Naming conventions in this are all over the place. Making it sound kinda ridiculous, imo. Ships, and plunder, Sire, all make it more confusing, not less, imo. No offense, just trying to give honest feedback.

Would love to discuss it with you! Too much detail to get into in replies here, yea definitely DMs. I look forward to explaining it more properly to you

Completely agreed! The fuller story on our current messaging is that current users and developers of the Urbit platform are most familiar with the technologies involved in our stack, and our messaging is mostly directed pretty narrowly at them. We absolutely owe a more readily understandable explanation to a wider audience and we're working on that. (As well as building demos for a general audience. We've already built an S3-style service that was shared with a small beta testing group). We are extremely busy and are trying to direct our energies where they are most fruitful, as I'm sure you understand :)

I’m keeping the DM inbox warm for you. To answer some of the questions you asked here now: - How much setup is needed: exactly zero. There are a couple different runtimes in the works right now, but with the C runtime it’s literally just getting a hold of the compiled binary and running it. There are zero host machine dependencies - How do you boot into it: **for now** “you don’t” (boot INTO it). You interact with it via the CLI or more robustly via the browser (either on the host machine or over HTTP from a remote machine, if you’re using the web server aspects). For the moment, the easiest way to create UIs is via standard web stack, and we have a number of examples of that (group chat, image board, S3 bucket, a MUD with randomly-generated maps, etc. etc.) Working with native graphics is a consideration, but we’re more interested ultimately with running our OS natively on devices - starting off something like an Android fork and going from there (the @Daylight Computer Co is a good mental model. basically a new device type category).