The Third Web

Longtime DFINITY Community member, Jordan Last takes us on a journey from his love of technology as a youth to his discovery of the Internet Computer. We discuss Sudograph, Jordan's open-source implementation of the GraphQL database for the Internet Computer, and some of his other numerous projects. Among them, his new podcast Demergence hosted entirely on the IC.

@lastmjs

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/demergence/id1570746602

Harrison Hines is back with an insightful discussion into the future of infrastructure funding and an examination of DAOs as infrastructure builders

Harrison Hines of Fleek discusses the challenges faced by the current generation of decentralised applications. Namely, the lack of decentralised frontend hosting. Enter the decentralised web, also known as Web 3.

Fleek is a provider of decentralised web tooling. visit at Fleek.co or follow on Twitter: @FleekHQ

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In this session, Dominic Williams, Founder of DFINITY, creator of the Internet Computer, and all-round good dude explains how the internet computer interoperates with Ethereum.

Subscribe @ cycledao.xyz

This episode of the Internet Computer Weekly features hybrid decentralised exchange Tacen, which enables users to settle trades atomically, matching trades using a centralised service but storing the orderbook and settlement information in user run oracles living on the Internet Computer. This approach is interesting in its use of an orderbook instead of the automated market maker design used by Uniswap and its derivatives. This is made possible by the inexpensive storage and compute the Internet Computer provides. I’ll let the team fill you in . . .

Find out more at tacen.com and follow the project on twitter @tacen_app

Nadim Kobeissi of the Capsule decentralised social media project describes the need for an alternative to the existing big-tech offerings and the reason the Internet Computer was chosen as a hosting layer.

capsule.social

CycleDAO.xyz

Tlon COO Erik Newton and Community Manager Kenny Rowe join this session to provide some additional background to Tlon and the Urbit Community.

Erik Newton begins by explaining the relationship between the Tlon corporation and the Urbit project. We also discuss the reason behind the valuation of the address space, business opportunities, and plans for the launch of Urbit OS 1.

Then Kenny describes the cultural reach of the Urbit aesthetic and how he found himself pulled into the project from his prior employer, Maker. In particular the notion of the Kelvin versioning system evolving toward stability as opposed to complexity, and the power of unique terminology to avoid false cognates.

Kenny elaborates on the community on-boarding strategy of Urbit and its suitability for the collaboration needs of DAOs and front end requirements of smart contracts.

urbit.org/install/

Urbit.live

The recurrent theme of calm computing is explored more deeply in this discussion with Logan Allen whose focus is infrastructure and product at Tlon.

Logan sees the attention economy, with all it’s popups and news feed clickbait as a result of the way startups are organised and funded. In between rebukes of VC capital and the growth business model, Logan describes a software landscape where the user is king, extending the views of Christian and Anthony.

The only way Logan believes this can be achieved is to create a computing platform with different product design incentives.

Part of this picture is a unified tech stack that applications share rather than the bespoke, but very similar, internal tooling built individually by major tech companies like uber, facebook, airbnb and others.

For Logan, Urbit addresses this by standardizing a large part of the system stack. As an abstract I/O interface it separates the software and hardware layers in a way that allows applications to be developed for an environment that is consistent across hardware.

This makes Urbit a much more efficient way of developing software from a corporate perspective by reducing dev-ops and the size of the layer that security concerns can happen in.

One of Logan’s most powerful revelations is that today, system software, linux for example, is deeply complex and growing ever more so and the number of people who understand the way it works is shrinking proportionally to the task of maintaining that software. Designing a new platform that evolves toward stability may be the only way to ensure a secure computing landscape in the future.

urbit.org/install/

Urbit.live

Christian Langalis is the resident bitcoin ambassador to the Urbit team. His motto is sound money requires sound computing and this well describes his role is to develop Bitcoin infrastructure for the Urbit ecosystem.

Christian’s interest in Urbit derives from a desire for a sound foundation on which Bitcoin can operate. He makes the argument that for all its potential, bitcoin cannot offer the benefits of sound money (sound being a term that requires specific definition in this case) without a sound computing platform on which to operate. Unix sysadmins have access to this today, but that leaves the future unevenly distributed.

More than just a piece of Bitcoin infrastructure, Christian sees Urbit as a response to the shift toward unowned software and data caused the popularity of Software as a Service and content streaming platforms. He also sees the platform as an opportunity for individuals to access the full power of server computing, instead having to rent individual functionalities from subscription based services.

Christian views data harvesting, and the pursuit of user attention as deep personal abuses in a way that recalls Galen’s reference to Stockholm Syndrome in episode 1

urbit.org/install/

Urbit.live

As Ted indicated in episode 2, The Urbit ID public key infrastructure and the Urbit network are core to the way individual Urbits communicate and maintain self-sovereignty. In this episode we hear from three members of the Tlon team, each explaining the part of the system they are most familiar with. OS lead Ted returns to introduce the subject.

Tlon engineer, Logan, Explains the use experience of Urbit ID, The reason for some of the design choices, and the topography of the Urbit Network.

Philip is a resident cryptographer at Tlon focussed on Public Key Infrastructure. He rounds this episode out by explaining what a PKI is, the differences between PKIs, and the way the Urbit ID PKI is implemented.

urbit.org/install/

Urbit.live