4/ Starting at the bottom and working up (if the next few tweets don't make much sense, stick with me, and it will get coherent again around tweet #10 or 15 or so) we have a new "virtual machine". A virtual machine is a model of computation that has a few specified operations.
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15/ but, key thing here, is the memory is linear. Addresses get bigger and bigger. In the urbit VM, memory is a tree structure. The first memory location has two children. Each of those children has two children. Etc. So to get to a certain memory location you can't just >>
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16/ start at location 0, check your notes, see "ahh, we're going to location 9 million and 6 ...let's speed walk along this row of mailboxes till we get there". Instead you start at location 0 and then take a forking path: left, left, left, right, left, right, right right...
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17/ The language, the 16 opcodes, that run on this virtual machine, are called Nock. Nock is insanely difficult to program in, so Curtis wrote a higher level language ON TOP of Nock, called Hoon ... which is ALSO insanely difficult to program in.
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18/ OK, we're back to the part of the thread that normal people can follow. So, we've got this new programming language called Hoon, which runs on top of a new virtual machine. So what? Well, the software is free. You can download it and run it on your windows, linux, Mac >
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19/ and when you do, the software on your machine is in connection with every other person in the Urbit-verse, or, rather, the software running on THEIR machines. You can type at your local Urbit, and interact with other people and their local Urbits. These local things >>>
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20/ were once called "ships", then "yachts", and after three or four renamings they are now called "planets" or "comets". A planet or a comet is a bunch of things at once:
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21/ * a window you can type into * a store of information on your local disk * a "mailing address" that is unique from every other "mailing address" in the urbit-verse (kinda like an email addr, or a domain name, or an IP address) * NFT "property" that can be subdivided & sold
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21.5/ Twitter apparently broke threading here. Thread continues ---> (tho if you go here and look for context, you can see that I threaded it correctly and 21 precedes it )https://twitter.com/MorlockP/status/1502285486865403911 …
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