curing and tanning process, which can use some pretty harsh chemicals. Another reason to be skeptical that this is a huge improvement environmentally.

I also note there's no real discussion of price. If this process can turn out finished leather more cheaply than traditional methods, that's a big sign this is more efficient environmentally. If it can't (and the silence is interesting), it raises the question of whether this is actually worse for the environment. (Which wouldn't be that hard to imagine!)

In short: Totally cool! But so far it doesn't look like a "we're going to get rich while saving the planet" kind of thing, more like a "maybe some vegans will pay a premium for a really good fake leather jacket" kind of thing. Also good! But not as amazing as they try to make it sound.

<comment><USER56> Maybe it makes more sense to view this in concert with other similar efforts to address different uses of livestock? Like, to replace all the uses of a cow with synthetics, you need lab-grown meat and lab-grown milk and lab-grown leather, and ...

And there are startups addressing each of these, independently of one another.

<comment><USER33> Until we're at that point, though, we're going to keep growing cattle the old fashioned way, and that means leather to spare.

<comment><USER56> Sure, but it'd be a shame to reach that point on the meat front and then still have to keep growing cattle for the leather while the textile technologies catch up. Why not do both now?

<comment><USER33> Chances are you'd be growing a whole mix of cow parts at first and have to figure out how to differentiate them for the vats, so I doubt it'd be a problem. By the time vat meat works properly, you'd probably have the right knowledge and tech to grow cow hide by the mile simultaneously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> This is the future I want.

</comment><comment><USER58> I've gone through the entire article and have taken a moment to check the links and it's amazing very organic and very astonishing nature has the hidden gems for us discover.

<comment><USER59> What?

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> One of those things that feels completely obvious in retrospect yet I envy person that has the mind to think you can grow mushrooms and make leather out of it.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm curious as to how this handles high temperatures. Almost all welding gloves, aprons etc. that I have seen are made of leather due to this property.

</comment><comment><USER62> Today: Leather; Tomorrow: Space travel!

</comment><comment><USER63> How do they kill the fungus? I hope it won't continue growing if you wear it.

<comment><USER64> If the cow doesn't, why would the fungus?

<comment><USER65> Random tiny fragments of cows don't cause cows growing around my house or on my stuff. Fungus/mold does that.

<comment><USER66> That sounds like a great science fiction story though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I wish they were taking on investments; I want to sink some cash into them.

</comment><comment><USER68> Two most important things that were left out are durability and price.

<comment><USER69> That was my immediate question, as leather is one of the most hard-wearing upholstery materials available. As far as price goes, at first blush I would imagine this would scale fairly well, at least much better than livestock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Is it patented?

</comment><comment><USER71> Allows you to travel at warp factor 13!

</comment><comment><USER72> Tensile strength, tear resistance?

</comment><comment><USER73> Interesting. But I cannot see any table with reference to mechanical properties of the new materials. MycoWorks instead shed some light upon it on their website. They are using strains of Ganoderma lucidim, and it can be tanned while it grows, not after.

<comment><USER74> I went down a rabbit hole, and stumbled upon [http://www.mycoworks.com/](http://www.mycoworks.com/) as well which is seemingly an earlier competitor. Particularly their resources & reading section at the bottom references a number of papers on the subject.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Insert obligatory Star Trek Discovery reference here.

<comment><USER76> Or Dune</comment></comment>