Core idea is how can you design a software system that avoids the pitfalls of spinning plate on a stick that requires constant maintenance as the world shifts around it, 'the big ball of mud'.

One way to do this is to design a system where all events of the system can be replayed from start to finish in an immutable/repeatable way. Taking the advantages of state guarantees from functional language design and applying something similar to an entire OS.

You can design something that abstracts this general design away from specific implementations of pieces that interact with the underlying system today (*nix).

This podcast doesn't a decent job of introducing some of the concepts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/understanding-urbit/id...

It's a little hard to summarize in a really short comment because there's a lot of new/first principles thinking that doesn't analogize super cleanly to the existing software stack people are familiar with (which is why it's interesting).

Yeah that's Curtis Yarvin, I think his neo-reactionary politics are wrong [0], but the design and ideas behind urbit are good (and he's no longer directly involved in the project).

[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-f...

> Also: Is "C. Guy Yarvin" Curtis Yarvin?

Yeah, Urbit was Yarvin's project until 2019 when he left the company.