Our blog posts and documentation are coming online a little more every week, and a good explanation of the SSI is much-needed topic, but I'll give a brief taste here. SSIs are a novel computing model and therefore are still tough to describe at first...
An SSI is a purely functional, single-level store VM and programming environment. Rather than "operating system", think "single operating function". There is a single, frozen top-level function that takes as it's input the "computer's" state as an append-only event log.
The net result of that is you have a highly portable SINGLE value that describes the entire state of a computer's storage AND active computation with zero external dependencies.
What I mean by "single level store" is that the Operating Function makes no distinction between memory and disk, such that you can take an entire running computer, turn it off instantly, put its representation on a USB drive and ship it across the world, plug it in and start it and it'll be running exactly as it was. (This has happy implications for "durable execution" style cloud services, as well as ridiculous peace of mind for local, personal compute).
You get this persistence for free in the programming language: there's no DB interface to import and rely on. The whole persisted state of the VM and every running application is a single closure.
Other similar systems (like Urbit, introduced in the paper below) have very limited storage capacity, while our system can easily handle terabytes of data.
Which means that an individual running a VM like this in the cloud can be their own S3-style static file host. Or a network of similar instances can act as a replacement for something like IPFS.
okay well I've rambled far too long now and only scratched the surface, but I'll leave you with: our "VM" is stupidly easy to run. It's not like installing Linux. You just start the binary and it's going. So an exciting bit of low hanging fruit in my mind is making it trivially easy for every nostr user to have their own personal relay, either on their own hardware or in the cloud and optionally behind a proxy to preserve IP privacy.
The whitepaper that originally introduced the concept of the SSI:
https://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf
We've got new posts and podcast episodes coming every week: https://blog.vaporware.network
My company's brief landing page: https://vaporware.network
I should also mention that all our work is free and open source and all the code that is analogous to regular systems' "compiler binaries" is actually human-readable, so our VM 's entire stack from hardware interaction to userspace applications doesn't ever ask you to trust, but instead to verify.
Happy to answer any questions!
vinney
npub19ma…axkl
2024-06-23 23:28:25
in reply to nevent1q…n2ku
Author Public Key
npub19ma2w9dmk3kat0nt0k5dwuqzvmg3va9ezwup0zkakhpwv0vcwvcsg8axklPublished at
2024-06-23 23:28:25Event JSON
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